Blood quantum laws
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blood Quantum Laws is an umbrella term that describes legislation enacted to define membership in Native American groups. "Blood quantum" refers to attempts to calculate the degree of racial inheritance for a given individual.
The Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, was part of a federal initiative to "civilize" the Indians by forcing them into Western cultural and legal practices. The strategy of this Act was to take lands held in common by tribes as reservations and break them up into individually-owned parcels. Parcels of land were given to individuals who could prove that they were members of the tribe who owned the land, and the remainder was often opened for white settlement. Tribes set their own membership requirements, and many used blood quantum as part of the necessary qualification.
Many Indian tribes continue to employ blood quantum in their own current tribal laws to determine who is eligible for membership in the tribe. These often require a minimum degree of blood relationship and often an ancestor listed in a specific tribal census from the late 1800s or early 1900s. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina, for example, require an ancestor listed in the 1924 Baker census and a minimum of 1/16 Cherokee blood inherited from their ancestor(s) on that roll. Meanwhile the Western Cherokee require applicants to descend from an ancestor in the 1906 Dawes roll (direct lineal ancestry), but impose no minimum blood quantum requirement. The Ute require a 5/8 blood quantum, the highest requirement of any U.S. tribe, while the Miccosukee of Florida, the Mississippi Choctaw and the St. Croix Chippewa of Wisconsin all require 1/2 "tribal blood quantum". At the other end of the scale, the Mashantucket Pequot of Connecticut and the Sac and Fox of Oklahoma both require 1/16, whereas the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon require a combined minimum of 1/16 from any of a list of several Oregon indigenous peoples. A 1/4 blood requirement is by far the most common, along with requirements of "Lineal descendency" which do not specify any minimum tribal ancestry.
Critics of the laws say they have been used to discriminate against Blacks and Native Americans and deny them their civil rights as well as pre-empt the right of tribes to determine themselves who is and who is not a member. They also point out that as blood quantums can never increase from generation to generation but can only stay the same or decrease, the eventual result could be the extinction of American Indian peoples as legally-defined groups; in effect, some critics argue, these laws are intended to effect the disappearance of Native Americans as a race. Contemporary defenders point out that U.S. tribes set their own rules to determine tribal membership, and that they can decide on their own whether or not to employ blood quantum. Groups such as the Cherokee Freedman and others claim they are denied tribal rights based on the blood quantum laws. The base rolls recorded blacks simply as blacks despite the fact that they had been made members of the tribe and even when they may have had some degree of Indian blood.
Federal blood quantum laws continue to affect benefits that some individuals of Indian descent receive from the Federal government, independent of tribal law. For example, in 1985, the US Congress passed the Quarter Blood Amendment Act to determine which Indian students were eligible for Indian education programs and tuition-free attendance at the Bureau of Indian Affairs or contract schools. This must be verified by obtaining a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood which is sometimes also used for tribal determinations.
Issues of blood quantum become more relevant with the modern development of lucrative Native American enterprises such as oil fields and casinos. The question of who shares in the proceeds, and in what amount, has been a contentious issue in many nations and tribes.
