Throughout history, blood quantum was used to define a point at which responsibilities to tribes, entitlement programs, treaty rights, and reservations would end. Other laws did not provide any definition of “Indian” identity, leaving it up to the courts to decide. Others required reservation residency, ownership of land kept in a government trust, or tribal citizenship for federal recognition. Most of these definitions specified a particular level of blood quantum, which is the amount of “Indian blood” (I have put references to type or amount of blood in quotation marks because they denote social constructs, not biological realities) a person has. In 1978, a congressional survey found thirty-three separate definitions of “Indians” in various pieces of federal legislation. The definitions of “Indian” are inconsistent because the government is constantly reshaping those definitions in order to fit its aims. One means of control was defining what it meant to be an “Indian.” The dominant White society in the United States has changed and manipulated legal and sociological constructions of race to further its goals: to acquire more land, preserve the institution of slavery, prevent certain groups of people from becoming citizens, maintain the White race, and more. For more discussion about the complexity of labels, see What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels) peoples, they have sought to control the land and resources that first belonged to the tribes. When I’m referring to a specific tribe, I refer to the tribe by its name. From the time that European colonists set foot on American shores and made contact with Native (throughout this article, I use the terms “Native,” “Indigenous,” “Indian,” “Native people(s),” and “Native American” interchangeably because there is disagreement among Native Americans regarding how they would like to be labeled.
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