"The Indian Card. Who gets to be Native in America?"

I suppose most of the books I've reviewed for my list of recommended books have been of limited interest to a broad population but of intense interest to certain subgroups of readers.  Such will likely be the case with The Indian Card, a scholarly examination of the role of racial identity in modern American life.  The book was of interest to me because through marriage and adoption I have relatives from at least four Native American tribes (Ácoma, Laguna, Ngäbe-Buglé, and Seminole).

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, but one of her grandfathers was German, passing on to her a European surname and a complexion that allows her to "pass for white."  She can also "play the Indian card" when social situations render that the best choice.  This flexible identity gives her a breadth of experience and a deep insight into the importance of (and the determination of) race.

She is also a skilled writer, holding an MFA in creative writing and a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  She spent seven years working in the Obama administration of issues of homelessness and Native policy.  Her writing style is to describe detailed individual situations (friends, relatives, professional colleagues) and then to extrapolate from the specific to the general.  She combines these narratives with deep dives into publicly-available statistics from surveys and census data.  Sometimes the details are TMI, but they lend credence to her conclusions.

There are lots of reviews you can access on the internet, so what I'll do here is just append a series of notes, excerpts, and thoughts that I jotted down while reading (lots of notes, so I'll dispense with full sentences and precise grammar).  Page notations are so that I can go back to look stuff up.

"At the same time that the number of people in the U.S. who claim Native identity has exploded - increasing 85% in just 10 years - the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not." (intro)

There are notations in the 1830 census of Native American heads of household who were also owners of (black) slaves (57-8).  Because they owned slaves they were recorded as "white" in the census. (87-8)

"Cases of white men marrying and the divorcing Creek women to qualify for a land allotment were rampant.  Neah Micco, a Creek headman noted that 'desperate men are rapidly collecting among us, under color of authority as Indian countrymen, are seizing and occupying our most valuable lands.'" (89)

A Native girl raised by an Amish family found herself "too dark" to be accepted in an Iowa community, but "too white" when she's in the Navajo Nation.  While there she picks up new vocabulary ("rez words"), but on a return to Iowa "she performs the careful dance of code-switching, reverting back to the Iowa way of speaking, with all the midwestern politeness she can muster." (92)

During the 1832 Creek Census, the (white) census-takers had a powerful incentive to undercount Natives because that number determined land allotments, so fewer Natives would mean more land available for Whites.  Those who were listed on the census as white rather than Native would then have descendants generations later who assume they are full-blood white. (94)

In modern times there is an incentive for Tribes to "disenroll" members, in part stimulated by the sharing of casino revenues or land and services on a reservation. (95)  The Pechanga Band in Southern California disenrolled 250 members, including posthumously (and thus their descendants).  The enrolled population is only 1,400, so the process resulted in an increase in "per cap" from casino revenues tom $15K to $40K per month. (98)

Hitler and the Nazis knew of the American process of displacing and disenfranchising Native peoples, and applied the same principles to the Jews in Germany.  

Lots of detail re the term "blood quantum" - the determination of what % of a person's blood is Native vs white or black.  Equivalent to the slave era process of designating mixed-race slaves as mulattos or quadroons or octaroons etc.

Details re the immense tragedy of the "Trail of Tears" during the forced removal of Natives from areas in the southeastern U.S.  (Chap 5 "Remove").

Details about forced "acculturation" (kidnapping of Native children and placement of them in boarding schools).  "In many cases, children were purposely separated from their siblings or other members of their Tribes.  Schools forcibly mixed together children from different Tribes, to prevent their use of Native languages of the practice of cultural traditions." (116)  "Indian agent Fletcher J. Cowart recalled that "it became necessary to visit the [Native American] camps unexpectedly with a detachment of Indian police, and [to] seize such children as were proper and take them away to school, willing or unwilling."

"To determine if a person can enroll, both Red Lake and Leech Lake use a calculation of blood quantum.  And, as with most Tribes in the United States, that blood quantum has to be from one Tribe alone.   So, to be enrolled at Leech Lake, a person must prove they have the required one-quarter blood quantum from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe." (121)

Note the following words in the United States Declaration of Independence.  "Among the laundry list of grievances against the king of England was the accusation that he had "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." (123)

Theodore Roosevelt: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are." (124)  George Washington had called Native people savages who needed to be "extirpated" or destroyed.

Details about the great land grab of the nineteenth century (Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion, homesteading).  "... there was a significant amount of fraud.  Historians estimate that most of the land granted through the Homestead Act went to speculators, cattle ranchers, miners,loggers, and railroads.  Of the more than five hundred million acres dispersed by the General Land Office between 1862 and 1904, only eighty million acres went to homesteaders." (127)

The Dawes Act, like the Homestead Act, alloted "the lands of any reservation anytime it was deemed advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes."  Plots were 160 acres for Indian heads of household and 80 for single adults.  The land was placed in trust, and people allotted land were given 25 years to demonstrate that they could succeed at Europeanized agricultural practices.  If so, they got the land.  (note the land being allotted was already tribal land).  But much of it wasn't appropriate for farming (soil, rain).  Many natives didn't have the $$ to purchase equipment to farm 160 acres.  The government also levied hefty taxes on the land granted to the Natives after the 25 years was over.  Whites were waiting in line for the land to go into forfeiture to pay taxes. (130-131).  Horror stories on pgs 132-3 re Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

"As with many Cherokee people, Marilyn's relatives included Black Natives and people enslaved by the Cherokee Nation.  It's a common story among the Five Tribes.  All five had a significant history of slavery, one that garered them the name "Five Civilized Tribes" by southern white society.  The thinking being that to own slaves qualified them as civilized."  Sometimes people enslaved by Tribes were part of those Tribes by blood.  Or the slaves spoke Native languages and practiced Native traditions.  "Categories like "Cherokee by blood" and "Freedmen" and "Black Native" were not distinct but, rather, significantly overlapping."...Some estimates are that the Cherokees enslaved more than 2,500 people in 1860; in 1867, in a census conducted of the Nation, there were almost 2,500 Freedmen among the 17,000 total Cherokee people." (134-5)

The Dawes Rolls database was a massive census that includes more then 100,000 people, but they are listed in no particular order.  It attempts to categorize people by "degree of Indian blood" (blood quantum), a principle incorporated into law in 1785 in Virginia.  In 1866 Virginia defined "Indian" as "every person, not a colored person, having one-fourth or more of Indian blood."  (144-5)

The U.S. government only quantifies three things by blood: dogs, horses, and Indians. (174)  There is an official Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood.

The possibility of multiple racial identities is now present in the U. S. Census.  "In 1990, 1.96 million Americans checked the Indian box.  In 2000, when respondents could suddenly check more than one racial category, 4.1 million people checked the Indian box... By 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 9.7 million people." (181)

"Sovereignty, enrollment, membership - these are all manifestation of a political identity, not a racial one." (186)

"I've lost track of the number of times I've been asked "how much" Indian I am, sometimes by complete strangers.  I'm often surprised at the number of people both familiar with the concept of blood quantum and comfortable asking Native people about theirs.  As if that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask someone.  As if it's anyone else's business.  As if there were some mathematical way to quantify an identity that was both meaningful and accurate.   I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a question I'd also asked of myself..."(187)

"It is in January 2023 - while I was writing this book - that I begin to notice an uptick in the number of people who have claimed Native identity who are exposed as liars... many of the claims of fraud feel legitimate, like true instances of people knowingly making false claims to profit somehow... In some ways, Native identity is relatively easy to forge.  Native people have no particular "look," despite what their portrayals on television and film might lead us to believe... (examples given of people tanning skin, dying hair)... My observation, though, is that while stories like these have some shock value, many of them are not so clear-cut... Often, such claimants are relying on stories passed down by family members or genealogy going back centuries.  They may have been told that their great-great-great-grandparent was Cherokee, and so they have internalized this not only as historical truth but as their modern-day reality. (191-2).  I've been told there's a list of "pretendians" floating around on the internet..."

"The problem - whether or not we care to admit it - is that we treat Nativeness differently depending on what a person looks like... In the US we generally accept claims of Native American ancestry by people who present as white.  We believe that it's possible to look white but also be Indian... Yet we do not as willingly give this same benefit of the doubt to people presenting as Black.  It was this way for my grandfather, my cousins, and it's this way for many Lumbee people when they travel outside Robeson County.  Their skin matches the color swatch to which society has assigned the category "Black," and so, therefore, they are Black.  If they claim Native identity, it's seen as hoax, a fanciful tale they've spun out of a desire to accrue privileges of some sort. (209)  

"Partly, I imagine, this is a result of the contradictory ways the United States has dictated Nativeness and Blackness throughout history.  For Native people, the federal project has long been to dilute their Native blood, to assimilate them into the larger society, to root out their Native traditions and force Europeanization (and whiteness) upon them... In the United States, Blackness has long been governed by the idea of "one drop" - that even a single drop of Black blood made a person Black and, thus, stripped them of any privileges or freedoms granted to white people... In the nineteenth century, as slavery became more important to the U.S. economy, the goal was to increase the number of potential slaves.  It was therefore the project of the dominant (white) society to ensure that anyone with Black ancestry could be enslaved.  Hence, anyone with any amount of Black blood would have been considered Black.   White people weren't as much after Native bodies as land... So, instead, the goal was to decrease the number of Native people to eventually make them disappear."  (200-201)

Credit for both bowls to Carmen Sarracino, Acoma, New Mexico