American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review

Abstract

Identity in American Indian communities has continually been a subject of contentious debate among legal scholars, federal policy-makers, anthropologists, historians, and even within Native American society itself. As American Indians have a unique relationship with the United States, their identity has continually been redefined and reconstructed over the last century and a half. This has placed a substantial burden on definitions for legal purposes and tribal affiliation and on American Indians trying to self-identify within multiple cultural contexts. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just who is an American Indian? One approach has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. This paper will review the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, social, biological, and legal implications inherent in using such group membership and, further, how American Indian identity is being affected.

American Indian Researcher Perspectives on Qualitative Inquiry About and Within American Indian Communities

“…AI identity politics are complicated and influenced by a long history of interface with the federal government. Initially used by the federal government to classify “Indianness” during the late 1800s in the United States, many American Indian tribes have adopted the use of blood quantum to define membership in the group (Schmidt, ). Blood quantum and other divisive policies have introduced troubling dynamics into AI communities, including core identity‐related questions such as “who is really an AI?” and “what makes someone AI?”…”

Racialization as a Barrier to Achieving Health Equity for Native Americans

“…Indeed, the US government increasingly sought to identify which individuals could be granted (or denied) access to Native lands based on their ancestral ties and family lineage. 13 In its bid to eliminate Indigenous presence and open Indigenous lands to further colonization and exploitation, the United States passed the Dawes Act of 1887, which allowed for allotment of reservation land. 13 More specifically, the law allowed the federal government to determine which individuals would have access to reservation land, based on a blood quantum of at least one quarter Native.…”

“…13 In its bid to eliminate Indigenous presence and open Indigenous lands to further colonization and exploitation, the United States passed the Dawes Act of 1887, which allowed for allotment of reservation land. 13 More specifically, the law allowed the federal government to determine which individuals would have access to reservation land, based on a blood quantum of at least one quarter Native. As a result, some communities' land was legally reduced because many Natives did not meet the minimum threshold, allowing the federal government to distribute land to more "competent" individuals who could sell it to homesteaders and others.…”

“…As a result, some communities' land was legally reduced because many Natives did not meet the minimum threshold, allowing the federal government to distribute land to more "competent" individuals who could sell it to homesteaders and others. 13 Although blood quanta criteria developed during this period to establish tribal affiliation were not intended to represent heredity, such hereditarian ideas pervade modern analyses of associations between ancestry and genetics. 14 Blood quanta became fundamental to federal policy determining Native identity, and such socially constructed categories have contributed significantly to perceptions of race as hereditary.…”

“The right to lead”: Navajo language, dis‐citizenship, and Diné presidential politics

“…Blood quantum is the amount of “Native American blood” inherited by tribal members from their parents. As Schmidt () explains, the Colony of Virginia was the earliest to define “mixed blood” in 1705. It did so in order to restrict and/or limit civil and property rights of people who had one‐eighth African or one‐half Native American ancestry.…”