The Indian Card by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

I begin to think about my own Native identity as a series of overlapping circles. A Venn diagram, id you will. In one of these circles exists political identity: membership in the Lumbee Tribe, citizenship through the process of enrollment. From a Native Nations standpoint, this identity seems paramount. Enrollment is the mechanism by which Tribes maintain political sovereignty and the vehicle by which they ensure their continued survival.

In another circle exists my racial identity: I am a Lumbee woman; a Native woman. Of course, the concept of a "Native race" is complicated. Many people would consider their Tribe to be their primary identity; they d o not feel an inherent sense of belong to a more global, pan-Indian "race." I'll be honest: it's still something I'm navigating for myself.

Remember when Elizabeth Warren released the results of her DNA test, showing that she had some percentage of Native American ancestry? It's got to be an all-time unforced error: it didn't convince any of the right-wing jerkoffs who like to call her "Pocahontas." But crucially, it offended many actual Native Americans, who responded by saying that a DNA test isn't enough to claim a Native American identity in the absence of any relationship with a Tribe or a tradition. Warren's cluelessness, in fact, touched upon a sore point in Indian Country today, one that you might only not know is a sore point if you haven't been paying attention: who gets to call themselves Native American, and how?

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz's new book, The Indian Card, is an in-depth exploration of this question. Schuettpelz frames the book with the story of her own "Indian card," a tribal document she received from the Lumbee Nation when she was a child. The card gave Schuettpelz a sense of legitimacy and connection, but this was troubled, in turn, by the fact that she lived in Iowa, far away from the geographical heart of the Lumbee in North Carolina. (And further troubled, we learn later, by the fact that the Lumbee Nation is not recognized by the federal government, which complicates the relationship between enrollment and sovereignty.) Schuettpelz, who worked in the Obama administration, pursues the question by means of statistical data analysis, but also through the stories of people, like her, whose "Native" identity is not straightforward, like those who have been denied enrollment because of the way different tribes define enrollment differently: because they don't have enough "blood quantum," or because of the barriers of proving their ancestry on the tribe's rolls.

Here's a couple big takeaways I had. While each tribe determines their own enrollment differently, there are only two main methods. One is blood quantum, the percentage of "Indian blood" you possess, often set at a minimum of one-quarter or one-eighth. The other is by tracing your ancestry back to someone who appeared on the official rolls of a particular historical census. This last is complicated by the fact that some tribes require patrilineal or matrilineal descent. This leads to complicated scenarios where someone, even with the same amount of "blood," is unable to claim the same enrollment as their half-sibling. These questions are not just about identity and belonging, Schuettpelz notes; they determine whether someone is able to receive cash payouts, like casino proceeds, or even use tribal health care resources. But they are also methods that can only be traced back to settler-colonial practices. She shows that many of the historical rolls used to determine ancestry were actually drawn up to facilitate forced immigration or allotment, tools used to depredate Natives of their land or resources. Similarly, blood quantum relies on European racial ideas imported to facilitate enslavement. Such is the bind placed on Native identity.

You might say that The Indian Card relies on three woven methods: statistical and historical fact, the interviews that Schuettpelz undertakes with various people about the challenges facing their own enrollment, and Schuettpelz's own story of her "Indian card." I felt a little underwhelmed by the book as a whole, perhaps because each of these three on its own seemed not quite whole or developed enough. It's no fault of the author's, really, but I think I might have liked a more scholarly approach, which traces more clearly and comprehensively the historical forces that created modern paradigms of identity. That said, as issues around Native identity go from being bruited within Indian Country to becoming public and political news--like Warren's DNA test, or the recent spate of "Pretendian" unveilings--it's good to have a book like this to fill a gap in general knowledge.