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Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe and a former advisor on homelessness and Native American issues in the Obama administration, loves data. When she noticed that the number of people self-identifying as “American Indian or Alaska Native” on the U.S. Census has more than doubled since 2000, while the number of enrolled members of federally recognized tribes has remained low, she wanted to know why. In The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, Schuettpelz not only details how these records hide a history of racism, genocide and erasure, but also how they continue to affect Native people.
The federal government has recorded the number of Native Americans throughout its history, with varying degrees of accuracy. Before ejecting Natives from their land and forcing them on death marches to reservations, the counts were expansive. But when records were used to mete out some kind of reparative benefit, the government’s definition of “tribe” or “Indian” was contracted to exclude as many people as possible. These rules also dictated tribal policy: To receive recognition from the federal government, tribes must have a constitution with similarly restrictive qualifications for membership.
Schuettpelz uses archival records to divulge insights into America’s disastrous history with Native people, while her in-depth interviews with present-day Indigenous Americans reveal how their lives and identities continue to be shaped by that history. For example, the Meskwaki constitution requires its members to trace their ancestry patrilineally. Tricia Long, one interviewee, is “the epitome of what it means to be part of a tribe,” yet she cannot pass her Meskwaki membership onto her older son because his father is white. Her younger son, whose father is Meskwaki, is entitled to tribal benefits like “land rights on the settlement, per capita payments, access to health care, housing assistance.” Her older son is entitled to none of this.
Schuettpelz herself has questions about her own identity. She is enrolled as a Lumbee member because one of her grandparents was Lumbee, but she did not grow up in the Lumbee community. Is she, she asks herself, Native enough? Her questions are open-ended, and her responses are invitations to further conversations in this powerful and important read.