‘The Indian Card’ reveals the complexities of claiming Native identity

Author Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz dives into the complexities of indigenous identity and the challenges of Tribal enrollment in her debut book, “The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America.”
An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, Schuettpelz spent seven years working as a policy adviser in the Obama administration on issues of homelessness and Native policy.
ABC News’ Linsey Davis sat down with Schuettpelz to talk about the Tribal enrollment, the impact of federal policies and the boom in people identifying as Native American.
ABC NEWS: Data from the U.S. Census shows the number of Americans claiming native ancestry has increased, while the number of Americans enrolled as Tribal members has stayed relatively the same. Exploring this issue is, at its core, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, who worked on Native policy for the Obama administration.
Carrie, who’s a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, investigates and interviews Native people to discuss their own experiences in her new book, “The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America.”
In it, she writes, the U.S. government’s requirements for Tribal membership were designed to eradicate and not support Native communities. Thank you so much for joining us.
SCHUETTPELZ: Thanks for having me.
ABC NEWS: OK. So you start first and foremost with this concept of what is the Tribal enrollment process. I think a lot of people just won’t know what that is.
SCHUETTPELZ: Sure. So I sort of equate it to going to the DMV. For those of us who have received a driver’s license, it’s largely a paperwork process. And so you sort of present yourself to your Tribe and you offer whatever evidence that they require in order to become an enrolled member.
There have always been people who have claimed to have Native identity when they indeed do not. And they do it for all different reasons. I think when private citizens claim Native identity and that’s just simply not the case, then it’s one thing. When people somehow earn money off of it, when they profit from that, that identity, I think we have to have a real conversation about that.
ABC NEWS: And you write here and I want to quote: “I think back to the U.S. Census, to the sudden explosion in the number of people claiming Native identity. I wonder if blood quantum has become the shield Tribes have decided to use to defend themselves against what they perceive as precarious claims of belonging.”
How did the, the boom of, of people identifying as Native American impact this country, in particular in the early 2000s?
SCHUETTPELZ: I mean, I think, you know, blood quantum has been around for a long time and it actually is not a Native construct at all. It is a federal government construct. The federal government encouraged Native Tribes to use blood quantum. And largely they did so not out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather the idea was that eventually we would have fewer and fewer Native people. They would be assimilated into American society. And so a lot of Tribes are still using blood quantum sort of as relics from that time.
In terms of a boom of people now claiming Native identity, I think we see it in the media and so we probably feel like this is something that’s all of a sudden happening. But it has been happening for decades and decades.
I think that now there has been a little bit more sophistication in the area of how to determine if someone, again, who’s profiting from that idea. So someone who teaches at a university, an actor, a filmmaker or, you know, whatever the case may be. I think that there’s a more sophisticated conversation around how do we approach that kind of situation.
At the end of the day, though, this is a Tribe’s purview. And so Tribes are the ones and the only entities that have the power and the authority to say, yes, we claim this person or no, we don’t.
ABC NEWS: Now, you have your own experience. Why did you decide intentionally to, to keep that out and only use the people who you interview?
SCHUETTPELZ: You know, I wrote a little bit about my own experience. I will say that, you know, they say you write the book you need and I needed this book. I needed to understand that I wasn’t alone in feeling like I wasn’t Native enough.
I needed to understand that there were actually pretty good reasons for that, that federal policies over the last hundred years plus have created a situation in which many of us feel like we don’t belong. And so it was really important that I talk to other people, and women in particular, about their own experiences feeling this way.
ABC NEWS: And you write toward the end about the idea of these Tribes in the Southwest, particularly those who straddle the U.S.-Mexico border and how that wasn’t kind of part of the purview of this book. Is there future work that you anticipated, anticipate doing that that might include discussions about that?
SCHUETTPELZ: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that that topic deserves its own book. Plural, right. Books. I mean, it’s own considerations. I think that putting a border sort of artificially in a place where we know that communities were divided is always going to create a really complicated situation. And so I would love to see scholars and writers tackle that topic.
ABC NEWS: Or maybe you.
SCHUETTPELZ: Yeah, possibly.
ABC NEWS: Carrie, we thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Want to let our viewers know you can purchase “The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America” wherever books are sold.