Who's Indian: DNA Testing

Some tribes are turning to DNA testing to determine who qualifies as Indian. This is raising all kinds of new problems, especially when you consider that statistics suggest mistaken paternity is far more common (across the board, not just in Native communities) than we think it is.

And in Wisconsin, a young Indian woman, Daria Powless, had the fruits of her sweet basketball season turn to vinegar when the apparently jealous family of a teammate unearthed a painful secret to challenge her qualifications as a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation. On September 17, the Ho-Chunk Nation General Council voted to disenroll her. ... Sheila Corbine, attorney general for the Ho-Chunk Nation[, said,] “But as with many tribes there is rumor and innuendo about who is a tribal member or not. All the DNA testing is designed for, in our instance anyway, is to prove parentage. And that is to arrive at what the blood quantum is.”

“I have been living with my grandmother since I was two days old,” says Powless, who turns 21 this month. She was born to a mother who left immediately, and a father who came around rarely. “They weren’t married, they just had a kid, and I was going to be up for adoption and my grandmother decided to take me.”

She was raised in a Ho-Chunk house and culture, which included pow wows, regalia, fancy dancing and later a more-modern expression of Indianness—playing basketball. Powless, a six-foot-two power forward and center, was one of three talented players for a Wisconsin Dells high school team that won their conference two years in a row. Powless then enrolled at Division I Texas Southern University and made the basketball team as a freshman walk-on.

It is too common, she says, to see young people blow through tribal funds in a matter of months, spending them on shiny things. For Powless, her future—as a player and an aspiring athletic trainer—was the shining thing, paid for with a scholarship from the tribe. And she feels it has been stripped from her. She says the grandmother of one of her high school teammates called one night while she was home from college on a holiday break to reveal a dirty secret Powless says she had never heard: that the man she’d always believed was her father wasn’t.

It seems to me that this is one of the pitfalls of using blood quantum: a young woman who was by all accounts involved in and committed to her tribal culture, who undeniably has Ho-Chunk ancestry but now, as it turns out, doesn't have enough... should she really be disenrolled from the tribe? It seems that hurts the tribe far more than it benefits anyone.

DNA testing may also open a whole can of worms that no one really wants to deal with.

There is no perfect system, in part because the methods used to determine Indianness are not Indian. “It was white people who determined how we measure this,” says Sherman Alexie, the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene poet and novelist. “The thing about DNA testing is that if you are going to do it for potential members, you should do it for everybody. I think people in favor of DNA wouldn’t like their results. Depending on the studies [of U.S. populations], between 10 and 20 percent of kids are being raised by fathers who aren’t biological.

“And,” he jokes, “considering the hair on my chest, one of my grandmas had to lie.”

The article covers the myriad issues of identity and sovereignty very thoroughly, and you should read it in its entirety.