The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America

The U.S. government’s restrictive requirements for tribal membership were designed to eradicate, not support, Native communities, and to this day they continue to undermine Native sovereignty, according to this brainy and illuminating debut from Lowry Schuettpelz, a professor of urban planning at the University of Iowa. Noting that the number of Americans claiming Native ancestry in the U.S. census is increasing even as the number of enrolled tribal members stays constant, Lowry Schuettpelz pores over archival population records and synthesizes a finely drawn portrait of Native Americans’ three centuries’ worth of struggle with colonizing powers’ attempts to define them in ways that destabilized their shared identity. Along the way, she surfaces fascinating details, like how wealthy turn-of-the-19th-century Choctaw households were recategorized as “Free White Persons” on the census, obfuscating Native prosperity. She also profiles contemporary Native people who are attempting, and often failing, to navigate the labyrinthine federal tribal enrollment process, and recounts her own experience with enrollment in the non-federally recognized Lumbee tribe. Grappling with the competing problems of “pretendians” (people who pretend to be Indian) and restrictive “blood quantum” enrollment qualifications that undermine Native self-determination, she lands on an intriguing solution: “indigenous data sovereignty,” or the handing over of control of genealogical data to Native communities. It’s an innovative exploration of a thorny issue. (Oct.)