- Describe environments, you're familiar with, where the conversation about race is deliberately avoided.
In Indian Country, one area where we avoid conversation on race center on tribal enrollment. Tribal enrollment is a very controversial topic for the Native community and is particularly contentious in Southern California. Historically, the federal government has worked diligently to wipe out American Indians through assimilation and intermarriage with other ethnic groups. Many people are familiar with the racist concept that if you had even one drop of African American blood you were only considered to be African American. Well, in Indian Country, the method is subtractive. If a full-blooded Native person married a white person, their children were only 1/2 Native – even if they were raised immersed in Native culture, traditions, and ways of life. It was the hope of the federal government, that with each generation, Native blood would diminish; thereby weakening the claims that Native peoples have to land as the original inhabitants of the Americas.
The federal government has set a minimum blood quantum of 1/4 Native blood for a person to be considered “Native American.” This is applied to many of the assistance programs for Native peoples – think Bureau of Indian Education and Indian Health Services. I also want to note that these programs are not privileges given to Native peoples and being Native is less of a race/ethnic identity and more of a political identity (it is very complex and difficult to explain). These programs for American Indians are a part of treaties that were signed between tribal nations and the federal government (there were multiple treaties with multiple governments; i.e. Britain, Spain, Mexico, USA). The government basically said “We’re going to take your land, and in exchange for signing this paper (which you cannot read because it is in English). We’re going to give you reservations (in the worst areas and off your sacred lands), food (commodities that were far from the healthy food you traditionally procured yourselves), education (where we’re going to force your children to live hundreds of miles away at a boarding school; take away their language, culture, and religion – to teach them English and Euro-American ways; and send them back to you as complete strangers who can’t even speak to you in your Native tongue), and health services (where we will sterilize your women). But we’re going to offer you these wonderful things for as long as your tribe is in existence (i.e. forever). Because you merciless Indian savages are wards of this of the United States of America.” [Apologies for the tangent.]
Fast forward to today, as sovereign nations, tribes are able to change this requirement – set forth by the government – when developing their enrollment laws. Every tribe has different enrollment requirements. Some base enrollment off of lineage, others on blood quantum (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 blood of the enrolling tribe), and others on some combination of the two – with most following the blood quantum for their tribe’s blood. The tribes that have embraced the concept of blood quantum utilize it as a method for keeping enrollment low – and if they’re a gaming tribe, more money in their pockets. Many Native peoples today are multi-racial or even multi-tribal, but this is a taboo topic; even identifying as more than one tribe can earn a lecture from a tribal elder that may last from hours to days to months as well as the inability to enroll in a tribe because the community feels you aren’t fully of their community. In essence, this attitude towards blood quantum will ultimately result in the extinction of a tribe. Instead of talking about it and making plans to change enrollment so our communities can grow, many tribes avoid the conversation on being multi-racial or multi-tribal. Individuals are made to feel that they do not belong to their tribal community because they do not possess enough blood from that tribe. These practices go against Native ways of knowing and our traditional family structures and create great conflict within our communities. Race was not something that was a part of our traditional ways. It is a Western social construct created to disconnect Indigenous peoples (from all over the world) from land, so that colonizers could justify their claims and fulfill Manifest Destiny.
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