Critical Lens Final
Diana Whittaker
Aisha Sidibe-Leyva
English 110
November 9th, 2018
Blood and Water
In highschool, I had a friend, named “Pat” for the sake of this writing, who claimed to be Cherokee. This came from a talk about his race – he mentioned being Irish and German (which is to say white) but he insisted on letting me know that he was “part Native American”, specifically Cherokee. Dismissing the conflation of race and nationality, I noticed that Pat defined his race based on his genealogical background. While not the same in his case, this is, to some degree, a reality for real Native Americans in the United States. The amount of native blood a person has, the blood quantum, was (and in some cases, still is) used by the United States government and by tribes to define who is and who isn’t Native. This idea dismisses a significant portion of being any race: the connection to the culture. In both “Custer Died For Your Sins” and “Superman and me”, Deloria and Alexie express this connection to their culture that cannot be found simply because of their family history. As such, there’s also a largely prevailing need in both to protect and continue their culture. While both the United States and tribal government use of blood quantum and family history to gauge Nativeness, both are flawed perceptions and are only marginally important. The truest validation of Native identity is in the practice and preservation of their own culture.
The history of the blood quantum began as way for the United States to define who was a “real Native” through family lines. Beginning in the 19th century, the Department of the Interior, which was part of the federal government, created it under previously understood ideas of race being a biological fact, and that phenotypes were viable to identify Natives – “at the time, anthropologists used feet and hair width as a ‘scientific’ test of blood degree in indigenous tribes” (Jarvis), yet still, “government agents compiling base rolls in the 1800s sometimes simply guessed at the percentage of Indian blood” (Jarvis). It already created a slippery slope: Natives and non-Natives could be misidentified and be respectively barred or accepted as Native. This is not mentioning people who were mixed race, like black and Native, and were classified as black, while at the same time accepting certain “mixed Natives” because of their proximity to assimilation. It also did not include people who distrusted the federal government and refused to enroll in the system, relinquishing the ability of their descendants to do so as well. On top of being a highly unstable system, its implementation based was for purely racial use, in the hopes that “Indians would literally breed themselves out and rid the federal government of their legal duties to uphold treaty obligations” (Chow). The blood quantum, therefore, was solely colonizing construct that attempted to erase the existence of Natives identity.
The United States stood to gain from such erasure too. Deloria’s writing gives insight on the violent erasure and suppression of Native identity in the form of forced assimilation. He states that “indian children were kidnapped and forced into boarding schools thousands of miles of home to learn the white man’s ways.” The goal was to make Natives “conform to white institutions” in the hopes that they would behave and think like white people and thereby be willing to give away their lands for profit the way white people wanted. Uncoincidentally, the blood quantum aligned with this idea – “‘Mixed blood’ Indians, for example, were added to rolls in hopes that assimilated Indians would be more likely to cede their land” (Jarvis). The definitions became stricter only after the U.S. government was able to lay claim to land.
Given that the blood quantum has, over time, become a large part of tribal citizenship – family lineage determines the “math” that dictates “Indianness” – it can be the thing that makes or breaks the ability to be identified as a Native, no matter the circumstances. In a case from 2013, after a member of the Nooksack Indian tribe was unable to enroll his children in the tribe due to a discrepancy involving his family line, the tribal council of tribe investigated the lineage of his other family members, one of which was a member of the council. This spread to other members of the tribe, leading to the tribal disenrollment of over 300 members because of an ancestor who had no record of existing. In one account, an 80 year-old, who had even faced discrimination for speaking “Indian”, was disenrolled, along with people who had been members for over 30 years. It seems unjust, then, to have something like this happen when Nooksacks, like many tribes, had their history “complicated by government efforts to extinguish, assimilate and relocate the tribe, and by a dearth of historical documents” (Jarvis). And despite the fact that those 306 Nooksack members became so involved with the tribe, some already being grandparents, they were completely cut out.
Can Native identity, then, be stripped so easily? Before the existence of this system, Natives already had their own history. They had confederacies, politics, even practices of democracy. Once things like task forcing started, these people banded further together to create inter-tribal councils in order to have autonomy against the federal government that was suddenly attempting to impose structure on them. Having such autonomy allowed the continuing of their own traditions, which had worked – in Deloria’s words, “ Tribes that can handle their reservation conflicts in traditional Indian fashion generally make more progress…than do tribes that continually make adaptations to the white value system.” We can see a smaller model of this in Alexie’s essay, the resounding strength of culture in the face of erasure. Children who did not try understand the materials presented to them in school were otherwise freely expressive outside of it – they “struggled with basic reading inside the classroom but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs”, told stories outside when they would barely speak in class, and stood up to bullies where they were less able to stand up to non-Natives. The lack of mention of blood quantum in Alexie’s essay in particular, in spite of the fact that modern Natives are pressed by “the need to “prove” their identities” (Jarvis) seems to be more focused on the preservation of his culture and his history through writing rather than through his family ties. Deloria’s act of listing out the history of Native politics, tribal affairs and the injustices that have made tribes stand together goes hand in hand with Alexie’s obviously fervent desire to write and encourage the writing of Native experiences in an effort to “save our (Indian) lives” – or in other words, save their continued existence.
However, returning to the case of Pat and his proclaimed Cherokee roots, one could say that the blood quantum system (especially its use within tribal councils) is only an effort to keep people like him – people who claim to that part of the race without being in the cultural circle – from claiming that nativity for gain. There are incentives in being part of a tribe, and “some of those incentives would be financial gain if the tribe, for example, has gaming revenue or other industries” (Chow). There also lies the risk that people may “claim an identity for affirmative-action purposes.” The instances in which this actually occurs, though, are rare. Not to mention, the system is still a government run effort to erase Native Americans. The system has barred an entire generation of Nooksack peoples from being able to be what they’ve always been; all because of one singular ancestor that could not be proven inside an already unreliable historical telling. While there’s no way to discern what degree of “Indianness” is present in Pat, there’s doubt that the system would even work for him in the first place when it cannot function for people who have been culturally native from the time of their grandparents.
The history of the blood quantum is one that was inherently meant to shut down Native voices. The truth of the identity lies in the awareness of their own culture and the way it is passed down from generation to generation. While the dilemma presented by the Nooksacks has an unclear ending, what is clear is that the 306 who were disenrolled are fighting not just for their right to citizenship but their right to cultural identification in a country that has been trying to strip it away by the same means for centuries. Shockingly, Sherman Alexie himself tweeted about the issue, saying (as quoted in Jarvis’s article), “Dear Indian tribes who disenroll members, you should be ashamed of your colonial and capitalistic [bs].” Even with the complexity of blood quantums and the way they are used now, there’s something to be said about the origins, and whether or not it is right to use what has been a vehicle for oppression.
Works Cited
Jarvis, Brooke. “Who Decides Who Counts as Native American?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/magazine/who-decides-who-counts-as-native-american.html.
Chow, Kat. “So What Exactly Is ‘Blood Quantum’?” NPR, NPR, 9 Feb. 2018, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/02/09/583987261/so-what-exactly-is-blood-quantum.