To the Editor:
In order to be truly sovereign a tribe must define for itself what
criteria to use for it's membership. Nations do not decide for
other Nations what the content for their membership criteria
should be. Only the colonized have their membership criteria
decided for them by a outside power. Recently I was reading
an article called A Closer Look At Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez:
Membership By Sex, By Race, And By Tribal Tradition by
Lucy A. Curry published in the Wisconsin Women's Law
Journal and on page 190 it says,"However entrenched in
ideologies was the subordination of races during colonization,
"racial lines were neither consistently nor sharply delineated
among or within all social groups." "The social meanings and
legal entitlements that were breathed into racial identity in the
race trials of the nineteenth-century South provide a context
in which to illuminate the similarities between the ways in which
Anglo-American whites have historically tried to preserve their
racial purity and privilege and the ways in which Congress has
and still does establish criteria for the requisite "Indian-ness."
On page 162 Curry says,"Accounting for the ancestry and
blood quantum of an individual to define one's identity has a
long, disastrous history in U.S. law. While it is unclear when
the importance of blood quantum gained acceptance among
certain Indian tribes, the federal government has pressed for
its use as an organizational tool since the General Allotment
Act of 1887." Curry goes on to say on page 194,"The legislative
obsession with ancestry marked the beginning of the statutory
regime of blood quantum, whereby "Indian" status was codified
as a racial identity, not a political identity." The Blackfeet people
as a whole should decide what criteria they want to use for
Enrollment. I believe the Blackfeet Enrollment Amendment
Reform (BEAR) Petition gives our people a chance to do this
and I encourage all Enrolled Blackfeet to sign it.
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