Native Currents is a new addition to our editorial page. It will occasionally replace one of our two customary weekly editorials. The idea is to expand the range of perception and analysis on current Indian issues and stories, sometimes by drawing attention to or heeding voices from the past. Native Currents will feature selections and excerpts of speeches, reports, articles, books and creative works that will tap a wide range of Indian country thought and expression.
The following is adapted from “Termination by Bureaucracy,” By Valerie Taliman, Native Americas magazine, Spring-Summer, 2002:
Most tribes determine their membership by one of four methods: birth to an enrolled mother or father, descendancy, blood quantum or residency. Many tribes adopted the one-quarter blood criteria proposed by the 1934 IRA constitutions, others like the Quintah-Ouray Utes require as much as five-eighths and the Cherokee follow lineal descent from the 1906 Dawes Commission Rolls. In some tribes, adoption was allowed and even encouraged, but many tribes have moved away from liberal adoption policies. The Navajo Nation prohibited adoptions in 1934, noting the only way to become a Navajo was by birth.
The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma – once drastically reduced in numbers by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 – set a precedent when it rejected blood quantum requirements in its 1975 constitution and defined its citizens as those who could prove Cherokee ancestry. This increased the tribe’s numbers from about 10,000 in the 1950s to more than 220,000 today and increased federal funding and political control over their former homelands.
Critics of the Cherokee charge they have “diluted their Indianness.” Scholars of history, U.S. policy and traditional tribal customs see merit in casting aside blood quantum membership policies that inevitably may weaken Indian nations. “I come from a tribe that doesn’t have degree of blood for enrollment,” says Charlotte Black Elk, a scholar of Lakota oral history. “Our enrollment is based on ancestry, and even though the BIA doesn’t like it, we set our own rules. Blood quantum is part of the whole American policy of genocide by bureaucracy. The history of U.S. government warfare that diminished our people was insidiously replaced by small pox blankets. I believe that using blood quantum, a pedigree, to establish who we are as Native people is akin to small pox blankets.”
The thorny issue of blood quantum is central to the controversies surrounding who is a “bonafide Indian” and who is not. Historians and traditionalists alike argue that the blood quantum standard is a U.S. government-imposed method that was always meant to reduce Native numbers and, subsequently, aboriginal claims to millions of acres of land, sacred sites, precious water rights and natural resources.
The practice of using blood quantum to establish racial composition of human beings was traced back to 1705 when Virginia colonists sought a means to deny civil rights to Native Americans, black slaves and mulattos, who were seen as inferior, according to Lenape author and scholar Jack Forbes. The U.S. government later used Virginia’s model to define who was eligible to receive land under the General Allotment Act passed by Congress in 1887. In order to free up some 150 million acres of land collectively held by Indian tribes at the turn of the century, the government devised a scheme to allot individual parcels of land to “eligible” Indians – those who possessed “not less than one-half degree of Indian blood.” This excluded untold thousands of Native people, many of whom refused to participate in the allotment.
Using a narrow definition of eligibility and ignoring tribes’ inherent rights to determine their own members, the government’s late 1890s official count of Indians was estimated to be little more than 237,000. Once each enrolled Indian had received his land allotment, albeit in “trust status,” which varied from 40 to 160 acres, the rest of Indian territory – more than 100 million acres – was converted to “surplus lands” available to non-Indian homesteaders, military outposts and private businesses.
Pursuant to treaty obligations, the federal government owed permanent monetary commitments to enrolled Indians for a range of services that included food rations, annuity payments, education and health care. As tribes began to renew their strength in numbers after the turn of the century, the government once again began to explore cost-cutting measures to reduce its financial obligations to Indian people.
Through the combined force of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), the Termination Act and other legislation, the federal government has effectively kept Native Americans at less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. Forbes notes that 1969 Bureau of the Census methods forced mixed-blood indigenous peoples to choose whether they were American Indian, Hispanic or African. This process “erased” some 15 million people of mixed-Native ancestry by 1980 when census figures estimated the Native American population at 1.4 million. Forbes argues that if all persons of Native ancestry identified themselves as Native, the 1990 Native population would have been almost 30 million.
Blood quantum appears to be another reductionist tactic used by the federal government to reduce the numbers of federally-recognized tribal members entitled to services paid for in perpetuity with Indian lives and land. Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick said it well in the book “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West”: “Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it had for centuries, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will be freed of its persistent ‘Indian problem.’”
Many Native people see the need to keep bloodlines strong as a necessary obligation to ensuring their survival as distinct people, but strong bloodlines alone are no guarantee for cultural survival. Commitments to core beliefs are fundamental.
“Who we are as a people is not defined by what’s on paper,” says Alex White Plume, a Lakota traditionalist from Manderson, S.D. “It’s the language, ceremonies and relationship to our Mother Earth that gives us our identity. It’s living our lives according to the teachings that make us who we are.”