The Newest Indians by Jack Hitt in The New York Times Magazine touches on those who’ve recently discovered their Indian blood and the reaction in Indian country, as well as the concept of ethnicity in America. An excerpt:
How much easier (though scarier) life might be if we all got ethnic identification cards so that when encountering a very light-skinned person claiming to be black, you could reply, ”O.K., show me your federal identification card guaranteeing the proper amount of African blood to qualify you as an African-American.” Here’s the thing: you could ask an Indian that question. Some Native Americans carry what is called, awkwardly, a white card, officially known as a C.D.I.B., a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This card certifies a Native American’s ”blood quantum” and can be issued only after a tribe has been cleared by a federal subagency.
The practice of measuring Indian blood dates to the period just after the Civil War when the American government decided to shift its genocide policy against the Indians from elimination at gunpoint to the gentler idea of breeding them out of existence. It wasn’t a new plan. Regarding Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote that ”the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” When this idea was pursued bureaucratically under President Ulysses S. Grant, Americans were introduced to such phrases as ”half breed” and ”full blood” as scientific terms. In a diabolical stroke, the government granted more rewards and privileges the less Indian you were. For instance, when reservation lands were being broken up into individual land grants, full-blooded Indians were ruled ”incompetent” because they didn’t have enough civilized blood in them and their lands were administered for them by proxy agents. On the other hand, the land was given outright to Indians who were half white or three-quarters white. Here was the long-term catch: as Indians married among whites and gained more privileges, their blood fraction would get smaller, so that in time Indians would reproduce themselves out of existence.