{"id":56775,"date":"2018-08-21T03:27:47","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T03:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56775"},"modified":"2018-08-22T03:38:16","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T03:38:16","slug":"what-makes-someone-native-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56775","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Someone Native American?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Makes Someone Native American?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post Magazine<\/a>
\n2018-08-20<\/p>\n

Story by Lisa Rab<\/strong><\/a>
\nPhotos by Travis Dove<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nBrittany Hunt (Travis Dove<\/em>)<\/small><\/p>\n

One tribe\u2019s long struggle for full recognition<\/em><\/p>\n

In March 2012, Heather McMillan Nakai wrote a letter to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs<\/a> asking the agency to verify that she was Indian. She was seeking a job at the Indian Health Service<\/a> and wanted to apply with \u201cIndian preference.\u201d Nakai knew this might be difficult: As far as she was aware, no one from her North Carolina<\/a> tribe \u2014 the Lumbee<\/a> \u2014 had ever been granted such preference.<\/p>\n

Her birth certificate says she\u2019s Indian, as did her first driver\u2019s license. Both of her parents were required to attend segregated tribal schools in the 1950s and \u201960s. In Nakai\u2019s hometown in Robeson County, N.C.<\/a>, strangers can look at the dark ringlets in her hair, hear her speak and watch her eyes widen when she\u2019s indignant, and know exactly who her mother and father are. \u201cWho\u2019s your people?\u201d is a common question in Robeson, allowing locals to pinpoint their place among the generations of Lumbee who have lived in the area for nearly 300 years.<\/p>\n

Yet in the eyes of the BIA, the Lumbee have never been Indian enough. Responding to Nakai the following month, tribal government specialist Chandra Joseph informed her that the Lumbee were not a federally recognized tribe and therefore couldn\u2019t receive any federal benefits, including \u201cIndian preference.\u201d Invoking a 1956 law concerning the status of the Lumbee, Joseph wrote: \u201cThe Lumbee Act precludes the Bureau from extending any benefits to the Indians of Robeson and adjoining counties.\u201d She enclosed a pamphlet titled \u201cGuide to Tracing Indian Ancestry.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…In the Jim Crow<\/a> South, white ancestry was acceptable for indigenous people, but black blood was not. When the United States was dividing up reservations and providing land \u201callotments\u201d to Indians, a government commission told the Mississippi<\/a> Choctaw<\/a> that \u201cwhere any person held a strain of Negro blood, the servile blood contaminated and polluted the Indian blood.\u201d Many Native Americans internalized these racial politics and adopted them as a means of survival. After North Carolina established a separate school system for Indians in Robeson County in the late 1880s, some Lumbees fought to exclude a child whose mother was Indian and whose father was black.<\/p>\n

In their segregated corner of North Carolina, Lumbees enjoyed more power and privileges than their black neighbors, but this was not the case for Native Americans in every state. In Virginia<\/a> in the 1920s, Indians were required to classify themselves as \u201ccolored,\u201d whereas Oklahoma<\/a> considered Indians to be white \u2014 prompting Creek Indians<\/a> to reject tribal members with black ancestry…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One tribe\u2019s long struggle for full recognition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,3015,26,20],"tags":[28927,17795,28928,28930,28929,28933,28926,28932,28931,11016,28925,877,1616,8533,28937,879,10628,2875,27606,28924,2581,27607],"class_list":["post-56775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-politics","category-usa","tag-bia","tag-brittany-hunt","tag-bureau-of-indian-affairs","tag-carl-seltzer","tag-chandra-joseph","tag-harvey-godwin-jr","tag-heather-mcmillan-nakai","tag-hilary-tompkins","tag-kerigahn-jacobs","tag-kim-tallbear","tag-lisa-rab","tag-lumbee","tag-malinda-maynor-lowery","tag-mark-miller","tag-mary-ann-jacobs","tag-north-carolina","tag-robeson-county","tag-the-washington-post","tag-the-washington-post-magazine","tag-travis-dove","tag-washington-post","tag-washington-post-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56791,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56775\/revisions\/56791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}