REGIONAL- Since the 1800s, federal and state laws have legally defined Native Americans in fractions of “Indian blood” – one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth, and so on – to determine their membership in tribes.
Last week, members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (MCT) soundly rejected that system in a nonbinding referendum that set in motion a series of events that could lead to changing the membership requirements for six member Ojibwe bands and reverse a projected decline that threatens their future existence.
The six-nation MCT includes the Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, Mille Lacs, Grand Portage, White Earth, and Leech Lake Bands, and the constitution drawn up and prescribed for them by the U.S. government decades ago dictates that someone must have 25-percent Indian blood, called blood quantum, to be a member of any individual band.
The referendum ballot, sent out to about 32,500 eligible MCT voters, asked members to vote on two questions. The first, to remove the blood quantum requirement from the constitution, passed with 64 percent of the vote. Voters also approved, with 57 percent of the vote, a provision to let individual bands determine their own enrollment requirements.
“The vote was higher than any other secretarial (constitutional) election and higher than any other vote that we had for office for our regular elections,” MCT Executive Director Gary Frazier said.
But the vote had a second purpose, which was to update the addresses of tribe members, as about half of MCT’s enrolled members live outside of Minnesota.
“We sent out just over 32,000 ballots and over 8,000 came back undeliverable,” Frazier said. “We got about 2,200 updated addresses and sent them out again and we got about 500 to 600 back. We did correct about 1,500 addresses, but there’s still 6,500 people that we don’t know how to contact.”
Those numbers are critical to consider as the process moves forward. A secretarial election, so called because the Secretary of the Department of the Interior has the final say in approving changes to tribal constitutions, has a minimum threshold of 30-percent participation of eligible voters, and the turnout for the referendum didn’t reach that.
“It’s a challenge right now. How are we going to count them as a threshold when we can’t even reach them to tell them we’re having an election? We’re going to have to talk about that,” Frazier said.
Still, Frazier is optimistic that they will reach the threshold when the time comes.
“I really think there will be a lot of people who will vote,” he said. “I’m thinking we’ll be pushing 7,000, and we can get another 500 over that.”
Before another vote, however, there are a number of things that have to happen, Frazier said.
First, the constitutional committee that has been working on the issue will bring it forward to the MCT Tribal Executive Committee at its next meeting in October. If the group decides to move forward, then MCT has to craft the language for the changes they want and send that to the Interior Secretary for approval, who can also make changes to the language. If the final draft is acceptable to the Executive Committee, then the election has to take place within 90 days.
Halting decline
Before Europeans came to the Americas, there was no such thing as blood quantum. Indigenous tribes defined themselves in a variety of ways, from lineal descent to social, cultural, and territorial definitions. Some tribes granted tribal citizenship to those who married or were adopted into tribes. It was only after colonization and the founding of the country that Native peoples began to be defined by the particular level of Indian blood that they had.
However, such definitions have the long-term effect of reducing tribal membership. As one expert, Maya Harmon, wrote in 2021 in the California Law Review, “The government hoped that using blood quantum wound eventually eliminate Native peoples, that intermarriage would ‘dilute’ the amount of ‘Indian blood’ in the population, causing descendants of Native peoples to become indistinguishable from the rest of the population.”
While far from being eliminated at present, if MCT were to continue with its current enrollment criteria of one-quarter blood quantum, the devastating effect would be in line with the trend asserted by Harmon and others, according to a study conducted in 2014 by Wilder Research.
Utilizing 2013 membership as a base and projecting out to the year 2098, MCT membership would fall from 41,410 to only 8,893, a drop of nearly 80 percent. As an example of the effect on a single band, Bois Forte would see its 2013 membership of 3,375 fall to only 1,109.
Under two other scenarios, keeping the 25-percent blood quantum requirement but broadening who it applies to, tribal membership would drop anywhere from half to 75 percent of 2013 numbers.
Membership would remain stable throughout the modeled time period if the blood quantum requirement was changed to one-eighth.
Under the most liberal scenario, in which blood quantum was eliminated entirely and enrollment criteria changed to demonstrating lineal descent based on the MCT 1941 base roll of members, the numbers would skyrocket in the other direction, reaching between 122,000 to 205,000 by the year 2100.
The study reflects what could happen under certain scenarios, but the possible combinations of enrollment criteria are far greater.
Some argue that expanding membership would stretch already scarce resources for housing and other services. Others are concerned that regular payments from casino revenues that some bands distribute to members, known as per-capita payments, could be reduced if membership grows.
On the other side, proponents of eliminating blood quantum say that it will strengthen families and communities by allowing traditions and culture to be passed on to the children. Blood quantum works against that when parents have children who are below the 25-percent threshold and don’t qualify for membership.
For now, though, it’s one step at a time. MCT Tribal President Cathy Chavers told MPR News that the tribe’s 12-member Executive Committee will decide what step comes next at its October meeting.
“For many years enrollment has been on the table. And nothing’s really been done,” Chavers said. “I think we’re on the right track.”