Native tribal membership rules co-construct race with gender and settler logics

Evidence

An example of co-creation comes from the changing standards used in determining Native tribal membership and identity. Native American identity has been determined differently during the history of settler colonialism in the Americas. Self-identification on the census, externallyimposed standards like blood quantum that renders anyone with mixed white and the requisite amount of Native ancestry a Native, and internal tribal recognition or non-recognition, are all means by which the question has been settled. And some tribes refuse to recognize African and Native descended peoples as Native, resulting in the denial of tribal membership. In Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, the tribe decided to exclude the Ms. Martinez’s daughter from inclusion in the tribe because she married a Navajo man. Male members of the tribe were not similarly excluded. Ms. Martinez and her daughter sued but lost. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 84

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s MOC thread: Native identity is anchored by a territorial/homeland and membership claim yet still fragments (blood quantum, Blackness negation, gendered exclusion) — a strong comparison case for whether American Islam’s fragmentation blocks inversion. — connects to: Identities co-create each other so no category has analytic priority — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 83; If race is social, race is an amalgam of practices, not proxies like phenotype — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 89; Tribes can exclude members on gendered marriage lines (+3 more)
• SHARE: The detail that admixture of whiteness does not negate Native identity but Blackness does is a sharp finding about how race mixing is read differently across racial lines.

Broader Connections

• Race and gender interlock as socially constructed relational categories #corroborates (0.85) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 136
• Colonial law deliberately constructed race as a caste system of power #expands (0.78) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 213