Claiming Tribal Identity Quotes

“It is no surprise that the Five Tribes, longtime leaders in remaining Native while assimilating nonindigenous ways, are leading the crusade to define Native people sin the United States today. They are demanding the power to say who is Indian, rather than having the ‘white man’ do it for them.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“Ideally, leaders of the Five Tribes would exercise their sovereignty and be the governments that recognize groups that claim to be their blood kin. However, political and legal realities intervene: only the federal government can recognize that a ‘government-to-government’ relationship exists between it and forgotten Indian communities scattered about the country. As such, the Five Tribes and other reservation groups helped establish the Federal Acknowledgment Process within the BIA in 1978 to determine which groups were still living indigenous communities.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“As principal chief Chad Smith told me, many people saying they are Cherokee likely have some ancestry. However, their ancestors ‘expatriated from the nation’ and renounced their tribal ties by failing to travel west on the Trail of Tears. The cost of that decision is that their descendants cannot now claim citizenship. Cherokee Nation Supreme Court justice Troy Wayne Poteete further emphasizes the often emotion, group kindship nation of the issue, fine details often missed by non-Indians claiming Indian status. ‘Our issue is no our ancestors had so little to pass on to us. We lost 90 percent of what we had. What they were able to pass on to us was a unique legal status, as well as a distinct culture and heritage.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“They were ‘half breeds,’ ‘mongrel races,’ and ‘mixed-bloods.” These individuals and families may have gravitated to frontier areas or to mixed-race communities that were more welcoming of their heritage. They too kept traditions of their Indian lineage alive, yet the fact that they assimilated into existing, non-tribal (if also nonwhite) communities leads to the same conclusion as the white-Indian individuals mentioned: it could hardly be said that these mixed Indian, black, and white communities were tribes. Because of stereotypes, however, it is easer to view these impoverished, marginal enclaves as Indian. The basic facts pertinent to tribal recognition are the same: thousands of individuals left tribal communities in the nineteenth century, and their descendants cannot now make a convincing case to be aboringal Indian tribes.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“Some tribes maintain blood quantum, such as once-quarter proven blood degree from their tribe. Even so-called purely ‘descendancy’ tribes such as the Five Tribes with no blood quantum requirement jealously guard some proven, documentary link by blood to distant ancestors. More than any single BIA requirement, however, this criterion has proven troublesome for southeastern groups because of its reliance on on-Indian records and the confused (and confusing) nature of surviving documents.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“A host of scholars who have studied surviving southeastern Indian groups conclude that few if any of these peoples possess cultures that do not bear the mark of significant contact with nonindigenous societies. Even the most “traditional,” such as the Seminoles of Florida, whom Nancy O. Lurie describes as “Contact-Traditional,” were significantly altered from precolonial days by the time pioneer “salvage” ethnologists described their cultural traits and created laundry lists that have since become benchmarks for defining aboriginal culture in the region. To many more traditional reservation-based groups, having surviving Indian cultural traits is extremely important to proving authenticity, although they are not required for acknowledgement via the BIA process. The existence of surviving Indian cultural traits is highly persuasive to most observers in proving that a group still exists as a viable tribal community.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“Just as the Five Tribes and others were formalizing their tribal governments and running their own programs, legal aid groups were helping nonrecognized tribes do the same: the two were on a collision course. One result was the Federal Acknowledgment Process, establsiehd within the BIA in 1978. Its rigorous criteria and evaluation process reflected the desires of the Five Tribes and many other reservation tribes to have a stringent regimen, on that protected their rights, economic resources, and overall ability to define ‘Indians” and “tribes.” Throughout these debates pulsed questions of “authenticity” and being “real” or “bona fide” Indians and tribes. While academics and unrecognized tribes questioned the ability of any party to accurately define “Indian” and “tribe,” as a practical political and cultural matter tribes and their federal allies groped toward a way to measure and define these highly problematic terms. By 1978 leaders of federally recognized tribes felt they had found the answer in the new Federal Acknowledgment Process, with many unrecognized groups agreeing that finally a way had been found to determine what group were “real” tribes.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“As historian Theda Perdue and anthropologist Jack Campisi have noted separately, the closing of all-Indian schools created a crisis for southeastern Indians. When institutions like the East Carolina Indian School in Sampson County, North Caroline, locked its doors, a symbol of Indian pride, independence, and identity was closed as well. Despite the negative publicity surrounding integration, some silver lining soon appeared. The loss of schools prompted many groups to establish formal tribal entities in place of old board of education and related committees.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“The manner in which Indians have been recorded, tracked, and identified has also worked against establishing concrete tribal identities. Lacking a relationship with the federal government, these groups do not posses associated reservation records, tribal rolls, and recorded blood degrees that often help modern tribes prove their indigenousness. The work of U.S. census takers also clouds the waters. Until 1960, when self-identification became the rule, census Bureau instructed enumerators to use their own judgement to identify the supposed race of residents. This was most often based on the testimony of respondents or the visual judgement of the census taker. Neither was scientific, and this was hardly foolproof, yet these record would prove important for groups trying to establish tribal recognition.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“After the removal era initiated officially in 1830 and the Seminole Wars of the 1840s, most Americans had the misperception that not Indians remained in the Southeast. Small communities of Indians persisted, however. Largely hidden in isolated pockets of their former homelands, southeastern Indians struggled ot survive, both physically and cultural, in the harsh social an political climate of the nineteenth century South. The groups that remained found refuge in generally undesired places: mountain hollows, swamps, costal marshes and pine-barrens were their homes…Most communities had intermarried with non-Indians and faced challenges to their racial status as Indians—local and state politicians repeated questioned their tribal acknowledgment and tried to break up their reservations.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“In existing writings about federally recognized tribes and their engagement with tribal acknowledgment politics, a palpable theme is clear: presently recognized nations are not acting the ‘Indian way’ when they refuse to acknowledge their less fortunate Indian relatives and share with them. To many writers, federally recognized tribal leaders are so ensconced in the hegemonic colonial order that they are no even aware that they are replicated and reinforcing it inequities. According to this line, because the Five Tribes and related groups like the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and the Eastern Band of Cherokees have embraced nonindigenous notions of ‘being Indian’ and tribal citizenship using federal censuses such as the Dawes Rolls and blood quantum they are not being authentic. Some critics charge that modern tribes like the Choctaw Nation have rejected aboriginal notions and conceptions of Indian social organization and nationhood. This thinking, however, seems to me to once again reinforce stereotypes about Indians as largely unchanging, primordial societies. The fact that the Creek and Cherokee Nations have evolved and adopted European notions of citizenship and nationhood is somehow held against them in tribal acknowledgment debates. We hear echoes of the ‘Noble Savage’ idea once again. In other context when tribes have demanded a assay in controlling their cultural property and identities – by protesting Indian sports mascots or the marketing of cars and clothing with their tribal names, or by arguing that studios should hire real Indians as actors – these actions are applauded. However, when these occur in tribal recognition contexts, the tribes are viewed as greedy or racists. The unspoken theme is that tribes are not actin gin the ‘traditional’ Indian way…With their cultures seen as frozen in time, the more tribes deviate from popular representation, the more they are seen as inauthentic. To the degree that they are seen as assimilated (or colonized and enveloped in the hegemonic order), they are also seen as inauthentic, corrupted, and polluted. The supreme irony is that when recognized tribes demand empirical data to prove tribal authenticity, critics charge that they are not being authentically ingenious by doing so.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“A host of scholars – many of whom, like Deloria, have aided petitioning tribes – support the ‘small pie’ theory. They believe that government definitions of Indians and tribes are simply part of the old colonial order, set to ‘divide and conquer’ Native peoples. These scholars see these government definitions as overreliant on nonindigenous models of tribalism, blood quantum, government rolls and censuses. Many of them call upon tribes and Native peoples to undertake decolonization projects, imploring Indian leaders to pursue a new acknowledgment agenda, on that is more inclusive and less based on national imperatives and Western epistemologies of race, history, empiricism, and science. The most accepted scholarly position, which has been called the ‘liberal-inclusive’ model for identifying tribes and Indian individuals, implies that the vast majority of unrecognized Indian groups and individuals are worthy of acknowledgment. This acknowledgment is not forthcoming, they say, due to a host of factors, including federal neglect, inadequate Euro-American recordkeeping, racism, and opposition from established tribes. Scholars who take this position find it shameful that marginal, unacknowledged aboriginal peoples are languishing today. Certain individuals within this loosely defined ideological school argue that officials should rely not on the current restrictive policy, but upon self-identification, community acceptance, and state recognition.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“Confusing the matter is the fact that there are three often-conflicting definitions at play: American Indians are the only people defined as an ethnic group, a racial group, and by reference to membership in a recognized tribe (politically). Many individuals do not comprehend the distinctions. Because of the confusion, the Five Tribes and others came to demand citizenship in a federally recognized tribe as the gold standard for Indian identification.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment

“There are 566 Indian tribes, bands, and Alaska Native villages recognized by the BIA, and no one could be expected to know the name of every one.”
― Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment