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.

Blood Quantum Issues

A very interesting blog post over at the National Museum of the American Indian blog, written by NMAI cultural specialist Dennis Zotigh, about blood quantum and determining tribal identity.

A colleague and I were discussing tribes that use blood quantum to determine their membership. She said, "Tribes that do this are setting themselves up for extinction. Eventually intermarriage will wipe fixed blood quantum out.” I totally agree with her: under the current blood quantum of my own tribal membership, my future grandchildren will not qualify to be members. As an American Indian and tribal member, this concerns me.

My colleague said her tribe recently opened up their membership for new members including new babies, people who moved out of state, etc. In order to become a new member each person seeking enrollment had to answer, historical, cultural, and family questions that pertained to the tribe's identity. For newborns, their parents had to answer these questions.

It was this tribe’s belief that if prospective members were connected to their community roots, they would know the answers to the tribe’s questions. Individuals who moved away and did not maintain any connection to their tribal community were not able to answer the questions and were refused membership, regardless of blood quantum. Perhaps this is one alternative that tribes will consider to replace blood quantum requirements.

Worth reading in full - and keep an eye out for the podcast of Friday's conference session on this. I have it marked in my calendar already.

Faultlines of Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship: Cherokee Freedmen

The issue of the Cherokee Freedmen is one of the more interesting intersections of sovereignty, racism, treaty rights, and tribal identity. The Freedmen are African Americans who are descended from slaves owned by Cherokees; the Cherokee Nation granted them citizenship after the U.S. Civil War, as part of its articles of surrender. (Though there were Cherokees on both the Union and the Confederate sides, the Cherokee Nation as a whole was considered part of the Confederacy.)

In 2007, the Cherokee Nation voted to approve a constitutional amendment restricting citizenship to people who could prove descent from a Cherokee ancestor, which essentially terminated the citizenship of most Cherokee Freedmen. The battle over their Cherokee citizenship has gone back and forth through many courts (both tribal and federal), and this past week, the U.S. Federal Government demanded that the Cherokee Nation reinstate the citizenship of members who were descended from Cherokee-owned slaves. Chad Smith, the current Principal Chief of the Cherokees, has voiced his support for removing the Freedmen's citizenship, as Indian Country Today explains:

Smith wrote and spoke publicly in support of the 2007 constitutional amendment to remove freedmen from Cherokee Nation citizenship rolls if they had no documentable Indian blood. “Cherokees are Indians,” he wrote in a March 9, 2007 Indian Country Today editorial. “They are the indigenous and aboriginal people of this land and there is a commonality of history, language, heritage and culture. It finally came to a point that non-Indians were claiming to be Cherokee when, in fact, they are not. So the vote was an affirmation of identity as Indian for those voting.”

Representatives of the Cherokee Freedmen strongly disagreed:

“I think it’s a huge injustice,” said Marilyn Vann, Cherokee Freedmen and president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association. “Number one, the freedmen people have citizenship based on the 1866 treaty. Our ancestors helped build up the tribe. [Citizenship] was something promised by the U.S. government and the tribal government, just as every nation that has enslaved or [colonized] people has brought those minorities into their society. Ancient Rome; the U.S. with the blacks in the Deep South; Romania, which enslaved Gypsies—they’ve all done it. That’s only the right and proper thing to do.”

This issue shows the multiple fault lines that exist when we talk about membership, citizenship, sovereignty, indigeneity, and national belonging. (It is also connected to an ongoing tribal election in the Cherokee nation, but that's a whole other story.)