Early Indigenous Literatures

The Dawes Act and story of blood quantum

The Dawes Act, also known as “Great Allotment Act of 1887”) was approved on February 8, 1887. Tallbear writes a succinct and helpful explanation of the act in Native American DNA: “Dawes Act “divided communally owned reservation land into individual 160-acre, 80-acre, and 40-acre allotments. But before commonly held Native American lands could be distributed, lists of ‘tribe members’ had to be constructed. Although the Dawes Act specified no criteria by which formal lists of Indians should be compiled, it noted that land should be allotted according to ‘belonging’ or to ‘tribal relations.’ After rolls of Indians were determined, parcels of land were then allotted to individual Indians depending on their status respectively as a head of family, as an unmarried adult, or as a minor” (56). Following two decades during which US federal lawmakers eliminated treaty making and forced assimilation by boarding school system, Western laws, and Christian missionary work, the Dawes Act marks the emergence of Native American “tribe,” “tribal membership,” and base rolls in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, the Dawes Act created the concept of membership without offering a method of determine it. The social and policy sciences then required the “semiotic and bureaucratic object” of blood quantum that could be applied retroactively to land allotment (54). As Tallbear writes, “tying blood quantum to land tenure aided the project of dispossessing Indians from their land” (56). Somewhat unwittingly, the metaphorical power of blood has endured even outside land policy towards the “management of racialized bodies” as well as “our vocabularies of self, inheritance, and destiny” (45). 

One can easily find a narrativization of the Dawes Act on the official website created by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In its self-introduction page entitled "What is the National Archives and Records Administration?" NARA states that "of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.” The Dawes Act is placed under a webpage entitled “Milestone Documents,” which can be found at the bottom of the homepage for “America’s Founding Documents.” The “Milestone Documents” first presents an interactive timeline that is peppered with dots throughout—each dot leads to a primary document that “highlights a pivotal moment in the course of American history and government.” Its timeline stretches from 1766 to 1978, of which the audience can scroll through and experience the passage of time in linear fashion. Otherwise, the audience can move through time document by document, animating the romantic notion of “they are kept by us forever.” The “Milestone Documents” also organizes American history into six chapters. The Dawes Act is categorized under a period called “The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900),” preceded by “Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)” and followed by “The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930).” “The Development of the Industrial United States” includes five other documents: Thomas Edison’s Patent Application for the Light Bulb (1880), Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Pendleton Act of 1883, Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Each document that has been placed in this category neatly maps out the body politic. Emerging from the Civil War, “The Development of the Industrial United States” meaningfully begins with a lightbulb that, according to the National Archives, “paves the way for the universal domestic use of electric light.” Edison’s lightbulb signifies both a turn away from past domestic turmoil and places United States at the center of international industrial power (the light of the world, if you will). At the same time, the lightbulb is a transformative addition to the home and domestic sphere that both must be protected and stands in for the larger patriarchal “household,” the nation-state. Such logic might easily be reversed as well and construct the home as a minor settler colonial state. But who gets to be members of the household? In developing the industrialized body, the United States had to free himself from both nature and uncivilized bodies. The Interstate Commerce Act at this time spurred the railroad industry, the first industry in fact to be subject to federal regulation, drawling limbs and infrastructure to create the fabric of unity. At the same time, the nation developed its first significant anti-immigration law that resolutely declared “the coming of Chinese laborer to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory” (Chinese Exclusion Act). The Dawes Act also coincides with when the US federal government was “ramping up its assimilation campaign” in the late 19th and early 20th century (216, Wilkins and Wilkins). “Ramping up” meant that government was searching for particularly cost-efficient methods to both “fulfill its constitutionally obligated treaty commitments to Tribal Nations and its increasing self-imposed policy choices designed to civilize, Americanize, and individualize the propertied Natives” (216). As Wilkins and Wilkins argue, the Dawes Act enacted the assumption that individual land ownership would assimilate Indigenous peoples into both US land base and body politic. The exclusion of Chinese laborers, assimilation of Native peoples, and finally anti-trust laws worked in tandem to create a   capable capitalist body. (The Chinese Exclusion Act defined laborers as “skilled and unskilled…and Chinese employed in mining") A white settler colonialist state then is imagined as healthy capitalism—white workers, the heads of their respective households, could freely compete with one another, unencumbered by the threat of degradation or contamination. 

While blood quantum (race science) was the means to a how (seizure of land), the need for bureaucratic and economic expediency was what drove land allotment forward. As Tallbear writes, “racial ideas were only part of what motivated federal agents…agents were being pressured to quickly complete the allotment process in order to expedite statehood in what had been Indian territories. They required a convenient mechanism to determine which Indians qualified for which type of allotments” (57). To this day, ‘Indian blood’ continues to be privileged in both the American racial imagination and tribal communities. The history of blood quantum—the imposition of it on Native peoples—gets very complicated today when tribes use blood tests (albeit their own system of blood tests) to determine membership. Critics of blood quantum have argued that tribes are now “self-colonizing entities.” At the same time, I have found that Tallbear affords much nuance this debate by arguing that one must consider the enduring conditions of settler colonialism. She writes, “tribal communities sometimes feel they are under assault by people with tenuous or nonexistent connections to their communities yet who want access to cultural knowledge or to cultural sites for personal identity, exploration and sometimes for profit. Such psychic and material longing have prompted some to seek a tribal identity…Monitoring biological connections is bureaucratically difficult and costly enough; the fear is that floodgates would fly open” (60-61). Indeed, blood “is no guarantor of cultural affiliation” (63). And yet, as Tallbear writes, “[Indigenous tribes] use the language of blood and blood fractions while keeping in mind a specific world of policy and while bearing in mind that that language is shorthand for what we know is a far more complicated story of our lineages” (64). In other words, while blood quantum exists, it also simply isn’t the only method out there as well. To extend blanket critiques of Native tribes for using blood quantum is unhelpful at best, and creates impossible mandates for survival at worst, considering the external pressures that persist. For example, Reed Bobroff’s short story, “A Fraction of Love,” shapes its story about dating in Indian country around the blood quantum formula. Against white bourgeois tales of “falling for each other,” “A Fraction of Love” depicts Native people in a double bind of trying to continue communities through marriage amid ongoing settler colonialism. That said, I am interested in how tracing blood quantum over time evades the straightforward story of race science’s ascent. Instead, blood quantum arises out of a series of social, economic, and political contingencies. This is not to downplay the importance of blood quantum itself, though it may allow one to ask: why did blood quantum, in particular, catch on and condition this notion of the Native American race? The story of blood quantum begins with the violence of a forbidding social technique. Over time, however, blood quantum has also offered at story of Indigeneity as it persists, reanimates, and repopulates the present through what Lauren Berlant might call the temporality of “getting by" (759)
 

This page has paths: