Indigeneity, Nationhood, Racialization, and the U.S. Settler State: Why Political Status Matters to Native ‘Identity’ Formation
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Blood Quantum and the State
3. Indigeneity: What Is It?
4. Pan-Indianism, Neo-Tribalism, and Generic “Indians”
Nonenrolled reclaimers consistently said things that illustrated their lack of engagement with issues of Indigenous nationhood, citizenship, or sovereignty. They maintained, for instance, that they knew they were Indian and did not need a “piece of paper” or “plastic” (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, tribal identification card) or “number” (tribal identification number) to prove it. They dismissed so-called political Indians as people who took pride in being certified as Indian by the US government but rarely mentioned Indian nations’ roles in determining tribal citizenship. They said things like “being Indian is a state of mind”; “it’s not the blood that counts, it’s the heart”; and, what really matters is “walking the red road” and “walking the walk” … In this way, many reclaimers defended their Indian identities while invalidating the identities of “political Indians”, whom they accused of acting like settlers (pp. 189–90).
5. Attacks on Tribal Sovereignty: Why Tribal Nationhood Matters
“In my view, the equal protection issue is serious. Under the Act, a child in foster care or adoption proceedings may in some cases be denied a particular placement because of the child’s race—even if the placement is otherwise determined to be in the child’s best interests. And a prospective foster or adoptive parent may in some cases be denied the opportunity to foster or adopt a child because of the prospective parent’s race. Those scenarios raise significant questions under bedrock equal protection principles and this Court’s precedents … Courts, including ultimately this Court, will be able to address the equal protection issue when it is properly raised by a plaintiff with standing.”
6. Conclusions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
1 | Race studies scholarship is increasingly linking histories of colonialism, antisemitism, indenture, and chattel slavery to understand how violent religious domination led to the concepts of race, racialization, and racism as we know them today. See for example Fredrickson (2015); Jones (2023); and Fenelon (2023). |
2 | “On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy. The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity, in exchange for unlimited independence.” Quoted in Newcomb (2008, p. 76). |
3 | I defer to Kim TallBear’s guidance on the use of the word “identity” to describe Nativeness. I echo her concern that the term is too judiciously used and that often there is a better term that can be used. In the book, I devote an entire chapter to the politics of Native-claiming and analyze “identity” as the extension of capitalist logics as a result of Nativeness becoming commodified and thus defended as a possession based on freedom of speech beliefs. |
4 | For example, in 1934 this was explicitly stated by Senator Burton K. Wheeler from Montana, co-author of the Wheeler Howard Act (aka the Indian Reorganization Act), which overturned the Dawes Act and ended assimilation as official federal Indian policy. In debates about how to define “Indian”, in response to Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s liberal thoughts that it should include everyone of Indian descent who were members of recognized tribes, their descendants who lived on reservations, and all others of one fourth or more Indian blood, the Senator balked, saying: “If you pass it to where they are quarter blood Indians you are going to have all kinds of people coming in a claiming they are quarter blood Indians and want to be put on the governments rolls, and in my judgement it should not be done. What we are trying to do is get rid of the Indian problem rather than add to it.” Quoted in Spruhan (2006, p. 46). |
5 | A study of the allotment councils on the Colville reservation from 1907 to 1917 is instructive. Author Alexandra Harmon shows how federal agents tried to educate tribal councils on legal concepts that should guide the councils’ determination for who should be counted as “Colville Indians” for the creation of a tribal roll. Her research shows that councilmembers were not entirely swayed by the agents’ efforts to racialize people through blood quantum but determined who members were through more culturally based, expansive understandings of the concept of “tribal relations.” See Harmon (2001). |
6 | In the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Supreme Court first articulated the concept of tribes as domestic dependent nations and characterizing Indians as “wards of the government.” As the U.S. continued to tighten the stranglehold on Native nations throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, in Lonewolf v. Hitchcock (decided in 1903) SCOTUS confirmed that Congress had “unfettered power as guardians over Indians and their lands” (Spruhan 2006, p. 40). |
7 | Non-federally recognized tribes do not have a political relationship to the U.S. but in some states that have regimes of state recognition it can be said that state-recognized tribes have a political relationship to the individual state. Such a relationship, however, is outside the established federal structure. |
8 | On the notion of Indigenous paradox, Timo Duile notes that it is not a new concept and relies on a framework of relation and difference. Understanding Indigeneity dialectically, Duile instead emphasizes “that paradoxes of indigeneity are a form of a dialectical process (rather than an issue of relation and difference)” (Duile 2021, p. 375). |
9 | See chapter six in Playing Indian, Counterculture Indians and the New Age, for Deloria’s enlightening analysis of this era of Indian cultural appropriation. |
10 | Circe Sturm most clearly articulated this idea in Sturm (2010). Also notable, in the conclusion of Playing Indian Deloria contends that “[Indian play] offered the concrete ground on which identity might be experienced, but it did not call its adherents to change their lives. Only a handful of Indian players ever went native and they tended to do so in the mid to late twentieth century when the borders were blurry enough to slip across with minimal difficulty” (p. 185). Since Playing Indian was published in 1999, we can see the extensiveness of pretendianism as a phenomenon. It is precisely the blurriness of the borders that people slipped across that commentators on Indian ethnic fraud are addressing. |
11 | As Thornton writes, census “self-identification changed everything. Now ‘Indian’ simply exists in someone’s mind.” Dwanna McKay reports that of the 5.2 million people who self-identified as American Indian on the 2010 census only 1.9 million people were enrolled members of federally recognized tribes, meaning that 67% of those who identified as American Indian were without official tribal membership status. See McKay (2021). |
12 | The term “ethnic revival” is a term used by sociologists to describe this era of identity shifting in the U.S. (Fitzgerald 2007). |
13 | In Circe Sturm’s work on Cherokee identity, she engages the term race-shifting to explain the phenomenon of white people crossing racial borders, leaving behind whiteness for often imagined and unverifiable Cherokee identities, connecting it to this era of changing census data. In 1980 alone, the census recorded a 251% increase in Cherokee claims. In his study on race-shifters in Canada, Daryl Leroux shows how white French-Canadians use genealogy to dig up an indigenous ancestor from hundreds of years in the past to legitimize neo-indigenous identities. See also Leroux (2019); Garroutte (2003); Sturm (2002); and Huhndorf (2001). |
14 | Quoted in Blansett (2018, pp. 8–9). Kent Blansett is known for his scholarship on the Red Power era, including the critically acclaimed book A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement. Blansett asserts himself as an “Indigenous descendant” from five different tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Shawnee, and Potawatomie), none of which he can demonstrate any current association with despite the fact that they are all either low- or no-blood-quantum tribes. He was hired under the prestigious Langston Hughes professorship program at University of Kansas whose purpose was to bring a “prominent or emerging minority scholar” to the university. Blansett’s university bio includes a seven-page (single spaced) narrative explaining his family’s oral history of Native heritage, which I find unconvincing. For more on the public challenging of Blansett, see Spoerre (2023). |
15 | One study on census data found that in the 2000 census one-third of people who identified as multiracial American Indians did not identify a specific tribal affiliation compared to one-sixth of those who identified as American Indian only. See Liebler and Zacher (2013). Another study found that people are more likely to join and leave the American Indian category than any other racial category, indicating that American Indian race-shifting is constant in the U.S. census. See Liebler et al. (2016). |
16 | According to market research firm IBIS World, the U.S.’s adoption and foster care market size was projected to be USD 20 billion in 2023. IBIS World (2022). |
17 | The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute has been at the forefront of the anti-ICWA movement, and others include (but aren’t limited to) the libertarian Cato Institute, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Project on Fair Representation, and Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation, which is a major funder of the right wing anti-ICWA “machine.” Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher routinely fights against tribal sovereignty and climate justice and is integral to the anti-ICWA efforts. For more on the shady linkages between the worlds of Indian adoption, extractive industries, and tribal sovereignty, see Patrice (2022), A. Brown (2021), and This Land Podcast Season 2 with Rebecca Nagle, available online: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/this-land/ (accessed on 9 September 2024). |
18 | The federal authority argument references the plenary power doctrine whereby Congress is assumed to possess plenary (i.e., absolute) authority in American Indian and Alaska Native issues. There are multiple views about what Congressional plenary power means in federal Indian law. In one view, it is seen as (oppressively) unlimited power over Indian lands and lives; in another, it is understood as being preemptive, where Congress preempts the power of states towards tribes, and affirming it as the branch of federal government vested with authority over Indian issues above other branches of the government (see Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001). In Brackeen, plenary power was affirmed by defenders of ICWA based on a preemptive view. |
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Gilio-Whitaker, D. Indigeneity, Nationhood, Racialization, and the U.S. Settler State: Why Political Status Matters to Native ‘Identity’ Formation. Genealogy 2024, 8, 116. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030116
Gilio-Whitaker D. Indigeneity, Nationhood, Racialization, and the U.S. Settler State: Why Political Status Matters to Native ‘Identity’ Formation. Genealogy. 2024; 8(3):116. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030116
Chicago/Turabian StyleGilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2024. "Indigeneity, Nationhood, Racialization, and the U.S. Settler State: Why Political Status Matters to Native ‘Identity’ Formation" Genealogy 8, no. 3: 116. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030116