This topic won’t go away until it goes away. So here goes.

In The Truth about Stories (2003), Thomas King (Cherokee) discusses the blood quantum approach that the government of Canada uses to determine “status Indians,” whereby those born a few generations down the line with a non-status parent and grandparent would not be granted “status.”

“No need to send in the cavalry with guns blazing. Legislation will do just as nicely.

And right now about 50 percent of status Indians are marrying non-status folk. No one knows for sure how long it will take, but according to John Borrows and Leroy Little Bear, if this rate holds steady, in fifty to seventy-five years there will be no status Indians left in Canada.

We’ll still have the treaties and we’ll still have treaty land held in trust for status Indians by the government.

We just won’t have any Indians.

Legally, that is.”

In 2015, the Pew Research Center estimated that 54 to 61% of tribal citizens married non-Natives (and many marry or have children with citizens of other tribes). In the US, where defining citizenship requirements is a key element of Native sovereignty (since Waldron v United States in 1905), about two-thirds of all tribes use blood quantum.

How did we get here?

It all started with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (though the concept goes back to the Virginia colony in 1705). The same year that King wrote, Kimberly TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) did a deep dive into this topic, DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe. She explains that the use of blood quantum was pushed by the US government in the late 1800s and became the norm by 1934. Thus, it’s a practice less than seven generations old.

In her 2001 paper, The Racial Formation of American Indians, Eva Maria Garroutte (Cherokee Nation), wrote, “The ultimate and explicit federal intention was to use the blood quantum standard as a means to liquidate tribal lands and to eliminate government trust responsibility to tribes along with entitlement programs, treaty rights, and reservations.”

TallBear bemoans this recourse to strict formulas and white conceptions of race, which are generally at odds with traditional notions of tribal membership. Using one of her great-grandmothers, who was half Ojibwe adopted into a Dakota tribe, as an example, TallBear notes that her great-grandmother was considered a Dakota tribal citizen based on traditional concepts of kinship and family ties. However, were she alive today, she would no longer qualify.

The math of blood quantum is straight-forward.

Suppose a tribe has 1,000 enrolled citizens. Let’s assume they are all full-blood for starters, but half the children born are mixed – their other parent either from another tribe or non-Native. Continuing this, after seven generations, 2% will be full-blood, 9% will be half, 23% will be quarter, 31% will be 1/8^th, 23% will be 1/16^th, and 11% will be less than that. You can see where this going. By the eighth generation, half the tribe will be less than 1/8^th. It’s a recipe for what the white man called “extermination.”

Many tribes are already a long way down this road. According to Leah Myers in her 2023 memoir, Thinning Blood, the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe has 542 citizens; 55% of them are 1/8^th, their cutoff for enrollment. That means that, in the future, tribal membership may but cut in half with each generation. Mathematically, the S’Klallam numbers line up closely with the sixth generation in my example above. A generation is about 25 years. It’s been about 160 years since the settlers arrived in numbers on their homeland on the Olympic Peninsula. That checks out – about 6.4 generations.

So the question is, how do we, as Natives, maintain our nations and cultures when it’s pretty clear that we have no control over who people fall in love with, marry, or have children with?

Worldwide, most nations define citizenship using either 1) where you are born (called jus soli), or 2) who your parents are (called jus sanguinis). Focusing on #2, if you’re born to a US citizen anywhere in the world, you can be a citizen of the US. The same is true for Canada, Italy, Brazil, Benin, and just about every other nation. Some have various rules and stipulations, such as how long your parents have been away from the homeland, to further approximate cultural connection. You can check out some of them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis.

As an alternative to blood quantum and direct lineal descent, some tribes use other criteria to consider cultural connection. Garroutte notes that some tribes grant citizenship to all children born to parents living on the reservation, others look at “various indicators of community participation,” and some subject each citizenship application to a tribal council vote. Even using lineal descent, some tribes use only the father, others only the mother. Garroutte provides examples of families facing separation because one parent and the children are unenrolled and evicted from tribal lands.

TallBear embraces creative solutions, noting that “If tribal political practice is not meaningfully informed by cultural practice and philosophy, it seems that tribes are abdicating self-determination.” She suggests that tribes draw upon their own histories for guidance.

They better do so quickly, because using blood quantum is a loser’s game.