Full Blood, Mixed Blood, Generic, and Ersatz: The Problem of Indian Identity

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-11-23 22:37Z by Steven

Full Blood, Mixed Blood, Generic, and Ersatz: The Problem of Indian Identity

Arizona and the West
Volume 27, Number 4 (Winter, 1985)
pages 309-326

William T. Hagan, Professor Emeritus of History
State University of New York, Fredonia
University of Oklahoma

One of the most perplexing problems confronting American Indians today is that of identity. Who is an American Indian? The question is raised in a bewildering variety of situations. Contingent on its resolution can be the recognition of a group by the federal government, voting rights in a multimillion-dollar Alaskan corporation, or acceptance of an individual as a member of a pueblo’s tightly knit society. Nor is this a question which has arisen only recently. It has been a problem for individuals, tribes, and government administrators since the birth of this nation.

Four centuries to the year after Christopher Columbus began the semantic confusion over how to label the original inhabitants of this hemisphere, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan spoke to a more important issue. He devoted six pages of his 1892 annual report to the question: What is an Indian? “One would have supposed,” observed Morgan, “that this question would have been considered a hundred years ago and had been adjudicated long before this.” “Singularly enough, however,” he continued, “it has remained in abeyance, and the Government has gone on legislating and administering law without carefully discriminating as to those over whom it has a right to exercise such control.”…

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