I have a biological tie to being Cowlitz, but I also am an enrolled member of my tribe in the same way that you are a citizen of a state or country. Tribes are, quite literally, " domestic dependent nations " operating within the US. The tribe is the only group that controls the requirements for enrollment in that tribe, and every tribe has different rules when it comes to enrollment. Some tribes require for enrollment a certain "blood quantum," which is a controversial measure of how Native American you are based on how far removed you are from your "full-blooded" ancestors.
Blood quantum laws are problematic for a whole slew of reasons I won't get into here, and contribute to a belief that the US government views Natives as less than human. The only beings the government measures in blood quantum are " dogs, horses, and Indians. To say that you're ". Between "Indian," "Native American," and "First Nations," there are a lot of catch-all terms that are used to describe North America's indigenous residents.
I'm often asked, "which one is the right one? The honest answer to this question is that it depends. Each of the catch-all terms is going to have fans and detractors. The way I've grown to understand it is that "Indian" or "American Indian" is an official term. I don't hear "Indian" said a ton by my Native friends with the general feeling being that "Indians are from India," though sometimes we'll refer to ourselves as Indians, abbreviated to "NDNs" in email chains and text threads because it feels cool.
With that in mind, many Natives find the term "Native American" offensive because associating us with "America" feels like rubbing salt in a wound, which, boy, do I get! Sometimes people indigenous to the United States will use the term, but it's officially in reference to our friends north of the border. If you want to make everyone happy, your best bet is to refer to people by their tribal affiliation. I'm not "Indian," I'm "Cowlitz," for example. That said, I understand that memorizing nearly a thousand tribal affiliations might be a lot to ask when your mind's already full of fun facts about your favorite "Bachelor" contestants.
Did you know that season 23's Colton Underwood used to play football? So interesting! This is less a question and more an observation. I often see people on the internet refer to everything from John Cena to Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty as their "spirit animal.
I get it, you like John Cena. As Paul Spruhan explains in his introduction to A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to , the practice of using blood to define identity existed in other, older systems of law prior to its adoption by the US government.
Blood-based identities have long been used to delineate who is eligible to receive legal privileges. The question of property—who would receive it and how—led the United States to create a blood quantum-based criterion for legally defining what it meant to be an Indian.
In cases where the parents of a child came from two different tribes, only the mother was taken into account when calculating the blood quantum of the child. Furthermore, blood quantum became a way of gatekeeping tribal enrollment. Blood quantums of one-half or one-quarter became the requirement for legal Indian-ness at the same time that the government began promoting programs of assimilation and intermarriage for indigenous peoples. The implications of these two factors are troubling: on the one hand, a certain blood quantum was required to be legally considered Native; on the other, the government was encouraging Native peoples to integrate and intermarry with non-Native communities.
A silent, sinister logic connects these government programs: if the Native population legally disappears, then the government has no obligations to it. Some tribes and nations still use the blood quantum to determine enrollment, and their sovereign choice should be respected. However, many American Indians today agree that the blood quantum, regardless of how tribes and nations choose to use it, is simply not the defining factor that makes a person Native.
The tribes and nations who still use the blood quantum have situated it within the communal context of cultural affiliation and identity. Taken out of this communal context, it becomes overly simplistic and reductionist. Non-Native paradigms of the blood quantum see Native populations as slowly disappearing or as having already vanished.
These paradigms ignore complex historical, political, and cultural factors that have transformed indigenous identity over centuries. I became alienated from my people and pulled away from my tribe, maintaining minimal contact.
When I began reconnecting with my tribe, I entered with my guard up, so ready to answer intrusive questions of lineage and blood quantum—so ready to justify my Indian-ness to my own people. But this justification was never demanded of me. Just a couple days after my conversation with Patrick, I made the long drive south to Smith River to attend my first nee-dash. It was June 21, the summer solstice—a sacred night for the Tolowa.
On summer and winter solstices, our people thank the creator for the harvest by performing the nee-dash , a feather dance.
I was alone; none of my family had come. I had only just begun building connections with non-family members in the tribe, so I expected to see only a handful of familiar faces. I had to begin repairing the neglected bridge.
I entered the Xaa-wan'-k'wvt community hall timidly. The main hall was half-full of mingling strangers. I could only procrastinate for so long. I finally slipped into the main hall, searching faces, wondering who to approach—who appeared kindest, most welcoming, least engrossed in a serious conversation. A young woman sat alone at a table near the back. I walked slowly over to her, gesturing toward an empty chair. I sat, and we talked. In fact, her boyfriend was dancing that night.
Our halting conversation was interrupted by an elder approaching our table. She had a shrewd gaze and an unapologetic air to her presence that both intrigued and intimidated me. She was looking at the other young woman, apparently familiar with her.
The younger woman shrugged. However, there are still hundreds of tribes undergoing the lengthy and tedious process of applying for federal recognition. Tribal sovereignty describes the right of federally recognized tribes to govern themselves, their lands, and their people. It also includes the existence of a government-to-government relationship with the United States. A tribe is not a ward of the government, but an independent nation with the right to form its own government, adjudicate legal cases within its borders, levy taxes within its borders, establish its membership, and decide its own future fate.
The federal government has a trust responsibility to protect tribal lands, assets, resources and treaty rights. In the US, there are only two kinds of reserved lands that are well-known—military and Indian. An Indian reservation is a land base that a tribe reserved for itself when it relinquished its other land areas to the US through treaties. More recently, Congressional acts, executive orders, and administrative acts have created reservations.
Today, some reservations include non-Indian residents and land owners. Not until were all Native Americans granted citizenship. This means Natives are now a slightly larger minority, comprising 1. Navajos may be interested to hear that, for the first time, their full-blooded population surpassed that of Cherokees - , versus , When mixed-race people are counted, however, the Cherokees are still far and away the largest tribe, with , souls versus , Navajos.
Most of the 1. As a percentage of America's population, full-blooded Natives stayed the same at just under 1 percent.
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