13—
American Indian Blood Quantum Requirements:
Blood Is Thicker than Family

Melissa L. Meyer

American Indians must be enrolled in one of more than three hundred federally recognized tribes to receive most benefits from the federal government. To be enrolled, they must meet various criteria that vary from tribe to tribe and are set forth in tribal constitutions. Upon meeting such criteria, members are issued cards and numbers that identify their special status visà-vis their tribe and the U.S. government via the Bureau of Indian Affairs.^[1] Members of no other ethnic or racial group in the U.S. maintain formal affiliations between themselves or with the federal government in this fashion. American Indians are unique.

That no one has explored in serious scholarly fashion how the enrollment process evolved or how "blood quantum" or degree of Indian "blood" came to be one of the most important criteria used first by federal policymakers and then by tribes themselves to establish tribal membership seems curious given the centrality of these issues to native people in the past and today.^[2] Tribal enrollment has been and still is intrinsically linked to entitlement to property and other material benefits in addition to the ethnic bonds that tribal members feel. Furthermore, everyone —past and present, native and non-native—employed folk understandings of the metaphorical term "blood" to the point of overwhelming all common sense. The belief that blood literally or symbolically transmitted the essential qualities of the group is, perhaps, one of the few things that all of the actors in this tortuous history have shared.

Prior to their involvement with European nations, native groups determined their membership through a myriad of kinship systems that demarcated lineages of relatives. Simply distinguishing between matrilineal and patrilineal methods of reckoning descent hardly does justice to the complex

forms that kinship systems might take. It is beyond the scope of this essay to elaborate on these various means of determining lineage, only to emphasize that family considerations, however construed, were paramount. Ironically, native notions of family lineage come closer to the origins of the term "blood" than current physiological meanings.

The historical roots of tribal enrollment extend back to the early nineteenth century when treaties with the U.S. government began to establish entitlement to specific rights, privileges, goods, services, and money. The practice of creating lists of tribal members and eventually formal censuses evolved to ensure the most accurate and equitable distribution of benefits possible. Surprisingly, the very first names to be recorded were those of individuals of mixed descent (early on referred to as "half-breeds" and then "mixed bloods"). Instead of enumerating all tribal members, U.S. policymakers relied on native leaders to distribute goods and money among their constituents. The first lists of names related to distributions of land to be held as private property. Many reasons underlay the policy of allocating plots of land to people of mixed descent. Policymakers rationalized that "half-breed" landowners would serve as a "civilizing" example to other Indians. Sometimes influential traders of mixed descent succeeded in having real or inflated "debts" covered by treaty money or land parcels. Often, federal personnel insisted that those who accepted plots of land sever their tribal affiliations, thereby fulfilling policymakers' dreams of native assimilation and hopes for reducing financial responsibilities.^[3] Discovering that people of mixed descent were the first to be enumerated was surprising, but it makes sense that such record-keeping would be tied to allocations of private property. Further elaborations of the enrollment process would also revolve around distributions of land.

The 1887 General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, heralded the most important period in the evolution of tribal enrollment. As part of the U.S. government's forced assimilation campaign, reservations across the country were divided into parcels of from 40 to 160 acres and assigned to individuals. Policymakers believed that owning private property would magically transform the collective values of most Indians and hasten their assimilation when nothing else had succeeded. Official censuses would determine those eligible to receive what came to be called "allotments" at each reservation. "Enrollment commissions" often compiled official tribal "rolls" that codified each individual's status as a member of their specific tribe. The commissions sometimes made decisions regarding individuals' fractional degree of Indian "blood" and otherwise determined whether people met eligibility requirements. Sometimes tribal members were given the opportunity to voice objections to these decisions, but not always. The long-term impact of official codification was not then apparent, so that concerns that would

later be voiced about the legitimacy of enrollees' claims were not raised at the time. Native people often resisted being enumerated, believing that the whole policy aimed at dispossessing them of their land, which was the long-term consequence.^[4] A substantial body of case law developed contesting the actions of the federal government in making these enrollment decisions.^[5] Today, most native people must reckon their blood quantum by reference to the lists codified at this time, despite widespread stories of miscalculation. Again, tribal enrollment revolved around distributions of private property.

Despite policymakers' efforts to undermine tribal governments and political leaders, native groups maintained or created formal tribal governments and began regulating their own membership, especially in regard to land allotments, royalties from the sale of resources, distributions of tribal funds, residence, and voting. Since 1905 in the precedent setting Waldron v. United States, U.S. courts have upheld tribal rights to determine membership based on their own laws and customs.^[6]

In 1934, Congress passed the Wheeler-Howard Act or Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) to foster economic development to relieve the poverty brought about by ill-conceived allotment policies. A central IRA feature encouraged the establishment of U.S.-sanctioned tribal governments patterned after corporations. Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives encouraged leaders from reservations that voted to accept the IRA to adopt formal tribal constitutions based on a U.S. model. In addition to making decisions regarding economic development, these tribal governments also codified enrollment requirements in their constitutions and ruled on individuals' eligibility. The IRA gave long-overdue support to Indian political organizations, but at the expense of indigenous forms and practices. Critics argue that elective IRA governments supplanted consensus governmental structures, created a permanent, voiceless, conservative minority, and were dominated by a capitalistically oriented reservation elite. Predictably, more case law developed contesting the decisions of these tribal governments. In line with established precedents, however, the courts have upheld the right of IRA governments over any contesting parties to determine eligibility for enrollment.^[7]

Complicating matters further, in the twentieth century the U.S. government established its own eligibility criteria for benefits like educational aid and health care. These requirements do not interfere with tribal membership practices. Instead, they add yet another layer to the increasingly complicated question of "Who is an Indian"?

Many criteria can be used to delimit a population. Residence, cultural affiliation, language, recognition by a community, genealogical lines of descent, self-identification, and degree of "blood" have all been used at some point in the past to define American Indian populations. However, each

measure produces a different sized population. For example, in 1990 the U.S. federal census enumerated 1.8 million self-identified American Indians, but only around 1 million were actually enrolled in one of the 304 federally recognized tribes. In other words, about 60 percent of all self-identified Indians in the 1990 census were enrolled. Which variables are ultimately employed is an arbitrary decision, but the implications for American Indians can be enormous.^[8]

As absurd as it sounds on the surface, "Who is an Indian?" has been an important question since the mid-nineteenth century. Commissioners of Indian Affairs have regularly grappled with it in their annual reports. Judges have repeatedly defined Indian identity in regard to property and entitlement, tribal membership, and criminal and civil jurisdictional conflicts among tribes, states, and the federal government. Sociologist C. Matthew Snipp identified three separate categories of American Indian identity evident in the 1980 federal census: American Indians (those who identified as Indian for both racial and ethnic categories); American Indians of multiple ancestry (those who identify racially as Indians, but list other ancestry as part of their ethnic background); and Americans of Indian descent (those who do not list Indian as their race, but include it in their ethnic background).^[9] Given such complexity, it is obvious that tribal enrollment provides only a partial answer to the question, "Who is an Indian?"

Among the most common criteria used both by tribal governments, to establish membership, and by the U.S. government, to determine who is an American Indian, is degree of Indian blood or "blood quantum." The amount necessary for enrollment can vary from 1/16 for the Eastern Band of Cherokee to 1/2 for the Hopi Nation. Some tribes, like the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, specify no blood quantum but require individuals to trace genealogical descent from a direct ancestor included on the Dawes Roll codified in 1907. The federal government maintains a 1/4 blood requirement for most of its benefits. Obviously, requiring a greater proportion of American Indian "blood" limits the eligible population more than a smaller percentage does.

Measuring Indian "blood" is a curious phenomenon that merits examination in its own right. It is incorrect to assume that the term "blood" is and always has been simply a metaphoric reference to genetic composition. Especially before knowledge of genetics, blood seemed the very stuff of life. The weakening effects of the loss of a great deal of blood—producing even death—cannot have been lost on the earliest humans. Among most band level people, blood has been and is regarded as a very powerful element. From the earliest times it has been regarded as the quintessential substance which carries and transmits the special qualities of the stock. Ancient Greeks linked blood to beliefs about human reproduction. Some be-

lieved that the mother's blood seeped into the fetus or that the testes separated blood from seed rendering semen a distillation of blood. Herodotus thought that African semen was black, and it took Aristotle to set the record straight. (What lively reading his field notes must be!) These beliefs concerning blood are probably among the oldest surviving ideas from the earliest days of humankind. They are widely distributed among the peoples of the world in much the same form.^[10]

Ideally, understanding native conceptions of blood and transmission of group qualities should form a crucial aspect of this project. Pre-contact native groups determined membership through kinship systems. Understanding how groups that formerly determined membership by kinship came to measure blood themselves is more difficult. United States policymakers set the precedent, but tribes maintained the practice. Why?

The historical record complicates exploring native ideas about blood's properties. Intermediaries like explorers, missionaries, agents, or ethnographers produced the most documents. They generally adopted language that conflated blood and peoplehood and did not render native conceptions. Native language dictionaries tend to translate in an abrupt, matter-of-fact style ill-equipped to convey subtle, nuanced cross-cultural meanings. The Human Relations Area Files, a compilation of ethnographic information for cultures across the world, contain nothing specific to any group nor anything which might support generalizations across tribal lines. Scholars have not had these questions in mind.

Anecdotal ethnographic material concerning beliefs about menstrual blood, ritual torture (and its connection to adoption) and sacrifice, and ingesting internal organs of humans and animals confirms that some native cultures regarded blood as very powerful. But findings will not apply across tribal lines. For a larger study, delving into a few illustrative case studies where the data are better might be most productive. Interviewing native people about blood in today's volatile atmosphere would not yield results applicable to the past.

The etymological roots of the term "blood" extend deep into the Anglo-Saxon tribal psyche. In Old English, "blot" denotes blood spilled in sacrifice, a ritual intended partially to ensure continuity of the familial or tribal lineage. In Middle English the connection with sacrifice is obscured except for Christian associations with the Eucharist. By 1200, "blood" increasingly connotes lineage, descent, and ancestry in association with royal claims to property and power and presages modern conceptions of "race." Associations with intermarriage and discussions of whole- and half-blood appear. By the early eighteenth century, modern physiological meanings take the fore and "race" begins to displace the connotations of lineage and ancestry formerly attributed to "blood."^[11]

In 1911, William Whitney's Century Dictionary turns to metaphorical meanings of "blood" in the fourth definition: "Persons of any specified race, nationality, or family, considered collectively." A citation from Popular Science Monthly illustrates the point: "Indian blood, thus far in the history of this country, has tended decidedly toward extinction.^[12] This concise, paradigmatic phrase closely approximates ramblings about kinship and descent in popular and legal discourse.

Whitney assumes that the physiological meaning of "blood" preceded its metaphorical extensions, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Anglo-Saxons lacked "modern, or even classical Greek conceptions of physiology and biology. . . . The close relation of blod with blot, sacrifice, suggests that it may have originated in 'metaphorical' usage and only later, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, picked up the varied but narrow biological meanings which the editors take for granted and believe are primary." Indeed, it seems more likely that the metaphorical connection of blood with lineage, descent, and ancestry preceded its literal physiological use.^[13] Pre-contact indigenous peoples of the Americas could easily have related to this understanding.

European beliefs about the relationship between "blood" and peoplehood infused into the Americas from two different but related directions. Spanish and Portuguese precedents on the Iberian peninsula left their mark on the first colonizing efforts. Subsequent English ventures encountered this legacy and contributed their own distinctive ideas about superior Anglo-Saxon institutions and, eventually, bloodlines. These European ideologies left distinctive imprints on the social relationships that evolved from region to region in the Americas.

For seven hundred years prior to 1492 the Iberian peninsula witnessed increasing ethnic heterogeneity as "Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, Gypsies, and medieval slaves of different origins" interacted and intermixed.^[14] Although Jews and Moors came to be persecuted and exiled, they also contributed much to Spanish and Portuguese culture, including their genes. Some have suggested that Spanish and Portuguese success as colonizers can be attributed to their heritage of miscibility. Did this fact coupled with their idealization of the dark skinned "Moorish enchantress" and the Muslim tradition of polygyny foster intimate relationships with native women? Magnus Morner suggests that scholars need to know much more about this heritage to assess its influence on the colonization of Latin America. Even so, some similarities are apparent. Interactions on both sides of the Atlantic were characterized by "the same kind of strange mixture between savage warfare and pacific exchange, including miscegenation, between intolerance and tolerance in interethnic relations."^[15] The chronicler of conquest Bernal Diaz wrote that the Spaniards raped, robbed, and pillaged, "as if they were in Moorish coun-

try." A long history thus sustained Spanish and Portuguese notions of their own cultural superiority and enabled them to rationalize the conquest, freely enter into intimate relations with native women, and define the evolving social and labor systems by reference to color and, eventually, racial and caste designators.^[16]

People of English descent had their own ideas about "blood" and peoplehood. The roots of the concept of a distinct, superior Anglo-Saxon race extend back at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The English people who conquered the eastern shores of North America brought with them a myth glorifying a "pure" English Anglo-Saxon church as part of their religious heritage. The English Reformation stimulated research designed to prove that the church was returning to supposedly purer practices that existed before 1066; they were cleansing the church of corruption. This helped to justify their break with Rome. By the American Revolution, Euroamericans believed themselves the beneficiaries of a long tradition in which the Anglo-Saxon English had enjoyed unprecedented freedoms that had been polluted by the Norman Conquest. The emphasis was on institutions rather than race.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the emphasis changed from celebrating superior institutions to celebrating innate racial strengths. Two movements—a burst of German nationalism and a growing European interest in the history of German peoples—helped to inspire the English and Americans to celebrate Anglo-Saxons as superior people competent to create institutions capable of ruling the world. In this view, high-minded, freedom-loving German people had migrated from their simple, pure life in the forests to infuse France and England with their excellent characteristics. European Romanticism's stress on the uniqueness of individuals and peoples helped to shift the emphasis from institutions to the continuity of innate racial strengths. English-speaking people in particular fastened on the idea of each nation possessing its own Volkgeist, or special national spirit. It helped them to explain their success in the modern era.

The Romantic emphasis on feelings, imagination, and emotions also helped to sustain the blurry thinking necessary to rationalize some of the more extreme manifestations of racial Anglo-Saxonism. From these origins in German Romanticism, the English and, eventually, Americans were to combine race, nation, and language in a confused jumble of "rampant, racial nationalism." The new Romantic image that emerged glorified Anglo-Saxons as "adventurous, brave, and respectful toward women" as well as the "originators of trial by jury and parliamentary institutions."

However, it is one thing to celebrate a heritage and another to attack other people and nations for their inferiority. Scientific inquiry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provided the fodder for an elaboration of the inferiority of others as the final ingredient necessary for rabid,

racial, Anglo-Saxonism. Natural scientists focused on observation, measurement, and classification. They were fascinated with anthropometry, especially physiognomy, craniology, and phrenology. Linnaeus and others applied modern scientific methodology to earlier categorization schemes like the Great Chain of Being. However, comparisons that were used in the eighteenth century to emphasize the unity of mankind were in the nineteenth century used to demonstrate fundamental human differences.

Great Britain, with its colonizing endeavors in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, was especially fertile ground for theories of racial hierarchy. English people, particularly, with their pronounced belief in the superiority of English Anglo-Saxon bloodlines and institutions were quite anxious to separate themselves from the "savages" they had encountered who were typically of darker complexion.'^[17]

From the thirteenth through the early sixteenth century, terms like pardo, loro, negro, olivastre, and berretino were employed in Europe to distinguish people with darker skin. Significantly, they denoted color differences, not racial or caste differences. In the European colonies, as conquest of Native Americans, Africans, and Asians progressed, terms like mestizo and mulatto, denoting hybrids of any sort, evolved. Increasingly, Euroamerican colonists emphasized biological or racial categorization of people of mixed descent. Cultural factors retained greater prominence in Spanish and Portuguese social systems, but all areas witnessed this transformation of color codes to racial ones. As interracial relationships produced progeny of increasingly diverse parentage, classificatory terms became broader and more general to accommodate this growing heterogeneity. The finely tuned lists of designators of every imaginable interracial mixture (mestizo, castizo, Spaniard, mulatto, morisco, albino, torna atras, lobo, zambaigo, cambujo, albarazado, barcino, coyote, chamiso, coyote mestizo, ahi te estas, cuarteron de mestizo, quinteron, requinteron de mestizo, quarteron de mulato ) reflected the concerns of elite thinkers and later scholars more than the social reality of the time.^[18]

The term "half-breed" originated in English common law to distinguish between siblings who were not descended from exactly the same two biological parents. It had nothing to do with race. When it appeared in colonial laws and discourse it could refer to any person of mixed descent.^[19] However, the term became ensconced in the language of the North American fur trade as people of mixed descent proliferated throughout the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes watershed and came to form a separate ethnic group.^[20] Wherever trade relationships persisted, people of mixed descent proliferated. That the terms employed in early treaties would reflect fur trade social realities should not be surprising. Land cessions, often accomplished through treaties, followed closely on the heels of the denouement of the regional fur trade. Fur trade personnel, many of them of mixed descent, served as intermediaries in treaty negotiations, sometimes wrangling special

considerations (like "half-breed scrip") for members of their social group. Traders, treaty negotiators, and native people alike conflated their understandings of "blood" and peoplehood. The terms had meaning for all participants and from this entry point would continue to infiltrate and permeate the language of U.S. Indian policy.

In the language of colonial racial politics and evolving scientific racism, fused notions of blood and peoplehood were also ordered hierarchically into superior and inferior stocks. "White blood" might uplift darker "blood," but not as quickly as "tainted blood" polluted. And the stain of degeneracy attached to all those of mixed descent for those of the dominant order. It was a contest that might be won only through phenotype and cultural behavior. Color lines drawn in the racial caste system remained impermeable unless an individual looked lighter and associated with and behaved like those of "purer blood."

These understandings pervaded U.S. Indian policy. From the beginning, policymakers believed that, despite their irredeemable hybrid stock, those of mixed descent would serve as a "civilizing" force and pave the way for the success of assimilation programs. There was some truth to this logic as people of mixed descent tended toward biculturalism if they existed in sufficient numbers.^[21] But the reasoning was carried to absurd extremes until even land policies rested on a foundation of "blood." People of mixed descent, in general, had greater opportunity to acquire plots of land than native people. "Half-breeds" or "mixed bloods" were supposed to sever their tribal ties when they accepted land scrip, but they often did not.^[22] Their tendency toward biculturalism also meant that they were more likely to accept the commodification of land, to understand the workings of the market, and to be among the first to claim further allotments of land and distributions of tribal funds. At the turn of the twentieth century, policymakers reasoned that people of mixed descent were more competent to manage real estate and removed protective restrictions designed to prevent the alienation of privately held reservation land by unscrupulous corporate interests. So firmly entrenched were these ideas that in 1917 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs literally forced all tribal people of half or more white "blood" to accept unrestricted title to their land. This meant that they were liable to pay property taxes. Small wonder that tax forfeiture emerged as the primary way in which individual Indian landowners lost land in the early twentieth century.^[23]

At the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, policymakers went to outrageous lengths in their efforts to equate white "blood" with comprehension of land in a capitalistic market. In 1907, Congress passed a law allowing "mixed bloods" of the White Earth Reservation to sell their land allotments. Failing to define "mixed blood," the law created a quagmire of uncertainty that spilled over into complex land fraud claims. In 1914 the

U.S. Supreme Court essentially applied the "one-drop rule," establishing that any amount of white "blood," no matter how minute, made an Indian a mixed blood, thus settling a complicated, nuanced issue in concrete, simplistic terms that only the judicial system can achieve.^[24] Armed with their Supreme Court definition, policymakers needed only to identify the mixed bloods to settle contested land claims. Nonetheless, it seemed that only physical anthropologists could provide the information that everyone involved with White Earth land claims eagerly awaited.

Ales Hrdlicka^[*] , of the Smithsonian Institution and AlbertJenks of the University of Minnesota Anthropology Department put their heads together to devise and apply physical tests to the White Earth people to ferret out the mixed bloods. Phenotypic characteristics were of greatest diagnostic significance to them; they even hoped to construct a racial typology based on hair using the Pima as their pure baseline standard. When the micrometer they used to do cross-sectional analysis of hairs produced ambiguous results, the two scientists puzzled over their data. A baffled Jenks reported, "Both Hrdlicka and myself have hair of most typical negro type, and the Scandinavians have hair more circular in cross section than our pure blood Pima Indians." Perplexed, Jenks was forced to conclude that, "Dr. Hrdlicka and I are related to the negro, and the Scandinavians are simply bleached out Mongolians."^[25] Mired in confusion, the anthropologists had to admit that classifying human races by hair texture was proving to be a far more problematic undertaking than they had initially imagined. Nevertheless, the scientists felt sure enough of their observations to go beyond identifying what they believed to be general racial characteristics to testify as to individuals' "blood" status. Through spurious methods of this sort, Hrdlicka and Jenks lent their professional, "scientific" expertise to attempts to identify White Earth mixed bloods. Their efforts legalized the largest possible number of land transfers and directly contributed to the codification of White Earth enrollment lists. Outright racism received the imprimatur of academia. The cross-cultural faux pas would be humorous had it not, in reality, been so tragic.^[26]

Given the destructive nature of past policies and social structures that rested. on racial (and "blood") distinctions, it seems surprising that native groups would adopt the same sorts of categorizations when they codified their requirements for tribal membership. Granted, they inherited a tangled mess of property and enrollment decisions based on blood quantum, but the push for greater native sovereignty and self-determination in the mid-twentieth century nonetheless seems like a lost opportunity.^[27]

Native people understood that past policies had differentiated between them on the basis of descent—specifically on the basis of intermarriage with Euroamericans. Often this meant that people of mixed descent enjoyed greater individual freedom and acquired greater amounts of what had once

been collectively owned property. Under the U.S. government's allotment programs, most supported the restriction that exempted allotted landholdings from taxation. But that was the only restriction that native people welcomed. No one foresaw or approved the massive intrusion of the federal government into individual and tribal affairs; it was forced upon them without notice. As policymakers sought some means by which they might lift restrictions from people who clearly were proficient in the workings of the market, they fastened on "blood" as a marker of capabilities. People of mixed descent were far more likely to be deemed "competent" and given the freedom to manage their land and bank accounts as they saw fit. It is true that tribal groups suffered widespread dispossession under allotment policies, but it does not follow that native people supported all restrictions on their individual resources. More often they yearned for freedom from government regulation and resented the selective lifting of property restrictions from those of mixed descent. As they saw it, those with white "blood" were unfairly rewarded.^[28]

One fact is obvious from examining tribal membership requirements. Native people established tribal policies that rewarded greater amounts of Indian "blood" rather than white "blood." Few scholars would argue that all of U.S. Indian policy amounted to genocide, but long-term demographic trends certainly point to a holocaust. Genocide has ideological as well as demographic consequences; defending and celebrating race is probably among them. In their purest form, blood quantum requirements amount to a celebration of race. But turning the tables in this fashion, though it may have accorded to some degree with their own notions of "blood" and lineage, would not spare tribes or individuals from the destructive consequences of basing policies on racial criteria.^[29]

The Indians who populate the American popular imagination bear absolutely no relationship to real native people either in the past or in the present. The imagery allows Americans and people over the world to sustain highly romanticized notions of Indianness.^[30] It encourages people with little or no cultural affiliation to claim Indian identity. People yearn to document descent from some relative lost in the past to enhance their chances of acquiring educational funds and gaining admittance to prestigious universities. Native people know this better than anyone. Never-before-seen "relatives" emerge as claimants every time any tribal group receives a court settlement or royalties from economic development. Such exploitation pierces as a thorn in the side of legitimate tribal members.

Given this history, it should come as no surprise that tribes with greater assets have more restrictive membership requirements. In fact, there is a correlation between more exclusive blood quantum requirements and the maintenance of reservation land bases (see tables 13.1 and 13.2). Tribes

without reservation land, like those of Oklahoma and California, tend to have more inclusive blood quantum requirements that underscore a concern with demographic survival. In this sense, enrollment criteria can be said to have both economic and demographic bases.

That claimants unrecognizable to reservation residents can and do successfully enroll carries a meaning beyond exploitation that contemporary scholars are wont to recognize. Assimilation on some level does occur, at least to the extent that descendants leave the tribal group and become unrecognizable to many of their "relatives" over the course of time. It is not easy to become enrolled even in a tribe with minimal blood quantum re-

quirements. Countless would-be relatives are turned away every year. That socalled distant relatives actually achieve enrollment should give tribes cause to reevaluate exactly what they hope to achieve by specific enrollment criteria.

Clearly, most tribes desire that enrollment reflect some sort of valid cultural affiliation. The assumption is that higher proportions of Indian "blood" increase the odds that this will be the case. Everyone knows that it does not guarantee it, just as they know that some with legitimate cultural ties will be eliminated due to their inability to meet blood quantum requirements. Carrying this logic to its extreme, anthropologist John Moore has boned up on combinatorial statistics to compare the actual distribution of blood quantum in the Creek Nation to ideal distributions. He hopes ultimately to show the probabilities of a legal "half-blood" having "Indian" chromosomes for each number in the range, from zero to forty-six.^[31] Whereas such a study has value in terms of tracing group descent, interracial marriage patterns, and health-related issues, it does not take much prescience to foresee some unintended and potentially disastrous uses to which it might be put. Imagine being required to produce a genetic, DNA analysis for purposes of tribal enrollment and receiving a card with a double helix hologram instead of a fractional delineation!

Many unenrolled people who claim Indian descent do not have exploitation on their minds; they are the victims of racist policies. Intermarriage across both tribal and racial lines means that blood quantums are everdecreasing. It takes almost no time for a one-half blood requirement to exclude from tribal enrollment people who are enmeshed in family networks and actively participate in living cultures. Many people exist today who identify as 100 percent Indian, but cannot meet the enrollment criteria of any tribe. It still remains to be explained how people who value family so dearly rationalize tribal enrollment criteria that operate to exclude so many family members.^[32]

Tribal enrollment policies and blood quantum requirements in particular represent a transformation in the way native people construe group membership. Indian identity has become increasingly racialized in the twentieth century. The pain engendered by such accusations of illegitimacy on this contested terrain of Indian identity has fractured Indian country and individuals' senses of themselves. Can a one-half blood quantum requirement be interpreted as anything other than a policy statement that "purity of blood" is more important than acknowledging and embracing family members? The Cherokee bear the brunt of many jokes and much criticism in Indian country; people among them who reflect European and African phenotypes bear testimony to their history of liberal interracial marriages. Oddly enough (aside from deviating from its matrilineal tradition), the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, with its requirement simply to trace direct familial descent to the Dawes Roll, more closely approximates the

ways in which pre-contact native groups would have defined family and kin. The Hopi one-half blood quantum requirement hardly reflects "traditional" Hopi values. Measuring fractions of blood and excluding relatives from tribal membership reflects the combined influence of Euroamerican scientific racism and conflated ideas about "blood" and peoplehood.