Apropos of non-Native Masto users making fun of an #Indigenous user (not me) for being light-skinned, let's talk about the colonial thought structure called BLOOD QUANTUM.
You might have wondered things like: Why do some Natives look so white? Are they reeeeally Native? Aren’t they just white people with one distant Native ancestor? Etc. Etc.
Blood quantum is the idea that you can be 1/4 this, 1/64th that, as if you were a dog breed or a racehorse. It’s based on the idea of BLOOD PURITY, which is an idea from eugenics.
If you don’t read anything else here, please marinate on this:
Asking a Native “how much are you” reinforces eugenics. It’s rude, it’s racism-enabling—don’t be that person. You don’t ask this of anyone else, so honestly why would you with Natives? Also: disappearing race trope. Yuck.
@Toastie
Yes! And, it seems to me that many north Americans do do this, constantly struggling to connect outdated and outmoded national identity in themselves and their neighbors.
It is all incredibly Stoopid and terrible. @NatureMC
Tribally enrolled people in the US have a federally issued card from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that says “how much” Indian they are in fraction form. It’s gross and weird.
And inaccurate! Some people have one ancestor through whom they’re eligible for tribal enrollment, and other ancestors through whom they’re not. Their tribal enrollment card only reflects the former, ignoring the others and diminishing the “percent” of “Native blood” they appear to have on paper.
Tribal status is a matter of CITIZENSHIP, not race.
Nevertheless, some tribes use BQ as a standard for enrollment. It’s their sovereign right to do so, even if many Natives disagree with their decision. It’s messy, and frankly it's usually not non-Natives’ business to judge or get involved with tribal identity disputes.
ANYWAY.
Let’s think about some of the reasons Native citizens might have heavily mixed European heritage! HMMM.
@Toastie We (Europeans) generally don’t think in terms of eg being 6% italian and 12% norwegian. We tend to think it’s a weird and very American preoccupation that we don’t understand
@kierkegaank Exactly. Hitler, another eugenicist, admired the US's treatment of Indigenous people, and used reservations as a model for his camps.
Also BQ makes more sense once you understand that the US created it to measure how many acres of stolen land the US would give back to Natives.
A "full blood" gets X acres, a "half blood" gets .5X acres, and so forth. So if they could "breed the Indian out" of us, a goal they didn't even really hide, they could erase Native land rights. With math!
@kierkegaank TBH i have not read Mein Kampf, and I don't particularly care to, so feel free to fact check me on this. But my understanding was that in the book he praises the US reservation system. Not to say he couldn't have also been inspired by the British?
@Toastie no the camps were not in the book (though i haven’t read it). Those came along much later, but he had his derangements in terms of living space for people according to their purity score. It does sound like his malfunctions to think of eg slavs and gauls as subjugated workers in reservations like in the us
@NatureMC@Toastie i said we don’t think in terms of us having a blended national makeup, ”I’m 50% Swedish, 25% Norwegian, 25% Walloon”, not that we didn’t have a constantly haunting history of nationalism and genocide
@NatureMC@Toastie interesting! When I lived there I only heard people talking in terms of their living heritage so to speak, like being Algerian or Jewish or Spanish rather than in terms of this is my family tree
Generally the same up here in the north. Though I have lived here longer and have had the “opportunity” to hear a very small amount of people go into their abstract unconnected “bloodline” nonsense, which seemed to be related to how icky vikingbro they were
Reason 1: Rape! This is a great reason not to bring BQ up with Natives! Our ancestors were traumatized! Haha! Leave it alone!
Reason 2: Betrayal! Some tribes tried to be friendly with (and marry!) the people who ended up colonizing them! SHITTY! Most Natives don’t want to talk about this with strangers either!
Reason 3: Assimilation! In the mid-1900s the US drove Native communities into poverty to break up and move them to the coasts for jobs—and assimilation! The idea was to solve the ‘Indian problem’ by erasing Native identity! COOL COOL!
Reason 4: Boarding schools! Another violent assimilationist shitshow! This one’s been particularly impactful in #Australia, with the stolen generation.
These are just a few painful examples. If a Native community claims its children and grandchildren, it’s not the business of non-Natives to question that.
Being white-passing is a luxury in the sense that white-passing Natives can blend in, and aren’t mistreated as badly as their dark skinned relatives.
But when you see someone mocking a Native person for looking white, just remember they’re actually REINFORCING racist imperialism.
I accept people for who they say they are. In time they either are who they say they are or aren’t. If someone turns out to be cruel, a Fascist, racist or something else I will end relationship. I have no other criterion.
@Toastie What frustrates me about the whole thing is, my native heritage is denied to me. My mom is native-presenting enough that she's been the target of racism in the workplace. I've seen her come home in tears from it, and she's been forced out of at least one job as a result. But on more than one occasion, I've spoken up about my native heritage and I've been told it isn't real, that because I'm white-presenting and don't have roll papers, I don't count. It's an important part of my identity, but strangers think it's fine to tell me that it's made up "romantic" BS, when I know that it isn't. I understand that tribes don't want to accept me as a citizen if I can't prove my heritage, and I can't blame them, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. It's very painful to me to have this part of myself denied, not just in formal records, but in my every day life.
@Toastie i learned about blood quantum through the 'all my relations' podcast episode. great recommendation for all who don't already know it. it is hosted by by matika wilbur (swinomish and tulalip), and dr. adrienne keene (cherokee nation).
@thepoliticalcat@Toastie indeed, BQ comes into play when you feel forced to play the white mans federal recognition game, and they want to define everyone native away, a 5th reason and means of erasure.
@thepoliticalcat@Toastie Not ethnicity, just whether or not the child is Jewish.Orthodox Hebrew school teacher said it was because you always know who the mother was. He left out people called "mamzers" --products of "forbidden" relationships.
Reform movement says it was to prevent assimilation by insisting Jewish men marry Jewish women & is a form of gatekeeping. There's a lot of arguments now because some Reform Jews from interfaith marriages are being excluded when changing shuls.
@Toastie weirdly, the most problems I’ve had re. BQ are other Indigenous people who give me the third degree. My mixed background is so complicated I don’t know how to figure out percentages. BQ has caused so much in-fighting, and I hate it so much.
@Shanmonster Yes, Freedmen issues deserve a whole other thread, and I'm not the best person to go into Afro-Indigenous identity issues but if any of my followers are interested here are some books to read:
@Toastie@Shanmonster The way I understand it is that the Freedmen issue is part and parcel of the Civilizing effort, and a tribe was considered to be a Civilized Tribe if it engaged in enslavement of Africans. Required.
Of recent vintage is the Cherokee Tribe refusing to recognize Cherokee Freedmen as tribal members, and they pretty much reversed that ruling, kicking and screaming.
@claralistensprechen3rd@Shanmonster I don't wish to discuss this outside of Black and Native communities, where the healing needs to happen, but I'll leave this article here in case anyone's interested in reading up on Freedmen and the Five Civilized Tribes.
@Toastie
…a bizarre and stupid idea, and just for the record, a footnote from a former dog breeder: genes don’t get passed on in such a linear way at all once you’re past the parent generation, NOT EVEN on the level of dog breeding.
So even if someone’s genetics were more important than their culture (and they aren’t) that concept would still be completely flawed right from the start.
It’s tragic that it ever took off, serving as a disgusting justification to suppress people to this very day.
@Toastie I come from Hawaii. There was never a miscegenation law there. People are quite eager to tell you about their ancestry. The more ethnicities you have, the more bragging rights. It's a healthy attitude toward ethnicity, in my opinion. And one thing that is very obvious from being in the culture is that ethnic mixing produces good results.
@Toastie Thank you for sharing this. Very enlightening. I still balk at tribal affiliation, as what could I possibly do to contribute to the culture and people?
There's learning and using the language, for sure.
But I was raised nowhere near any Tsalagi traditions, thus I feel conflicted.
Add comment