The Marshall Trilogy

A dialog on the Ind-Net list, November 1995

Hello everyone!

In a number of discussions on ethnic identity I have made mention of the Marshall Triology or foundation cases of Federal Indian Law as being a source of the Euroamerican political, cultural, and biological definitions of Native American ethnicity. This would seem to coincide with the administrative, mystical, and blood quantum definitions identified by Matthew Snipp. Of course I am being pressed for sources which are less cumbersome to read than Supreme Court decisions, yet still provide similar arguments. Other than one article in the Michgian Law Review, I am not aware of readable materials on this subject. Would someone care to enlighten me with some citations on this issue? I would be especially appreciative of documentation of historical definitions of Native American ethnicity as understood by Natives.

Richard

Could not reply to you personally, as you did not leave your e-mail address, but there is a brand-new and slim anthology on the Cherokee Trilogy--Jill Norgren, _The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics_ McGraw-Hill, 1995. I literally received it in the mail this week, so I cannot attest to is goodness.

Blood quantum is more elusive. Perhaps the best tribal study done to date, which address the attempt to quantify the Anishinaabeg (or Ojibway) in Minnesota at White Earth Reservation is Melissa Meyer, _The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920_ Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Hope this helps.

--Kathryn Abbott kabbott@history.umass.edu

The original message in this thread asked for Native understanding of ethnicity as well as legal cites.

I have been told by two pretty traditional Cherokee elders, one since deceased, two completely different things. Because it is my practice to listen and not to cross-examine, I can only report what I was told.

One elder said: One drop of Cherokee blood makes a Cherokee.

Another said: A child born to a Cherokee father and a white mother is not Cherokee.

The three federally recognized Cherokee bands all have different views of blood quantum and Cherokee individuals do, too.

This is not anything I have stayed up at night pondering. I usually just ask, in the words of the old United Mine Workers' song, Which side are you on?

Steve Russell

>One elder said: One drop of Cherokee blood makes a Cherokee.
>
>Another said: A child born to a Cherokee father and a white mother is >not Cherokee.
>
>The three federally recognized Cherokee bands all have different views of
>blood quantum and Cherokee individuals do, too.

This is an excellent example of the ways that identity concepts/definitions shift, according to personal perspective and historical exigencies. I would say that this shifting is a natural part of indentity politics.

The law, on the other hand, often pretends that an abstract, absolute identity is posssible and may enforce such a definition. That's why blood quantum, with its aura of genetic certainty, arises within and is useful to the law.

Keep in mind that when law needed to keep black people as property, black blood became almost infinitely fractionable while retaining its defining power: octoroons and demi-octoroons, etc. were still black and therefore still property.

On the other hand, law has been concerned to minimize property rights of red people. Thus, red blood very quickly thins out to nothing, so that a half-breed is already half non-Indian and less than one-quarter is typically defined as wholly non-Indian for legal (property owning) purposes.

Peter d'Errico
derrico@legal.umass.edu
Legal Studies Department
voice: 413-545-2003
University of Massachusetts, USA 01003
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WWW pages: http://hanksville.phast.umass.edu:80/~native/pde/