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Blood quantum laws or Indian blood laws are laws that define Native Americans in the United States status by fractions of Native American ancestry. These laws were enacted by the federal government and state governments as a way to establish legally defined racial population groups .
For decades in his writings, Churchill has argued that blood quantum laws have an inherent genocidal purpose. He says: "Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it [has] and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence".
While federally recognized tribes have for some time had the authority to establish their membership rules, some United States laws and policies regarding financial services provided to recognized Native Americans are based on blood quantum. The book's title comes from a quote attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer who developed the ...
In his 1935 Memorandum to John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Assistant Solicitor, Felix S. Cohen, discussed the rights of a group of non-tribal Indians under the Indian Reorganization Act. This Act defined a person as Indian based on three criteria, tribal membership, ancestral descent, or blood quantum.
The system was further codified by the federal government in acts such as the 1887 Dawes Act and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. [7] [10] Blood quantum levels for Native Americans can be recorded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who issue Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood to individuals that are used in tribal recognition. [7] [10]
The federal government initially viewed the Dawes Act as such a successful democratic experiment that they decided to further explore the use of blood-quantum laws and the notion of federal recognition as the qualifying means for "dispensing other resources and services such as health care and educational funding" to Native Americans long after ...
Some tribes have a blood quantum requirement for citizenship. Others use other methods, such as lineal descent.While almost two-thirds of all federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States require a certain blood quantum for citizenship, [15] tribal nations are sovereign nations, with a government to government relationship with the United States, and set their own enrollment criteria.
While many US states historically categorized a person as Black if they had even one Black ancestor (the "one drop rule"), Native Americans have been required to meet high blood quantum requirements. For example, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 only recognized Native people with "one half or more Indian blood". It can sometimes be ...