Not-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneity
What is Indigeneity—race or sovereignty? On the one hand, the racialization of Native Americans might refer to the process in which Native Americans are disembodied and abstracted into violent tropes so they can fit into the settler colonialist project that is the United States. As O’Brien writes, historical narration in the United States has argued that “Indians could only be ancient, and refusal to behave as such rendered Indians inauthentic in their minds” (xxii). Whether it invokes tropes of the "Vanishing Indian" or “Extinct Indian,” settler colonialism endeavors to freeze racialized Native Americans to both allotted land and historical past for its own timeline to march forward. On the other hand, sovereignty, as explained by many Indigenous scholars such as Simpsons and Barker, offers a method of re-animating the Indian Nation from fixed racial categories by calling attention to the many practices around land, self-determination, entanglement, and cultural knowledge. Sovereignty then ruptures the static order of settler colonialism to reintroduce Indigeneity as an always unfolding process, that not only exists on but also opens up a multiplicity of temporalities.
To explore both ideological constructions and animate possibilities of Indigeneity, this digital exhibit centers on the embroilment between Native American identity and blood quantum. Scholars of Native American Indigenous Studies (NAIS) have long discussed blood quantum because of the way it signifies early efforts by the United States to racialize Native Americans as well as contemporary discussions about tribal belonging and authenticity. My project approaches blood quantum as a particularly slippery metaphor that can act as anything from colonial tool to method and critique. As Tallbear writes, blood quantum “emerged as a tool for the state and for science to categorize and trade in human bodies and body parts” (48). And yet, as many scholars have written about, tribes today continue to use blood quantum to determine membership and fight ethnocide. Blood quantum as metaphor is “slippery” because it can index both a static colonial order and entangled sovereignty, shared identity and denial of relationship, racial contamination and racial purity. Blood quantum begins as both a scientific and mathematical question: who belongs? At the same time, blood quantum articulates the impossibility of true belonging and authenticity under settler colonialism.
This exhibit begins with the Dawes Act, as one of the first of the United States’ experimentation with consigning Native Americans to land allotment. The Dawes Act of 1887 marks a particular phase nation-state building from absorbing Indigenous peoples, land, and resources into the US body politic to rewriting what it means to be Indigenous. In other words, the Dawes Act signifies a particular colonial calculus that both continues and complicates US endeavor to “secure a labor supply…and seize Indian lands on the basis of Indian ‘disappearance’” (xxii, O’Brien). In particular, I will discuss how time under settle colonialism hardens through a colonial logic that works recursively, always keeping Native Americans within an impossible bind. To put another way, that colonial logic works recursively is key to understanding how settler colonialism is not only an ongoing process (as opposed to event) but also must repeatedly abstract Indigeneity away from the situated nature of experience to fixed racial tropes and genetic information. That said, this digital exhibit hopes to argue that paradigms of representation and identity cannot understand the particular racialization of and the demand for sovereignty by Native Americans. Paradigms of representation and identity both assume and require a stabil(ized) category of Indigeneity, they can neither map out the dizzying illogic of blood quantum and land allotment nor imagine Indigenous resistance. Thus, this digital exhibit will turn to readings of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” by E. Pauline Johnson and Carlos Montezuma’s newsletter as critiques of epistemic paradigms.