Comparing how the US racially defines the category “Indian” with how it racially defines the category “Black” reveals another difference. The Dawes Act of 1887 created racial definitions for tribal members by introducing the notion of “blood” and proportion of “blood” which it called “blood quantum.” Senator Henry Dawes (R, MA) was chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in the late 19th century. Considering himself a great “friend of the Indian” he advocated measures designed to speed their detribalization and assimilation to the American mainstream. The Dawes Act took land from the various and assigned it piecemeal to individual tribal members as their personal property. (And, because it was an Act of Congress, the Courts have accepted this unilateral treaty abrogation as legitimate.) This had the immediate - and not coincidental - effect of reducing the Native land base by two thirds, because the “surplus” was sold to non-tribal members after allotments were made. Later studies have said that this was the most destructive piece of Indian policy in a long history of genocidal policies.
The Act also introduced the classification of tribal members by ancestry. In other words a person was full-“blood” if both parents were full-“blood.” They were three-quarter “blood” if one grandparent was white, one-quarter “blood” if one was full-“blood”, etc. Of course the commission members couldn’t always consult accurate genealogical charts, so they sometimes went by eye, applying the Donald Trump “look test,” regardless of their commitment to tribal culture. In addition, an individual who was more assimilated might be designated half-“blood” because of their language, clothing, or employment… regardless of actual ancestry or racial features. Similarly a person could be designated full-“blood” because of their lack of assimilation into white social norms. So even as it introduced a racial system of classification - using the imagined “blood” - it was relying on cultural criteria to assign people to a group. “Blood” quanta are used by some tribes to this day to determine eligibility for membership. The minimum quantum varies from nation to nation. They have also become more complicated over time and require excellent skills in adding fractions. (Diego grew up in a sheep camp west of Kaibito. Diego’s mom is 7/16 Navajo and 1/2 White Mountain Apache and his dad is 3/32 Navajo and 11/16 Miccosukee. Is he eligible to be Navajo?)*
By now you may have noticed an oddity in all this talk about blood. Let’s set aside the realization that citizenship is not biology, that people of all colors can be subjects of HRH Elizabeth II, that - as I mention above - only the most extreme white supremacists argue out loud that “American” is a race, rather than a matter of birth or naturalization. Let’s return to the question I asked about the American understanding of an Indian “race” versus a Black “race.” In the case of Indigenous people this blood quantum serves to “dilute” ones “Indianness” over generations for children of people who marry outside that “race” and regardless of political and cultural belonging. For Black people, there is no such “dilution.” Historically, this was called a “one-drop rule” and it dates back to the early 20th century, not to the institution of slavery. If the Jim Crow laws introduced at the time were to segregate Black people from white people, then they demanded a definition of who was who.** Initially, some states decided at first that persons with one Black great great grandparent (or one Black great great great grandparent) were White, but eventually all states that had laws on the subject defined any person with “one drop” of “Black blood” as “Negro.” They also insisted that the Census Bureau drop the category “Mulatto” as a racial category.***
A moment’s reflection will explain every bit of this. Again, drop the notion that this is about white people’s discomfort with being around Black people or some sort of essentialism about biological characteristics inhering in people of European or African descent. Go back to the designation of “a class of people with no rights that a white man was bound to respect” and the exploitation of others that it allows. Before the Civil War, when chattel slavery was legal, the simple rule was that the child of a person held as a slave was also a slave. That meant that the children of the kidnapper himself - if they were mothered by the Black woman he raped - were also his property by law! The 20th century brought Jim Crow. Miscegenation was made illegal. But the exploiters of labor certainly did not want any “dilution” of the class of people they meant to exploit. Hence a “one-drop” rule.
Natives, on the other hand, held treaty rights that the settler state aimed to extinguish. So if white supremacy could convince itself that Native blood was, indeed, “diluted” by admixture of white “blood”, then eventually the Indigenous people would disappear, and with them their treaties. The “vanishing Indian” was a great trope of white supremacist art and literature. Think of titles like “The Last of the Mohicans.” (I imagine when Donald Trump was trying to block Mohegan Sun he was really disappointed that the fictional character Chingachgook was not, actually, the last. Or would have been if he read books.) Think of all those popular Edward S. Curtis photographs that show Native people in soft focus moving away from the camera. If your main goal is to exploit people, a one-drop rule. If your main goal is to rob people of their treaty-reserved land and other rights, a blood quantum rule. It is worth remembering that Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws were modeled after American racial laws. Jews with four Jewish grandparents were stripped of their citizenship. People with one Jewish grandparent were still considered Jewish, but remained citizens (at least in 1935) unless they participated in Jewish communal and religious life, in which case they, too, were stripped of citizenship.
What about tribal members with some African ancestry? The one-drop rule kicks in for them. Senator Dawes conducted separate censuses for the Oklahoma tribes: one for “Indians by blood,” another for “Freedmen.” As anti-Blackness spread among the Oklahoma tribes in the 20th century this led to moves to exclude descendants of people on the second roll from membership and thorny legal questions about who gets to determine that membership when people are clearly being excluded because they are Black. In the Jim Crow South the state governments tried to redefine virtually every tribal member on the grounds that they were really Black. This gave them the ability both to steal their treaty rights and turn them into members of a permanent class of peons!
** Note that Homer Plessy (the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which declared Jim Crow to be Constitutional) had one Black great grandparent and would have been taken for white by anybody who didn’t actually know him.
*** People listed in the 1910 Census as “M” are listed in the 1920 census as “B” and in the 1930 Census as Negro.
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