Tribal Citizenship: A Primer

I was recently struck by a conversation I had with a Dartmouth professor. When the subject of my favorite Presidential candidate came up, this professor, told me that Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test was, in effect, exculpatory because it proved that she had Native American heritage. Such a claim is laughable for two reasons; firstly, because the Indian DNA which ancestry sites like 23AndMe is, to the best of my understanding, limited to only a few tribes and individuals and not reflective of the genetic diversity of Native peoples as a whole. Secondly, her claim that the results of Warren’s DNA test somehow proved that the Senator was justified in purporting to be of Indian heritage throughout her career ignores the process by which tribes determine their own citizenship-and, by extension, who gets to justifiably claim Indian ancestry.

Every federally recognized tribe in the United States has the ability to set its own requirements for tribal membership; some tribes require a certain blood quantum (i.e., the fraction of one’s ancestors, out of their total ancestors, documented as being of full Indian blood), while others require members to prove direct descendance from tribal members listed on historical tribal rolls or censuses. For example, my tribe, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) determines citizenship based on direct descent from tribal members appearing on the 1870 Census Roll of the town of Gay Head, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The ability of tribes to determine their own requirements for membership has been recognized by the Supreme Court, most notably in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978), in which the Court ruled that the Santa Clara Pueblo, based in New Mexico, was not in violation of the Indian Civil Rights Act when it denied tribal citizenship to the children of a female tribal member who had married outside the tribe. In its ruling, the court weakened the Indian Civil Rights Act, an example of Johnson-era overreach at is finest, which in effect sought to make self-governing Indian tribes compliant with the Constitution, thus limiting their ability to in fact be self-governing. Additionally, the Court ruled that the Santa Clara were exempt from federal enforcement in regards to their internal affairs, further strengthening the tribal self-determination set forth first by the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1932 and boosted by the Nixon administration in the 1970s. In spite of her claims of Indian ancestry, Senator Warren has never specified which tribe she purports to be descended from (as an Oklahoman, she has a number of tribes from which to claim extraction), which indicates little to no connection to any tribal culture. While culture is by no means a determining factor in granting tribal citizenship, for her to claim Indian ancestry based purely on family conjecture demonstrates a lack of even basic knowledge of tribal citizenship policies and how it relates to one’s ability to self-identify as Indian. While not all Native people can claim membership in a tribe-either due to a lack of sufficient blood quantum to be able to enroll with one tribe in spite of a high degree of Indian ancestry overall, a tribe choosing to disenroll members in an attempt to restrict its membership requirements, or a host of other factors, Native people who are not enrolled are generally able to pinpoint a tribe from which they descend and which they have a degree of familial connection outside of family legends. Oklahoma is filled with tribes which do not have a particularly high standards for enrollment (the current principal chief of the Cherokee nation, Bill John Baker, is only 1/32 Cherokee), so for Warren to be so non-committal about what tribe she in fact descends from