stories about blood quantum
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Book #4 expands this graphical experiment by underlying conversations about blood quantum and citizenship. Each contributor’s blood quantum--the raw number--asserts itself across the page. The fractions are arranged from greatest to least blood, becoming more insistent as they bleed below the minimum 1/4 required to remain a member of the Blackfeet Tribe. The 1/4-blood membership requirement was adopted by the tribe in the 1960s, making it possible for two enrolled parents who were born before the requirement took effect to have their children disenrolled at birth; this is the case for many Blackfeet people in their 30s and younger, including KH and RH. In this book, when contributors share the same blood quantum the number is compounded and reflected over itself. In this group of eight people, two brothers and two cousins shared a number. However, cousins, half-siblings, nieces, children, and parents tend to have wildly different numbers depending not on their Blackfeetness, community participation, or any kind of science, but on missing records, political feuds, and typos made a hundred years ago.
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Blood quantum is literally connected to every part of the system and the only results are: diminished land, diminished political—not human—population, diminished sovereignty. Follow it to the end point, what is the result? You politically eliminate yourselves but you’re still here. Your only choice at that point is to assimilate to the mainstream American culture because it’s your only chance to survive. -shwm
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During Dawes Act competency commissions—you’ve heard about competency commissions? An Indian Agent basically allotting land based on an interpretation of who’s competent, who’s not competent based on blood quantum. A lot of those deemed to have a lower blood quantum got fee lands and lost them to state taxation. It’s really interesting because that also has a major impact on those potential unenrolled members having access to trust lands or fee lands either, which obviously impacts housing as well. -ddr
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I think just being on the reservation it’s widely talked about: who owns land, who doesn’t own land; who’s enrolled, who’s not enrolled. That kind of opens up more dialogue—my closest friends are not enrolled but they’re still members of the reservation. I’m surprised that our government still embodies and embraces blood quantum. I hope it changes. Although I know this [new tribal] constitution doesn’t change the enrollment, I hope it makes this a safer place for this to happen down the road. In some areas we’re pretty progressive but there are still some of us that hold on to that concept of blood quantum. I think what it is is we’re internalizing the oppressor because this is obviously not a concept that we adhered to at all. -ke
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There’s a major lack of housing on the reservation. A big part of that is connected to allotment, land fractionalization, and the legacy of allotment too. So you have these fractionated trust pieces where there’s 100 different heirs that own a piece of land. The problem is not only can they not benefit economically from that piece—say they want to finance a house or build a house, neither of those options work because they don’t benefit from the land. Two, they can’t make land-use management decisions without that consent. -ddr
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Both my parents are enrolled and I’m not, so, you know, you have to be enrolled to cross that border [to/from Canada] without a passport at Port of Piegan. So I grew up with my mom and dad crossing that border at a whim, and for myself, they never had to get a passport. They never needed it. So me and my brother were not exposed to those things. When you’re not enrolled, there are certain procedures you have to do to get Indian rights, or there are just certain things that aren’t available so you have to go another route to achieve it. A passport is a good example to use in this because my mom and dad never needed a passport but me and my brother did. We never did see anyone buy a passport, we never heard anyone speaking of a passport growing up, in terms of in the household. So by the time I’m learning the language and I want to cross the border, I have to get a passport. I don’t have that knowledge, I don’t know where to go. To me it feels as if you need a green card in order to exist in your own land. Seriously, that’s what it feels like to me. There’s this kind of stress and animosity that comes with it, so you do take your time with it. You feel as if you don’t need it, you feel as if you don’t want it. -rh
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I’m never going through what Robert went through last year when he and I went through the border and that guard said you can’t come through here because you’re a descendant, and we were just sitting there looking at each other. It’s so degrading. It’s so degrading. I’m not putting myself in a situation where I have to go through that; I refuse. I know that people like me and Robert, us being able to vote would be really important politically for this place but part of me just doesn’t even want to participate. I know that I’m close, and if it’s possible I’m going to do it because I need to be able to talk to the council without being dismissed for being a descendant, and I need to be able to talk to these kids in my family. I need to be able to fight for them somehow. It takes up another generation. -shwm
I could feel this thing happening in Indian Country. I was meeting so many Indians doing this oil and gas lease work all over the West and in all these encounters there was this undercurrent like, we want something that’s ours. We want something that’s ours because everything else is American and everything else is from the outside. -shwm
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I was one of the primary members of BEAR [Blackfeet for Enrollment Amendment and Reform] on the reservation in 2012; I was the only male who was a primary member who actually lived here. Everyone else at those meetings were women in their 50s and upward. All the other guys were off-reservation. I think because women are the ones who think about their kids in terms of both before and after they have kids in a much higher degree of specificity than men do. Women on reservations are the primary people who perpetrate blood quantum. Women tend to think about kids way before guys do and since blood quantum laws are in effect, women on reservations are more likely to say “If I’m gonna have kids I want them to be enrolled.” Whereas I’ve never heard a guy talk about wanting to make sure he has enrolled kids. It’s women who actively, consciously will choose men according to enrollment status. The flipside of that is that women who have kids who aren’t enrolled seem to empathize with their kids more easily. Part of this is maybe a cultural thing: the guys who got involved in this who were enrolled, they were only enrolled on the periphery and were more personally motivated than the women were. For the women it was very much like family. Family. Family. The guys understood that this was an unacceptable situation but there wasn’t a single guy here willing to put anything on the line to make that happen. That’s part of the political situation here: the people who work for the tribe have no civil rights as employees. My dad didn’t get involved because he couldn’t afford for the tribe to try to run our Conoco out of business again because we would have lost all our houses and been forced off the reservation. There was a total absence of men and retrospectively it still baffles me. -shwm
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This never occurred to me—if you’re not on the rolls I’m assuming you can’t get on the housing list. That means if you want to stay here and you can’t get the pay you need to get a mobile home or anything that means your only option is to live with an enrolled relative. -shwm
You can’t participate in the political process here on any level. If you apply for jobs you can be turned down for someone enrolled, and the tribe is the largest employer on the reservation. -shwm
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“I want there to be a caveat there [in using my blood quantum for this project] because I’ve completely dissociated from thinking of myself in that term.” -shwm
I grew up on this reservation exposed to the exact same education and the exact same economic situation as everyone else. It’s not affirmative action, it’s not as if unenrolled people are more pitiful. What it is is discrimination. -rh
It made me dissociate from my own life. I realized I was only half participating in my own life because I didn’t feel like the things in my life belonged to me. -shwm
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The destruction of our land base is continuing because of blood quantum: we have people inheriting land as descendants who can’t pay taxes so we continue to lose land. Right now that loss is relatively slow but in one generation it’s going to accelerate so fast people won’t even know what’s going on. It’s terrifying to think about. No one really gets it. -shwm
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[Voting] affects everything, that affects your life and where you’re going to live and how you’re going to live. I can’t vote for the political figures that I need that are going to design laws I have to abide by. Being unenrolled but being Indian, you’re considered Indian in the eyes of the federal government but you’re not considered Indian by your own government, so you lose both ways. -rh
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Even in the imaginary world of blood quantum we should be enrolled because there are at least two women on my family line who were taken off the rolls and even one of them would easily put us over the quarter mark and both would be significantly higher than that. Oh it would be a ton of people, it would be Robert, it would be whole families. If we even got one it would enroll hundreds of people. She would be coming down through the LaPlante line and there’s also a Bremner— they’re huge families. There’s even another guy originally from Canada and his numbers don’t even exist here; he would have been considered a full-blood, you know, there’s stuff like that. If they were enrolled and if Canada recognized the Jay Treaty…it goes on and on. -shwm
Even though I know in my bones how important it is, part of me just doesn’t give a f**k because I’ve lived my whole life without it. I’d love to be able to vote, but I also know even if me and my siblings get enrolled, my nieces and nephews won’t be enrolled. There’s a way in which, because I don’t exist within the arena of law that enrolled people here do, the second I become enrolled, even if I philosophically reject it, my imaginary blood quantum becomes real in a way it just isn’t for me right now. I ain’t getting that card, I don’t need it. That says I’m less than everyone here but I still get a card; it categorizes me as subhuman. -shwm
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It separated me from my own father. For most of my life, I felt like I was only partially my father’s son because of blood quantum. If I were the kind of son I was supposed to be, I would be enrolled. Because it separated me from his life; I didn’t even have a right to my dad’s life in the way you’re supposed to have a right to your parents’ lives. I wasn’t able to participate in the way you naturally do—I distanced myself from his life and my own life, even the geographic space— everything—it removed me one whole step from all of it. I felt like even though I was here, none of this was actually mine. It so profoundly affected me that there are moments daily that I recognize I’m functioning at a full step removed from what’s happening around me and it’s entirely because of enrollment. -shwm
I am the literal death of Blackfeet politics. I am the death of our political system. -shwm
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Those enrollment cards create laziness because that becomes the identity. It’s a fundamentally abusive relationship. I’m a fairly self-aware person and I still regularly recognize things in my character I can trace directly to not being enrolled. It’s crazy how much of who I am was shaped by not being enrolled; the way I relate to people here, to myself, what I went through when I went to college. Outside the biological facts of my existence, blood quantum is just a half step past that in terms of the reality I was born into. The big one was during the enrollment reform movement and it dawned on me that I had unconsciously dissociated myself from tribal politics because I did not think I had a right to participate in them in any way even though my own dad had served on the council twice. I had listened to him talk about tribal politics my whole life but because I was not enrolled, I believed the stories he was telling me weren’t for me, they were the stories of real Indians. -shwm
That’s what all the drama is over. All this collective land was my grandparents’ but I never saw any lines dividing it my whole life. And not only that, this land borders the railroad tracks and then there’s the tracks and on the other side is Glacier National Park and it just goes, like 60 miles to the border. And then on the other side of the road there’s some fences and some concept of land over here, but just right up here is national forest all the way down to Lincoln; that’s 100-some miles! So we just went wherever we wanted when were kids. Then when my grandma died we found out that it had been divided among three of her seven kids without any of the other four knowing; then it was all about the land. Just like my uncle said, ‘stay out of my yard,’ and that such a weird thing for me; I was like, this is all my land, all our land together. I never had that separation. -nr
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