A proposal by the Crow tribal chair could dramatically change who counts as a Crow tribal member under the “blood quantum” standard, a concept created by White settlers and rooted in assimilation tactics.
Blood quantum refers to the fractional amount of tribal affiliation in an individual’s ancestry. It is central to individual identity and highly controversial.
Right now, according to the tribe’s enrollment policy, an individual must “possess one-quarter Crow Indian blood” to enroll as a member of the Crow Tribe. The proposed legislation from Chairman Frank Whiteclay would alter things so that all existing members would be considered as having 100% Crow “blood.” That would change the lives not just of the 14,289 enrolled Crow tribal members but also potentially thousands of descendants who would be more likely to qualify as tribal members and receive services.
The legislation, Whiteclay said, “will affect all of the reservation in a huge way.”
Experts say tribes nationwide will have to contend with blood quantum in the near future. Its limitations, one California Law Review article contends, “threaten to jeopardize the existence of Native nations, as you cannot have a nation without citizens.”
“That’s what blood quantum is designed to do,” she said. “So, in effect, making everyone four-fourths resets the clock. It doesn’t stop the clock, but it hits reset.”
Tribal Secretary Levi Black Eagle said the notice of the proposed legislation was sent to the tribe’s 18-member Legislature and will be added to the body’s January meeting agenda. A committee will discuss the legislation and propose amendments. And if the act passes the Legislature by a simple majority, it will return to the chair, who can sign it into law.
Black Eagle acknowledged that the act isn’t a perfect solution to the generations-long blood quantum conundrum.
“The United States government requires us to have some sort of metric in place to say, ‘OK, these people qualify as a legal member of the tribe,’” he said. “So we’re taking the leeway we have within that system and flexing our sovereignty.”
Crow and blood quantum
Whiteclay, whose term as chairman ends in 2028 and who cannot run again because of term limits, said he proposed the legislation to “break a cycle of lost enrollment” and to improve the lives of members and descendants.
He referred to the issue of blood quantum as “death by numbers.” With each new generation, and as tribal members marry non-Natives or people from other tribes, it becomes harder for the Crow Tribe, and for any tribe using blood quantum, to maintain its membership. Whiteclay said when he took office as chairman in 2020, the tribe had about 14,600 members. Five years later, that number has declined by at least 311 people.
The proposed legislation, Whiteclay said, will also address several other issues for community members.
“There’s a lot of kids and people on the reservation; everything about them is Crow,” Whiteclay said. “They live here, they’re part of the culture. Everything about them (is Crow) except their blood quantum by a very small percent, a small fraction.”
For Black Eagle, a supporter of the legislation, the issue is personal. He said that because his mother-in-law is a member of another tribe, his wife grew up being told she’d have to marry someone from a certain tribe if she wanted her children to be enrolled members.
“It’s sad,” Black Eagle said. “It just really narrows the limits on how you want to live your life. And I don’t think us tribal members should have that in the back of our mind. I think that we should just be free to live our lives and love whoever we want and make a family with whoever we want.”
Blood quantum, Black Eagle said, is not used to define other groups of people.
“People say, ‘What pedigree does your horse have?’” he said. “Or, ‘How much does your dog cost? Does it have papers?’ That’s the kind of vein we’re in. But we’re not animals.”
While early reactions to Whiteclay’s Facebook post indicated widespread support, expanding blood quantum requirements is controversial. A popular counterargument is that broader enrollment requirements could result in more people vying for fewer resources in a federal system where resources are already scarce.
But for Whiteclay, the issue “is bigger than ourselves.”
“We have to have that mentality that the tribe as a whole should benefit,” he said. “Not just a certain few.”
Blood quantum controversy, Doerfler said, often reveals different attitudes towards citizenship.
“Some people might think about every citizen as draining the nation, as taking something,” she said. “Other people might see more citizens as having more power, more leverage, more votes, more lobbying. Maybe they see more citizens as contributing something.”
History of blood quantum
One of the first deployments of the concept of blood quantum was in Virginia in the 18th century. At the time, it restricted the rights of anyone deemed more than 50% Native American.
From 1887 to 1934, the federal government divided reservation land into allotments for distribution to individual tribal members with the goal that private ownership would assimilate Native Americans into White society. The government used the concept of blood quantum to determine who was eligible for allotments. And in 1934, with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, tribes began using blood quantum as a requirement for their own citizenship.
Blood quantum was determined in different ways for different tribes. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example, used census rolls to assign blood quantum to some Native Americans, though their calculations were often incorrect. Doerfler said blood quantum for the White Earth Nation in Minnesota was established by anthropologists.
“They came and measured people’s heads and did a scratch test on the chest to see the reaction of the skin, took hair samples, did analysis of the hair samples and cobbled together blood quantum out of that,” she said.
That process, which serves as the basis for blood quantum for tribal members today, Doerfler said, is inherently flawed. She said she has seen blood quantum rolls of biological siblings with vastly different quantum amounts.
“What we can see in those inconsistencies is that there is no way to measure blood quantum,” she said. “What test are you going to do to measure blood?”
Historically, tribes did not determine membership based on biological ancestry. Doerfler said some tribes adopted people into the community, or based membership on factors such as where a person lived or their relationships within a community. Identity, she said, cannot be measured in the way blood quantum suggests.
“Sometimes, I try to get people to think about American citizenship,” she said. “How much American blood do you have? How much Montana blood do you have? Or how much Minnesotan blood do you have? It’s not a thing. You can say, ‘I was born and raised here. My parents were born and raised here.’ But there isn’t a ‘blood’ associated with that.”
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This story was originally published by the Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
