According to the U.S. census, the number of people who self identify as Native American has more than doubled in the last 20 years. But, at the same time, the number of people actually enrolled in tribes is much lower than it used to be.
In her new book "Indian Card," Carrie Schuettpelz uncovers the history behind that phenomenon. Schuettpelz joined The Show to discuss, starting with how people with Native American descent in America have to prove their identity.
Full conversation
CARRIE SCHUETTPELZ: Every tribe is different. Some tribes in the country use a lineage based system, and so in order to enroll, a person needs to prove that they are direct descendant from someone on the tribe's roles and the roles can be from any point in time. It is a role that the tribe has decided to use. There are tribes that use roles from within the last decade and tribes that use roles from the early 1900s.
The majority of tribes though actually use what we call blood quantum and blood quantum is sort of a mathematical calculation of identity. How much blood does a person have from that particular tribe? It's not how much native blood a person has, but rather how much blood from that one specific tribe.
LAUREN GILGER: How do you prove?
SCHUETTPELZ: Well, you prove it in similar ways in terms of descendancy, right? And so if I have a grandparent who was enrolled in my tribe and their blood quantum is written as four-fourths or 100% on that tribe's roles. Then I am, at the very least, one quarter.
GILGER: Wow. OK. So, you delve into the history of this kind of process and these different of doing this in the book. Well, talk about about where this comes from, like who designed these kinds of, you know, requirements to prove, you know, blood quantum or, or something like that.
SCHUETTPELZ: Well, it wasn't the tribes.
GILGER: Right.
SCHUETTPELZ: These systems, you know, the idea of enrollment, the idea of written and formal membership. These are not native concepts. The U.S. federal government began making lists of native people as early as, you know, the first couple of decades of the 1800s. Back then, it was so that they could divvy up treaty money list making became more and more of a common sort of idea as Indian removal happened. And so native tribes were sent to reservations far from where their ancestral lands were, and that really was to make sure that the federal government had sort of rounded them up and, you know, accounted for everybody.
And then moving into the late 1800s, we had sort of an epic failure of native policy, which was the Dawes Act or the General Allotment Act. And this really was the tipping point of list making. This was when the federal government said to tribes, “we're going to take your land, we are going to divide it up and divvy it up to your members individually.” This was an attempt by the government to not only strip tribes of power, but also to encourage/force native people into plot farming.
GILGER: Hm. So this goes a long way back and has kind of a fraught history. Tell us about your own story here. Like, you did this yourself kind of going through this process. Tell us what drove you to do that, what you learned.
SCHUETTPELZ: Yeah, I mean, one of the questions I've been asking myself for a while now is, “how did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where I have a small laminated card in my wallet that says I am a member of the Lumbee tribe,” which is my tribe. Certainly, this wasn't something my ancestors were doing 200 years ago. They weren't churning out cards.
And so, you know, the research began as personal curiosity, frankly. But, as that journey continued, I actually started to connect it back to this idea of identity more broadly. I also happened to have a couple of kids during the process of writing this book. And I think that once you have kids, these ideas of identity for yourself also sort of snowball into ideas of identity for them.
And so, it sort of became more of a story of me and my own journey and the journeys of the women who I interviewed, as part of the book, with this kind of historical landscape in the background.
GILGER: Yeah, that's really interesting. So, I mean, I, yeah, you're grappling with this idea of why you did it. You wrote this really interesting quote I wanna, I wanna read, you wrote that, “the one quarter of Indian ‘blood’ that I possess could just as easily be stated as the reverse equation. I am three quarters, German too.” Tell us what you mean by that and how this kind of idea gets at this, this bigger question that you're talking about, of, of identity in general.
SCHUETTPELZ: You know, I have always sort of walked around thinking I wasn't native enough. I grew up 1000 miles away from my tribe. I grew up in Iowa, my tribe is located in North Carolina. I was not surrounded by a Lumbee community, other than my immediate family members. I don't know that I present as native looking, whatever that means. You know, based on the stereotypes that we society have.
And so I always sort of felt almost like an imposter, and unfortunately, blood quantum has gotten wrapped up into that. It's not uncommon for a native person to be asked, by complete strangers, how Indian they are. And so I think that it's impossible not to let that stuff seep into your own thoughts about identity, right? And if you're more quote unquote of one thing than you are of another, well, then what does that mean?
I think we've reached a point in this country where everybody carries around multiple identities. And so I think that a lot of people probably walk around thinking, “well, am I enough of X, Y and Z to call myself X, Y and Z?” And so that has always been a theme of my life. And honestly, what was really fascinating was when I began to grapple with these questions, I started noticing that other people were too.
GILGER: So, I want to ask you lastly about something that you wrote here about why you think people do this, why maybe you wanted to do this, that you think it's maybe unique to native people, this need to constantly prove that identity, where do you think that comes from?
SCHUETTPELZ: I can tell you that it probably started with federal policy. You know, throughout the last 200 years, particularly with list making and this identity of membership, the federal government has attempted to assimilate native people into the broader society with the idea of shrinking the amount of “Indian” they are.
You know, during the Dawes Act, when a person would get their plot of land from the government, eventually they would receive a title to the land if they were less than one half Indian. Once you reached one half Indian or less, you were deemed competent, and in other words, a part of American society. And so there's always been this sort of strange cut off that the federal government has used to say, “you are Indian and you are not.”