Brokering American Indian Tribal Citizenship Amidst Growing Racial Diversity

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 25. Impacts of Colonialism

Abstract

Concurrently straddling race, ethnicity, and citizenship, American Indian (AI) identity is among the most complex of any race or ethnic group in the United States. These boundaries intersect at what has become a highly contested space between the federal government, tribes, and individuals. At the center of this debate is the exclusivity of tribal citizenship vis-à-vis blood quantum and the growing racial diversity among the AI population. Like other nation states, tribal governments confer and abrogate citizenship to their people free of any encroachment, at least in theory. In practice, however, the creation and maintenance of tribal citizenship boundaries reflects a most persistent colonial race project with implications for family formation, inequality, and tribal sustainability. As the material rewards associated with tribal citizenship grow, so too does tension at its boundaries. This paper examines how colonial forces have racialized the exercise of tribal sovereignty by effectively shifting the tribal identity process from customary measures inherent in kinship systems to distortions now circumscribed by imposed race logics and colonial imperatives. As the last publication compiling tribal citizenship dates back nearly twenty years, I first present an updated landscape of tribal citizenship criteria for federally recognized tribes. Descriptive statistics explore regional and national patterns among these varied criteria. Lastly, I signal part two of this study, which includes in-depth interviews with AI tribal leaders about the current and future brokering of tribal citizenship. In light of the widely discredited biological foundations of race, I ask: why does blood quantum remain a persistent metric of belonging for the American Indian population?

Author

• Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, University of Arizona