Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina through her mother, whose father was Lumbee and mother German. Her own father was also German, she tells us, so her one-quarter “Indian blood” could also be stated in reverse, as three-quarters German. But it is her official identity as a Native American, with the right to carry the “Indian card,” that was the starting point for the research that informs her new book, The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native in America. So strong is the notion of “blood quantum,” she says, that she thinks of herself as “one quarter Native” precisely because a bureaucratic process requires such a label.
As has happened in Australia, the number of Americans who identify as First Nations or Indigenous has risen in ways that are not explicable in terms of natural increase. The reasons behind the dramatic increase — 85 per cent over the last decade in the United States — are complex and intriguing. Claiming Native identity by ticking a box on a census form is simple and cannot be challenged; attaining membership of a recognised Tribe is not. (As a “card-carrying Lumbee,” Schuettpelz embraces the term “Native” but also uses “Indian” because of its pervasive historical and bureaucratic usage.)
Indigenous identity has been politically contentious in America for centuries, and the variety of responses has generated its own paradoxes and contradictions. In the process of forcing Indigenous people from their lands, colonial settlers used a tight legal definition of indigeneity as a way of excluding claimants to appropriated land. This “blood quantum,” or required fraction of genealogical connection, has remained a criterion for legal identity: it is not the only requirement, and nor has the fraction stayed constant over time, but in spite of its irrational emphasis on one ancestral line it continues to be invoked as the yardstick of authentic Native identity.
As is often the case with bureaucratic processes, all nuance is abandoned in the interest of clarity. Most Tribes now accept as “true” the Dawes Rolls, which listed the members of “the Five Civilized Tribes” — the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole — who ceded their lands to the government in exchange for receiving “allotments” as individual owners. Using these rolls, which were drawn up between 1898 and 1914, communally held land was divided, became private property and acquired a monetary value that facilitated purchase by whites.
Under this explicitly assimilationist policy, the Five Civilized Tribes were perceived to have already adopted crucial elements of the colonisers’ social and cultural values. (Schuettpelz, conscious of the implicit stigmatisation of the excluded Tribes, which were considered “wild” or “savage,” mentions the full name of this group only once, thereafter referring to them as the Five Tribes.) Many had converted to Christianity and established economic or treaty relations with colonists; many wore European-style clothing; many were literate or spoke English and — perhaps most surprisingly — many owned slaves.
The practice of enslaving war captives had had existed prior to colonisation but expanded with the arrival of African slaves. Natives sometimes sold their slaves to white settlers and in other instances bought African slaves to work on their own farms or plantations.
After the civil war, many of the Tribes’ slaves were added to the Dawes Rolls as “Freedmen” because they had effectively been incorporated into the Tribes. But some, descendants of Black and Native parents, were excluded in spite of being named on the rolls. Only after 2006, when one of them, Marilyn Vann, successfully challenged the exclusion in court, were “Freedmen” accepted as members of the Cherokee nation.
The economic and political interests at work become clear when the system of Tribal classification is compared with that applied to African Americans. Slave identity was defined broadly during the nineteenth century to maximise the number of people who could be enslaved. Thus a person of mixed European/White and African parentage was designated “mulatto” and identified with their Black parent. This “one drop of Black blood” rule, which applied in many states until the mid-twentieth century, was also used to prevent marriages between whites and people deemed to be African American.
The blood-quantum regulations covering Natives, on the other hand, were part of the national strategy of assimilation and elimination. They were exclusive rather than inclusive, and aimed at “diluting” indigeneity. Just as notions of “half-caste” and “full-blood” divided Indigenous communities in Australia, so the blood-quantum regulations in America facilitated child-removal, indentured labour and other deracination policies.
As a policy analyst in the Obama administration, Schuettpelz catalogued and coded the patterns and requirements of Tribal membership. She very quickly realised that her spreadsheets failed to capture the history and ambiguities of the procedures and the experiences of Native people. Tribal enrolment is often difficult, even heartbreaking, and Schuettpelz shifted her attention to the stories of the problems that people experience as they attempt to verify their Tribal status.
At a time when the humanities and social sciences is criticised for creating forms of knowledge that perpetuate colonial precepts and racism, a historical analysis written by a Native American is of particular interest. A non-Native would have anguished, for instance, over nomenclature and feel obliged to explain and justify the choice — Indian? Native? First Nations? Indigenous? Schuettpelz simply changes her terminology to reflect historical, official or contemporary usage; sometimes she simply uses the word she or others use to describe themselves.
Her writing is conversational in tone and full of information about her research methods. The research itself is scholarly and her sources meticulously documented, but the book is an amalgam of genres — part memoir, part investigative journalism with human interest stories, part historical analysis of the current situation of Native Americans.
Schuettpelz describes her various interlocutors, with warmth and admiration, as friends. She sometimes expresses astonishment at yet another damaging bureaucratic intervention in the lives of Native people. But her undertone is often of suppressed rage and her reactions — dismissing contemporary ritual land acknowledgements as “sort of bullshit,” for instance — are forthright and irreverent.
Schuettpelz also admits to uncertainty about her Native identity. She was born and brought up in Iowa, far away from the territory of her Native ancestors in North Carolina, and “the policies and fuckery unleashed upon Native people by the US government” have “made them feel supremely disconnected.” As a member of the Lumbee Tribe, she also is one of many Native Americans who, “through a combination of racism and political injustice,” are not federally recognised (though Donald Trump promised during the presidential election campaign to extend recognition to the Lumbee).
The 347 Native Tribes have been granted sovereignty within their designated reservations by the federal government, and each has a constitution, an elected council or governing body, a judiciary and law enforcement authority over their citizens. The Lumbee Tribe, on the other hand, was formed by people from several Tribes who had fled or been forced from their land by European colonists. As an amalgam, says Schuettpelz, the Lumbees have “continued to confuse the hell out of everyone but themselves.” The fact that the rules of admission to any Tribe are a mishmash of racial and political factors means that authenticity can always be questioned.
Schuettpelz compares herself with a friend of predominantly Irish descent whose ancestry has never been questioned. She’s lost track of the number of times she has been asked to quantify her Indian identity, “sometimes by complete strangers.” Blood quantum as a measure of heredity and skin colour, both quintessential nineteenth-century notions of race, are still invoked as markers of indigeneity, as they were when the Dawes Rolls were compiled. In 1936, 209 members of the Lumbee Tribe were subjected to racist testing that included head measurements and inserting a pencil into hair — if the pencil fell out, they were judged to be Indian; if it stayed in, supported by frizz, they were mulatto.
Dotted through Schuettpelz’s historical narrative are stories illustrating the effects of government policies on individuals and families. She describes president Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act as an exercise in “gaslighting” — he professed a benevolent intention to reduce conflict over land — and characterises the “despicable forced march sixty thousand people from their homelands,” often across ice and snow, as genocide.
Children were forcibly removed from families and placed in boarding schools where they were given new names and prohibited from speaking their mother tongue. If judged to be neglected or “at risk,” they were often placed in foster homes with white parents. These relocations, depopulation and social dislocation reverberate still in the stories of descendants.
Chuck Diver, a Chippewa man whose daughter Karen became Obama’s special assistant for Native American affairs, was stolen at the age of six and sent with his brother to Wahpeton boarding school two hundred miles from his parents, whom he did not see again for ten years. Karen recalls how he and his brother were “obsessed with buying new coats, with collecting them — at Wahpeton, the two brothers had had to share one.”
Darlene Wind was removed at the age of four from a widowed mother with a “tendency to alcohol” and placed with her brother in a white foster family. The two children dressed themselves in their snow suits and set out for home in a blizzard. Captured, they were moved from Minnesota to Iowa as a way of discouraging further escapes. As a young adult Darlene reunited with her mother, who had thought she would never see her again. (Changes in the laws relating to fostering and adoption were enacted in 1978, giving federally recognised Tribes control over child all types of child custody.)
The fact that each Tribe makes its own rules about membership creates contradictions and injustices. Some Tribes accept only those whose identity can be traced through the mother; others are rigidly patrilineal. The dispersal of Tribes and families often makes searching the Dawes Rolls very difficult. The agents who recorded and made decisions about inclusion were not experts on Indian identity and it seems highly likely that self-identification and skin colour trumped other forms of identification.
Today, with self-identification no longer accepted, many claims of Native ancestry are treated with suspicion. Schuettpelz observes that there has been an increase in the number of people who fraudulently claim Native identity. She acknowledges that many claims are based on stories, believed to be true, that have been handed down over generations, and acknowledges that such claims rarely do anyone any harm. She also notes that people’s fascination with imposter stories means they are often publicised.
She reserves her contempt for those who profit from their deceit and effectively take jobs (most commonly in the arts and universities) or scholarships from genuine Native candidates, but tempers this with sympathy for people who are pilloried in social media and humiliated using “terrifying tactics.” As several Tribes now operate casinos on their reservations, one explanation for the increase in claims (and the stricter rules of admission) is a desire to get access to payments from their very large profits. But Schuettpelz doesn’t fully canvass the reasons for the increase in both fraudulent and benign claims, in spite of the fact that it was this trend that initially piqued her interest.
DNA tests can determine whether a person has Native heritage by excluding sections of the genome that derive from European or African ancestry, but for obvious reasons people resist a parsing of their physical identity that diminishes the Indigenous component. Nonetheless, notions of being “full blood” and efforts to quantify blood quantum persist. In the 1970s the US government produced a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood with instructions that, as Schuettpelz remarks, sound like recipes: “Mix together 7/16th Indian with 3/16th Indian and — voila! — you’ll have 5/16th Indian!”
Having revealed how flawed, unjust and divisive the system of Tribal identification is, Schuettpelz eventually comes out in support of it. In her introductory chapter she had indicated that she would have to decide her newborn child’s Native status. In her conclusion it is clear that she wants her child to be a card-carrying Lumbee and is proceeding with the process. Yet she concedes that “blood quantum is egregious. It’s one of those ideas we reflect on with dismay. With disgust.”
Her reasoning is pragmatic, but she hopes some of the rules that result in unjust disqualifications will eventually change, as they have in the Freedmen case. She sees the need to protect sovereignty so that each Tribe manages its own affairs and its composition. The use of blood quantum is a sad anachronism, but it is also a way of insisting on continuity and endurance and the right of self-determination. •
The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native in America
By Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz | Flatiron Books | $47.99 | 259 pages
