Spring 2025
Being Native or non-Native, federally recognized vs. unrecognized, are all distinctions that can either ensure or exempt access to certain rights affirmed by the United States government. Native nations have rights that are afforded to them through treaties. This can look like hunting and fishing rights, land, and self-governance (Library of Congress). Upholding treaty rights costs money. For example, in places that are allotted for Native people to live, land cannot be used for commercial agriculture unless dictated by the tribe who has ownership of the lands.
In order to dictate who to categorize as Native, the US government used a system called “blood quantum.” This began in 1817 to determine which Native people would be eligible for the rights that were given to them through treaties (Miller 2014, 323-324). This meant that an Indian agent would go around a reservation and, largely based on phenotype, write down how Native the person was. Effectively, what this does is that as Native people have children with people that are not Native, future generations are no longer able to qualify as tribal citizens. As time passes, less and less people are tribal citizens and the government has fewer people who are ensured certain rights from them because of treaties (Calloway 2021, 574).
Blood quantum rules on membership are often written into the constitutions of Native tribes, however, this inclusion was pushed onto tribes by the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs within it (Goldberg 2002, 446-447).
A similar method of control was practiced by the US government to dictate who would be counted as Black and therefore subject to slavery. In antebellum America, discrimination and slavery was based on the idea that there was something intrinsically inferior about Black people. Because of fear surrounding this inferiority to disseminate among white people, a similar blood quota policy was applied to Black people. The “one-drop rule” dictated that any person with even one drop of African blood was considered Black and therefore legally able to be enslaved (Sharfstein 2007, 593).
This control over bodies and something as visceral as blood is indicative of a racialization that raises the influence of white people (and keeps their position in the system of racialization sacred) while simultaneously absolving them of responsibility and affirming a “right” to ownership over bodies. Each of these examples shows how the system is manipulated, invented, and fragile in order to rule over non-white bodies. By contrasting either system, one can see that the logic does not make sense. In one system, too little Native heritage makes you ineligible for rights granted through treaties. In the other system, any amount of African heritage makes you condemned to slavery. The discrepancy in these examples makes clear the invention of these systems as methods of rule over non-white bodies by an imperial system.
Bibliography
Calloway, Colin G. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, (2021).
Goldberg, Carole. Members Only? Designing Citizenship Requirements for Indian Nations. 50 U. KAN. L. REV. 437, (2002.
Library of Congress, “Treaties,” American Indian Law: A Beginner’s Guide.
Miller, Tommy. “Beyond Blood Quantum: the Legal and Political Implications of Expanding Tribal Enrollment.” American Indian Law Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 2014.
Sharfstein, Daniel J. “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860.” Minnesota Law Review 91, no. 3 (February 2007).
