Determining American Indian identity

George Benge
Gannett News Service
May 3, 2004 (first print)

What’s the most important issue facing Native Americans today?

Health care? Education? Jobs? Economic empowerment? Cultural preservation? Race-based discrimination? Casinos? Offensive sports mascots and nicknames?

Without doubt, these are all vital issues.

But there’s another issue that doesn’t grab headlines and is off the radar of many people and much of the news media in mainstream America.

It’s the question of Indian identity: Who is and who is not an Indian?

To many non-Indians, it’s a non-issue.

But to Indian people and to people who either know they’re Indian but can’t prove it or don’t meet their tribe’s blood-quantum requirements, it’s a huge deal.

The situation reflects the generations of native children engendered by marriages and relationships between Native Americans and non-Indians.

Now, each of the more than 500 federally recognized Indian nations in the United States possesses the sole, sovereign right to decide who is or is not a member of their tribe.

Make no mistake, this is not a reality show in which people get dumped by the Donald, are exiled from an exotic island or have their singing careers terminated as a prurient nation watches and TV ratings soar.

This is reality, period, for full-bloods on tribal lands, for the thousands of mixed-blood native people living and working in the urban corridors of New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago and for individuals like Seth Prince, a friend and journalist at The Oregonian in Portland.

Prince, a Choctaw and Cherokee whose native roots are in Oklahoma, wrote eloquently about coming to terms with, and embracing, his Indian identity.

“I could easily pass as white,” Prince wrote as he described an adolescence consumed with racial ambiguity, knowing he was an Indian but appearing white and growing up in a white suburban community.

Now, after years of research and soul searching, Prince knows who and what he is. “I have come to believe that faces such as mine, which I once questioned whether could be called Indian at all, are the faces of tomorrow’s Native America,” he wrote. “As I was recently told in the course of sorting out my story, it is what is in my heart, not what pumps through it, that makes me Indian.”

Another aspect of the Indian identity story was unfolding in the Southwest, where The Arizona Republic reported on a proposal to reduce the Navajo nation’s blood-quantum requirement from one-quarter to one-eighth, potentially increasing the largest U.S. tribe from 310,000 members to more than 600,000.

Identity issues like these resonate every single day.

According to the 2000 census, there are 2.4 million Native Americans, including officially recognized tribal members and self-identified Indians.

And for many of those 2.4 million people, there is no bigger issue than their identity as Indians.

(George Benge, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, writes a monthly commentary on American Indian issues and people for Gannett News Service