"My latest exercise in nailing Jello to a tree is an encyclopedia entry about Native American demographics. Sounds simple enough. The trouble is first of all that Native Americans don’t like census time — they disappear — and second of all, what IS one anyway? I mean, it’s easy enough to identify a buffalo, but an Indian? Without feathers and a horse, without a Navajo blanket and a bunch of turquoise and silver, without a tipi or a hogan or some other good clue, how do you tell a Native American from an Italian? Is an Inuit a Native American? Is a Mexican a Native American? Are Canadian Indians the same as Native American Indians? What about Hawaiians?

And then there are tribes. We used to be clear about what a tribe was and what it meant to belong to one. Now it’s a legal status: whether you’re legally enrolled. And every tribe gets to set its own criteria — I mean, the BIA is not too swift, but they’re smart enough to stay out of fights about whose grandkids get to be enrolled in the tribe which is the same as qualifying to be a shareholder in a corporation or a cooperative. They say there are no more full-bloods, but then you find out that there are — in fact, the number of full-bloods is increasing, because Indians marry Indians because that’s who they know. But because they met on the pow-wow trail, or in some part of the diaspora created by wartime work and Eisenhower’s plan to relocate tribal people in the cities, or maybe even met someone their age at boarding school — they aren’t enough “descendant” of any one tribe to qualify for membership in any of them."

Get the Story:
Mary Scriver: Native American Demographics (iNewp.com 11/13)