Former Obama administration official Carrie Laurie Schuettepeltz became, in her words, a “card-carrying Indian,” an enrolled member of North Carolina’s Lumbee tribe, from which her mother is descended, at the age of six. It was at the time. side. The event was marked by the delivery of typewritten cards issued by the tribal registrar’s office. It was the size of a driver’s license, but was transported more symbolically. Her mother made Schuettpeltz wash her hands before touching her.
Most of Mr. Schuettepelz’s Lumbee relatives are concentrated in the tribe’s homeland of Pembroke, North Carolina, which has a population of about 2,800 people, two-thirds of whom are Native American. In Pembroke, her family “lives in a circle” on a circular gravel road, with various cousins, aunts and uncles living close to each other. “If you stand in the middle of this circle and shout loudly, you can probably invite everyone to dinner,” she wrote.
Schuettpeltz, who grew up in Iowa and still lives in the Midwest, has spent most of her life alternately feeling inside and outside the circle. Her maternal grandfather, a Lumbee, met a German woman while serving in World War II. They married and moved to the Midwest. During the summer, Schuettepeltz’s family traveled 1,000 miles to North Carolina, where she attended local bonfires and visited relatives. Pembroke’s Lumbee community was a cohesive, almost insular world, and her sense of belonging was intertwined with her anxiety about not belonging enough.
Tribes have the right to determine their own citizenship requirements. Schuettepeltz repeatedly points out that “every tribe is different” and each tribe has its own criteria for membership. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina requires direct biological descent from the tribe’s “base roll” (a list of tribal members compiled decades ago) and a demonstrated understanding of Lumbee history and culture. is. (In the past, this meant taking a test, but now applicants must attend classes.) As an adult, Ms. Schuettpeltz said her registration had lapsed. , I learned that I had to reapply. Her trip to the Lumbee Registration Office was similar to her trip to the Land Transportation Office. There were line drawings and clipboards and unflattering photos. Although she met all the requirements, including passing the test, “in the process, a thick thread of doubt about my identity was sewn inside me,” she writes.
Ms. Schuettpeltz’s experiences are a part of the larger story of tribal membership, its personal and political meanings, and the ambiguous, genre-bending reportage, memoir, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America. ” sparked her curiosity about the story she had created. And history. She has learned that it is not unusual for her relationship with her Indigenous identity to be volatile and changing. In 1990, just under 2 million Americans selected “American Indian or Alaska Native” as their race on the U.S. Census. In 2000, when respondents were first allowed to select multiple racial categories, that number doubled. Within 20 years, it had more than doubled again. Schuettepeltz outlined a number of things, including changes to census response guidelines and efforts to expand census operations on reservations that have historically been undercounted. But Schuettepeltz points out that there is nothing widespread enough to explain such an “astronomical rise.” It’s simply, or maybe not so simple, that far more people now identify as Native.
But of the 10 million people who checked the “American Indian or Alaska Native” box on their 2020 Census forms, only a fraction are registered as state or federally recognized tribes. Not too much. When asked to indicate their tribal affiliation, more than 1.6 million people wrote some form of “Cherokee.” There are three federally recognized Cherokee tribes in the United States, with a total of nearly 500,000 members. In other words, the number of people who identify as Native is far greater than the number of people who are officially recognized as Native. Further complicating matters, while “American Indian” is counted as a racial category in the census, tribal membership is more of a legal status. Indigenous identity is therefore a matter of individual identification, and is also determined by tribal and federal authorities. Perhaps more than any other sub-racial category, indigeneity is mediated by institutions that have a vested interest in including (or excluding) people.
Schuettepeltz, a former adviser to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, acknowledges that he “sees the world through the lens of data.” She’s interested in the kind of information that fits in a spreadsheet. In this case, when faced with the mystery of how tribal nations decide on membership, she instinctively turned to “something that has always been a comfort to me in my life: Microsoft Excel.” she writes. She has set a goal of building a database of tribal registration policies that covers as many of the 347 federally recognized Native American tribes in the continental United States as possible. (She chooses not to include Alaska Native communities or tribal nations, including the Lumbee Tribe, which the state recognizes but lacks federal recognition.) Of the tribes for which she can find information, Much of it is based on the amount of blood, or percentage, of its membership. Ancestry that can be traced back to a particular tribe. The second most common method is lineage-based, which requires members to identify a direct ancestor who was a member of the tribe.
There are tangible benefits to proving direct lineage to a federally recognized tribe. Some tribes offer members child care, housing assistance, or annual payments from casino revenues. (Schuettepeltz points out that many people often assume that per capita payments are much larger and more widespread than they actually are.) We offer grants and grants for native-born students. Perhaps more importantly, there are also intangible benefits. Membership strengthens Schuettepeltz’s sometimes shaky sense of identity and connects her to the community. Quoting Osage professor and author Jimmy Beeson, she writes that Native identity is “not so much about who claims it as it is about who claims it.”
“Indian Cards” is not a simple story about finding peace through belonging. As Schuettepeltz researched the tribe’s membership system, she realized there were many concerns. She interviewed many Native Americans who faced the limitations of tribal registration policies. Schuettpeltz’s research assistants cannot complete their membership applications unless they obtain birth certificates from their mostly absent fathers or grandfathers they don’t speak the language of. Then there’s a man who serves as a historian for his tribe, but his tribe determines membership on a patrilineal basis, and he couldn’t register because his father was white.
The federal government is also involved in determining who officially “qualifies” as an Indigenous person through the issuance of a document known as an Indian Bloodline Certificate, which serves as official verification of an individual’s blood content. . CDIB sounds like a relic from a much older era. In fact, its origins are unclear, and as far as Schuettepeltz can tell, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began issuing CDIB cards in the 1970s. This certification remains a requirement for certain federal benefits, and some tribes require a CDIB as a pre-registration step. The idea of the government certifying people’s bloodlines clearly makes Schuettepeltz nervous. “Pay particular attention to the word blood,” she writes. “Think about other U.S. policies that are still in place today that gave the federal government the power to quantify people by blood, and realize that there is no such thing.”
During the colonial period, the United States approached tribes as sovereign nations that should be dealt with on a government-to-government basis. However, treaty provisions were often exploitative or ignored when it became inconvenient. By the mid-to-late 19th century, tribal nations were devastated by the cumulative effects of war, disease, land confiscation, and forced migration. Schuettepeltz identifies an important change during this period, when the violent extermination campaigns of the early colonial period gave way to more bureaucratically obfuscated forms of victimization. The government became less interested in fostering relations with tribes. Instead, attention increasingly focused on individual Native Americans. Indigenous identity began to be seen as racial rather than political designation or membership in a particular tribe. At the same time, the U.S. government became increasingly focused on “valuing Indianness,” as Schuettepeltz puts it.
The federal government has never been good at this. The U.S. Census did not include “Indian” as an option until 1860. (Even after that point, Schuettepeltz points out, many Lumbees were classified as “mulatto.”) Schuettepeltz’s Lumbee great-grandmother, born around 1860, had three different racial identifiers on the census rolls. is listed.
The situation changed during the Allotment Era in the late 19th century, when the federal government divided collectively owned tribal lands into parcels and assigned them to individual owners. As part of determining land eligibility, the Dawes Commission tasked federal officials with creating a “correct roster” of tribal residents, some of which is still used today in blood quantum calculations. The compilation of what became known as the Dawes Roll was often haphazard and what Schuettepeltz called a “non-process.” It was rumored that some white families, seeking access to their allotted land, bribed their way into the land. With little official guidance, federal authorities sometimes relied on racist assumptions. Investigators tasked with creating an official list of Mississippi’s Choctaw tribes say people who “demonstrate a preponderance of Choctaw blood and features,” meaning they look Indian, are not required to provide documentation of their ancestry. No, I was instructed.
Tribal members with African ancestry probably faced the greatest obstacles to formal acceptance. Until the late 1860s, many tribes practiced slavery. (The five so-called civilized tribes, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole, were given such honorific titles in part because they enslaved their people.) Many In cases, those freed from slavery were incorporated into the tribe as full citizens. As a liberator. However, when Dawes officials compiled their lists, freedmen and their descendants were often listed separately or not included at all. (This racist past is still alive in today’s tribal policies. Of the five tribes, only the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma allows descendants of freedmen the exercise of full citizenship rights. )
