Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Native sovereignty in a race-based society

When American Indians (and yes, I mean true NATIVE Americans, as in “original peoples”) talk about their heritage and history, they aren’t classifying themselves based on racial difference. It was the U.S. government that inflicted (and continues to inflict) this socially constructed ideology on Indians as a way to ultimately claim their lands and assimilate them once and for all into American society. It is woven into the fabric of American society. This is one of the things scholars mean when they say settler colonialism is a structure, not an historic event.

Racial ideology was the basis of the 1887 General Allotment Act, embedded with the Social Darwinist theory that Indians’ racial inferiority necessitated the breaking up of tribal lands, communities and families. The Burke Act, which amended the Allotment Act in 1906, made it easier for Indians with more European ancestry to sell their lands (invariably to whites) because they were seen as more “competent” than Indians with more Indian blood.

The concept of blood quantum is still maintained as a racial marker for all Native people. Any Native person who interacts with the federal government today does so on the basis of their blood quantum, paradoxically as a test of their authenticity as a Native person. The Native who was supposed to be “vanishing” must always prove that they have not vanished, based on racial quantification criteria the federal government determines. It is a double bind few non-Natives seem to understand.

The distinction American Indians are talking about when they talk about their heritage is a political distinction, not a racial distinction. Native Americans as citizens of Native nations today fight for a “degree of measured separatism” in order to preserve their lands and cultures, and resist assimilation that has been forced on them by the United States.