In late 2001, Marilyn Vann, a woman with Cherokee and Black ancestry, applied for citizenship to the Cherokee Nation. She was denied on the basis of her Black ancestry. Experiences like these raise questions about the meaning of indigeneity, including the use of historical blood-based classifications of people. For Indigenous people, the blood-based rule is referred to as “blood quantum,” which measures the fraction of “Indian blood” that a person possesses. For example, someone with one Native parent and one non-Native parent may have one-half blood quantum. Historical use of blood quantum use led to frequent violations of Indigenous sovereignty and erasure of Native identity, including being used to limit social mobility and sustain structural violence. In the present day, however, many nations and peoples’ voluntary use of blood quantum membership requirements complicates the story and suggests that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to indigeneity.
Indigeneity and Colonial Erasure
Prior to colonization, the linguistic and cultural identities of North America were distinct and had group-specific membership criteria. For instance, for the Cherokee Nation, membership was generally determined by kinship affiliations to one of the nation’s clans. Because Cherokee society was matrilineal, children became part of their mother’s clan, regardless of paternal lineage. Consanguinity, meaning direct family descendance, was not exclusive in determining group membership, however. In Cherokee origin stories like the legend of Corn Mother Selu, ceremonial adoption practices were seen as sacred acts of creating new blood. Within the Cherokee imaginary, blood was understood as a metaphorical, as opposed to literal, quality. Evidently, among some Indigenous groups, systems of naturalization granted non-kin groups tribal membership.
With the development of colonialism in North America, metaphorical understandings of blood were replaced by European associations of blood to physiological characteristics. Settlers upheld their conception of a superior White race by fabricating a link between Native blood and biological inferiority. Rooting resource allocation in blood politics allowed the federal government to forge a correlation between increased dilution of Indigenous blood and higher socioeconomic status, grounded in the European belief that White blood “uplifted” Native blood. Such a belief was expressed by individuals such as phrenologist Charles Caldwell, who said that the “only efficient scheme to civilize the Indians is to cross the breed.”
Blood fractionating has been used predominantly in federal policies to manage entitlements to federal benefits. The framework through which federal benefits are allocated to Indigenous communities is inherently paternalistic, which helps contextualize the erasive history of blood quantum. In the Supreme Court case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall stated that the United States was a “guardian” to tribes in a “state of pupilage.” Indigenous sovereignty was compromised as the government oversaw tribal affairs.
A consequential piece of federal legislation in which blood quantum was particularly relevant was the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act. The act ceded millions of acres of tribal lands to the federal government by administering individual allotments. In 1893, the Dawes Commission was created to enforce the provisions of the act for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogees (Creeks), and Seminole tribes. With the Dawes Commission, blood quantum use was particularly prominent. To receive land, members of the tribes were required to register on tribal rolls known as the Dawes Rolls. On these rolls, the Dawes Commission assumed three racial categories: “freedmen, intermarried Whites, and Indians by blood.” One’s racial classification dictated the size and location of their allotment: Full-blood Natives received small parcels of land while mixed-blood Natives received larger, better tracts of land.
Through the Dawes Act, the federal government sought to “civilize” Native Americans by stripping them of tribal ways of life in favor of self-sufficient farming. Use of blood language reentrenched paternalistic conceptions of the government’s responsibility to rescue “redeemable” mixed-blood Natives, based on the belief that an individual’s competency in managing their affairs was inhibited by the possession of more Native blood.
Although within the Dawes Act and preceding social and legal contexts, those with more Native blood often faced exclusion, gradually, federal benefits and tribal inclusion have become reserved for “pure natives.” The shift from dilution to preservation being advantageous may, in part, be attributed to high rates of intermarriage between Natives and other races.
The Complexities of Indigeneity Today
Currently, all Natives enrolled in a federally-recognized tribe are issued a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, also known as a CDIB, by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The CDIB specifies an individual’s blood quantum. Although the federal government’s use of blood quantum limits the number of Natives who have access to certain federal benefits, tribes currently have the right to determine their own tribal membership requirements. Blood quantum is the most common requirement used to determine membership among nations. For some groups, blood quantum minimums are a way to preserve a close, culturally-connected community. Some fear that individuals with mixed ancestry self-identify as Indigenous because of a desire to affirm a marginalized ethnic identity and to reap land or health and education benefits. Others see disregard for blood quantum as a way to build up a nation’s numbers for the sake of survival.
The varying justifications both for and against blood quantum use suggests that there is no one right legal and social conception of indigeneity. In an interview with the HPR, Professor Matthew Fletcher, a law professor at Michigan State University and a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, said, “if you ask 100 Indians to define Indians, you’ll get 100 separate definitions.” In any case, Fletcher believes blood quantum occupies a more negative role in Indigenous communities today, citing repercussions of blood quantum use within his own tribe. “Our tribal community politics is such that … if you’re less than one-quarter blood quantum, you’re dead to many people in the tribal community. You might live there, you might speak the language, but they don’t care about you.”
Eva Garroutte, a sociology professor at Boston College and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, proposes a framework of “radical indigenism” as a starting point for new definitions of Native identity. She describes this framework in her book “Real Indians, Identity and the Survival of Native America,” proposing that “Radical Indigenism illuminates differences in assumptions about knowledge that are at the root of the dominant culture’s misunderstanding and subordination of indigenous knowledge. It argues for the reassertion and rebuilding of traditional knowledge from its roots, its fundamental principles.”
Garroutte’s framework would nurture a counter-hegemonic narrative based in “a sacred logic to which notions of genealogical distance and blood quantum are foreign and even irrelevant.” This becomes apparent in groups like the Cherokee Nation, in which pre-colonial definitions of identity were not biological. The adoption of non-blood individuals into clans highlights that blood quantum is foreign to traditional Cherokee practices.
Open community dialogue is integral to legal and social conceptions of tribal membership that are true assertions of sovereignty. Through dialogue, communities better acknowledge the roles lived experience, cultural connection, pre-colonial forms of knowledge production, and blood-based classifications all play in shaping indigeneity.
The Freedman Controversy
Models like that of Garoutte are at odds with the reality of the postcolonial membership requirements in groups like the Cherokee Nation. Specifically, Freedmen, the descendants of Black slaves of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogees (Creeks), and Seminole tribes, have faced significant exclusion. This article will focus on the Cherokee Nation’s history with Freedmen and their descendants, but the other four nations have equally rich histories worth discussing.
Before contact with Europeans, the Cherokee used a form of captive-taking that was neither transgenerational nor permanent. Cherokee slavery was a product of warfare between tribes, sometimes to repopulate a community after intertribal conflict or disease. Starting in the 18th century, however, settler encroachments on Native sovereignty pressured Cherokees to adopt settler practices, including slavery, to maintain some semblance of control over their economic and diplomatic affairs.
In an 1886 Reconstruction treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the United States, Freedmen were given the opportunity to define themselves as tribal citizens within six months of ratification of the treaty. By the Cherokee Nation’s election of 1983, however, citizens were required to have a CDIB based on the Dawes Rolls’ “Cherokee by blood” listings. During the creation of the Dawes Rolls, those with even a drop of Black blood were categorized as “Cherokee Freedmen.” Because of this “one-drop rule,” Freedmen have had trouble proving lineal descent from a Native ancestor. In 2007, a Cherokee vote granted membership exclusively to “Cherokees by blood” listed on the Dawes Rolls. Cherokee citizen Darren Buzzard wrote in a widely circulated email before the election, “Don’t let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION.”
Some Freedmen pushed back on this exclusion, including Marilyn Vann, a descendant of the Cherokee Freedmen and President of the Descendants of the Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. Vann began her advocacy for Freedmen membership after being denied citizenship in 2001. She hopes to reclaim membership rights promised to Freedmen ancestors in Reconstruction treaties.
“Almost all nations around the world have incorporated their former slaves, or colonized people into their societies. And so why do tribal governments … not have to follow these agreements?” Vann asked in an interview with the HPR. Vann also argues that Freedmen exclusion is a form of race-based discrimination that ignores their historical contributions to the Cherokee community. On the Trail of Tears, Freedmen were the backbone that helped the Cherokee Nation survive. Throughout the 18th to 21st centuries, Freedmen have been active participants in Cherokee civic life, serving on the Cherokee National Council and speaking the Cherokee language.
In the 2006 case Marilyn Vann v. Dirk Kempthorne, regarding Cherokee Freedmen citizenship, the Cherokee Nation asserted that they could not be sued in a U.S. court because of sovereign immunity. Under the sovereign immunity doctrine, Native tribes are protected from suit unless they voluntarily waive immunity or Congress abrogates it.
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chad Smith denied accusations of racism in the exclusion of Freedmen, instead arguing that later Congressional legislation like the Five Tribes Act of 1906 abrogated Freedmen rights to citizenship. Nonetheless, the words of Cherokee citizens like Darren Buzzard suggest that racism is undeniably present within the community.
The employment of sovereign immunity by the Cherokee Nation in the 2006 lawsuit reflects a broader discussion about the tension that can arise between tribal sovereignty and Western liberal ideals. In other words, when tribes operate along patriarchal, racist, or homophobic lines, should federal and state governments of the United States intervene to protect individual civil liberties, given that tribes are not bound by the U.S. Bill of Rights? Such unresolved questions continue to plague tribes today and underscore the importance of sustained community dialogue as a starting point to acknowledge the complexities of tribal identity.
The efforts of Vann and her partners were rewarded in the 2017 case Cherokee Nation v. Raymond Nash and Marilyn Vann, in which Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled that Freedmen citizenship “is coextensive with the right of native Cherokees.” Following the decision, Vann said she was “elated.”
Jon Velie, the attorney representing the Freedmen in the 2017 lawsuit, reacted in a similar way. “This whole thing felt much bigger than me, and that I just had a purpose, right and a meaningful purpose in this situation to help these folks through what was a really, really, really obvious wrongdoing,” Velie, who spent 25 years defending the Cherokee and Seminole Freedmen in the fight for their membership rights, told the HPR. The attorneys representing the Cherokee Nation in the lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment.
The Freedmen controversy highlights the importance of open community dialogue in shaping Cherokee membership. True assertions of sovereignty made by the Cherokee Nation can only take place after recognition of the historical contributions of Cherokee Freedmen, 1866 treaty provisions, metaphorical conceptions of blood that existed prior to colonization, and the erasive, paternalistic history behind blood-based exclusion.
The importance of community dialogue in the development of Cherokee citizenship requirements was articulated by S. Alan Ray, a Cherokee Nation citizen in an article for the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. “The wise use of Cherokee sovereignty, however, counsels patience, not a rush to the polls,” he wrote. “It requires honest, sustained, and, no doubt, difficult dialogue, not politicking, and the critical reinterpretation of cultural resources in the service of kinship, not the blind reproduction of divisive racial hegemonies-in short, ga-du-gi, ‘all working together.’”
The Future of Tribal Membership
Congress issued a statistic that 60% of Indigenous individuals will have one-fourth or less blood quantum in the next century. In the context of developments such as urbanization, large numbers of Natives are in contact with non-Natives, increasing intermarriage rates. These statistics raise questions about the future of blood politics, the makeup of the constituents of Native tribes, and the trajectories of tribal population numbers. Some don’t believe that blood quantum requirements will change in the near future.
“Hardly any tribes are looking to move away from a blood quantum regime … so I would say that it’s here to stay. Should it be? Should we wind back, you know, move away from it? I totally think we should. But like I said, it’s not a reality,” Fletcher said.
Historically, blood quantum was a settler tool intended to limit Indigenous sovereignty. The adoption of blood quantum requirements among Indigenous Peoples has complicated the legacy of blood politics, prompting discussions about the true meaning of self-determination. Diversity of experience within and among tribes suggests that there is no one-size fits all approach to defining a “Native person.” Looking forward, sustained, open community dialogues can foster recognition of these complexities by considering the legacy of colonization, lived realities, and pre-colonial practices from a time when Indigenous Peoples had ultimate authority over their land.
Image by Andrew James is licensed under the Unsplash License.
