In the past I’ve been critical of Jack Hitt’s writing for the NY Times about language and culture, but his recent magazine article about recently recognized Native American tribes is quite good:

Ethnicity is a tricky thing because it is commonly understood as something fixed and essential rather than what it more likely is: an unarticulated negotiation between what you call yourself and what other people are willing to call you back. Geniusz has lived her life culturally among the Ojibwe and is recognized by them as an Indian. Her easy comfort at calling herself an Indian comes in part because everyone in her area recognizes the essential Indian life she has led. Her physically European features are, in this part of Michigan at least, understood as only marginally curious.

The way the ethnic negotiation works depends on what part of the country you are located in. Native Americans recognize that there exists a kind of spectrum. At one end there are Indians living on a well-established Western reservation in a tribe that is branded as seriously authentic — Hopi, say — where many in the tribe retain the classic Indian physical characteristics. Moving along, you encounter various tribes that have intermarried a lot — like the Ojibwe — yet whose members still feel a powerful sense of authenticity. But once you visit tribes of newcomers, where few members knew their Indian ancestors personally, you begin to sense a clawing anxiety of identity. At the far end are hobbyists, those Indian groupies who hang around powwows, hoping to find a native branch in their family tree. They enjoy wearing the traditional tribal garb and are, as the University of Michigan history professor Philip Deloria titled his book, ”Playing Indian.”

Hitt is careful to point out that the whitening of the Native American population was actively promoted by U.S. government policies:

Some Native Americans carry what is called, awkwardly, a white card, officially known as a C.D.I.B., a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This card certifies a Native American’s ”blood quantum” and can be issued only after a tribe has been cleared by a federal subagency.

The practice of measuring Indian blood dates to the period just after the Civil War when the American government decided to shift its genocide policy against the Indians from elimination at gunpoint to the gentler idea of breeding them out of existence. It wasn’t a new plan. Regarding Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote that ”the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” When this idea was pursued bureaucratically under President Ulysses S. Grant, Americans were introduced to such phrases as ”half breed” and ”full blood” as scientific terms. In a diabolical stroke, the government granted more rewards and privileges the less Indian you were. For instance, when reservation lands were being broken up into individual land grants, full-blooded Indians were ruled ”incompetent” because they didn’t have enough civilized blood in them and their lands were administered for them by proxy agents. On the other hand, the land was given outright to Indians who were half white or three-quarters white. Here was the long-term catch: as Indians married among whites and gained more privileges, their blood fraction would get smaller, so that in time Indians would reproduce themselves out of existence.

Compounding this federal reward for intermarriage was the generally amicable tradition most tribes had of welcoming in outsiders. From the earliest days of European settlement, whites were amicably embraced by Indian tribes. For instance, the leader of the Cherokee Nation during the forced exile of 1838-39 — the Trail of Tears — was John Ross, often described as being seven-eighths Scottish.

Because phenotypic markers of Indianess are so hard to find among some of the newcomers (who seem to have tremendous anxiety about their own whiteness), language has become a crucial marker of authenticity:

Because it is time-consuming and difficult to learn any language, the commitment it takes to attend one of Wendy Geniusz’s camps or to sign on with Fielding’s work or to participate in any of the widespread Native American language revivals weeds out the easy hobbyists and leaves a cohort of Indians whose authenticity — regardless of genealogy or blood quantum — may one day be hard to question.

Finally, it is also interesting to learn about the various levels of of official recognition that are available for Native American tribes:

The Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama is, according to the University of Oklahoma anthropologist Circe Sturm, one of more than 65 state-recognized tribes, most of which have emerged in the last few decades in the Southeast. State recognition is merely one of many legal mechanisms used to legitimate a Native American tribe. They range from the most difficult — federal recognition, which is required for running a casino — to state and local designations and on to unrecognized groups. (The Cherokees alone account for more than 200 of these recently formed unaffiliated tribes.)

And no, it is isn’t about cashing in on casino money, very few of these new groups qualify for casinos, and those who do are very restrictive about who can be a member.

The only quibble I have with the article is the implication that academics used to treat ethnicity as some kind of a fixed quantity but now recognize it as more mutable and negotiated. Anthropologists have understood the mutable nature of ethnic identity at least as far back as Boas. And, although it falls outside the scope of the article, if I were teaching this topic in a class I would want to point out how in South Africa or Brazil the links between race and ethnicity are conceived of quite differently than they are in the United States.