The Utes were created by Sinawav (the Creator) and were placed in the mountains. The Sinawav told the people they would be few in number but, they would be strong warriors, and protectors of their lands.
There is no migration story, we were placed here in the mountains, we have always been here, we will always be here.
— From the Southern Ute Tribe website
The New York Times posted a YouTube video last April, entitled “A Conversation With Native Americans on Race.” The six-minute “op-doc” is one installment in a wide-ranging NYT series called “Conversations on Race,” and was directed by Michèle Stephenson and Brian Young. The text description included on YouTube states that the film “grapples with the racist contradictions of a country that, many feel, would prefer it if Native Americans didn’t exist.”
You can view the video here.
I presume that most Americans — of whatever family background — spend very little time thinking about ‘Native Americans’ and the issues that affect the lives of ‘American Indians.’ One of those issues, as we heard in the video above, concerns blood quantum.
The discussion has special meaning to me, because my own children are descended, through their mother, from the Tlingit Indian tribe, and thus find themselves dealing with, and concerned about, these ‘blood quantum’ issues.
I am here using the term “Indian” quite consciously and in full knowledge that many members of our continent’s indigenous tribes dislike that particular term and would never refer to themselves as “Indians,” while other members of the same tribes prefer that very designation.
The Southern Utes, for example, include the word “Indian” in their official tribal name.
No doubt most of our Daily Post readers are aware that about 15 percent of the land area comprising Archuleta County — about 129,000 acres — is administered by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, as part of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation. The Reservation includes another 552,000 acres in neighboring La Plata County.
Which is not to suggest that the Southern Ute Indian Reservation has much similarity to the lands occupied and utilized by the Ute tribe prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. On the Southern Ute website you can view a series of sketched maps that illustrate the manner in which the U.S government — and the eager settlers represented by that government — relocated the Southern Utes, and the Ute Mountain Utes, and the Uintah Utes, onto relatively small Indian reservations between 1864 and the present day. Here’s a map showing the approximate range of the Ute tribes, pre-contact:
As we can see, the area settled by the various Ute tribes, shown by the cross-hatched area, was about the size of present-day Colorado (shown in light green in this and the following maps.) The invading American settlers wanted access to the excellent farmlands in eastern Colorado, and to mining claims in central Colorado — and convinced the U.S. government to establish, between 1864 and 1868, treaties with the various Ute tribes, limiting them to approximately the western third of present-day Colorado, plus a smaller reservation in northeastern Utah — as indicated again by the cross-hatched area:
But those treaties proved unsatisfactory for the settlers and gold miners pouring into Colorado from the eastern U.S.
So further series of treaties gradually reduced the size of the Ute tribe reservations, ending up in 1937 with the current reservations:
Several of the young people, featured in The New York Times video above, offer comments on the continued existence and struggles of their tribal peoples. For example:
“Being Native in a city is almost a daily reminder of your people’s erasure, of the fact that people don’t even remember that you’re here and you exist…”
“But what I did encounter, was this preconceived notion that all Native Americans are dead…”
“We’re treated like animals. They monitor our blood quantum. We’re the only… I mean, besides dogs and horses, I don’t know of any other animals that they monitor the blood quantum…”
“The way I explain it to people is, imagine a pizza with different slices — and, say, 32 slices. Of the 32 slices, I’m 28, Apache. That’s my particular blood quantum. And Native Americans in the U.S. are the only minority group that has to prove their Native-ness on an Indian Card…”
An Indian person’s blood quantum is defined as the percentage of their ancestors who are documented as ‘full-blood Native Americans.’ A person who has, for example, one ‘full-blood’ Native American parent, and the other parent with no Native ancestry, has a blood quantum of 1/2.
Since re-establishing self-government and asserting sovereignty, some tribes began using blood quantum as part of their requirements for membership or enrollment, often in combination with other criteria. For instance, the Omaha Nation requires a blood quantum of 1/4 Native American and descent from a registered ancestor for tribal enrollment.
As I mentioned, the blood quantum issue has been part of my life, as the father of three children who have American Indian ancestry on their mother’s side.
I arrived in Alaska as a teenager, in 1971, at a time when the Native tribes there were beginning to embrace, with renewed vigor, their customary traditions and cultural patterns — after a century of oppression and racial discrimination. My future wife, Clarissa, was among the young people finding strength and hope in that revival.
In 1977, we had our first child — our son, Kahlil — born into a world that would measure his worth partly by the number of full-blood Indians among his ancestors. His mother Clarissa had been born in 1956 with a Tlingit Indian grandmother and a Filipino grandfather on her mother’s side — and a Filipina grandmother and an American Jewish grandfather on her father’s side.
Obviously, Clarissa could have grown to view herself as a person of mainly Filipino descent, or as a person of Jewish descent — but as she entered adulthood, she embraced her Tlingit Indian background as primary, and eventually became a well-respected weaver in the Tlingit tradition.
Because she had a blood quantum of 1/4, she was qualified to enroll as a shareholder with Sealaska Corporation, a private company owned by people of Indian heritage. Sealaska Corporation and twelve similar corporations were brought into existence as a result of the 1971 Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, federal legislation that replaced traditional tribal relationships and governance with corporate structures.
A short quote from that complicated and controversial piece of federal legislation:
“(b) ‘Native’ means a citizen of the United States who is a person of one-fourth degree or more Alaska Indian… Eskimo, or Aleut blood, or combination thereof. The term includes any Native as so defined either or both of whose adoptive parents are not Natives. It also includes, in the absence of proof of a minimum blood quantum, any citizen of the United States who is regarded as an Alaska Native by the Native village or Native group of which he claims to be a member and whose father or mother is (or, if deceased, was) regarded as Native by any village or group.”
As far as I know, I have no ancestors who could be described as American Indians. Certainly, my parents and grandparents has never claimed such a heritage. So my children, born to a “certified” American Indian mother (as defined by the U.S. government) — are not themselves “certified” American Indians, since they have less than a 1/4 blood quantum…