A Mebane activist who sued the Occaneechi Band of Saponi Nation last year claiming an illegal election of its officers, and other practices that she claimed to have violated its tribal constitution, is now seeking to hold the defendants in contempt of an order entered by the Alamance County senior resident superior court judge Andrew (“Andy”) Hanford.
The plaintiff, Crystal Cavalier of Mebane, is asking a superior court judge to enforce a consent order that both the plaintiff and defendants agreed to late last year, requiring the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation to form a new membership/election committee by January 1 and hold an election by April 20, 2026 to fill several vacancies on the nine-member council.
Neither of those things has happened, according to a motion for contempt that Cavalier has since filed to enforce the order, which is currently scheduled to be heard in superior court next month.
Two members of the election committee were to have been chosen by the plaintiff; and two were to have been selected by the defendants. According to a motion that Cavalier filed in superior court in May, she selected two members for the committee, while the defendants insisted on selecting four committee members, which she contends had delayed its formation long past the January 1 deadline.
As of April 17, the membership/election committee still hadn’t been established, and the election didn’t take place on April 20, 2026, as required under the consent order, Cavalier asserts in her motion for contempt. The election committee was to be responsible for contacting all members, determining eligibility, preparing and distributing ballots, counting ballots, and reporting the election results to the tribe, according to the council.
Hanford’s order also directed the defendants to: remove a member, Vickie Jeffries, from its tribal council; reinstate or create a “tribal web portal”; conduct an audit of all tribal accounts. The order doesn’t specify why Jeffries is to step down but did state that she would continue as tribal administrator through the end of this year.
The order also requires the OBSN to hold a constitutional conference in September 2026 and then schedule a vote to amend the constitution in September 2027, which will require a two-thirds majority vote.
Cavalier had sued the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation (OBSN) in 2025 for violating its tribal constitution by expanding the criteria for membership by voting to amend the tribal constitution in 2024.
According to Cavalier’s original suit, the tribal chair, Tony Hayes, under an amendment to the tribal constitution adopted in 2024, “altered the membership requirements to exclude non-direct lineal descendants.”
The previous criteria, as outlined within a tribal constitution adopted in 2001, had required prospective members to have a grandparent living in the traditional Occaneechi community of Orange, Alamance, and Caswell counties, based on arguments made at a hearing in Alamance County superior court last fall.
The defendants countered at the hearing last fall that the 2024 amendment was intended to prevent the tribe from ceasing to exist.
Cavalier also successfully argued in her suit that some members of the tribe had been excluded from voting in the 2024 amendment due to “email-only voting mechanisms.”
Ninety-one eligible voting members of the OBSN had been verified prior to the vote to amend the constitution in 2024; and out of 72 members who participated, 41 voted to ratify the amendment; 29 voted against; and two members abstained, according to a motion to dismiss the suit that the defendants filed in superior court last year.
In their motion to dismiss the suit, the defendants contended, “Courts are powerless to intervene in the exercise of tribal self-government. “Federal statute, federal common law, and state statute all require us to treat bonafide Indian tribes as sovereign nations and to protect [the] tribal right to self-determination,” as established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978, as well as court precedents in Connecticut, Georgia, and Maine, the defendants asserted in their unsuccessful motion to dismiss the suit last year.
The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1978 established that Native American tribes have the right to determine their own membership, according to the defendants’ response to Cavalier’s suit.
The OBSN became the eighth officially-recognized tribe in North Carolina in 2002, according to the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and has an office at 4902 Dailey Store Road in rural Burlington.
A state law governing civil contempt does not appear to impose a fine, but a defendant who is deemed to be in civil contempt may be jailed for up to 90 days.
