1. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribal Enrollment (Phoenix: U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1979); Charles Park, "Enrollment: Procedures and Consequences," American Indian Law Review 3 (1975): 109-113. The precise number of federally recognized tribes is likely to continue to increase as groups pursue the difficult process of petitioning the U.S. government for federal recognition.

2. For a recent effort toward this end, see Pauline Turner Strong and Barrik Van Winkle, "Indian Blood: Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity (Resisting Identities)," Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 547-577. Terry Wilson's discussion of blood quantum requirements in "Blood Quantum: Native American Mixed Bloods," in Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992) raises important questions regarding native people of mixed descent and notes some historical precedents, but does not carefully trace the history of tribal enrollment or the evolution of blood quantum requirements.

3. It is beyond the scope of this essay to list all treaties and statutes with provisions directed at "half-breeds" or "mixed bloods." See Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942); Charles J. Kappler, comp., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942); "Chippewa Half-Breeds of Lake Superior," House Executive Documents 1513, no. 193, 42d Cong., 2d sess.

4. Loring Benson Priest, Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1887 (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1942); Robert A. Trennert, Jr., Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846-1851 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975); Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); D. S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, Francis Paul Prucha, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); Robert Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971); Leonard Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); H. Craig Miner, The Corporation and the Indian: Tribal Sovereignty and Industrial Civilization in Indian Territory, 1865-1907 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976); Janet A. McDonnell, "Competency Commissions and Indian Land Policy, 1913-1920," South Dakota History 11 (1980): 21-34; Janet A. McDonnell, "The Disintegration of the Indian Estate: Indian Land Policy, 1913-1929," Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 1980; Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 199 ).

5. Jo Ann Woodsum provided invaluable research assistance in compiling all federal court cases dealing with enrollment or blood quantum requirements in any fashion. It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide more than the most general descriptive reference to these court cases.

6. Waldron v. United States (C.C. S.D. 1905) 143 Fed. 413. See also: (1888) 19 Op. Atty. Gen. 109; Western Cherokee Indians v. United States (1891) 27 Ct. Cl. i; (1894) 20 Op. Atty. Gen. 711, 712; Roff v. Burney, 168 U.S. 218 (1897); (C.C.A. 8th Cir. 1897) 83 Fed. 721; Nofire v. United States (1897) 164 U.S. 647, 17 Sup. Ct. 212, 41 L. Ed. 588; Hy-yu-tse-mil-kin v. Smith (1904) 194 U.S. 401, 24 Sup. Ct. 676, 48 L. Ed. 1039; United States v. Hefron (2 cases), (C.C. Mont. 1905) 138 Fed. 964, 968; Cherokee Intermarriage Cases (1906) 203 U.S. 76, 27 Sup. Ct. 29, 51 L. Ed. 96; (1927) 245 N.Y 433, 157 N. E. 734; Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 (1978); Chapoose v. Clark, 607 F. Supp. 1027 (D. Utah 1985), aff'd, 831 F. 2nd 931 (10th Cir. 1987).

7. Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

8. Census of Population, Vol. II, Subject Reports. American Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts on Identified Reservations and in the Historic Areas of Oklahoma (Excluding Urbanized Areas). Document no. PC80-2-ID, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985); Edna L. Paisano, comp. We the . . . First Americans (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics, and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, September 1993); 1990 Federal Census of Population, unpublished data, U.S. Bureau of the Census, contact person, Edna Paisano; information about unpublished Bureau of Indian Affairs population figures are in the possession of Russell Thornton and Melissa Meyer.

9. C. Matthew Snipp, "Who Are American Indians? Some Observations about the Perils and Pitfalls of Data for Race and Ethnicity," Population Research and Policy Review 5 (1986): 237-252. See also: Russell Thornton, "Tribal Membership Requirements and the Demography of 'Old' and 'New' Native Americans," Population Research and Policy Review 7 (1997): 1-10; Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989); William T. Hagan, "Full Blood, Mixed Blood, Generic, and Ersatz: The Problem of Indian Identity," Arizona and the West 27 (1985): 309-326; Fred M. Owl, "Who and What Is an Indian?" Ethnohistory 9 (1962): 265-284; Ronald L. Trosper, "Native American Boundary Maintenance: The Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana, 1860-1970,'' Ethnicity 3 (1976): 256-274; Susan Greenbaum, "What's in a Label: Identity Problems of Southern Indian Tribes," Journal of Ethnic Studies 19 (1991): 107-126; Alexandra Harmon, "When Is an Indian Not an Indian: The Friends of the Indian and the Problems of Indian Identity," Journal of Ethnic Studies 18 (1990): 95-123.

10. Bernard Seeman, The River of Life: The Story of Man's Blood, from Magic to Science (New York: Norton, 1961); Ashley Montague, Man's Most Dangerous Myth (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1964); Ashley Montague, "The Myth of Blood," Psychiatry 6, no. 1 (February 1943): 17; Nancy B. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

11. See Arthur R. Borden, Jr., A Comprehensive Old-English Dictionary (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 188-189; T. Northcote Toller, ed., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898), 111; Hans Krath and Sherman M. Kuhn, eds., Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1956), 985-989; Keith Spaulding, An Historical Dictionary of German Figurative Usage, Fascicle I (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), 358-362; John Kersey, A New English Dictionary (1702 ) (reprint, Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969); Thomas Dyche and William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary (London: G. Ware, 1758); Thomas Sheridan, A General Dictionary of the English Language (1780 ), vol. 1 (reprint, Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1967); John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (Edinburgh: Peter Brown and Thomas Nelson, 1835); John Ogilvie, The Imperial Dictionary (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1850).

12. William Dwight Whitney with Benjamin E. Smith, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (New York: The Century Company, 1911); Popular Science Monthly 26: 233.

13. The quotation is drawn from my research assistant Kerwin L. Klein's research notes.

14. Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 13.

15. Ibid., 14.

16. Quotation from Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Ediciones Mexicanas, 1955), 113, as quoted in ibid. See also Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Walker, 1964); James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); John Hemming, Red Gold: The Destruction of the Brazilian Indians, 1500-1760 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) J. I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); C. E. Marshall, "The Birth of the Mestizo in New Spain," Hispanic American Historical Review 43 (1963): 161-184; Anthony Pagden, "Identity Formation in Spanish America," in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 51-94; Stuart Schwartz, ''The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil," in Canny and Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 15-50; Stuart Schwartz, "New World Nobility: Social Aspirations and Mobility in the Conquest and Colonization of Spanish America," in Miriam Usher Chrisman and Otto Grundler, eds., Social Groups and Religious Ideas in the Sixteenth Century (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1978), 23-37.

17. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). Quotations are from pp. 26 and 30. See also Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979); G. E. Thomas, "Puritans, Indians, and the Concept of Race," New England Quarterly 48 (1975): 3-27; David Smits, "Abominable Mixture: The Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage in 17th-Century Virginia," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1987): 157-192; David Smits, "'We Are Not to Grow Wild': Seventeenth-Century New England's Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage,'' American Indian Culture and Research Journal 11 (1987): 1-31; David Smits, "'Squaw Men,' 'Half-Breeds,' and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Attitudes toward Indian-White Race-Mixing," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15 (1991): 29-61; Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1978).

18. The list of terms is drawn from Morner, Race Mixture, 58-59. Here, I am following the argument of Jack D. Forbes in Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993). His research into colonial laws and etymology has convincingly shown that major scholars of American race relations have drawn only a "black-white" picture of social relations where native people should have been included as major players. See alsoJ. Leitch Wright, Jr., The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York: Free Press, 1981); James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); James H. Merrell, "The Racial Education of Catawba Indians," Journal of Southern History 50 (1984): 363-384. The literature on the history of racism and miscegenation in relation to American slavery is far too vast to be cited here. See especially Jordan, White over Black; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; and George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 ). See also Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980); Everett V. Stonequist, "Race Mixture and the Mulatto," in Edgar T. Thompson, ed., Race Relations and the Race Problem: A Definition and an Analysis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1939).

19. Morner, Race Mixture; Forbes, Africans and Native Americans.

20. Jennifer S. H. Brown, "Linguistic Solitudes in the Fur Trade: Some Changing Social Categories and Their Implications," in Carol M. Judd and Arthur J. Ray, eds., Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 147-159; Jennifer S. H. Brown, "Fur Traders, Racial Categories, and Kinship Networks," in William Cowan, ed., Papers of the Sixth Algonquian Conference (Ottawa: Museum of Man, 1975), 209-222; Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1986); Robert E. Bieder, "Scientific Attitudes toward Indian Mixed-Bloods in Early Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Ethnic Studies 8 (1980): 17-30; Vincent Havard, "The French Half-Breeds of the Northwest," Smithsonian Institution Reports (1879): 309-327; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Salme Pekkala, Marian B. Hamilton, and Wiley Alford, "Some Words and Terms Designating, or Relating to, Racially Mixed Persons or Groups," in Edgar T. Thompson and Everett C. Hughes, eds., Race: Individual and Collective Behavior (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 52-57; William J. Scheick, The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth Century American Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

21. James Clifton, ed., Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989).

22. See "Chippewa Half-Breeds of Lake Superior," House Executive Documents 1513, no. 193, 42d Cong., 2d sess.

23. McDonnell, Dispossession of the American Indian; Janet A. McDonnell, "Competency Commissions and Indian Land Policy, 1913-1920," South Dakota History 11 (1980): 21-34.

24. United States v. First National Bank 234 U.S. 245 (1914).

25. Both quotes from A. E. Jenks to R. J. Powell, 21 March 1917, Ransom J. Powell Papers, Box 1, Minnesota Historical Society Archives.

26. Ales Hrdlicka^{[ *]} , "Trip to Chippewa Indians of Minnesota," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 66, no. 3 (1915): 73; Ales Hrdlicka, "Anthropology of the Chippewa," in F W. Hodge, ed., Holmes Anniversary Volume: Anthropological Essays (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916), 202-203; Ales Hrdlicka, ''Physical Anthropology in America: An Historical Sketch," American Anthropologist n.s., 16 (1914): 508-554; Ales Hrdlicka, "Anthropological Work among the Sioux and Chippewa," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 66, no. 17 (1915); Albert E. Jenks, Indian White Amalgamation: An Anthropometric Study, Studies in the Social Sciences no. 6 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1916); David L. Beaulieu, "Curly Hair and Big Feet: Physical Anthropology and Land Allotment on the White Earth Chippewa Reservation," American Indian Quarterly 8 (1984): 281-314; Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). For a critique of anthropometry, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1981).

27. See M. Annette Jaimes, "Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America," in Fremont J. Lyden and Lyman H. Legters, eds., Native Americans and Public Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 113-135, for a polemical account which completely absolves tribal nations from any responsibility in maintaining blood quantum requirements once granted the authority to determine their own membership.

28. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy; William E. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

29. Historians of the Shoah struggle with the narrative legacy of the Holocaust, and scholars have solidified the terms "holocaust" (the larger story) and "genocide" (specific episodes within the larger story) within American Indian Studies. See Kerwin L. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) for the original elaboration of this insight. For a recent work directly exploring this issue, see Aaron Hass, The Aftermath: Living with the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an introductory sampling of Holocaust studies, see especially Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historian's Debate (Boston: Beacon, 1990); John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York: Paragon House, 1989); Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988); Gerd Korman, "The Holocaust in American Historical Writing," Societas 2 (Summer 1972): 250-270. And though applying the term "holocaust," even with a lowercase h, to anything other than the Shoah draws much censure from Holocaust scholars, many in American Indian Studies have fixed on "holocaust'' and "genocide" as the descriptors of choice. See especially Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival; David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jack Norton, Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1979); Estle Beard, Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); Seena B. Kohl, "Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis: A Case Study of the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw, A Genocide Avoided," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (1986): 91-100; Rupert Costo and Jeanette Costo, eds., The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1987); Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994). Beyond these titles which make specific reference to "holocaust" and "genocide," further allusions to dramatic, traumatic population decline are too numerous to cite.

30. Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man 's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979); Raymond Stedman, Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982).

31. Personal communication, John Moore to Melissa Meyer, 27 November 1990.

32. Ron Andrade, "Are Tribes Too Exclusive?" American Indian Journal (1980): 12-13; Henry Zentner, The Indian Identity Crisis: Inquiries into the Problems and Prospects of Societal Development among Native Peoples (Calgary: Strayer Publications Limited, 1973); Rob Williams, "Documents of Barbarism: The Contemporary Legacy of European Racism and Colonialism in the Narrative Traditions of Federal Indian Law," Arizona Law Review 31 (1989): 237-278. In addition follow the online "Native Network" (natchat@gnosys.svle.ma.us) and Indian Country Today for ongoing accusations and debates about Indian identity. Two absolute certainties emerge: 1) this issue is of great importance to many native people, and 2) the pain is palpable.