Sterling HolyWhiteMountain: Race, blood quantum and Indians

The US has a long history of mistaking one Indian for every Indian – all it takes is one look at the history of Federal-Indian policy to see this. For example, during the allotment era in the late 1800s the idea was to civilize tribal members on reservations by turning them into farmers – even if the reservation where they were located was entirely unsuitable for farming. This policy of course was enacted by Congressional members who had little to no experience with Indian Country, but who nonetheless had near absolute power over tribes – a power that was finally solidified with the 1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock US Supreme Court ruling. What did the ruling say? That Congress had plenary power over tribes. What does plenary power mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines plenary as such: full, complete, or perfect; not deficient in any element or respect; absolute. The Lonewolf case, even though it was a case regarding the allotment of a single tribe’s lands on the southern plains, gave Congress total and final power over all tribal affairs, placing tribes under a kind of political Sword of Damocles, and along with it the unending threat of Congressional action without tribal consent.

Consider the ideas of blood, and blood quantum, the ideas we use today in large part to define who is and is not an American Indian, don’t have tribal origins – they originate in Europe, hundreds of years before contact in North America. As early as the 1200s the British were using ideas of blood to limit the political and social rights of people who were deemed less than so-called “full-blood” – and they carried that idea to the new continent, where they began implementing ideas of blood to penalize people who married either an Indian or an African-American, and to limit a person’s ability to testify in court or vote according to whether or not they were considered to be of so-called mixed-blood.