"What is an Indian?": Identity Politics in United States Federal Indian Law and American Indian Literatures* (Law, Literature, Postcoloniality‪)‬

The emergence of the idea of race as a scientific category in the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States was simultaneous with the emergence of biology as a category of knowledge and scientific racism as a mode of justifying both the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of American Indians. (1) This racial bio-logic formed a new discourse of identity in the West, which claimed an autonomous and original realm of analysis for itself, though we can read it today as a particular form of cultural logic. This emergent bio-logic, however ambiguously, enters the discourse of federal Indian law in the landmark case of U.S. v. Rogers in 1846. The Lumbee legal scholar David E. Wilkins gives us this summary of the facts of the case: