The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America

“The Indian Card is about growing up as an enrolled Native American and what that means, from the harsh treatment in Indian schools to hardly making any difference in a person’s life.”

Many of America's recognized problems go unfixed because they do not matter enough to the people in power to go through the messy struggle to fix them, so they continue indefinitely. Fraud in counting who is a descendant of Indigenous people or which group should be counted for federal benefits is one such issue. The situation has become as if the legitimate “Indians” are being robbed one last time.

Since at least 2000, the number of people “self-identifying” as Native Americans or Native Alaskans has exploded. They number now “over 9.7 million, the number of people enrolled in tribes is much, much lower.” In The Indian Card: Who Gets to be Native in America, Carrie Lowrie Schuettpelz, identifying as a North Carolina Lumbee, sets out to learn why.

This phenomenon is most often associated with the Cherokees, but it applies to other tribes as well. Many people see results from DNA tests and think they are entitled to special benefits. The federal government recognizes 347 tribes. Other groups want but have not achieved that status. Schuettpelz’s Lumbee had a particularly complicated situation.

“Every tribe is different.” Federal recognition of being Native American grants individual rights not found with someone with only family stories of “Indian” ancestry. Of these groups, at least 120 are determined membership by family tree, and 170 others, or more, by some percentage of blood, usually 25%.

The blood percentage must be of one tribe. DNA is rarely accepted and is only used for maternity and paternity tests. Enrollment can be simple, depending upon the tribe, but the process is often complicated to nearly impossible. Family records can make the effort more manageable, but sometimes, relatives will not cooperate.

The author notes “an uptick in the number of people who have claimed Native identity who are exposed as liars” and “Native identity is easy to forge.” Schuettpelz writes, "identity is rarely a well-marked line that a person is on either one side of or the other.”

The author divides the history of Native Americans into coexistence, removal and reservations, assimilation, reorganization, termination, and self-determination. Periods vary by tribe. Some groups did not survive coexistence, which could “mean murder and conquer, capture and pillage.”

The Indian Card discusses blood, censuses, constitutions, land, reservations, rights, and 369 treaties between 1778 and 1871. The author keeps the story to the basics, not as dissertations. Old records, like the 1850 federal census, “feel like a million years and a universe ago.” Facts are always given with statistics close at hand.

The author injects her experiences growing up in a typical middle-class American household without Lumbee influences, although the situation was the opposite for her parents and grandparents. Authors' memoirs tied to historical narratives have become a genre, but often make a book more about interpreting the present than learning from the past.

The Indian Card is about growing up as an enrolled Native American and what that means, from the harsh treatment in Indian schools to hardly making any difference in a person’s life. Writing a book about the history of the Native American experience without mentioning the crimes committed against them as a race is impossible. Schuettpelz tries to avoid making the book a “pity party,” although she considers it with the Holocaust.

The lists described began as payments for land taken by treaties and later for removing native peoples from lands taken by treaties. Ironically, the 1890s Dawes and Curtis Acts broke up the lands assigned to the “Five Civilized Tribes” and dissolved the tribal governments in part because the success of these people threatened the federal government.

Today, lists serve as a means of legally recognized identity. Especially concerning dividing gambling revenues, some tribes have been “disenrolling” members. This brings in the modern conflict over the Cherokee Nation having to accept the descendants of the “freedmen,” the descendants of the tribe’s African American enslaved.

This book is about enrollment as a Native American told through the personable and informal stories of various individuals. The author does not examine the credibility of federally recognized tribes and groups claiming descent but failing to receive government acknowledgment or the “tribes,” some mentioned in this book that have no real documentation of their initially enrolled members' ethnicity.

America is in a time when everyone wants to be a victim, and exposing what Schuettpelz describes as the hard facts proves dangerous. The author wonders “whether I, someone who hadn’t grown up in this place or surrounded myself with my Lumbee relatives, should even be enrolled at all.” Even to the end, the author remains uncertain.