The Indian Card
Who Gets to Be Native in America
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States
“A genre-bending work of reportage, memoir, and history” —The New Yorker
“Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life.” —The Whiting Foundation Jury
Who is Indian enough?
To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded—increasing 85 percent in just ten years—the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe.
In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity—the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children—she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today’s Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The U.S. government's restrictive requirements for tribal membership were designed to eradicate, not support, Native communities, and to this day they continue to undermine Native sovereignty, according to this brainy and illuminating debut from Lowry Schuettpelz, a professor of urban planning at the University of Iowa. Noting that the number of Americans claiming Native ancestry in the U.S. census is increasing even as the number of enrolled tribal members stays constant, Lowry Schuettpelz pores over archival population records and synthesizes a finely drawn portrait of Native Americans' three centuries' worth of struggle with colonizing powers' attempts to define them in ways that destabilized their shared identity. Along the way, she surfaces fascinating details, like how wealthy turn-of-the-19th-century Choctaw households were recategorized as "Free White Persons" on the census, obfuscating Native prosperity. She also profiles contemporary Native people who are attempting, and often failing, to navigate the labyrinthine federal tribal enrollment process, and recounts her own experience with enrollment in the non-federally recognized Lumbee tribe. Grappling with the competing problems of "pretendians" (people who pretend to be Indian) and restrictive "blood quantum" enrollment qualifications that undermine Native self-determination, she lands on an intriguing solution: "indigenous data sovereignty," or the handing over of control of genealogical data to Native communities. It's an innovative exploration of a thorny issue.
