Blood Money and Biogeographical Ancestry

I'm posting this link for I, who is teaching an American Literature and Culture course that focuses on issues of race and nativism in 1920s American fiction. Her class just finished Willa Cather's The Professor's House, which deals with, among other things, the ideological appeal that a vanishing race, namely, the ostensibly authentic indigenous Indian or Native American culture that had disappeared, held during an era in which immigration became a particularly contentious issue.

The article demonstrates that notions of racial purity still inflect debates about American Indians. It describes how black Indians who have been denied tribal citizenship by one of the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation, are turning to science in order to establish their claims to a tribal identity. The whole scenario offers yet another example of the detrimental effects of conflating racial and cultural identities. Or, as Walter Benn Michaels might put it, in American discourse appeals to cultural identity have displaced or replaced appeals to racial identity. But don't be fooled: the logic of exclusion tends to work more or less the same when it comes to defining people according to racial or cultural critera that posit some allegedly authetnic norm.

The black Indians, are descendents of former slaves of the Cherokees. These slaves gained their independence in 1866 and most of the Freedmen were assimilated into the tribes without many problems. That changed in the 1980s with the passage of legislation authorizing tribes to construct, you guessed it, casinos on Indian reservations. The prospect of sharing in casino profits and government reparations paid to some tribes for the seizure of their lands has resulted in an enormous increase in people claiming Indian ancestry in the past couple decades. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some tribes are denying citizenship to people who are direct descendents of Indians.

How this will all play out remains unclear. The Bush administration has sided with the Indian tribes against the black Indians, claiming that the government has no mandate to meddle in Indian affairs. (Anyone else wonder why Bush Sr.'s administration didn't take that position with regard to the use of peyote in tribal ceremonies?) The Supreme Court has tended to agree.

However companies are marketing DNA test kits, which cost from about $100 to $300, that provide users with their genetic profile. While this information can't establish whether a person's ancestors belonged to a particular Indian tribe, it can indicate their "biogeographical ancestry" based on what percentage of their genes come from where.

For details, read Brendan I. Koerner's Wired article, Blood Feud.

Editorial note: It's great to see Wired, a magazine whose quality fluctuates, publishing more than celebrity profiles of tech investors and entrepreneurs or hype about new high-tech gadgets targeted at status-conscious hipsters.