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White Earth Band votes to end ‘blood quantum’ for tribal membership

When Erma Vizenor was first elected to the office of secretary-treasurer at White Earth in the late 1990s, she promised she would work toward constitutional reform. Voters approved that reform last night. (Tom Robertson/MPR News file)

By Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio

MOORHEAD, Minn. — White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribal members have approved a new constitution that dramatically changes tribal government and expands membership in Minnesota’s largest Chippewa tribe.

The new constitution eliminates the blood quantum which requires a person to prove they have 25 percent Indian blood and changes to a system based on family lineage. But choosing a new constitution is only the first step in what will likely be a long and challenging process.

White Earth Nation Chairwoman Erma Vizenor has advocated for constitutional reform for 16 years, and said Tuesday that when 79 percent of voters approve a new constitution, as they just did with 3,492 votes cast, it’s a transformational moment.

“It feels great. It is gratifying to know that the people of White Earth have spoken and spoken strongly,” Vizenor said.

White Earth’s government will also expand. The new constitution replaces the five-member Reservation Business Council with independent executive, legislative and judicial branches.

The new separation of powers will help create economic stability on the northern Minnesota reservation, Vizenor said. “If we look at all the research on economic development in Indian Country, to diversify the economics of the reservation is dependent on an independent judicial system.”

But first, White Earth needs to resolve a conflict its new constitution sets up with the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe which is the governing body of six bands. The Red Lake Nation is independent of the MCT.

White Earth Constitutional Reform Manager Terry Janis says negotiations with the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe will take time.

“There’s some significant differences between the current MCT structure and this new proposed constitution and so they’re going to have to engage a process with MCT to figure out how they’re going to resolve those differences to allow White Earth to remain a part of MCT,” Janis said. If those differences can’t be resolved, White Earth would need to decide if it will withdraw from the MCT. The issue will be discussed at a Minnesota Chippewa Tribe meeting next month.

Vizenor said she’s confident an agreement can be reached because the numbers are on the White Earth band’s side: Its members make up more than half of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.

Once membership in the MCT is resolved, White Earth will schedule an election for a president, members of the legislative council and a chief judge. Those new elected officials will then create the laws that define the new government roles based on the new constitution.

That might well be a process fraught with challenge according to James Mills, a consultant who helps tribes across the country with constitutional reform. He has not worked with White Earth, but said he’s helped about 50 tribes write or amend constitutions. In his experience, reform sometimes creates a power struggle.

“When someone writes a constitution that divides the powers between the three branches, if they’re not clear about who does what and when, the executive and legislative will often argue over whose authority it is and I’ve seen them just become stagnant as a result,” Mills said.

Vizenor said she knows the path forward is filled with challenges, but she says tribal members have given a mandate for change and she expects the transition to be successful.

How long that transition will take is unclear. Vizenor says she hopes new elections can be held within a year.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe governs all of the Minnesota Chippewa bands. The Red Lake Nation is independent of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. The current version of this story is correct.

What is an Indian?

By STERLING HOLYWHITEMOUNTAIN

MTPR.ORG

September 18,2013

In the background of all issues involving American Indians is always the question of what is an Indian? While there are any number of groups in this country today who have complicated issues surrounding identity, there is no identity issue more complicated than that of American Indian identity. As an aside, you will notice I did not say no identity issue is more important. It’s difficult to call any American Indian issue in this country important in a standard social sense the way, say, African-American issues are important – there simply aren’t enough Indians in the country to warrant national media attention. When it comes to politics, numbers are, in a way, everything.

A case in point is that of the most recent controversy surrounding the Washington Football Team’s name – notice that in all this talk, and there’s a lot of talk, all you have to do is Google the team’s name – notice the only Indian that has made any kind of national public appearance anyone has paid attention to is the man team owner Dan Snyder trotted out to defend the name. And notice what is going on when so-called Chief Dodson is telling the nation that not only is the name ok with him, but that people in his community use the term regularly when greeting each other. Here we have an example of the inside being mistaken for the outside, and that age-old fallacy of one Indian’s opinion being mistaken for every that of every Indian.

The US has a long history of mistaking one Indian for every Indian – all it takes is one look at the history of Federal-Indian policy to see this. For example, during the allotment era in the late 1800s the idea was to civilize tribal members on reservations by turning them into farmers – even if the reservation where they were located was entirely unsuitable for farming. This policy of course was enacted by Congressional members who had little to no experience with Indian Country, but who nonetheless had near absolute power over tribes – a power that was finally solidified with the 1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock US Supreme Court ruling. What did the ruling say? That Congress had plenary power over tribes. What does plenary power mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines plenary as such: full, complete, or perfect; not deficient in any element or respect; absolute. The Lonewolf case, even though it was a case regarding the allotment of a single tribe’s lands on the southern plains, gave Congress total and final power over all tribal affairs, placing tribes under a kind of political Sword of Damocles, and along with it the unending threat of Congressional action without tribal consent.

Consider the ideas of blood, and blood quantum, the ideas we use today in large part to define who is and is not an American Indian, don’t have tribal origins – they originate in Europe, hundreds of years before contact in North America. As early as the 1200s the British were using ideas of blood to limit the political and social rights of people who were deemed less than so-called “full-blood” – and they carried that idea to the new continent, where they began implementing ideas of blood to penalize people who married either an Indian or an African-American, and to limit a person’s ability to testify in court or vote according to whether or not they were considered to be of so-called mixed-blood. Tribes on this continent traditionally identified membership most simply by who was or was not living with and participating in the community. That is, if you lived with the people, you were part of the people. These ideas of blood eventually extended to limiting the land ownership rights of Indians on reservations during the allotment era, to such a degree that in some cases over 2/3 of a tribe was not allotted land on their respective reservations because they didn’t meet so-called blood quantum criteria – a US established criteria, of course, that made it much easier to justify selling land that was “left-over” to non-Indians, thus splitting up land ownership on reservations between tribal members and non-Indians.

So how is it I got to talking about blood? Because one of Snyder’s contentions for the validity of so-called Chief Dodson’s opinion was that he is a “full-blooded” Inuit chief. The suggestion of course is that blood alone makes you an Indian – never mind particular cultural knowledge, and definitely never mind speaking an indigenous language – the only thing that matters here is blood. This idea of Indian blood is so prevalent that any number of intelligent contemporary Americans have taken this idea of Indian blood at face value, as if there is some intrinsic value in the blood itself. But when we turn this idea around, things fall apart pretty fast, don’t they? Because while there are plenty of people in Montana with so-called Irish blood, how much knowledge of Irish culture has this blood brought with it? If this blood thing isn’t making much sense to you at this point, don’t worry, you’re not alone, it’s never made any sense to me either.

Finally, to return to a point I made earlier about so-called Chief Dodson’s statement regarding Indians use of the team’s name as a kind of friendly greeting – I have never once seen it happen in my life. While the term “skin” is not uncommon among Indian who are friends, the point is that it’s a term used by insiders among each other. In other words, I would love for Dan Snyder to walk into any social gathering place on any reservation or reserve in North America and say, What’s up, Redskins? I’m absolutely positive things would turn out just fine.

I’m Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, thanks for listening

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Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

When the Last American Indian Dies

When did blood purity replace cultural purity?

By Julianne Jennings

Posted May 08, 2013 in Indian Country Today

Anthropology has from the beginning been influenced and dominated by European males. They set the criteria of hierarchically ordered level descriptions, giving themselves the power to dictate the boundaries of group membership by defining race in terms of biology. As a consequence, the last Indian dies not by blunt force, expulsion or disease, but by the social construction of race imposed upon us— terminating our existence by blood.

Recently, my son Brian and his new wife, Emily, came to visit me in beautiful Montefalco, Italy. It gave me an opportunity to spend time with her and attempt cordial conversations about her background. Emily was born in the Dominican Republic (historically inhabited by the Taino), a nation on the island of Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. It is also the site were Columbus landed in 1492, becoming the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. Emily, who has a master’s degree in communications, will tell you she is descended from the island’s first people, “Many people will say our society was made extinct by Columbus; or blood mixing.” She continues, “America has no special technique for handling mixed races, perceptions of self and by others is less than human.” The rest of history she says, “Is swept under the rug, and does not allow for discourse by those who believe Tiano blood still courses through our veins.”

As the history of the world proves, false constructs give life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, a reason to define the power between individuals and groups of people, instead of intellectual understanding. During the Age of Enlightenment, European philosophers sought to reform society by using reason, faith and the science available during that time, drawing lines and boundaries to discriminate against people who appeared and acted different then themselves (left-over from theories of the earlier Catholic interpretation of Biblical continental positions and the knowledge that then existed of the peoples of their known world).

Their conclusions however, are still with us hundreds of years later.

Starting with the predominant colonial theory of race, The Great Chain of Being was the idea that human races could be lined up from most superior to most inferior. The Chain originates with God at the pinnacle, and progresses downward through angels, demons, stars, moon, kings (the summit of humanity’s social order), princes, nobles, men, animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, metals, minerals, and then an arrangement of non-white people, with blacks at the bottom. There is no mention of Indians in the Chain because New World explorers had not yet encountered them; but upon meeting, Europeans considered them proto-human and not descendant from the original Biblical pair (Adam and Eve).

Swedish Botanist Carolus Linnaeus, “The Father of Taxonomy,” in 1735 published Systemae Naturae, which formalized the distinctions among human populations based on race. Within Homo sapiens, Linnaeus proposed five taxa or categories first based on place of origin and later skin color. Linnaeus believed each race had certain endemic characteristics. His work is the first to mention Native Americans as choleric, or red, straightforward, eager, and combative as opposed to Europeans depicted as sanguine, pale, muscular, swift, clever and inventive. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, (1752-1840), a German anatomist, also classified humans into five categories or races, but added Malaysian/brown racial type to Linnaeus’ original taxa.

Samuel George Morton, provided “scientific evidence” of Indian inferiority. In his 1839 study, Crania Americana, and concluded from collected statistical data that the brain size of Europeans was far greater than that of Native people and thus reflected a correspondingly greater intellectual capacity. Even anti-racist Franz Boaz, is now believed by many as having promoted Jewish interests. According to Herbert S. Lewis’ The Passion of Franz Boas, published in “American Anthropologist” journal Volume 103, Issue 2, pages 447–467, June 2001, “Boas did great service at the start of this progression. His hand-waving and smoke-blowing was, as usual for Jews, used to obscure the Who/Whom – who was served by whom and at whose expense – behind a pretense that everyone benefited.”

The article continues, “Anthropology, though a cryptically Eurocentric culture of critique, has pathologized and demonized and prevailed (at least in intellectual/academic circles) not only over “racist” Nordic champions such as Madison Grant, who was responsible for one of the most famous works of scientific racism (a.k.a. eugenics) and played an active role in crafting strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, but of “Whites in general.” Further, “ These men, along with others, shifted the understanding of race from real, to insignificant, to imaginary, to the self-contradictory anti-White/anti-”racism” of today. Race is a construct of the evil White race, who used (and still uses) it to exploit and oppress all the other, innocent ‘people of color.’”

“Mixed-raced” Indian populations, in particular, suffered the greatest racial assaults because there are no “full bloods” among them; providing the notion there are no more “real” Indians, especially groups living along the east coast, the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Pequot and others. They have all paid in blood; and were the first to suffer the brunt of European invasions so other Indian nations could stand. When did blood purity replace cultural purity?

Peter Burke, author of History and Social Theory, states, “Historians, like sociologists and anthropologists, used to assume that they dealt in facts, and that their texts reflected historical reality. However, this assumption has crumbled under the assaults of modern-day philosophers, whether or not they may be said to ‘mirror’ a broader, deeper change in mentality.” Burke continues with, “Hence, it is necessary to consider the claim that historians and ethnographers are as much in the business of fiction as are novelists and poets; in other words, they too are producers of ‘literary artifacts’ according to rules of genre and style, whether they are conscious of the rules or not.” Specifically, the ways in which, imperialism is embedded in the disciplines of knowledge and tradition as governments of truth.

In his work on The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha provides an alternative view, “What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond the narratives of originary and initial subjectivities to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sights of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”

As people and places change so radically, and before any more vestiges of the past are gone, re-examination of archival materials, oral traditions, and ethnohistoric sources prove promising when looking at our subject from an “in-between” reality. History and social theory now converge, reappraising the relationship between the two and expanding discussions of topics in new directions. By no means should the voices of the people be silenced any longer; they demand a history written in their image. The combination of these sources, I believe, allows the best understanding of the nuances and complexities of Native life among mixed-raced Indians, and gives indigenous voice its greatest power, and best informs theoretical debates about cultural construction, maintenance and change.

Jalil Sued Badillo, an ethnohistorian at the University of Puerto Rico asserts, “The official Spanish historical record speak of the disappearance of the Taínos. Certainly there are no full-blood Taíno people alive today, but survivors had descendants and intermarried with other ethnic groups. Recent research notes a high percentage of mestizo ancestry among people in Puerto Rico and Dominica.”

Frank Moya Pons, a Dominican historian, documented that Spanish colonists intermarried with Taíno women. Over time, some of their mestizo descendants intermarried with Africans, creating a tri-racial Creole culture. 1514 census records reveal that 40% of Spanish men in the Dominican Republic had Taíno wives. Ethnohistorian Lynne Guitar writes that Taíno were declared extinct in Spanish documents as early as the 16th century; however, individual Taíno Indians kept appearing in wills and legal records in the ensuing years (wikipedia.org).

Anthropologist and archaeologist Dr. Pedro J. Ferbel Azacarate writes that Taíno and Africans lived in isolated Maroon communities, evolving into a rural population with predominantly Taíno cultural influences, as they had the advantage of knowing the native habitat. Ferbel documents that even contemporary rural Dominicans retain Taíno linguistic features, agricultural practices, foodways, medicine, fishing practices, technology, architecture, oral history, and religious views. However, these cultural traits are often looked down upon by urbanites as being backwards. “It’s surprising just how many Taino traditions, customs, and practices have been continued,” says David Cintron, who wrote his graduate thesis on the Taíno revitalization movement. “We simply take for granted that these are Puerto Rican or Cuban practices and never realize that they are Taino” (Ferbel, Dr. P. J. “Not Everyone Who Speaks Spanish is from Spain: Taíno Survival in the 21st Century Dominican Republic.” Kacike: Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology. Retrieved on September 24, 2009.

So, when does the last Indian die? As traditions change over time, so do its people, from one generation to the next. A culture and its people must remain dynamic, honoring the sacred hoop, serving as an archetype in foundation myths, customs, language and culture, but rewriting history in our changing image for self-renewal/affirmation and perseverance, to insure that the last Indian never dies.

Sued-Badillo, in previous interviews and lectures resounds on the ideologically vibrant connection of this past with the present when talking about Tiano people, including its application to all mixed race Indians, “We do this as the Greeks of today and the Romans of today, hark back to the ancestral strengths of the Greeks and Romans of antiquity. … They may be completely different people, but ideological constructions are always built on the past. All peoples do this; it should not surprise us from among our own people” (TainoLegacies.com).

Julianne Jennings (Nottoway) is an anthropologist.