Incorporating Inheritance and Complementarity

This chapter highlights the poetics and politics of Indigenous People’s dense inheritances around the turn of the twenty-first century and how these genealogies can be translated as complementary through sound. It focuses on the musical output of the Anchorage-based “tribal funk” band Pamyua, and how their distinctive sounds engage lived intersections between Blackness and Indigeneity. The author outlines how their business acumen challenges racialized gatekeeping mechanisms of the music industrial complex endemic to “blood quantum” and “one-drop” ideologies, a colonial pairing of what one might call “sound quantum” with earlier discussions of “audible Indigeneity.” The author offers an analysis and musicographic model that seeks to better represent the priorities and processes of Pamyua’s relational and radical soundwork, through which multiple densities are navigated and transformed. Pamyua’s work expands the ways in which we hear Yupiit masks and drumsongs as always already modern, both in Yukological and Eurological understandings of the phrase.

BLOOD QUANTUM IN SCOTT MOMADAY’S THE NAMES

The semiotics of blood quantum in Scott Momaday’s memoir, The Names, is interpreted regarding its role as a signifier of American Indian survival and resistance in the context of his introspective concept of mythopoetic blood memory. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0841/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

The Blood Line: Racialized Boundary Making and Citizenship among Native Nations

Blood informs a central racial ideology in the United States that has historically been used to racialize many different groups. American Indians (AIs) are the only population in the United States for whom the racial logic of blood remains codified as a means of conferring collective belonging. This article explores how AI blood quantum persists as both a race-making and nation-making instrument. I ask two research questions: How does blood quantum persist as a metric of tribal citizenship? Are tribal citizenship criteria connected to contemporary demographic, geographic, political, and economic forces? I first extend racial formation theory to describe blood quantum as a “racial project” in its use to both construct tribal identities in explicitly racial ways and determine access to political, social, and material resources. I also consider how the sovereign right of Native nations to confer tribal citizenship is evident in the observed variation among citizenship rules. Using data from more than 80 percent of AI Native nations in the contiguous United States, I employ a multinomial regression model to evaluate tribal citizenship variation. I have two central findings: (1) although tribal citizenship criteria are starting to depart from the racializing policies of the settler-colonial state, blood quantum thresholds remain particularly durable; and (2) variation in tribal citizenship criteria is meaningful by geographic region, tribal governance status, and Indian gaming. Against a backdrop of growing racial diversity in the United States, I discuss implications of the blood line on tribal citizenship boundaries and tribal sovereignty.

Where are you From? Reframing Facilitated Admissions Policies in the Faculty of Health Sciences

Understanding that Indigenous learners can face specific barriers or challenges when pursuing higher education, schools and programs within McMaster’s Faculty of Health Sciences have facilitated admissions streams for Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) applicants. The intent of reframing admissions policies is to provide equitable access while aligning with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, specifically Number 23. This work explores the development of an Indigenous-determined Facilitated Indigenous Admissions Program (FIAP), a self-identification policy that moves away from the politics of mathematical blood quantum to nationhood, community, and seeing the applicant as whole being. Further, it critiques (for example) medical school admissions as biased, in that they often replicate an elite and narrow segment of society. It also addresses how interpretations of decisions like Daniels v Canada, which speaks to the rights of Métis and non-status Indigenous peoples, are communicated or miscommunicated within emerging population groups in terms of rights and their potential relationship to admissions.

Adoption Constitutionalism: Anishinaabe Citizenship Law at Fort William First Nation

This article explores familial jurisdiction over citizenship, using the study of Anishinaabe citizenship practices in the Fort William First Nation, through the lens of adoption stories. The author highlights how families are able to use adoption to regulate citizenship, bringing new citizens into the nation, while also selecting those who do not belong. The familial system of affirmation is different than a Certificate of Indian Registration and requires collective action, rather than individual self-determination. Belonging at Fort William is further argued to not depend solely on blood quantum, Indian status, or band membership but, rather, depends on active community determination and accountability to the community on an on-going basis. Seen this way, adoption narratives reveal a citizenship order that challenges Canada’s claimed jurisdiction to discern who belongs with First Nations.

Adoption, incorporation, and a sense of citizenship and belonging in Indigenous Nations and culture: a Haudenosaunee perspective

During the salvage ethnography period in the early 20th century, the adoption of scholars by tribes provided those scholars with access to Indigenous Knowledge and garnered their support of Indigenous agendas at a time when there were few Indigenous scholars. Adoptive practices and protocols today raise complex questions that have very real legal, political, and cultural repercussions. The introduction of enrollment cards and blood quantum—how are we to make sense of old adoption protocols of Indigenous Nations outlined in traditional narratives such as Creation? The answer for Haudenosaunee communities lies in two of the core narratives: Creation and Great Law. What do these narratives illuminate regarding adoptive cultural practices that today can be utilized in an ever changing political, legal, and culture framework using the long-understood notion of Good Mindedness?

The Justice to Which We Are Entitled

As the lines between “white” and “colored” hardened in North Carolina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indians participated in segregation and the institutionalization of race in an attempt to ensure two things: that whites would recognize their “Indianness” and that Indians would retain control of their own institutions. The creation of Indian schools became a main part of the fight for recognition. Indians recognized the game of race and addressed it by consistently trying to move it to an arena where they had power. Picking and choosing tribal names and pursuing federal and state recognition of those names became one way of dealing with this problem. Throughout the twentieth century, the name of the Robeson County Indians changed from “Croatan” to “Cherokee Indians of Robeson County” to “Siouan Indians of the Lumbee River”. The name changes frequently led to conflict within and outside the community. Supporters of Cherokee or Siouan names pursued different paths to recognition. Robeson County Indians had to navigate standards of authenticity set forth by the federal government, such as blood-quantum provisions. Even after some Indians were finally granted official recognition, they were often still denied their full benefits from the government.