Blood quantum laws
Blood quantum laws or Indian blood laws are laws that define Native Americans in the United States status by fractions of Native American ancestry. These laws were enacted by the federal government and state governments as a way to establish legally defined racial population groups. By contrast, many tribes do not include blood quantum as part of their own enrollment criteria. Blood quantum laws were first imposed by white settlers in the 18th century. Blood quantum continues to be a controversial topic.
History
In 1705, the Colony of Virginia adopted the "Indian Blood law" that limited the civil rights of Native Americans and persons of one-half or more Native American ancestry. This also had the effect of regulating who would be classified as Native American. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the US government believed tribal members had to be defined for the purposes of federal benefits or annuities paid under treaties resulting from land cessions. According to the Pocahontas Clause of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a white person in Virginia could have a maximum blood quantum of one-sixteenth Native American ancestry without losing his or her legal status as white.The Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears led to a major enumeration of Native Americans as well as controversies and misunderstandings about blood quantum that persist to this day. As they were being forcibly driven out of their ancestral homelands and subjected to genocide, many Natives understandably feared and distrusted the government and attempted to avoid enumeration. The only way to do this was to completely flee the Native American community during a time of widespread persecution. Native Americans who tried to refuse, if they were not already in a prison camp, had warrants issued for their arrests; they were forcibly rounded up and documented against their will. It is a modern misconception that this enumeration was equivalent to contemporary tribal enrollment, or in any way optional.
The concept of blood quantum was not widely applied by the United States government until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. At the time, the federal government required persons to have a certain BQ to be recognized as Native American, and thus eligible for financial and other benefits under treaties or sales of land. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 marked the beginning of the US government's widespread application of the blood quantum idea. At the time, for someone to be recognized as Native American and be qualified for financial and other benefits under treaties or land sales, they had to meet a specific BQ requirement set by the federal government.
Native American tribes did not formally use blood quantum law until the government introduced the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, instead determining tribal status on the basis of kinship, lineage, and family ties. Some tribes, such as the Navajo Nation, did not adopt the type of written constitution suggested in that law until the 1950s. Given intermarriage among tribes, particularly those that are closely related and have settled near each other, critics object to the federal requirement that individuals identify as belonging to only one tribe when defining blood quantum. They believe this reduces an individual's valid membership in more than one tribe, as well as costing some persons their qualification as Native American because of having ancestry from more than one tribe but not 1/4 or more from one tribe. Overall, the number of registered members of many Native American tribes has been reduced because of tribal laws that define and limit the definition of acceptable blood quantum.
Native American nations have continued to assert sovereignty and treaty rights, including their own criteria for tribal membership, which vary among them. In the early 21st century, some nations, such as the Wampanoag tightened their enrollment criteria and excluded persons who had previously been considered members. Challenges to such policies have been pursued by those excluded. Native American tribes have maintained their claims to sovereignty and treaty rights, as well as their own membership requirements. By the early 21st century, many Native American tribes had modified their enrollment requirements and banned people who were already considered members. Those who are not members had tried to challenge policies to become a member.
Measuring an individual's blood quantum
A person's blood quantum is defined as the fraction of their ancestors, out of their total ancestors, who are documented as full-blood Native Americans. For instance, a person who has one parent who is a full-blood Native American and one who has no Native ancestry has a BQ of 1/2. Nations that use blood quantum often do so in combination with other criteria. There are different BQ that are required for enrollment in different tribes. For example, to be eligible for enrollment, the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska requires a BQ of 1/4 Native American and descent from a registered ancestor, while the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma just requires lineal descent from a proven Cherokee ancestor recorded on the Dawes Rolls and has no BQ requirements at all. Others use a tiered system, with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma using lineal descent for general enrollment, but requiring a BQ of "at least one-fourth" for all tribal council candidates.Tribe requirements for membership
Prior to colonization, individual tribes had established their own requirements for membership, including the practice of banishment for those who had committed unforgivable crimes. Some traditional communities still hold to these precontact standards. Tribes that follow lineal descent may require a Native American ancestor who is listed on a prior , such as the Dawes Rolls for the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma or a late 19th-century census. In some cases, they may also require a certain percentage of Native American ancestry and demonstrated residence with a tribe or commitment to the community. Few tribes allow members to claim ancestry in more than one tribe. The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians accept persons of 1/4 Native American ancestry plus documented descent from an ancestor listed in specific records. In part, this recognizes that the Odawa people historically had a territory on both sides of what is now the border between the US and Canada. Each federally recognized tribe has established its own criteria for membership. Given the new revenues that many tribes are realizing from gambling casinos and other economic development, or from settlement of 19th-century land claims, some have established more restrictive rules to limit membership. Between 1904 and 1919, tribal members of mixed African and Native American ancestry were disenrolled from the Chitimacha tribe of Louisiana, and their descendants have since then been denied tribal membership.In 2007 the Cherokee Nation voted in the majority to exclude as members those Cherokee Freedmen who had no documented ancestors on the Cherokee-by-blood list of the Dawes Rolls. However, the Cherokee Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that they were legitimate members of the tribe at that time. After the Civil War, the US required the Cherokee and other Native American tribes that had supported the Confederacy to make new treaties. They also required them to emancipate their slaves and to give full tribal membership to those freedmen who wanted to stay in tribal territory. The Cherokee Freedmen often had intermarried and some had Cherokee ancestry at the time of the Dawes Rolls, qualifying as Cherokee by blood, but registrars typically classified them as Freedmen.
Similarly, in 2000, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma attempted to exclude two bands of Seminole Freedmen from membership to avoid including them in the settlement of land claims in Florida, where Seminole Freedmen had also owned land taken by the US government.
Since 1942, the Seminole have, at times, tried to exclude Black Seminoles from the tribe. The freedmen were listed separately on the Dawes Rolls and suffered segregation in Oklahoma. More recently, the Seminole refused to share with them the revenues of 20th-century US government settlements of land claims. The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed an amicus brief, taking up the legal case of the Black Seminoles and criticizing some officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for collaborating in this discrimination by supporting tribal autonomy in lawsuits. By treaty, after the American Civil War, the Seminole were required to emancipate slaves and provide Black Seminoles with all the rights of full-blood Indian members.
"American Indian tribes located on reservations tend to have higher BQ requirements for membership than those located off reservation.... ver 85 percent of tribes requiring more than a one-quarter BQ for membership are reservation based, as compared with less than 64 percent of those having no minimum requirement. Tribes on reservations have seemingly been able to maintain exclusive membership by setting higher blood quanta, since the reservation location has generally served to isolate the tribe from non-Indians and intermarriage with them."
Impact
Many Native Americans have become used to the idea of "blood quantum". The blood quantum laws have caused problems in Native American families whose members were inaccurately recorded as having differing full or partial descent from particular tribes. In some cases, blood quantum has strained families and relationships.At certain times, some state governments classified persons with African American and Native American admixture solely as African American, largely because of racial discrimination related to slavery history and the concept of the one drop rule. This was prevalent in the South after Reconstruction, when white-dominated legislatures imposed legal segregation, which classified the entire population only as white or colored.
It related to the racial caste system of slavery before the American Civil War. Some critics argue that blood quantum laws helped create racism among tribal members. The historian Tony Seybert contends that was why some members of the so-called Five Civilized tribes were slaveholders. The majority of slave owners were of mixed-European ancestry. Some thought they were of higher status than full-blood Indians and people of African ancestry. Other historians contend that the Cherokee and other tribes held slaves because it was in their economic interest and part of the general southeastern culture. Cherokee and other tribes had also traditionally taken captives in warfare to use as slaves, though their institution differed from what developed in the southern colonies.