THE INDIAN CARD

The complexities of claiming a Native American identity.

In this brief study, Schuettpelz explores how a long, troubled history of dispossession has contributed to the vexed status of Native selfhood in contemporary America. While the number of people who identify as Native has been steadily increasing over the past several decades, Native people “[have] been forced into a corner of needing constantly to prove our identities to ourselves and others, to carry around a card in our wallet [providing] not just validation, but also protection from those who’d like us to believe we’re not Indian enough.” The author provides an accessible historical overview of the various military, legal, and social factors that have blocked and complicated assertions of Native identity, along with illuminating case studies of individuals struggling to affirm their identities against cultural and bureaucratic resistance. Interspersed throughout are accounts, too, of the author’s own evolving sense of what it means to be Native and what full federal recognition of the Lumbee, her tribal nation, would mean to her and others. Particularly engaging here are the summaries of how different tribal nations continue to negotiate with government authorities over self-definition and how “the federal government is still actively tugging at the puppet strings of Native identity.” Also intriguing are the discussions of how different tribal nations are working out the conditions of membership on their own terms, often in the face of entrenched prejudices from non-Natives, and how fraudulent claims to Native identity have impacted those efforts. The personal and collective stakes for Native peoples are ably set forth here, and one gains a vivid sense of why establishing more sensible and fair criteria for tribal belonging is so urgent. Greater Native sovereignty is, the author aptly concludes, a worthy and realizable goal.  

A clear and frank analysis of the challenges that define Native selfhood.