A reader writes:
The example you quoted from Dave Baldridge doesn't even begin to relate how controversial blood lineage has become, and not just to the federal government. My father is a card-carrying member (really – he has a membership card) of the Quechan tribe in Yuma, Arizona. He was born and raised on the reservation before his father moved their family to Los Angeles in the '60s. His father (my grandfather) had 3/4 Native blood, making my father 3/8ths and me 3/16ths. The reason I lay all that out is to frame the controversy just in my family. Sometime in the 1970s our tribe instituted a blood requirement for membership.
You had to be at least 1/4 Quechan in order to be permitted membership, which means not only those benefits provided by the federal government but also ownership of a portion of tribal lands, a share in gaming profits (visit the Quechan Paradise Casino on the California/Arizona border if you're stranded in that desert sometime), and all other benefits arranged by the tribe. I have dozens of cousins – both on the reservation and off – who share the same blood as mine but are official, card-carrying members of our tribe because they were born before the cut-off date. As you can probably tell from the way I've laid this out, I was born after the cut-off.
The sad thing about the whole situation is that blood requirements were an invention of the white man – specifically the Bureau of Indian Affairs – that was sure to lead to our eventual breeding out. And now many tribes have adopted the practice in order to limit tribal rolls and concentrate existing members' shares of gaming revenues and other resources (land chief among them).
Garance Franke-Ruta wrote about "blood quantums," as they're known, earlier this year.
The Dish 