The US has used blood quantum to racialize American Indian identity, gain access to resources, and evade financial and legal obligations. The use of blood quantum as an enrollment or citizenship requirement will result in political disappearance.
“How much Indian are you?” This question is often asked by non-Indigenous people seeking to calculate and quantify identity, which they have been unconsciously conditioned to do by both popular media and American culture.
However, there is also the reality that many American Indian nations have a blood quantum requirement for citizenship, which today is also known as enrollment. Citizenship carries the right to participate in governance and other legal rights. In such cases, the question “What’s your blood quantum?” is often necessary for individuals calculating eligibility for enrollment for future children.
Growing up on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, I was very familiar with the concept of blood quantum and the impacts that it had on me, my extended family, and my friends. I am a first-degree descendant. I have a parent, my mother, who is enrolled, but I am not enrolled. Everyone at White Earth has a relative or friend who does not meet the one-quarter blood quantum minimum and/or has had to make difficult choices when deciding who to have children with.
The official population of citizens is declining due to the blood quantum requirement, and population studies estimate that there will be very few or no citizens left by the end of this century. (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Population Projections and Methodology Report, 2014). Without citizens, the nation will disappear, and the US will be absolved of any legal obligations.
Ever since I was a young person, I have been interested in history and how the past impacts the present. For my undergraduate senior thesis, I explored why the leadership of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe implemented a one-quarter Minnesota Chippewa Tribe blood quantum requirement for enrollment/citizenship/membership in the early 1960s. The secondary sources were relatively minimal, but with the encouragement of elders and family members, I decided to pursue a PhD and dove deeper into primary research.
Blood and Identity
I found an astounding body of records and expanded my focus to include how blood quantum impacted land allotment and sales in the early twentieth century, Anishinaabe understandings of identity during that same period, and twenty-first-century efforts to eliminate blood quantum as an enrollment/citizenship requirement. Much of what follows in this article has been published in Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg (Michigan State University Press, 2015). For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using Anishinaabe(g), Ojibwe, and Chippewa interchangeably.
Native systems for determining identity were diverse and multifarious. The complexity of these systems was largely disregarded, and blood quantum became the easy and convenient way for the US to define American Indian identity.
Blood symbols and rituals are widely distributed throughout cultures and legal traditions, and the meanings and metaphors attached to blood vary and continue to change over time. While the “one drop rule,” used to categorize Americans of African descent, might be the most well-known US use of blood, the US has also used blood as a means to define and identify American Indians. Through the concept of blood quantum, the US has racialized American Indians and pushed American Indian nations to use blood quantum as a requirement for citizenship. As Oneida scholar Doug Keil has argued, “The effects of the adoption of blood quantum as a measure of Indianness are hard to overstate.” (The Great Vanishing Act, “Bleeding Out,” 83).
During the nineteenth century, Europeans and European Americans widely believed that blood carried and determined intelligence and a wide array of personality traits. Of particular significance is that they believed that Europeans were naturally more intelligent while American Indians were typically incompetent to handle their own affairs, such as land and finances. They also generally believed that blood was an objective measure of American Indian identity.
The theory held that the more “white” blood an American Indian had, the more they were socially, culturally, and politically assimilated. In Native Acts, Lenape scholar JoAnne Barker discerns that blood was certainly simpler than the “complexities posed by Native customs and epistemologies, which offered alternative perspectives on belonging and kinship that would have been more inclusive regarding intermarriage, adoption, and naturalization as well as alternative understandings of belonging and kinship that would have tied members back to their lands and governments as citizens with multiple kinds of responsibilities” (Native Acts, 94).
Native systems for determining identity were diverse and multifarious. The complexity of these systems was largely disregarded, and blood quantum became the easy and convenient way for the US to define American Indian identity.
Beyond simplicity, however, there were economic and political motivations for the use of blood quantum. The US has used blood and racialized conceptions of identity to dispossess American Indians of their resources. In addition, fewer American Indians meant fewer political and financial obligations for the US. As historian Patricia Limerick noted, “Set the blood quantum at one quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it had for centuries, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will be freed of its persistent ‘Indian problem’” (The Legacy of Conquest, 338).
Red Blood, White Blood, Mixed-Blood in the 1910s
It is not clear exactly when the concepts of “full-blood” and “mixed-blood” were first introduced among the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe/Chippewa) or how these terms might have been initially understood, but an investigation at White Earth in the 1910s provides some incredible insights. The US government was attempting to determine which Anishinaabeg at White Earth were “mixed-blood” (had one drop or more “white” blood) and which were “full-blood” with no “white blood” because of US land sale laws.
Those with one drop or more “white blood” were considered legally “competent” and could sell their land, while those without any “white blood” needed to be evaluated for competency and could not agree to a land sale on their own but needed the approval of a guardian and/or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). By “white blood,” they meant any European ancestry/heritage. This law reflects European American beliefs about connections between intelligence and blood.
The testimonies taken during the investigation are rich. Interviewees were often asked if a person had any “white blood.” The translation would have been difficult, even for a skilled translator, because the root of the Ojibwe word for blood, miskwi, is miskw. Miskw is the color red and probably references the literal color of blood (The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary). Consequently, red is inherently tied to the word blood.
Therefore, the term “white blood” was entirely nonsensical for Anishinaabe witnesses who did not understand blood as a metaphor for or measure of race and/or ancestry. In addition, Ojibwe scholar Scott Lyons has noted, “There is nothing in the Ojibwe language that evokes biological notions like blood quantum or other essentialist traffickers of identity” (X-Marks, 56).
Regardless of any translation or language challenges, the investigation pushed ahead. The questions asked by the US investigators were variations of that classic question “How much Indian are you?” and “Does X have any white blood?” The answers given by the Anishinaabeg do not disappoint:
“He is dead long ago. I don’t know exactly what he was. You can go dig him out of his grave, and then you can find out.”
Investigators also asked many questions about phenotype, especially skin color, and spent a considerable amount of time attempting to connect skin color with an individual’s status as either “full-blood” or “mixed-blood.” Anishinaabe witnesses frequently noted that skin color varied and was not necessarily indicative of either an individual’s racial ancestry or their cultural status as a “full-blood” or a “mixed-blood.” Once again, the answers provided by the witnesses reveal a lot about Anishinaabe concepts of identity and also a trace of the tradition of humor.
“Yes, she was light. Some Indians are light, but she was an Indian.”
“There are some Indians real dark and some not as the others, but she was a medium shade — she was not very dark. I do not say that she was light or dark.”
“I could not say whether he was lighter than the others because it is so long ago. I cannot recollect.”
Together, the answers given by the Anishinaabe witnesses destabilize the idea that all Indians look like the popular images the investigators were measuring them against and noted the diversity present within the Anishinaabe identity.
Taking a closer look at one exchange from the investigation, we again see how Anishinaabeg witnesses pushed back against the US government’s terms and definitions. Nancy Taylor asserted that racial ancestry alone should not be used by American investigators to determine if a person was a “full-blood” or a “mixed-blood.” An investigator asked if people with a small amount of white blood were called “full-bloods.” She responded that blood quantum was not used, saying, “No, sir, we call one another as Indians. We never call those as mixed-bloods, and nobody else calls them mixed-bloods.”
Taylor went on to directly question the single factor of ancestry used by the investigators to determine who was a “full-blood” and who was a “mixed-blood.” When she was asked if an individual was a “full-blood,” she replied, “I will tell just what I think. There are some have one drop of white blood, and you call them mixed blood, but we call them as Indians.” Her statements also show that the definition of “mixed-blood” and “full-blood” as defined by the investigators were not analogous with Anishinaabe conceptions of identity.
The racialization of Anishinaabe identity and the broad definition of “mixed-blood” served as a means to ensure the dominance of the United States and to facilitate the fulfillment of manifest destiny. To make a long story short, the vast majority of individuals at White Earth were found to be “mixed-bloods,” which meant they were competent and had no recourse regarding any fraud or theft that they experienced; the land sales at White Earth were deemed legal. The economic impacts were immediate and continue to reverberate through generations, but blood quantum will come to be even more important in the decades to come.
The One-Quarter Blood Quantum Requirement
In 1934, the US passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which ended allotment and provided some recognition of Tribal governments. It pushed American Indian nations to adopt new governing structures and documents. As a result, many Native nations have very similar constitutions and governing structures, which do not reflect their traditions, values, and practices.
The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (MCT) was created in 1936 with several member nations/reservations/bands: White Earth (which initially included Mille Lacs), Leech Lake, Fond du Lac, Bois Forte, and Grand Portage. The detailed meeting minutes and accompanying documents of the governing bodies of the MCT revealed that the elected leadership had numerous long and thoughtful discussions about blood quantum throughout the 1940s, 50s, and into the 60s.
Despite federal pressure, they consistently rejected blood quantum as an appropriate means to define citizenship — poignantly noting that we “aren’t like dogs,” “we want to enroll everyone who is entitled to enrollment,” and “you can’t tell your own relatives to get out because they aren’t full-bloods.”
After extensive discussions, elected leadership passed resolutions clarifying that family should be the basis for citizenship. However, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior rejected those resolutions. Finally, under significant pressure from the BIA, the MCT adopted a one-quarter MCT blood quantum requirement for enrollment/membership/citizenship in 1961. The change, along with many others, was incorporated into a “revised” constitution adopted in 1963. The MCT would not have created and implemented a quantum requirement had it not been for the insistence of the BIA.
One-quarter MCT blood has now been a requirement for citizenship for more than sixty years. Since the self-determination era, the BIA has generally wielded less power. As a result, some American Indian nations have made changes to their constitutions, including removing Secretary of Interior approval clauses and eliminating blood quantum as a requirement for enrollment. While there has been much discussion about eliminating the one-quarter MCT blood quantum requirement for enrollment, no amendments to change the requirement for enrollment have been made to the MCT constitution.
Individuals and families have been literally and figuratively divided, with some qualifying for enrollment and others who do not. The political status of being a citizen is an important official recognition of identity that brings the ability to participate in governance (vote, run for office). In addition, citizenship carries deep psychosocial impacts related to belonging and acceptance.
Those in favor of returning to an enrollment/citizenship requirement that reflects Anishinaabe values and traditions have long argued that returning lineal descent would follow the wishes of our ancestors and make our nation stronger. As our ancestors insisted, our blood is red. It’s time to stop relying on fictional colonial measures of blood to define citizenship eligibility.
Works cited:
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Population Projects and Methodology Report, https://www.mnchippewatribe.org/population_proj.html
The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/
Barker, Joanne Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press), 2011.
Deloria, Vine Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within (Austin: University of Texas Press), 1984.
Doerfler, Jill Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press), 2015.
Gover, Kirsty Tribal Constitutionalism: States, Tribes, and the Governance of Membership (New York: Oxford University Press), 2010.
Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1995.
Limerick, Patricia The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.), 1987.
Spruhan, Paul “A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935,” South Dakota Law Review 51, no. 1, 2006.
