September 25, 2023

Describe the difference between blood quantum and the one-drop rule.

Based on the readings and lectures from our unit on Biological Perspectives, describe the difference between blood quantum and the one-drop rule. How are they related to settler colonialism in the United States

please Reade before answer–

CHAPTER TWO “If He Gets a Nosebleed, He’ll Turn into a White Man” Biology North American Indians who successfully negotiate the rigors of legal definitions of identity at the federal level can achieve what some consider the dubious distinction of being a “card-carrying Indian.” That 1s, their federal government can issue them a laminated document (in the United States, a CDIB; in Canada an Indian status card) that certifies them as possessing a certain “degree of Indian blood.” Unlike Louis Owens, of the previous chapter, Canadian-born country music singer Shania Twain has what it takes to be a card-carrying Indian: she is formally recognized as an Anishnabe (Ojibwe) Indian with band membership in the Temagami Bear Island First Nation (Ontario, Canada). More specifically, she is legally on record as possessing one-half degree Indian blood. Given this information, one might conclude that Twain’s identity as an Indian person is more or less unassailable. It’s not. Controversy has engulfed this celebrity because of an anonymous phone call to a Canadian newspaper a few years ago that led to the disclosure of another name by which Shania was once known: Eileen Regina Edwards. Eileen/Shania was adopted by a stepfather 1n early childhood and took the surname of Twain at that time. So far well and good — except for one thing. Both sides of her Jzological family describe themselves not as Indian but as white. It is only Jerry Twain, her late stepfather, who was Indian. As the adopted child of an Anishnabe man, Shania Twain occupies an unusual status. Though the U.S. government allows for the assignment of blood quantum only to biological descendants of Indian people, 38 Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 39 Canada allows for the naturalization of non-Native children through adoption.! Although Twain has stated that her white mother (now deceased) had told her, in childhood, that her biological father (also deceased) had some Indian heritage, his family denies the suggestion entirely. They say they are French and Irish. Ms. Twain explains: “I don’t know how much Indian blood I actually have in me, but as the adopted daughter of my father Jerry, I became legally registered as 50-percent North American Indian. Being raised by a full-blooded Indian and being part of his family and their culture from such a young age 1s all Pve ever known. That heritage is in my heart and my soul, and ’m proud of 1t.”2 Twain has been sharply criticized, in both the United States and Canada, for not making the full details of her racial background clearer, especially to awards-granting agencies such as the First Americans in the Arts (FAITA), which honored her in February 1996 as a Native performer. FAITA itself has made no such complaint. The group states that it is satisfied that “Ms. Twain has not intentionally misrepresented herself’ And more importantly, her adopted family defends her. An aunt observes: “She was raised by us. She was accepted by our band. If my brother were alive, he’d be very upset. He raised her as his own daughter. My parents, her grandparents, took her into the bush and taught her the [ Native] traditions.”? Twain’s case shows with uncommon clarity that legal and biological definitions are conceptually distinct. It is the task of this chapter to examine the latter. In their modern American construction, at least, biological definitions of identity assume the centrality of an individual’s genetic relationship to other tribal members. Not just any degree of relationship will do, however. Typically, the degree of closeness 1s also important. And this is the starting point for much of the controversy that swirls around issues of biological Indianness. Closeness of biological or blood relationship can be conceived in a fairly mechanical fashion, as suggested in the diagram provided by a Bureau of Indian Affairs training handbook and shown 1n figure 2.1. It graphically illustrates the amount of blood that should be attributed to a child born to one parent of four-fourths (full-blood) Indian ancestry and one parent of one-quarter Indian ancestry: this child 1s shown to be filled up to the level of five-eighths with Indian blood. Some Indian people accept a similar construction of blood relationship. Interview respondent Donald G., a Cherokee full blood, explained Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University FATHER MOTHER CO = : O > 5/8 FIGURE 2.1. Visualizing blood quantum. Diagram from Bureau of Indian Affairs handbook, illustrating how blood quantum may be conceptualized and calculated. (Source: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Enrollment, 82.) the implication of racial admixture for tribal identity, using mayonnaise and ketchup to represent Caucasian and Indian genetics: Donald G.: If you took mayonnaise and ketchup and mixed it equally, what 1s 1t? Mayonnaise or ketchup? Author (laugling): Both. Donald G.: Or 1f you took just a small portion… of ketchup and a larger portion of mayonnaise, then what do you have? Author: Does it get to the point where youre not Indian any more, with all the intermarriage? Do you finally just end up with mayonnaise? Donald G.: Well, see, that’s it. Thats the big question. Because I was going to say—at what point? At what point is it more ketchup or at what point is 1t more mayonnaise? That’s a question that remains to be answered, I guess. . . . [But] obviously, 1f you put more of one, it’s going to be more of that one. And that’s how I feel about 1t. Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED AI Cornelia S., a full-blood Cherokee mother, offers similar sentiments: “My opinion is [that people should be] a quarter or a half [to be considered Indians]. . . . Because I think that the less Indian . . . blood that you have in you. . . . Well, [the non-Indian blood] is watering it [the Indian blood] down.” Hopi geneticist Frank D. draws explicitly on the language of biology to express concerns about racial mixing: “I don’t know what ‘blood’ means. But I do know what ‘genes’ means. . . . I don’t like the idea of the blood or the genes being deleted [through Indians’ intermarriage with non-Indians]. I think it should go the other way, [so that Indian people] . . . increase their Indian population [by marrying each other, rather than]… marry[ing] some non-Indian.” Sociologist Eugeen Roosens summarizes such common conceptions about the importance of blood quantum for determining Indian identity: There is . . . [a] principle about which the whites and the Indians are in agreement… . People with more Indian blood . . . also have more rights to inherit what their ancestors, the former Indians, have left behind. In addition, full blood Indians are more authentic than half-breeds. By bezmg pure, they have more right to respect. They ave, in all aspects of their being, more integral.+ Biological ancestry can take on such tremendous significance in tribal contexts that it overwhelms all other considerations of identity, especially when it 1s constructed as “pure.” As Cherokee legal scholar G. William Rice points out, “Most [people] would recognize the full-blood Indian who was enrolled in a federally recognized tribe as an Indian, even if the individual was adopted at birth by a non-Indian family and had never set foot in Indian country nor met another Indian.”> Mixed-race individuals, by contrast, find their identity claims considerably complicated. Even if such an individual can demonstrate conclusively that he has some Native ancestry, the question will still be raised: Is the amount of ancestry he possesses “enough”? Is his “Indian blood” sufficient to distinguish him from the mixed-blood individual spotlighted by an old quip: “If he got a nosebleed, he’d turn into a white man”? Members of various tribes complain of factionalism between these two major groups — full bloods and mixed bloods — and they suggest that the division arose historically because of mixed bloods’ greater access to the social resources of the dominant society and their enhanced abulity to impose values and ideas upon others.°® As Julie M., a citizen of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians, says: “For the Cherokee people, there’s been this mixed blood/full blood kind of dynamic going Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 42 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED from before the removal [in 1838, also known as the Trail of Tears]… . Its kind of like us-and-them…. It’s almost been like a war in some cases. . . . It’s a ‘who’s-really-going-to-be-in-control-of-the-tribe?’ kind of thing.” Many historians have similarly found it logical that political allegiances would tend to shift for those Indian people who formed alliances, through intermarriage, with members of the dominant society, and that this has made the division between full bloods and mixed bloods politically important.” Modern biological definitions of identity, however, are much more complicated than this historical explanation can account for. This complexity did not originate in the ideas and experiences of Indian tribes. Instead, they closely reflect nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories of race introduced by Euro-Americans. These theories (of which there were a great many) viewed biology as definitive, but they did not distinguish it from culture. Thus, blood became quite literally the vehicle for the transmission of cultural characteristics. “‘Half-breeds’ by this logic could be expected to behave in ‘half-civilized) 1.e., partially assimilated, ways while retaining one half of their traditional culture, accounting for their marginal status in both societies.”8 These turn-of-the-century theories of race found a very precise way to talk about amount of ancestry in the idea of blood quantum, or degree of blood. The notion of blood quantum as a standard of Indianness emerged with force in the nineteenth century. Its most significant early usage as a standard of identification was in the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887, which led to the creation of the Dawes Rolls that I discussed in the last chapter. It has been part of the popular — and legal and academic — lore about Indians ever since. Given this standard of identification, full bloods tend to be seen as the “really real,” the quintessential Indians, while others are viewed as Indians in diminishing degrees. The original, stated intention of blood quantum distinctions was to determine the point at which the various responsibilities of the dominant society to Indian peoples ended. The ultimate and explicit federal intention was to use the blood quantum standard as a means to liquidate tribal lands and to eliminate government trust responsibility to tribes, along with entitlement programs, treaty rights, and reservations. Through intermarriage and application of a biological definition of identity Indians would eventually become citizens indistinguishable from all other citizens.° Degree of blood is calculated, with reference to biological definitions, on the basis of the immediacy of one’s genetic relationship to those Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 43 whose bloodlines are (supposedly) unmixed. As in the case with legal definitions, the initial calculation for most tribes’ biological definitions begins with a base roll, a listing of tribal membership and blood quanta in some particular year. These base rolls make possible very elaborate definitions of identity. For instance, they allow one to reckon that the oftspring of, say, a full-blood Navajo mother and a white father 1s onehalf Navajo. If that half-Navajo child, in turn, produces children with a Hopi person of one-quarter blood degree, those progeny will be judged one-quarter Navajo and one-eighth Hopi. Alternatively, they can be said to have three-eighths general Indian blood. As even this rather simple example shows, over time such calculations can become infinitesimally precise, with people’s ancestry being parsed into so many thirty-secondths, sixty-fourths, one-hundred-twentyeighths, and so on. The Bureau of Indian Affairs uses the chart in table 1 as a means of calculating blood quanta. The chart constitutes a quick reference for dealing with such difficult cases as a child with one parent with a twenty-one thirty-seconds blood quantum and another with a thirteensixteenths blood quantum. (The answer in this example, the table informs us, would be forty-seven sixty-fourths.) For those of us who have grown up and lived with the peculiar precision of calculating blood quantum, it sometimes requires a perspective less influenced by the vagaries of American history to remind us yust how far from common sense the concepts underlying biological definitions of identity are. I recall responding to an inquiry from a Southeast Asian friend about what blood quantum was and how it was calculated. In mid-explanation, I noticed his expression of complete amazement. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he burst out. “Who ever thought of that?” The logic that underlies the biological definition of racial identity becomes even more curious and complicated when one considers the striking difference in the way that American definitions assign individuals to the racial category of “Indian,” as opposed to the racial category “black.” As a variety of researchers have observed, social attributions of black identity have focused (at least since the end of the Civil War) on the “one-drop rule,” or rule of hypodescent.!° In the movie Raintree County, Liz Taylor’s character articulates this rule in crassly explicit terms. The worst thing that can happen to a person, she drawls, 1s “havin” a little Negra blood in ya’—yjust one little teensy drop and the person’s all Negra.” That the one-drop method of racial classification 1s fundamentally a matter of biological inheritance (rather than law, culture, or even Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University TABLE 1. Calculating the Quantum of Indian Blood Non- Indian 1/16 1/8 3/16 1/4 5/16 3/8 7/16 1/2 1/16 1/32 1/16 3/32 1/8 5/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 1/8 1/16 3/32 1/8 5/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 3/16 3/32 1/8 9/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 1/4 1/8 5/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 5/16 9/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 3/8 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 3/8 13/32 7/16 7/16 7/32 1/4 9/32 9/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 = 1/2 9/16 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 5/8 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 11/16 | 11/32 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 3/4 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 13/16 | 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 7/8 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 15/16 | 15/32 = 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 = 23/32 4/4 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 = 3/4 1/32 1/64 3/64 5/64 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 3/32 3/64 5/64 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 = 19/64 5/32 5/64 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 7[32 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 9/32 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 11/32 | 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 13/32 | 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 15/32 | 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 17/32 | 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 19/32 | 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 21/32 | 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 23/32 | 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 25/32 | 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 27/32 | 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 29/32 | 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 31/32 | 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 SOURCE: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Enrollment, app. H. NOTE: To determine the degree of blood of a child, find the degree of one parent in the left-hand column and the degree of the other parent 1n the top row. Read horizontally to the right and vertically down to find the degree. Example: If one parent is 11/16 and the other is 5/8, the child 1s 21/32 degree. Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University TABLE I. (continued) 9/16 5/8 11/16 3/4 13/16 7/8 15/16 4/4 1/16 | 5/16 11/32 3/8 13/32 7/16 ~=15/32 «1/2 17/32 1/8 11/32 3/8 13/32 =—7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 =9/16 3/16 3/8 13/32 =—-7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 =9/16 19/32 1/4 13/32 ~=7/16 15/32 = 1/2 17/32 =9/16 19/32 5/8 5/16 7/16 15/32 =1/2 17/32 =9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 3/8 15/32 91/2 17/32 = 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 +=11/16 7/16 1/2 17/32: 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 83/4 9/16 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 5/8 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 11/16 | 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 3/4 21/32 «11/16 = =23/32— 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 7/8 13/16 | 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 7/8 29/32 7/8 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 7/8 29/32 15/16 15/16 | 3/4 25/32 = 13/16 27/32 7/8 29/32 15/16 = 31/32 4/4 25/32 13/16) 27/32 7/8 29/32 15/16 3 31/32 4/4 1/32 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 3/32 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 5/32 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 7/32 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 9/32 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 11/32 | 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 13/32 | 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 15/32 | 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 17/32 | 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 19/32 | 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 21/32 | 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 23/32 | 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 25/32 | 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 27/32 | 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 59/64 29/32 | 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 59/64 61/64 31/32 | 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 59/64 61/64 63/64 Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 4.6 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED self-identification) 1s clear from the 1948 Mississippi court case of a young man named Davis Knight. Knight, accused of violating antimiscegenation statutes, argued that he was quite unaware that he possessed any black ancestry, which in any case amounted to less than onesixteenth. The courts convicted him anyway and sentenced him to five years in jail. “Blood” was “blood,” whether anyone, including the accused himself, was aware of it or not.!! The same definition of identity held sway for blacks in America well past the 1940s. For instance, up until 1970, Louisiana state law defined as black anyone possessing “a trace of black ancestry.” In an apparent seizure of racial liberalism, however, the legislature formally revised the definition of identity in that year. It decided that the amount of blood constituting a “trace” should be limited by declaring that only those possessing more than one-thirty-second-degree “Negro blood” would be considered black.!2 A woman named Susie Guillory Phipps challenged this law in 1982- 1983, when she discovered, at age forty-three, that she was a black woman. It happened this way: Susie Guillory was born in 1934 in Louisiana to a poor, French-speaking family. She married a tradesman, Mr. Phipps, who worked hard and did well—so well that, in 1977, the couple decided to take a trip to South America. Mrs. Phipps drove to New Orleans to apply for the first passport she had ever required. Upon arrival, she ran smack into one of the American definitions of racial identity. There was a problem, the clerk at the records agency whispered, drawing Mrs. Phipps into a private oflice. She had declared on the application that her race was white. But, the clerk pointed out, Phipps’s birth certificate described both her parents as “colored.” Mrs. Phipps protested. She “looked” white, she said. She thought of herself as white. She lived as a white woman. She saw no reason why her personal documents should describe her otherwise. She felt so strongly about the matter, in fact, that she started a legal battle to have the racial identification on her birth certificate changed. It turned out to be a long road, but her perseverance illuminated some of the most interesting back alleys of America’s biological definitions of racial identity. The Division of Vital Records of New Orleans, it seemed, did not subscribe to Phipps’s view of herself as white, and it was not about to change its mind. The New Yorker, reporting on Phipps’s case in 1986, wrote: “At Vital Records, it was taken for granted that certain families were white and certain families had a traceable amount of black blood, Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 47 and that it was up to the vital-records office to tell them apart. When it came to tracing traceable amounts, nobody ever accused the vital-records office of bureaucratic lethargy.” Certainly in the case of Mrs. Phipps the office was on its toes. The office chief began by commissioning a genealogist to trace Mrs. Phipps’ ancestry all the way back to the 1700s, and then he went in search of her living relatives and her childhood neighbors. (The similar ransacking of “Chief” Buftalo Child Long Lance’s ancestral roots comes to mind.) By the time the case came to court, the office had gathered boxes of depositions and other records testifying to the Guillory bloodlines. And they could show that the Guullorys, indeed, had black ancestry: Mrs. Phipps’s great-great-great-grandmother Margarita had been a slave in the 1700s. Margarita had borne children to her white master, and some of her descendants had married individuals of mixed race. Confronted with the evidence, Susie Phipps consented to the argument that she might possess one-thirty-second-degree black ancestry — the amount that would bring her in just under the wire for establishing a white identity. Vital Records, however, by scraping together and adding up all the dribs and drabs of ancestral blood, argued that Mrs. Phipps was as much as five-thirty-secondths black. This was enough for the courts. They denied her petition to change the racial designation on her birth certificate to white, and in 1985 an appellate court upheld the decision. The complainant had failed to produce sufficient evidence to show that the document, as issued, was in error, and it would have to stand. Regardless of her self-perception, Mrs. Phipps had to bow to the biological definition of race, and its corollary, the one-drop rule. For legal purposes, she would forever be a black woman. Mrs. Phipps’s story in and of itself is an interesting study of the way Americans link ideas about racial identity and biology. But 1t becomes far more intriguing when we contrast the logic underlying the definition of identity in operation there with the one that applies to Indian identity. Can the reader imagine a scenario in which an office of the American government legally compels a person professing anything more than onethirty-second-degree Indian blood to accept identification as Indian: Can she imagine such a claim being widely tolerated as legitimate, even for the purposes of casual social interaction? Far from being held to a one-drop rule, Indians are generally required — both by law and by popular opinion — to establish rather high blood quanta 1n order for their claims to racial identity to be accepted as meaningful, the individual’s own opinion notwithstanding. Although Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 48 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED people must have only the slightest trace of “black blood” to be forced into the category “African American,” modern American Indians must (1) formally produce (2) strong evidence of (3) often rather substantial amounts of “Indian blood” to be allowed entry into the corresponding racial category. The regnant biological definitions applied to Indians are simply quite different than those that have applied (and continue to apply) to blacks. Modern Americans, as Native American Studies professor Jack Forbes (Powhatan/Lenape/Saponi) puts the matter, “are always finding ‘blacks’ (even if they look rather un-African), and… are always losing Indians?” Biological Definitions: Contexts and Consequences Biological definitions of Indian identity operate, in short, 1n some curious and inconsistent ways. They are nevertheless significant in a variety of contexts. And they have clear relationships, both direct and indirect, to legal definitions. The federal government has historically used a minimum blood quantum standard to determine who was eligible to receive treaty rights, or to sell property and manage his or her own financial affairs.!© Blood quantum 1s ove of the criteria that determines eligibility for citizenship in many tribes; it therefore indirectly influences the claimant’s relationship to the same kinds of rights, privileges, and responsibilities that legal definitions allow.?” But biological definitions of identity affect personal interactions as well as governmental decisions. Indian people with high blood quanta frequently have recognizable physical characteristics. As Cherokee Nation principal tribal chief Chad Smith observes, some people are easily recognizable as Indians because they pass “a brown paper bag test,” meaning that their skin 1s “darker than a #10 paper sack.” It 1s these individuals who are often most closely associated with negative racial stereotypes in the larger society. Native American Studies professor Devon Mihesuah makes a point about Indian women that is really applicable to either gender: “Appearance is the most visible aspect of one’s race; It determines how Indian women define themselves and how others define and treat them. Their appearance, whether Caucasian, Indian, African, or mixed, either limits or broadens Indian women’s choices of ethnic identity and ability to interact with non-Indians and other Indians.”!8 Every day, identifiably Indian people are turned away from restaurants, refused the use of public rest rooms, ranked as unintelligent by the eduGarroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 49 cation system, and categorized by the personnel of medical, social service, and other vital public agencies as “problems” — all strictly on the basis of their appearance. As Keetoowah Band Cherokee full-blood Donald G. notes, a recognizably Indian appearance can be a serious detriment to one’s professional and personal aspirations: “It seems the darker you are, the less important you are, 1n some ways, to the employer. . . . To some, it would be discouraging. But I am four-fourths [1.¢e., full-blood] Cherokee, and 1t doesn’t matter what someone says about me. . . . I feel for the person who doesn’t like my skin color, you know?” There are circumstances, however, in which it 1s difficult for the victims of negative racial stereotyping to maintain an attitude as philosophical as this. In one interview, a Mohawk friend, June L., illustrated the potential consequences of public judgments based on skin color. She reminded me of a terrifying episode that had once unfolded while I was visiting at her house. Our conversation was interrupted by a phone call informing this mother of five that her college-student son, who had spent the summer day working on a roof, had suddenly become ill while driving home. Feeling faint, he had pulled up to a local convenience store and made his way inside, asking for a drink of water. The clerk refused. Dangerously dehydrated, the young man collapsed on the floor from sunstroke. “The worst thing about it,” June recalled, “was that I have to keep wondering: What was the reason for that? Did that clerk refuse to help my son because she was just a mean person? Or was it because she saw him stumble into the store and thought, ‘Well, it’s just some drunken Indian’?” Anxiety about social judgments of this kind are a fact of daily life for parents of children whose physical appearance makes their Indian ancestry clearly evident. At the same time, June’s remarks showed the opposite side to the coin of physical appearance. In some contexts, not conforming to the usual notions of “what Indians look like” can also be a lability: My aunt was assistant dean at a large Ivy League university. One day she called me on the phone. She had one scholarship to give out to an Indian student. One of the students being considered was blonde-haired and blue-eyed. The other one was black-haired and dark-skinned, and she looked Indian. ‘The blonde girl’s grades were a little better. My aunt didn’t know what to do. She said to me, “Both these girls are tribal members. Both of them are qualified [for the scholarship]. They’re sitting outside my office. What would you do?” I told her that, as an Indian person, there was only one thing I could say. Which was to give the money to the one with the dark skin. As Indian people, we do want to have Indian people that look like theyre Indian to represent us. Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 50 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED Readers may be surprised by such a candid statement. But June’s pragmatic reasoning takes account of certain historical realities. As she explained further, “We like people to know who’s doing those accomplishments, like getting scholarships. We want them to know this is an Indian person doing this. Because I come from a background where if you looked Indian, you were put in special education because the schools said you couldn’t learn. And it wasn’t true. We need Indian people today who look Indian to show everyone the things we can do.” A physical appearance that 1s yudged insufficiently “Indian” can also act as a barrier to participation in certain cultural activities. Bull T., a Wichita and Seneca minister in his midfifties, recalls that, in his youth, he witnessed light-skinned individuals who attempted to participate in powwow dances being evicted from the arena. “That kind of thing 1s still happening today,” he added sadly, and other respondents readily confirmed this observation. A more unusual instance of the relevance of physical appearance to cultural participation was volunteered by Frank D., a Hopi respondent. His tribe’s ceremonial dances feature the appearance of powerful spirit beings called kachinas, which are embodied by masked Hopi men. Ideally, the everyday, human identity of the dancers remains unknown to observers. Frank commented on the subject of tribal members whose skin tone is noticeably either lighter or darker than the norm: Frank D.: Say, for instance, 1f a Hopi marries a black person . . . [and] you get a male child . . . 1¢s gonna be darker skinned. It might even be black. A black kachina just wouldn’t fit out here [at Hopi]. You see, everybodyd know who it 1s. He’d be very visible [in the ceremonial dances]. . . . Itd be very hard on that individual. Kids don’t work the other way, too — if they’re real light… . Kachinas gotta be brown. Author: So there are certain ceremonial roles that people could not fill because of their appearance: Frank D.: Well, they could, but it would be awful tough. A lot of these [ceremonial] things are done with secrecy. No one knows who the kachinas are. Or at least, the kids don’t. And then, say you get somebody who really stands out, then everybody knows who that [dancer] 1s, and it’s not good. For the ceremony — because everybody knows who that person 1s. And so the kids will start asking questions — “How come that kachina’s so dark, so black?” or “How come that kachina’s white?” They start asking questions and it’s really hard. So I think, if youre thinking about kids, it’s really better 1f kachinas are brown. Finally, the physical appearance borne by mixed bloods may not only create barriers to tribal cultural participation; 1t may also offer an occaGarroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 51 sion for outrightly shaming them. Cornelia S. remembers her days at the Eufala Indian School: You had to be Indian to be [allowed admission] there… . But . . . if [certain students] . . . didn’t look as Indian as we did, or if they looked like they were white, they were kind of looked down upon, like treated differently because [people would say] “oh, that’s yust a white person.” . . . They just [would] tease °em and stuff. Say “oh, whatcha doin’ white boy” or “white girl” — just stuff like that. Nor is the social disapproval of light-skinned mixed bloods strictly the stuff of schoolyard teasing. The same respondent added that even adults confront questions of blood quantum with dead seriousness: Us Indians, whenever we see someone else who 1s saying that they’re Indian . . . or trying to be around us Indians, and act like us, and they don’t look like they’re Indian and we know that they’re not as much Indian as we are, yeah, we look at them like they’re not Indian and, ya know, don’t really like why they’re acting like that… . But you know, Pm not that far off . . . into yudging other people and what color [they are]. The late author Michael Dorris, a member of the Modoc tribe (California), has written that humiliations related to his appearance were part of his daily experience. He describes (in his account of his family’s struggle with his son’s fetal alcohol syndrome, The Broken Cord) an encounter with a hospital admissions staff, to whom he had just identified himself and his son as Indians. “They surveyed my appearance with curiosity. It was an expression I recognized, a reaction, familiar to most people of mixed-blood ancestry, that said, “You don’t Jook like an Indian. No matter how often it happened, no matter how frequently I was blamed by strangers for not resembling their image of some Hollywood Sitting Bull, I was still defensive and vulnerable. ‘Pm part Indian; I explained.”!° Even his tragic death has not safeguarded Dorris from insinuations about inadequate blood quantum. Shortly after his 1997 suicide, a story on his life and death in New York magazine reported that the author’s fair complexion had always caused some observers to wonder about his racial identity and archly repeated a rumor: “It is said he . . . [eventually] discovered tanning booths.”° In short, many Indian people, both individually and collectively, continue to embrace the assumption that close biological connections to other Indian people — and the distinctive physical appearance that may accompany those connections — imply a stronger claim on identity than Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 52 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED do more distant ones. As Potawatomi scholar of Native American Studies Terry Wilson summarizes, “Few, if any, Native Americans, regardless of upbringing 1n rural, reservation, or urban setting, 1gnore their own and other Indians’ blood quantum in everyday life. Those whose physical appearances render their Indian identities suspect are subject to suspicious scrutiny until precise cultural explanations, especially blood quantum, are offered or discovered.”?! Negotiating Biological Identities There are many reasons why people fail in their efforts to negotiate a meaningful identity as an Indian by reference to a specific biological definition. For one thing, many tribes today really do have large numbers of claimants to membership with relatively low blood quanta, due to intermarriage. However, difficulties in establishing an Indian identity by reference to blood do not stem solely from having a deficient corpuscle count. Many times, the problem lies with the way blood quanta are reckoned. It would be an enormous understatement to say that the original assignments of blood quanta on the tribal base rolls that are still used to determine the blood quanta of Indians today were often not especially accurate. Modern observers may express disbelief at the decision of the Passamaquoddy tribe of Maine, which was recently recognized by the federal government. A highly intermarried tribe, they declared an intention 1n 1990 to constitute anyone appearing on the tribal census of that year as a full blood, automatically and by fiat.?? But the arbitrariness of this decision is not unlike the methods employed in many historic records of blood quantum. On some reservations, nineteenth-century Indian agents assigned and recorded blood quantum on the basis of the candidate’s physical appearance, making darker people into full bloods and lighter ones into mixed bloods with a pen stroke, even when all the individuals involved were oftspring of the same set of parents. In Oklahoma, the Dawes Commission dealt with people of mixed tribal ancestry by calculating blood degree based on the mother’s tribe only. This could reduce an enrollee’s total, recorded Indian blood quantum by as much as one-half. Applicants with discernible black ancestry were not assigned a blood quantum at all (even 1f they clearly had an Indian parent or grandparent), but were simply marked down in the census category for freedmen. As Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 53 long as applicants did not appear to have black ancestry, some Indian agents simply took people’s word about their racial heritage, but even then the results were not necessarily particularly reliable. The definition of blood quantum was not one familiar, historically, to Indian people of traditional upbringing, and not something they previously had reason to keep track of.2? Moreover, by the time the U.S. government began collecting this information in the nineteenth century, Indian people had acquired incentives to creatively revise estimates of their blood quanta. They could not have been unaware of a widely prevailing sentiment 1n the larger society that “white blood makes good Indians.” Given the social handicaps associated with Indian blood, it seems likely that people would frequently have admitted to as little of it as they reasonably could. Those decisions continue to aftect their descendants’ ability to demonstrate that they possess “enough” blood to satisfy particular biological definitions.*4 The difficulties of negotiating a legitimate identity within biological definitions multiply as specific requirements shift, creating a whole new set of opportunities for, and constraints upon, identity claims. For instance, the Rosebud Sioux tribe (South Dakota) at one time dropped its blood quantum requirement for tribal enrollment, but then reinstated it a few years later (1n 1966). This has created families in which the older children are enrolled tribal citizens, while the younger children of the same couple are not.?> A similar situation occurs when a tribe “closes” its rolls and declines to accept further enrollments. In this case older people remain citizens while younger ones, no matter if they possess the same blood quanta as their elders, or even higher, can never be enrolled. What all this means is that even though one’s actual blood quantum obviously cannot change, the definition of identity that depends upon it can and does. Biological Indianness, just as much as legal Indianness, can wink in and out of existence, sometimes with remarkable rapidity. Evaluating Biological Definitions Like legal definitions, biological definitions of Indian identity have both advantages and disadvantages, when viewed from tribal perspectives. On the positive side of the ledger, biological definitions have their common usage to recommend them. They are drawn upon frequently for the purposes of both informal interaction and formal record keeping. Like legal definitions based upon documentary evidence, blood quantum defiGarroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 54. IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED nitions provide a relatively nonsubjective standard amenable to bureaucratic needs. Another virtue of biological definitions is that they allow for the expression of a justifiable pride of ancestry. For a family lineage to have survived for hundreds of years, with few or none of the benefits that accrued to those who attached themselves through marriage and other alliances to members of the dominant race, simply zs an accomplishment. As Cornelia S. explains: “I know that both my parents are full-blood Cherokee, and I know that their parents are full-blood Cherokee, and [my ancestors] before them. [m really proud that I am full-blood Cherokee in this . . . more modern society, … because I… know… it might be harder to be Indian, or just any minority.” Of course, all those who have maintained more or less unmixed bloodlines did not necessarily choose this course entirely out of a ferocious dedication to ethnic personhood. Cherokee sociologist C. Matthew Snipp remarks that, historically, “to be an American Indian often meant that one had not developed the requisite skills to avoid being identified as such.”2° Many more Indian people might have intermingled with and lost themselves in the larger, European population if they had had the opportunity to do so. But acknowledging this fact should not diminish our appreciation of how bone-crushingly hard it has been for families simply to carry on in the absence of the resources that often came to those who merged their lives and fortunes with those of Europeans. Survival under such circumstances 1s an extraordinary achievement, and the language of blood quantum gives people a well-deserved means to express it. Elder Martha S. has the right to her shy smile and the light that comes into her eyes when she says, in gentle tones, “I just feel real good about being full-blood Yuchi. I can trace my grandparents down to my great-grandparents, and they were all Yuchis.” Cornelia S. voices an equally justifiable pride in being a full-blood Cherokee: “I know exactly what I am. That’s zt. Like, you know, race horses that are purebred, . . . and they’re the best ones. That’s how I feel like about myself, because Pm a full blood of my tribe.” A related but more subtle benefit of a biological definition of identity is that it allows for a protest against a certain arrogance that Indians rather commonly encounter on the part of people who resemble, in all discernible ways, members of the dominant society. This arrogance 1s portrayed in an episode of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy. Lucy is an indigenous woman from the West Indies, a Carib Indian, and she 1s aware of the price that this ancestry has exacted from her tribal people: Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 55 “My grandmother is a Carib Indian. … My grandmother 1s alive; the Indians she came from are all dead.” Lucy works in a wealthy American household as a nanny, and one day her employer hesitantly announces that, like Lucy, she “has Indian blood in her.” Lucy reacts with astonishment and bitterness: “There was nothing remotely like an Indian about her. Why claim a thing like that? . . . [U]nderneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?”27 The claim “I have Indian blood in me” has many layers of implication that are difficult to tease out. Perhaps it 1s a compliment to the liberal attitudes of the speaker and her family: that her forebears did not shudder to conjoin themselves with others of a presumably “lesser” race. Or perhaps it is an effort to garner the prestige of exoticism without crossing over into disreputability. After all, “having Indian blood in you” 1s rather different than “being Indian.” These are only two possible analyses of a particular conversational foray, and perhaps they are overly cynical. However, when one observes the common reactions of Indian people to the statement “I have Indian blood in me,” one suspects that it may often feel to them like the speaker is trying to lay claim to benefits that she did not earn. The definition of identity through biology and blood quantum, however, provides those most likely to have endured the life chances reserved for “the vanquished” with a way of thinking about the differences between themselves and those who, whatever remnant of racial admixture their genetics may admit, now openly enjoy the rewards of “the victor.” On the negative side of the evaluation of biological definitions of Indian identity: While some Indian people embrace the terminology and the logic of blood quantum, others find it offensive. Individuals of the latter persuasion may distance themselves from such definitions by means of humor. For example, Jimmie Durham, an artist whose selfidentification as Cherokee has earned him a number of inquiries into his racial identity, has become well known for his comment: “The question of my ‘identity’ often comes up. I think I must be a mixed blood. I claim to be male, although only one of my parents 1s male.”?8 Others express their displeasure more straightforwardly. An Anishnabe and Cree grandmother, Kathleen W., comments, “I don’t like being talked about in a vocabulary usually reserved for dogs and horses.” Her remark recalls Snipp’s comment that, for Indians, the matter of “blood pedigree” assumes significance “in a manner bordering on flagrant racism.”?? A Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 56 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED Cherokee colleague expresses a similar annoyance with questions concerning whether or not he is “part Indian.” “Indians,” he writes dryly, “do not come in ‘parts.’”° Lyrics from the song “Blood Quantum,” by the Indigo Girls, capture some of the emotions suggested by the previous remarks: Youwrre standing in the blood quantum line With a pitcher in your hand Poured from your heart into your veins You said Iam, I am, I am Now measure mec, McCasure mec Tell me where I stand Allocate my very soul Like you have my land.#! Some commentators, in fact, object to the entire notion of mixedbloodedness, which is central to biological definitions, because it 1s so frequently used to diminish a whole category of people. It more than hints that mixed bloods are some kind of degenerate representatives of a once-pure category. As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the Dakota Sioux (South Dakota) editor of the Native American Studies journal Wicazo Sa Review, argues, “To adopt this idea [of racial purity] in its fullest, most sophisticated sense makes hybridity a contaminant to the American Indian’s right to authenticity.”%? An emphasis on “pure” cultural expressions can encourage us to devalue the important role played by the “impure,” the mixed blood. For centuries, mixed bloods have bridged the chasm between cultures — bridged it with their bodies, bridged it with their spirits, bridged it with their consciousnesses, bridged it often whether they were willing or unwilling. In the scholarly literature, researchers such as Terry Wilson, Clara Sue Kadwell, and Margaret Connell Szasz talk about mixed bloods as “cultural brokers,” practical mediators of the relations between the different racial categories they simultaneously inhabit.** However, it 1s a fictional mixed-blood character created by Native novelists Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich in The Crown of Columbus who states the intermediary role of mixed bloods most clearly: We’re parked on the bleachers looking into the arena, never the main players, but there are bonuses to peripheral vision. . . . We’re jealous of innocence, Pll admit that, but as the hooks and eyes that connect one core to the other we have our roles to play. “Caught between two worlds,” 1s the way it’s often put in cliched prose, but Pd put it differently. We are the catch.*4 Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 57 This marginal, mediative role deserves to be honored alongside the roles played by full bloods, who are better able to accept the place of the unselfconscious insider in tribal communities. But biological definitions, with the fractionated Indians they create, work to the contrary eftect. Cook-Lynn finds still another reason to criticize these definitions. She argues that the American fascination with degree of biological connection to a given tribe finds its roots 1n, and encourages, a dismissive attitude toward the status of tribal nations. On the one hand, Americans regularly scrutinize the identity claims of well-known Indian authors. Yet, Cook-Lynn writes, “No one asks how much Egyptian Naguib Manfouz is, nor do they require that J. M. Cootzee provide proof that his citizenship and identity is embodied in tribal African nationhood.” The reason for such differences, Cook-Lynn concludes, concerns differing levels of “mutual respect between nations.”?> Observers are willing to defer, without question, to decisions that Egypt and other African countries make about citizenship, but obstinately believe that individuals, even those entirely unconnected to tribal affairs, should be able to second-guess similar decisions that Indian nations make. Cook-Lynn’s analysis suggests that the embrace of a biological (or any other) definition of identity over whatever legal definitions a tribe elects to apply 1s an insult to tribal sovereignty. It suggests an underlying assumption that, regardless of tribes’ formal status as separate nations that enjoy government-to-government relations with the United States, they are somehow less qualified to determine their own citizenship than are other nations. Another negative product of determining identity by reference to biological characteristics is the issue of technical extinction, or “statistical extermination.” Biological definitions have long been used to limit the numbers of Indians to whom the American government retains obligations, with the anticipation that those obligations would eventually cease altogether. In recent years, the long-awaited event has quickly drawn into view for a number of tribes. This is fairly unsurprising, given that Indians have the highest rate of intermarriage of any ethnic group, with slightly more than half of all Indian men and women marrying non-Indians.*° Under these circumstances, blood quantum requirements (used by about two-thirds of all tribes in the lower forty-eight states)?” are clearly not well suited to the needs of groups too small to support endogamy, or marriage of members within their own group. Bull T. describes the circumstances of his own Wichita tribe: “We were decimated so low [as a Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 58 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED result of European contact] that we can’t intermarry. Were almost all related to each other now. … Now, in order to be on the [Wichita] tribal roll, you have to have one-eighth blood quantum. And after a period of years there will be no one [who meets this criterion].” As Native scholars Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., put the matter, “To make genetics the defining criterion for continuation of [tribes with only small numbers of full blood members] . . . would be quite literally suicidal.”38 It projects, indeed, a scenario in which such tribes may find themselves redefined as technically “extinct,” even when they continue to exist as functioning social, cultural, political, linguistic, or residential groupings. A final concern that one might raise regarding biological definitions of identity 1s their inextricable entanglement with the notion of race. Biological definitions promote the notion that “race” constitutes an objective, genetically based difference between groups of people. Most Americans accept this assumption, unaware that it runs contrary to most current scientific knowledge, which tends to view racial distinctions as significant social, but not biological, realities.%° The most significant point here, however, 1s not the scientific “respectability” of the biological definition of race, or its lack thereof; more importantly, those definitions also have a dubious past, having been put to use in service of social goals that have been extremely oppressive to Indian populations. This becomes apparent if one looks, for instance, to the social science of the early to mid-twentieth century. Anthropologists of that period, operating from a conviction that “blood would tell” — and tell in all kinds of ways — assisted in defining membership for various tribal groups (including the Ojibwe, Lumbee, Creek, Choctaw, and others) on the basis of observable characteristics assumed to derive from biological inheritance. Usually for the purpose of determining eligibility for legal rights, they ferreted out full-blood and mixed-blood Indians by such “scientific” methods as measuring feet (mixed bloods were supposed to have big ones), scrutinizing hair samples (full-blood hair was to be absolutely straight), and scarifying chests (mixed-blood chests knew enough to turn redder, when so assaulted, than their full-blood counterparts).4° These procedures tended, as one might suspect, to yield rather variable results, even for members of the same immediate family: A study of the Lumbee tribe by physical anthropologist Carl Seltzer, for example, yielded at least one instance in which the same set of Indian parents found themselves with children of different racial statuses.*! But reliable or not, the results Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 59 of such tests were used to deny the Lumbee federal recognition on the grounds that, collectively, they did not possess enough “Indian blood.” A more general goal of early-twentieth-century biological definitions of identity was to sort out the “superior” races from the “inferior” ones. “In this racial hierarchy, Indians were in competition with African Black Americans as the lowest race of mankind, in what was referred to as ‘the great chain of being’ by Eurocentric social scientists.”4? Biologists engaged in this lofty quest shipped countless Indian body parts to government institutions for research purposes. Some museum personnel or their agents stopped at almost nothing to acquire their grisly trophies. Indians who met with mortal misfortune on the battlefield (even those in the service of the United States) were frequently in danger of being snatched up by vigilant U.S. military personnel, decapitated, and their crania sent off to such institutions as the National Museum of Health and Medicine.*# Nineteenth-century army surgeons wrote of their resourcefulness in repeatedly plundering Indian cemeteries to secure the severed heads of those interred there, or filching the newly deceased from under the very noses of their comrades (who had developed the regrettable habit of “lurk[ing] about their dead”).45 But perhaps the most shocking single episode involving the theft of human remains in the interests of substantiating a biological definition of identity is the 1897 case of a group of Inuit (then called Eskimos). In that year, Arctic explorer Robert Peary visited Greenland and loaded his return vessel with an exotic cargo. It included the corpses of several Inuit, whom Peary had unearthed from their fresh graves, for delivery to the American Museum of Natural History. But it also included half a dozen living “specimens,” among them a man named Qisuk and his son, Minik. These were to be put on display at the museum as a means of generating money to fund future Arctic expeditions. Tragically, 1t soon became evident that the warm climate did not agree with the Inuit, and when Qisuk shortly died (along with four of the others), scientists dissected him. ‘The remains of his physical body were then boiled and the flesh stripped away so that the skeleton could be placed in a museum collection. By way of a final indignity, the staff of the American Museum of Natural History then covered up what they had done by presenting the surviving Minik (then seven years of age) with a blanketwrapped piece of wood, which they asserted was his father’s corpse, and staging their own version of a traditional Inuit funeral for it, on the museum lawn. When, as a teenager, Minik learned the truth of his Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University 60 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED father’s fate, he began a quest to retrieve and bury his father’s body. Although he spent many years 1n the effort, he never succeeded.*6 The point of this recitation of injuries to Native spiritual beliefs and practices regarding the dead is that it was a biological definition of Indian identity that motivated non-Native individuals and institutions to commit those injuries. It would seem that there 1s much to lose by embracing a definition of identity that encourages the fiction of race. Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb33858.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of San Diego State University THREE What If My Grandma Eats Big Macs: Culture Strange and perplexing legal cases have tried the sagacity of judges and juries throughout the history of the American judicial system. But in 1976, the country witnessed an unprecedented event. An entire tribe went on trial. Events began with the Indian community’s efforts to bring a land claims case. But the point upon which the outcome quickly came to turn was whether or not that community had the right to a collective identity as an Indian tribe. The trial involved a community of self-identified Indian residents of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the Mashpee. They proposed to bring a land claims suit that had the potential to significantly reconfigure economic relations in the state.! The basis of their suit was the Indian NonIntercourse Act of 1790, which stipulated that the federal government must approve all transfers of land from Indians to non-Indians.? In violation of this act, the Mashpee said, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had allowed Indian land to be sold over a period of years without congressional approval. And the Mashpee wanted their land back — about 16,000 acres of It. The non-Indian residents of the town of Mashpee had reason to be nervous about the threatened legal action, which involved approximately three-quarters of the land on which the town sat. The late 1960s and the 1970s had already seen a series of land claims cases based on violations of the Non-Intercourse Act, and some tribes — notably the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot (both of Maine) — had received large settlements in consequence. Lawyers for the town of Mashpee, accordingly, decided to 61 Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. E-book, Berkeley: University of California Pres

Requirements: 250-300

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 39 Canada allows for the naturalization of non-Native children through adoption.! Although Twain has stated that her white mother (now deceased) had told her, in childhood, that her biological father (also deceased) had some Indian heritage, his family denies the suggestion entirely. They say they are French and Irish. Ms. Twain explains: “I don’t know how much Indian blood I actually have in me, but as the adopted daughter of my father Jerry, I became legally registered as 50-percent North American Indian. Being raised by a full-blooded Indian and being part of his family and their culture from such a young age 1s all Pve ever known. That heritage is in my heart and my soul, and ’m proud of 1t.”2 Twain has been sharply criticized, in both the United States and Canada, for not making the full details of her racial background clearer, especially to awards-granting agencies such as the First Americans in the Arts (FAITA), which honored her in February 1996 as a Native per-former. FAITA itself has made no such complaint. The group states that it is satisfied that “Ms. Twain has not intentionally misrepresented her-self’ And more importantly, her adopted family defends her. An aunt observes: “She was raised by us. She was accepted by our band. If my brother were alive, he’d be very upset. He raised her as his own daugh-ter. My parents, her grandparents, took her into the bush and taught her the [ Native] traditions.”? Twain’s case shows with uncommon clarity that legal and biological definitions are conceptually distinct. It is the task of this chapter to examine the latter. In their modern American construction, at least, biological definitions of identity assume the centrality of an individual’s genetic relationship to other tribal members. Not just any degree of relationship will do, how-ever. Typically, the degree of closeness 1s also important. And this is the starting point for much of the controversy that swirls around issues of biological Indianness. Closeness of biological or blood relationship can be conceived in a fairly mechanical fashion, as suggested in the diagram provided by a Bureau of Indian Affairs training handbook and shown 1n figure 2.1. It graphically illustrates the amount of blood that should be attributed to a child born to one parent of four-fourths (full-blood) Indian ancestry and one parent of one-quarter Indian ancestry: this child 1s shown to be filled up to the level of five-eighths with Indian blood. Some Indian people accept a similar construction of blood relation-ship. Interview respondent Donald G., a Cherokee full blood, explained

FATHER MOTHER CO = : O > 5/8 FIGURE 2.1. Visualizing blood quantum. Diagram from Bureau of Indian Affairs handbook, illustrating how blood quantum may be conceptualized and calculated. (Source: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Enrollment, 82.) the implication of racial admixture for tribal identity, using mayonnaise and ketchup to represent Caucasian and Indian genetics: Donald G.: If you took mayonnaise and ketchup and mixed it equally, what 1s 1t? Mayonnaise or ketchup? Author (laugling): Both. Donald G.: Or 1f you took just a small portion… of ketchup and a larger portion of mayonnaise, then what do you have? Author: Does it get to the point where youre not Indian any more, with all the intermarriage? Do you finally just end up with mayonnaise? Donald G.: Well, see, that’s it. Thats the big question. Because I was going to say—at what point? At what point is it more ketchup or at what point is 1t more mayonnaise? That’s a question that remains to be answered, I guess. . . . [But] obviously, 1f you put more of one, it’s going to be more of that one. And that’s how I feel about 1t.

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED AI Cornelia S., a full-blood Cherokee mother, offers similar sentiments: “My opinion is [that people should be] a quarter or a half [to be consid-ered Indians]. . . . Because I think that the less Indian . . . blood that you have in you. . . . Well, [the non-Indian blood] is watering it [the Indian blood] down.” Hopi geneticist Frank D. draws explicitly on the language of biology to express concerns about racial mixing: “I don’t know what ‘blood’ means. But I do know what ‘genes’ means. . . . I don’t like the idea of the blood or the genes being deleted [through Indians’ intermarriage with non-Indians]. I think it should go the other way, [so that Indian peo-ple] . . . increase their Indian population [by marrying each other, rather than]… marry[ing] some non-Indian.” Sociologist Eugeen Roosens summarizes such common conceptions about the importance of blood quantum for determining Indian identity: There is . . . [a] principle about which the whites and the Indians are in agree-ment… . People with more Indian blood . . . also have more rights to inherit what their ancestors, the former Indians, have left behind. In addition, full blood Indians are more authentic than half-breeds. By bezmg pure, they have more right to respect. They ave, in all aspects of their being, more integral.+ Biological ancestry can take on such tremendous significance in tribal contexts that it overwhelms all other considerations of identity, especially when it 1s constructed as “pure.” As Cherokee legal scholar G. William Rice points out, “Most [people] would recognize the full-blood Indian who was enrolled in a federally recognized tribe as an Indian, even if the individual was adopted at birth by a non-Indian family and had never set foot in Indian country nor met another Indian.”> Mixed-race individuals, by contrast, find their identity claims considerably complicated. Even if such an individual can demonstrate conclusively that he has some Native ancestry, the question will still be raised: Is the amount of ancestry he possesses “enough”? Is his “Indian blood” sufficient to distinguish him from the mixed-blood individual spotlighted by an old quip: “If he got a nosebleed, he’d turn into a white man”? Members of various tribes complain of factionalism between these two major groups — full bloods and mixed bloods — and they suggest that the division arose historically because of mixed bloods’ greater access to the social resources of the dominant society and their enhanced abul-ity to impose values and ideas upon others.°® As Julie M., a citizen of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians, says: “For the Cherokee people, there’s been this mixed blood/full blood kind of dynamic going

42 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED from before the removal [in 1838, also known as the Trail of Tears]… . Its kind of like us-and-them…. It’s almost been like a war in some cases. . . . It’s a ‘who’s-really-going-to-be-in-control-of-the-tribe?’ kind of thing.” Many historians have similarly found it logical that political alle-giances would tend to shift for those Indian people who formed alliances, through intermarriage, with members of the dominant society, and that this has made the division between full bloods and mixed bloods politically important.” Modern biological definitions of identity, however, are much more complicated than this historical explanation can account for. This com-plexity did not originate in the ideas and experiences of Indian tribes. Instead, they closely reflect nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century the-ories of race introduced by Euro-Americans. These theories (of which there were a great many) viewed biology as definitive, but they did not distinguish it from culture. Thus, blood became quite literally the vehi-cle for the transmission of cultural characteristics. “‘Half-breeds’ by this logic could be expected to behave in ‘half-civilized) 1.e., partially assimi-lated, ways while retaining one half of their traditional culture, account-ing for their marginal status in both societies.”8 These turn-of-the-century theories of race found a very precise way to talk about amount of ancestry in the idea of blood quantum, or degree of blood. The notion of blood quantum as a standard of Indianness emerged with force in the nineteenth century. Its most significant early usage as a standard of identification was in the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887, which led to the creation of the Dawes Rolls that I discussed in the last chapter. It has been part of the popular — and legal and academic — lore about Indians ever since. Given this standard of identification, full bloods tend to be seen as the “really real,” the quintessential Indians, while others are viewed as Indians in diminishing degrees. The original, stated intention of blood quantum distinctions was to determine the point at which the various responsibilities of the dominant society to Indian peoples ended. The ultimate and explicit federal intention was to use the blood quantum standard as a means to liquidate tribal lands and to eliminate government trust responsibility to tribes, along with entitlement programs, treaty rights, and reservations. Through intermarriage and application of a bio-logical definition of identity Indians would eventually become citizens indistinguishable from all other citizens.° Degree of blood is calculated, with reference to biological definitions, on the basis of the immediacy of one’s genetic relationship to those

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 43 whose bloodlines are (supposedly) unmixed. As in the case with legal definitions, the initial calculation for most tribes’ biological definitions begins with a base roll, a listing of tribal membership and blood quanta in some particular year. These base rolls make possible very elaborate definitions of identity. For instance, they allow one to reckon that the oftspring of, say, a full-blood Navajo mother and a white father 1s one-half Navajo. If that half-Navajo child, in turn, produces children with a Hopi person of one-quarter blood degree, those progeny will be judged one-quarter Navajo and one-eighth Hopi. Alternatively, they can be said to have three-eighths general Indian blood. As even this rather simple example shows, over time such calculations can become infinitesimally precise, with people’s ancestry being parsed into so many thirty-secondths, sixty-fourths, one-hundred-twenty-eighths, and so on. The Bureau of Indian Affairs uses the chart in table 1 as a means of calculating blood quanta. The chart constitutes a quick ref-erence for dealing with such difficult cases as a child with one parent with a twenty-one thirty-seconds blood quantum and another with a thirteen-sixteenths blood quantum. (The answer in this example, the table informs us, would be forty-seven sixty-fourths.) For those of us who have grown up and lived with the peculiar preci-sion of calculating blood quantum, it sometimes requires a perspective less influenced by the vagaries of American history to remind us yust how far from common sense the concepts underlying biological definitions of identity are. I recall responding to an inquiry from a Southeast Asian friend about what blood quantum was and how it was calculated. In mid-explanation, I noticed his expression of complete amazement. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he burst out. “Who ever thought of that?” The logic that underlies the biological definition of racial identity becomes even more curious and complicated when one considers the striking difference in the way that American definitions assign individu-als to the racial category of “Indian,” as opposed to the racial category “black.” As a variety of researchers have observed, social attributions of black identity have focused (at least since the end of the Civil War) on the “one-drop rule,” or rule of hypodescent.!° In the movie Raintree County, Liz Taylor’s character articulates this rule in crassly explicit terms. The worst thing that can happen to a person, she drawls, 1s “havin” a little Negra blood in ya’—yjust one little teensy drop and the person’s all Negra.” That the one-drop method of racial classification 1s fundamen-tally a matter of biological inheritance (rather than law, culture, or even

TABLE 1. Calculating the Quantum of Indian Blood Non-Indian 1/16 1/8 3/16 1/4 5/16 3/8 7/16 1/2 1/16 1/32 1/16 3/32 1/8 5/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 1/8 1/16 3/32 1/8 5/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 3/16 3/32 1/8 9/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 1/4 1/8 5/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 5/16 9/32 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 3/8 3/16 7[32 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 3/8 13/32 7/16 7/16 7/32 1/4 9/32 9/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 1/4 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 = 1/2 9/16 9/32 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 5/8 5/16 11/32 = 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 11/16 | 11/32 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 3/4 3/8 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 13/16 | 13/32 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 7/8 7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 15/16 | 15/32 = 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 = 23/32 4/4 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 = 3/4 1/32 1/64 3/64 5/64 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 3/32 3/64 5/64 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 = 19/64 5/32 5/64 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 7[32 7/64 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 9/32 9/64 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 11/32 | 11/64 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 13/32 | 13/64 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 15/32 | 15/64 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 17/32 | 17/64 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 19/32 | 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 21/32 | 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 23/32 | 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 25/32 | 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 27/32 | 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 29/32 | 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 31/32 | 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 SOURCE: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Enrollment, app. H. NOTE: To determine the degree of blood of a child, find the degree of one parent in the left-hand column and the degree of the other parent 1n the top row. Read horizontally to the right and vertically down to find the degree. Example: If one parent is 11/16 and the other is 5/8, the child 1s 21/32 degree.

TABLE I. (continued) 9/16 5/8 11/16 3/4 13/16 7/8 15/16 4/4 1/16 | 5/16 11/32 3/8 13/32 7/16 ~=15/32 «1/2 17/32 1/8 11/32 3/8 13/32 =—7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 =9/16 3/16 3/8 13/32 =—-7/16 15/32 1/2 17/32 =9/16 19/32 1/4 13/32 ~=7/16 15/32 = 1/2 17/32 =9/16 19/32 5/8 5/16 7/16 15/32 =1/2 17/32 =9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 3/8 15/32 91/2 17/32 = 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 +=11/16 7/16 1/2 17/32: 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 1/2 17/32 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 83/4 9/16 9/16 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 5/8 19/32 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 11/16 | 5/8 21/32 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 3/4 21/32 «11/16 = =23/32— 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 7/8 13/16 | 11/16 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 7/8 29/32 7/8 23/32 3/4 25/32 13/16 27/32 7/8 29/32 15/16 15/16 | 3/4 25/32 = 13/16 27/32 7/8 29/32 15/16 = 31/32 4/4 25/32 13/16) 27/32 7/8 29/32 15/16 3 31/32 4/4 1/32 19/64 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 3/32 21/64 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 5/32 23/64 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 7/32 25/64 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 9/32 27/64 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 11/32 | 29/64 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 13/32 | 31/64 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 15/32 | 33/64 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 17/32 | 35/64 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 19/32 | 37/64 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 21/32 | 39/64 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 23/32 | 41/64 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 25/32 | 43/64 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 27/32 | 45/64 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 59/64 29/32 | 47/64 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 59/64 61/64 31/32 | 49/64 51/64 53/64 55/64 57/64 59/64 61/64 63/64

4.6 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED self-identification) 1s clear from the 1948 Mississippi court case of a young man named Davis Knight. Knight, accused of violating antimis-cegenation statutes, argued that he was quite unaware that he possessed any black ancestry, which in any case amounted to less than one-sixteenth. The courts convicted him anyway and sentenced him to five years in jail. “Blood” was “blood,” whether anyone, including the accused himself, was aware of it or not.!! The same definition of identity held sway for blacks in America well past the 1940s. For instance, up until 1970, Louisiana state law defined as black anyone possessing “a trace of black ancestry.” In an apparent seizure of racial liberalism, however, the legislature formally revised the definition of identity in that year. It decided that the amount of blood constituting a “trace” should be limited by declaring that only those pos-sessing more than one-thirty-second-degree “Negro blood” would be considered black.!2 A woman named Susie Guillory Phipps challenged this law in 1982-1983, when she discovered, at age forty-three, that she was a black woman. It happened this way: Susie Guillory was born in 1934 in Louisiana to a poor, French-speaking family. She married a tradesman, Mr. Phipps, who worked hard and did well—so well that, in 1977, the couple decided to take a trip to South America. Mrs. Phipps drove to New Orleans to apply for the first passport she had ever required. Upon arrival, she ran smack into one of the American definitions of racial iden-tity. There was a problem, the clerk at the records agency whispered, drawing Mrs. Phipps into a private oflice. She had declared on the appli-cation that her race was white. But, the clerk pointed out, Phipps’s birth certificate described both her parents as “colored.” Mrs. Phipps protested. She “looked” white, she said. She thought of herself as white. She lived as a white woman. She saw no reason why her personal docu-ments should describe her otherwise. She felt so strongly about the mat-ter, in fact, that she started a legal battle to have the racial identification on her birth certificate changed. It turned out to be a long road, but her perseverance illuminated some of the most interesting back alleys of America’s biological definitions of racial identity. The Division of Vital Records of New Orleans, it seemed, did not subscribe to Phipps’s view of herself as white, and it was not about to change its mind. The New Yorker, reporting on Phipps’s case in 1986, wrote: “At Vital Records, it was taken for granted that certain families were white and certain families had a traceable amount of black blood,

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 47 and that it was up to the vital-records office to tell them apart. When it came to tracing traceable amounts, nobody ever accused the vital-records office of bureaucratic lethargy.” Certainly in the case of Mrs. Phipps the office was on its toes. The office chief began by commissioning a genealogist to trace Mrs. Phipps’ ancestry all the way back to the 1700s, and then he went in search of her living relatives and her childhood neighbors. (The similar ransacking of “Chief” Buftalo Child Long Lance’s ancestral roots comes to mind.) By the time the case came to court, the office had gathered boxes of deposi-tions and other records testifying to the Guillory bloodlines. And they could show that the Guullorys, indeed, had black ancestry: Mrs. Phipps’s great-great-great-grandmother Margarita had been a slave in the 1700s. Margarita had borne children to her white master, and some of her descendants had married individuals of mixed race. Confronted with the evidence, Susie Phipps consented to the argu-ment that she might possess one-thirty-second-degree black ancestry — the amount that would bring her in just under the wire for establishing a white identity. Vital Records, however, by scraping together and adding up all the dribs and drabs of ancestral blood, argued that Mrs. Phipps was as much as five-thirty-secondths black. This was enough for the courts. They denied her petition to change the racial designation on her birth certificate to white, and in 1985 an appellate court upheld the decision. The complainant had failed to produce sufficient evidence to show that the document, as issued, was in error, and it would have to stand. Regardless of her self-perception, Mrs. Phipps had to bow to the biological definition of race, and its corollary, the one-drop rule. For legal purposes, she would forever be a black woman. Mrs. Phipps’s story in and of itself is an interesting study of the way Americans link ideas about racial identity and biology. But 1t becomes far more intriguing when we contrast the logic underlying the definition of identity in operation there with the one that applies to Indian identity. Can the reader imagine a scenario in which an office of the American government legally compels a person professing anything more than one-thirty-second-degree Indian blood to accept identification as Indian: Can she imagine such a claim being widely tolerated as legitimate, even for the purposes of casual social interaction? Far from being held to a one-drop rule, Indians are generally required — both by law and by popular opinion — to establish rather high blood quanta 1n order for their claims to racial identity to be accepted as meaningful, the individual’s own opinion notwithstanding. Although

48 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED people must have only the slightest trace of “black blood” to be forced into the category “African American,” modern American Indians must (1) formally produce (2) strong evidence of (3) often rather substantial amounts of “Indian blood” to be allowed entry into the corresponding racial category. The regnant biological definitions applied to Indians are simply quite different than those that have applied (and continue to apply) to blacks. Modern Americans, as Native American Studies pro-fessor Jack Forbes (Powhatan/Lenape/Saponi) puts the matter, “are always finding ‘blacks’ (even if they look rather un-African), and… are always losing Indians?” Biological Definitions: Contexts and Consequences Biological definitions of Indian identity operate, in short, 1n some curi-ous and inconsistent ways. They are nevertheless significant in a variety of contexts. And they have clear relationships, both direct and indirect, to legal definitions. The federal government has historically used a mini-mum blood quantum standard to determine who was eligible to receive treaty rights, or to sell property and manage his or her own financial affairs.!© Blood quantum 1s ove of the criteria that determines eligibility for citizenship in many tribes; it therefore indirectly influences the claimant’s relationship to the same kinds of rights, privileges, and respon-sibilities that legal definitions allow.?” But biological definitions of identity affect personal interactions as well as governmental decisions. Indian people with high blood quanta frequently have recognizable physical characteristics. As Cherokee Nation principal tribal chief Chad Smith observes, some people are eas-ily recognizable as Indians because they pass “a brown paper bag test,” meaning that their skin 1s “darker than a #10 paper sack.” It 1s these indi-viduals who are often most closely associated with negative racial stereo-types in the larger society. Native American Studies professor Devon Mihesuah makes a point about Indian women that is really applicable to either gender: “Appearance is the most visible aspect of one’s race; It determines how Indian women define themselves and how others define and treat them. Their appearance, whether Caucasian, Indian, African, or mixed, either limits or broadens Indian women’s choices of ethnic iden-tity and ability to interact with non-Indians and other Indians.”!8 Every day, identifiably Indian people are turned away from restaurants, refused the use of public rest rooms, ranked as unintelligent by the edu-

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 49 cation system, and categorized by the personnel of medical, social service, and other vital public agencies as “problems” — all strictly on the basis of their appearance. As Keetoowah Band Cherokee full-blood Donald G. notes, a recognizably Indian appearance can be a serious detriment to one’s professional and personal aspirations: “It seems the darker you are, the less important you are, 1n some ways, to the employer. . . . To some, it would be discouraging. But I am four-fourths [1.¢e., full-blood] Cherokee, and 1t doesn’t matter what someone says about me. . . . I feel for the person who doesn’t like my skin color, you know?” There are circumstances, however, in which it 1s difficult for the vic-tims of negative racial stereotyping to maintain an attitude as philosoph-ical as this. In one interview, a Mohawk friend, June L., illustrated the potential consequences of public judgments based on skin color. She reminded me of a terrifying episode that had once unfolded while I was visiting at her house. Our conversation was interrupted by a phone call informing this mother of five that her college-student son, who had spent the summer day working on a roof, had suddenly become ill while driving home. Feeling faint, he had pulled up to a local convenience store and made his way inside, asking for a drink of water. The clerk refused. Dangerously dehydrated, the young man collapsed on the floor from sunstroke. “The worst thing about it,” June recalled, “was that I have to keep wondering: What was the reason for that? Did that clerk refuse to help my son because she was just a mean person? Or was it because she saw him stumble into the store and thought, ‘Well, it’s just some drunken Indian’?” Anxiety about social judgments of this kind are a fact of daily life for parents of children whose physical appearance makes their Indian ancestry clearly evident. At the same time, June’s remarks showed the opposite side to the coin of physical appearance. In some contexts, not conforming to the usual notions of “what Indians look like” can also be a lability: My aunt was assistant dean at a large Ivy League university. One day she called me on the phone. She had one scholarship to give out to an Indian student. One of the students being considered was blonde-haired and blue-eyed. The other one was black-haired and dark-skinned, and she looked Indian. ‘The blonde girl’s grades were a little better. My aunt didn’t know what to do. She said to me, “Both these girls are tribal members. Both of them are qualified [for the scholar-ship]. They’re sitting outside my office. What would you do?” I told her that, as an Indian person, there was only one thing I could say. Which was to give the money to the one with the dark skin. As Indian people, we do want to have Indian people that look like theyre Indian to represent us.

50 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED Readers may be surprised by such a candid statement. But June’s prag-matic reasoning takes account of certain historical realities. As she explained further, “We like people to know who’s doing those accom-plishments, like getting scholarships. We want them to know this is an Indian person doing this. Because I come from a background where if you looked Indian, you were put in special education because the schools said you couldn’t learn. And it wasn’t true. We need Indian people today who look Indian to show everyone the things we can do.” A physical appearance that 1s yudged insufficiently “Indian” can also act as a barrier to participation in certain cultural activities. Bull T., a Wichita and Seneca minister in his midfifties, recalls that, in his youth, he wit-nessed light-skinned individuals who attempted to participate in pow-wow dances being evicted from the arena. “That kind of thing 1s still hap-pening today,” he added sadly, and other respondents readily confirmed this observation. A more unusual instance of the relevance of physical appearance to cultural participation was volunteered by Frank D., a Hopi respondent. His tribe’s ceremonial dances feature the appearance of pow-erful spirit beings called kachinas, which are embodied by masked Hopi men. Ideally, the everyday, human identity of the dancers remains unknown to observers. Frank commented on the subject of tribal mem-bers whose skin tone is noticeably either lighter or darker than the norm: Frank D.: Say, for instance, 1f a Hopi marries a black person . . . [and] you get a male child . . . 1¢s gonna be darker skinned. It might even be black. A black kachina just wouldn’t fit out here [at Hopi]. You see, every-bodyd know who it 1s. He’d be very visible [in the ceremonial dances]. . . . Itd be very hard on that individual. Kids don’t work the other way, too — if they’re real light… . Kachinas gotta be brown. Author: So there are certain ceremonial roles that people could not fill because of their appearance: Frank D.: Well, they could, but it would be awful tough. A lot of these [ceremo-nial] things are done with secrecy. No one knows who the kachinas are. Or at least, the kids don’t. And then, say you get somebody who really stands out, then everybody knows who that [dancer] 1s, and it’s not good. For the ceremony — because everybody knows who that person 1s. And so the kids will start asking questions — “How come that kachina’s so dark, so black?” or “How come that kachina’s white?” They start asking questions and it’s really hard. So I think, if youre thinking about kids, it’s really better 1f kachinas are brown. Finally, the physical appearance borne by mixed bloods may not only create barriers to tribal cultural participation; 1t may also offer an occa-

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 51 sion for outrightly shaming them. Cornelia S. remembers her days at the Eufala Indian School: You had to be Indian to be [allowed admission] there… . But . . . if [certain stu-dents] . . . didn’t look as Indian as we did, or if they looked like they were white, they were kind of looked down upon, like treated differently because [people would say] “oh, that’s yust a white person.” . . . They just [would] tease °em and stuff. Say “oh, whatcha doin’ white boy” or “white girl” — just stuff like that. Nor is the social disapproval of light-skinned mixed bloods strictly the stuff of schoolyard teasing. The same respondent added that even adults confront questions of blood quantum with dead seriousness: Us Indians, whenever we see someone else who 1s saying that they’re Indian . . . or trying to be around us Indians, and act like us, and they don’t look like they’re Indian and we know that they’re not as much Indian as we are, yeah, we look at them like they’re not Indian and, ya know, don’t really like why they’re acting like that… . But you know, Pm not that far off . . . into yudging other people and what color [they are]. The late author Michael Dorris, a member of the Modoc tribe (California), has written that humiliations related to his appearance were part of his daily experience. He describes (in his account of his family’s struggle with his son’s fetal alcohol syndrome, The Broken Cord) an encounter with a hospital admissions staff, to whom he had just identified himself and his son as Indians. “They surveyed my appearance with curiosity. It was an expression I recognized, a reaction, familiar to most people of mixed-blood ancestry, that said, “You don’t Jook like an Indian. No matter how often it happened, no matter how frequently I was blamed by strangers for not resembling their image of some Hollywood Sitting Bull, I was still defensive and vulnerable. ‘Pm part Indian; I explained.”!° Even his tragic death has not safeguarded Dorris from insinuations about inadequate blood quantum. Shortly after his 1997 suicide, a story on his life and death in New York magazine reported that the author’s fair complexion had always caused some observers to wonder about his racial identity and archly repeated a rumor: “It is said he . . . [eventually] discovered tanning booths.”° In short, many Indian people, both individually and collectively, con-tinue to embrace the assumption that close biological connections to other Indian people — and the distinctive physical appearance that may accompany those connections — imply a stronger claim on identity than

52 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED do more distant ones. As Potawatomi scholar of Native American Studies Terry Wilson summarizes, “Few, if any, Native Americans, regardless of upbringing 1n rural, reservation, or urban setting, 1gnore their own and other Indians’ blood quantum in everyday life. Those whose physical appearances render their Indian identities suspect are subject to suspicious scrutiny until precise cultural explanations, espe-cially blood quantum, are offered or discovered.”?! Negotiating Biological Identities There are many reasons why people fail in their efforts to negotiate a meaningful identity as an Indian by reference to a specific biological definition. For one thing, many tribes today really do have large num-bers of claimants to membership with relatively low blood quanta, due to intermarriage. However, difficulties in establishing an Indian identity by reference to blood do not stem solely from having a deficient cor-puscle count. Many times, the problem lies with the way blood quanta are reckoned. It would be an enormous understatement to say that the original assignments of blood quanta on the tribal base rolls that are still used to determine the blood quanta of Indians today were often not especially accurate. Modern observers may express disbelief at the decision of the Passamaquoddy tribe of Maine, which was recently recognized by the federal government. A highly intermarried tribe, they declared an inten-tion 1n 1990 to constitute anyone appearing on the tribal census of that year as a full blood, automatically and by fiat.?? But the arbitrariness of this decision is not unlike the methods employed in many historic records of blood quantum. On some reservations, nineteenth-century Indian agents assigned and recorded blood quantum on the basis of the candidate’s physical appear-ance, making darker people into full bloods and lighter ones into mixed bloods with a pen stroke, even when all the individuals involved were oftspring of the same set of parents. In Oklahoma, the Dawes Commission dealt with people of mixed tribal ancestry by calculating blood degree based on the mother’s tribe only. This could reduce an enrollee’s total, recorded Indian blood quantum by as much as one-half. Applicants with discernible black ancestry were not assigned a blood quantum at all (even 1f they clearly had an Indian parent or grandparent), but were simply marked down in the census category for freedmen. As

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 53 long as applicants did not appear to have black ancestry, some Indian agents simply took people’s word about their racial heritage, but even then the results were not necessarily particularly reliable. The definition of blood quantum was not one familiar, historically, to Indian people of traditional upbringing, and not something they previously had reason to keep track of.2? Moreover, by the time the U.S. government began col-lecting this information in the nineteenth century, Indian people had acquired incentives to creatively revise estimates of their blood quanta. They could not have been unaware of a widely prevailing sentiment 1n the larger society that “white blood makes good Indians.” Given the social handicaps associated with Indian blood, it seems likely that people would frequently have admitted to as little of it as they reasonably could. Those decisions continue to aftect their descendants’ ability to demon-strate that they possess “enough” blood to satisfy particular biological definitions.*4 The difficulties of negotiating a legitimate identity within biological definitions multiply as specific requirements shift, creating a whole new set of opportunities for, and constraints upon, identity claims. For instance, the Rosebud Sioux tribe (South Dakota) at one time dropped its blood quantum requirement for tribal enrollment, but then reinstated it a few years later (1n 1966). This has created families in which the older children are enrolled tribal citizens, while the younger children of the same couple are not.?> A similar situation occurs when a tribe “closes” its rolls and declines to accept further enrollments. In this case older people remain citizens while younger ones, no matter if they possess the same blood quanta as their elders, or even higher, can never be enrolled. What all this means is that even though one’s actual blood quantum obviously cannot change, the definition of identity that depends upon it can and does. Biological Indianness, just as much as legal Indianness, can wink in and out of existence, sometimes with remarkable rapidity. Evaluating Biological Definitions Like legal definitions, biological definitions of Indian identity have both advantages and disadvantages, when viewed from tribal perspectives. On the positive side of the ledger, biological definitions have their common usage to recommend them. They are drawn upon frequently for the pur-poses of both informal interaction and formal record keeping. Like legal definitions based upon documentary evidence, blood quantum defi-

54. IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED nitions provide a relatively nonsubjective standard amenable to bureau-cratic needs. Another virtue of biological definitions is that they allow for the expression of a justifiable pride of ancestry. For a family lineage to have survived for hundreds of years, with few or none of the benefits that accrued to those who attached themselves through marriage and other alliances to members of the dominant race, simply zs an accomplishment. As Cornelia S. explains: “I know that both my parents are full-blood Cherokee, and I know that their parents are full-blood Cherokee, and [my ancestors] before them. [m really proud that I am full-blood Cherokee in this . . . more modern society, … because I… know… it might be harder to be Indian, or just any minority.” Of course, all those who have maintained more or less unmixed blood-lines did not necessarily choose this course entirely out of a ferocious dedication to ethnic personhood. Cherokee sociologist C. Matthew Snipp remarks that, historically, “to be an American Indian often meant that one had not developed the requisite skills to avoid being identified as such.”2° Many more Indian people might have intermingled with and lost themselves in the larger, European population if they had had the opportunity to do so. But acknowledging this fact should not diminish our appreciation of how bone-crushingly hard it has been for families simply to carry on in the absence of the resources that often came to those who merged their lives and fortunes with those of Europeans. Survival under such circum-stances 1s an extraordinary achievement, and the language of blood quan-tum gives people a well-deserved means to express it. Elder Martha S. has the right to her shy smile and the light that comes into her eyes when she says, in gentle tones, “I just feel real good about being full-blood Yuchi. I can trace my grandparents down to my great-grandparents, and they were all Yuchis.” Cornelia S. voices an equally justifiable pride in being a full-blood Cherokee: “I know exactly what I am. That’s zt. Like, you know, race horses that are purebred, . . . and they’re the best ones. That’s how I feel like about myself, because Pm a full blood of my tribe.” A related but more subtle benefit of a biological definition of identity is that it allows for a protest against a certain arrogance that Indians rather commonly encounter on the part of people who resemble, in all discernible ways, members of the dominant society. This arrogance 1s portrayed in an episode of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy. Lucy is an indigenous woman from the West Indies, a Carib Indian, and she 1s aware of the price that this ancestry has exacted from her tribal people:

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 55 “My grandmother is a Carib Indian. … My grandmother 1s alive; the Indians she came from are all dead.” Lucy works in a wealthy American household as a nanny, and one day her employer hesitantly announces that, like Lucy, she “has Indian blood in her.” Lucy reacts with astonish-ment and bitterness: “There was nothing remotely like an Indian about her. Why claim a thing like that? . . . [U]nderneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the van-quished also?”27 The claim “I have Indian blood in me” has many layers of implication that are difficult to tease out. Perhaps it 1s a compliment to the liberal atti-tudes of the speaker and her family: that her forebears did not shudder to conjoin themselves with others of a presumably “lesser” race. Or perhaps it is an effort to garner the prestige of exoticism without crossing over into disreputability. After all, “having Indian blood in you” 1s rather different than “being Indian.” These are only two possible analyses of a particular conversational foray, and perhaps they are overly cynical. However, when one observes the common reactions of Indian people to the statement “I have Indian blood in me,” one suspects that it may often feel to them like the speaker is trying to lay claim to benefits that she did not earn. The definition of identity through biology and blood quantum, however, provides those most likely to have endured the life chances reserved for “the van-quished” with a way of thinking about the differences between them-selves and those who, whatever remnant of racial admixture their genet-ics may admit, now openly enjoy the rewards of “the victor.” On the negative side of the evaluation of biological definitions of Indian identity: While some Indian people embrace the terminology and the logic of blood quantum, others find it offensive. Individuals of the latter persuasion may distance themselves from such definitions by means of humor. For example, Jimmie Durham, an artist whose self-identification as Cherokee has earned him a number of inquiries into his racial identity, has become well known for his comment: “The question of my ‘identity’ often comes up. I think I must be a mixed blood. I claim to be male, although only one of my parents 1s male.”?8 Others express their displeasure more straightforwardly. An Anishnabe and Cree grand-mother, Kathleen W., comments, “I don’t like being talked about in a vocabulary usually reserved for dogs and horses.” Her remark recalls Snipp’s comment that, for Indians, the matter of “blood pedigree” assumes significance “in a manner bordering on flagrant racism.”?? A

56 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED Cherokee colleague expresses a similar annoyance with questions con-cerning whether or not he is “part Indian.” “Indians,” he writes dryly, “do not come in ‘parts.’”° Lyrics from the song “Blood Quantum,” by the Indigo Girls, capture some of the emotions suggested by the previous remarks: Youwrre standing in the blood quantum line With a pitcher in your hand Poured from your heart into your veins You said Iam, I am, I am Now measure mec, McCasure mec Tell me where I stand Allocate my very soul Like you have my land.#! Some commentators, in fact, object to the entire notion of mixed-bloodedness, which is central to biological definitions, because it 1s so frequently used to diminish a whole category of people. It more than hints that mixed bloods are some kind of degenerate representatives of a once-pure category. As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the Dakota Sioux (South Dakota) editor of the Native American Studies journal Wicazo Sa Review, argues, “To adopt this idea [of racial purity] in its fullest, most sophisti-cated sense makes hybridity a contaminant to the American Indian’s right to authenticity.”%? An emphasis on “pure” cultural expressions can encourage us to devalue the important role played by the “impure,” the mixed blood. For centuries, mixed bloods have bridged the chasm between cultures — bridged it with their bodies, bridged it with their spirits, bridged it with their consciousnesses, bridged it often whether they were willing or unwilling. In the scholarly literature, researchers such as Terry Wilson, Clara Sue Kadwell, and Margaret Connell Szasz talk about mixed bloods as “cultural brokers,” practical mediators of the relations between the different racial categories they simultaneously inhabit.** However, it 1s a fictional mixed-blood character created by Native novelists Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich in The Crown of Columbus who states the intermediary role of mixed bloods most clearly: We’re parked on the bleachers looking into the arena, never the main players, but there are bonuses to peripheral vision. . . . We’re jealous of innocence, Pll admit that, but as the hooks and eyes that connect one core to the other we have our roles to play. “Caught between two worlds,” 1s the way it’s often put in cliched prose, but Pd put it differently. We are the catch.*4

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 57 This marginal, mediative role deserves to be honored alongside the roles played by full bloods, who are better able to accept the place of the unselfconscious insider in tribal communities. But biological defini-tions, with the fractionated Indians they create, work to the contrary eftect. Cook-Lynn finds still another reason to criticize these definitions. She argues that the American fascination with degree of biological connec-tion to a given tribe finds its roots 1n, and encourages, a dismissive atti-tude toward the status of tribal nations. On the one hand, Americans reg-ularly scrutinize the identity claims of well-known Indian authors. Yet, Cook-Lynn writes, “No one asks how much Egyptian Naguib Manfouz is, nor do they require that J. M. Cootzee provide proof that his citizen-ship and identity is embodied in tribal African nationhood.” The reason for such differences, Cook-Lynn concludes, concerns differing levels of “mutual respect between nations.”?> Observers are willing to defer, without question, to decisions that Egypt and other African countries make about citizenship, but obsti-nately believe that individuals, even those entirely unconnected to tribal affairs, should be able to second-guess similar decisions that Indian nations make. Cook-Lynn’s analysis suggests that the embrace of a bio-logical (or any other) definition of identity over whatever legal defini-tions a tribe elects to apply 1s an insult to tribal sovereignty. It suggests an underlying assumption that, regardless of tribes’ formal status as sep-arate nations that enjoy government-to-government relations with the United States, they are somehow less qualified to determine their own citizenship than are other nations. Another negative product of determining identity by reference to bio-logical characteristics is the issue of technical extinction, or “statistical extermination.” Biological definitions have long been used to limit the numbers of Indians to whom the American government retains obliga-tions, with the anticipation that those obligations would eventually cease altogether. In recent years, the long-awaited event has quickly drawn into view for a number of tribes. This is fairly unsurprising, given that Indians have the highest rate of intermarriage of any ethnic group, with slightly more than half of all Indian men and women marrying non-Indians.*° Under these circumstances, blood quantum requirements (used by about two-thirds of all tribes in the lower forty-eight states)?” are clearly not well suited to the needs of groups too small to support endogamy, or marriage of members within their own group. Bull T. describes the cir-cumstances of his own Wichita tribe: “We were decimated so low [as a

58 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED result of European contact] that we can’t intermarry. Were almost all related to each other now. … Now, in order to be on the [Wichita] tribal roll, you have to have one-eighth blood quantum. And after a period of years there will be no one [who meets this criterion].” As Native scholars Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., put the matter, “To make genetics the defining criterion for continuation of [tribes with only small numbers of full blood members] . . . would be quite literally suici-dal.”38 It projects, indeed, a scenario in which such tribes may find them-selves redefined as technically “extinct,” even when they continue to exist as functioning social, cultural, political, linguistic, or residential groupings. A final concern that one might raise regarding biological definitions of identity 1s their inextricable entanglement with the notion of race. Biological definitions promote the notion that “race” constitutes an objective, genetically based difference between groups of people. Most Americans accept this assumption, unaware that it runs contrary to most current scientific knowledge, which tends to view racial distinctions as significant social, but not biological, realities.%° The most significant point here, however, 1s not the scientific “respectability” of the biological definition of race, or its lack thereof; more importantly, those definitions also have a dubious past, having been put to use in service of social goals that have been extremely oppres-sive to Indian populations. This becomes apparent if one looks, for instance, to the social science of the early to mid-twentieth century. Anthropologists of that period, operating from a conviction that “blood would tell” — and tell in all kinds of ways — assisted in defining mem-bership for various tribal groups (including the Ojibwe, Lumbee, Creek, Choctaw, and others) on the basis of observable characteristics assumed to derive from biological inheritance. Usually for the purpose of determining eligibility for legal rights, they ferreted out full-blood and mixed-blood Indians by such “scientific” methods as measuring feet (mixed bloods were supposed to have big ones), scrutinizing hair samples (full-blood hair was to be absolutely straight), and scarifying chests (mixed-blood chests knew enough to turn redder, when so assaulted, than their full-blood counterparts).4° These procedures tended, as one might suspect, to yield rather variable results, even for members of the same immediate family: A study of the Lumbee tribe by physical anthropologist Carl Seltzer, for example, yielded at least one instance in which the same set of Indian parents found themselves with children of different racial statuses.*! But reliable or not, the results

IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED 59 of such tests were used to deny the Lumbee federal recognition on the grounds that, collectively, they did not possess enough “Indian blood.” A more general goal of early-twentieth-century biological definitions of identity was to sort out the “superior” races from the “inferior” ones. “In this racial hierarchy, Indians were in competition with African Black Americans as the lowest race of mankind, in what was referred to as ‘the great chain of being’ by Eurocentric social scientists.”4? Biologists engaged in this lofty quest shipped countless Indian body parts to gov-ernment institutions for research purposes. Some museum personnel or their agents stopped at almost nothing to acquire their grisly trophies. Indians who met with mortal misfortune on the battlefield (even those in the service of the United States) were frequently in danger of being snatched up by vigilant U.S. military personnel, decapitated, and their crania sent off to such institutions as the National Museum of Health and Medicine.*# Nineteenth-century army surgeons wrote of their resourcefulness in repeatedly plundering Indian cemeteries to secure the severed heads of those interred there, or filching the newly deceased from under the very noses of their comrades (who had developed the regrettable habit of “lurk[ing] about their dead”).45 But perhaps the most shocking single episode involving the theft of human remains in the interests of sub-stantiating a biological definition of identity is the 1897 case of a group of Inuit (then called Eskimos). In that year, Arctic explorer Robert Peary visited Greenland and loaded his return vessel with an exotic cargo. It included the corpses of several Inuit, whom Peary had unearthed from their fresh graves, for delivery to the American Museum of Natural History. But it also included half a dozen living “specimens,” among them a man named Qisuk and his son, Minik. These were to be put on display at the museum as a means of generating money to fund future Arctic expeditions. Tragically, 1t soon became evident that the warm climate did not agree with the Inuit, and when Qisuk shortly died (along with four of the oth-ers), scientists dissected him. ‘The remains of his physical body were then boiled and the flesh stripped away so that the skeleton could be placed in a museum collection. By way of a final indignity, the staff of the American Museum of Natural History then covered up what they had done by pre-senting the surviving Minik (then seven years of age) with a blanket-wrapped piece of wood, which they asserted was his father’s corpse, and staging their own version of a traditional Inuit funeral for it, on the museum lawn. When, as a teenager, Minik learned the truth of his

60 IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED father’s fate, he began a quest to retrieve and bury his father’s body. Although he spent many years 1n the effort, he never succeeded.*6 The point of this recitation of injuries to Native spiritual beliefs and practices regarding the dead is that it was a biological definition of Indian identity that motivated non-Native individuals and institutions to commit those injuries. It would seem that there 1s much to lose by embracing a definition of identity that encourages the fiction of race.

THREE What If My Grandma Eats Big Macs: Culture Strange and perplexing legal cases have tried the sagacity of judges and juries throughout the history of the American judicial system. But in 1976, the country witnessed an unprecedented event. An entire tribe went on trial. Events began with the Indian community’s efforts to bring a land claims case. But the point upon which the outcome quickly came to turn was whether or not that community had the right to a collective identity as an Indian tribe. The trial involved a community of self-identified Indian residents of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the Mashpee. They proposed to bring a land claims suit that had the potential to significantly reconfigure economic relations in the state.! The basis of their suit was the Indian Non-Intercourse Act of 1790, which stipulated that the federal government must approve all transfers of land from Indians to non-Indians.? In vio-lation of this act, the Mashpee said, the Commonwealth of Massa-chusetts had allowed Indian land to be sold over a period of years with-out congressional approval. And the Mashpee wanted their land back — about 16,000 acres of It. The non-Indian residents of the town of Mashpee had reason to be nervous about the threatened legal action, which involved approximately three-quarters of the land on which the town sat. The late 1960s and the 1970s had already seen a series of land claims cases based on violations of the Non-Intercourse Act, and some tribes — notably the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot (both of Maine) — had received large settlements in consequence. Lawyers for the town of Mashpee, accordingly, decided to 61

Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers

Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.

Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS

Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?

Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.

We write plagiarism Free Content

Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.

Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.

Describe the difference between blood quantum and the one-drop rule.

Related Posts

Masters Essay Help Expert Postgraduate Writing Support

PhD Research Help Expert Support for Doctoral Students

MBA Dissertation Help Expert Business Research Support