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WORK TITLE: The Indian Card
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WEBSITE: https://www.carrielowryschuettpelz.com/
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PERSONAL
Children: two.
EDUCATION:University of Iowa, B.A., 2006; Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, M.P.P., 2009; University of Wisconsin, Madison, M.F.A., 2018.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Advisor, educator, and writer. WBUR (NPR), Boston, MA, production assistant, 2008-09; Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington, DC, policy advisor, 2009-16; University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate lecturer, 2016-18; University of Iowa, Iowa City, faculty lecturer in Department of Rhetoric, 2018-21, associate professor of practice in the School of Planning and Public Affairs (SPPA), 2021–, director of Native Policy Lab, became director of undergraduate studies for SPPA.
AWARDS:Fulbright Scholarship, 2006-07; Cabinet Fellow, European Commission, 2008; Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, 2023, for The Indian Card.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is a policy expert and professor who has brought her perspective as a Native American to her federal and academic work. An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, through a Lumbee grandparent, Schuettpelz grew up in Iowa. As framed by Los Angeles Times contributor Lorraine Berry, “Her family’s trips back to North Carolina brought her into a community of kinship, a permanence tied to a homeland, personal stories that gave her a sense of belonging that contrasted with her family’s isolation.” As a policy advisor in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the administration of President Barack Obama, Schuettpelz focused on Native issues and addressing homelessness. Afterward earning a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she gained a post teaching public policy at the University of Iowa, where she became an assistant professor and has also directed the Native Policy Lab.
Schuettpelz’s attention was captured by the abrupt doubling of people identifying as Native American or Alaskan Indian in the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century—from 4.1 million in 2000 to 9.7 million in 2020—even as official tribal enrollment remained steady. She herself once held her tribal enrollment card in her hand wondering whether to renew a form of “authentication” that had nothing to do with historical Lumbee culture. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is not federally recognized; Schuettpelz herself was not raised in the Lumbee community. Concerning the narrative-in-waiting underlying the census results, Schuettpelz told Scott Detrow for NPR’s All Things Considered: “I thought … I should write something that talks about my own struggles with my Native identity and my feeling of disconnection.”
Schuettpelz made her nonfiction debut with The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America. Dispossession has been a recurring theme in U.S. relations with Native American nations or tribes, as witnessed in the seizing of lands, vicious military campaigns, forging of deceptive treaties, forced marches, confinement in boarding schools, and relocation policies, to name only the broadest strokes of federal actions that collectively amounted to genocide. In parallel with the long series of injustices have been contentions about who qualifies as members of tribes, with early treaties often allotting parcels of land or goods according to tribal populations, and with later remunerations or reparations being reserved for enrolled members. In view of the sums involved, federal authorities have used their one-sided leverage to insist that tribes restrict enrollment to people of certain blood quanta, often one-quarter, or lineages. Schuettpelz’s volume provides salient details in Native history, offers historical reckonings of projects like Indian boarding schools, and profiles individuals whose lives have been irrevocably twisted by U.S. policies. A Meskwaki woman laments that, despite her own full belonging in her tribe, benefits like health care are unavailable to her son because his father is white and the Meskwaki define membership patrilineally. An elderly Native man from Minnesota was effectively severed from his tribe in being abducted at age five, held at Indian Boarding School until age eighteen—despite letters from his family pleading for his return, which he was never shown—and relocated to Cleveland. As for the jump in people claiming Native identity on the census, one cause was a reframing of the question. Based on her reading of Schuettpelz’s book, Berry further elaborated: “Some are members of unrecognized tribes. Some may be embracing unverified family lore, perhaps of a distant Cherokee ancestor. Others might claim a minority identity in the hope of preferential treatment in hiring or college admissions, or for cultural cachet. Whether most of these people descend from pre-Columbian Americans is anyone’s guess.”
About the largely unresolvable census puzzle, Berry noted in her Los Angeles Times review of Schuettpelz’s book, “The most satisfying explanation may lie in the microcosm she generously shares with readers: Unpacking the ways that she knows herself as Lumbee, she establishes the ways her kids will know and be known by her community.” BookPage reviewer Deborah Mason appreciated how Schuettpelz’s “questions are open-ended, and her responses are invitations to further conversations in this powerful and important read.” A Kirkus Reviews writer declared that the “personal and collective stakes for Native peoples are ably set forth” in The Indian Card, which provides a “vivid sense” of the need for fair criteria of tribal belonging. Affirming that Schuettpelz “aptly concludes” that greater Native sovereignty is a “worthy and realizable goal,” the reviewer found in The Indian Card a “clear and frank analysis of the challenges that define Native selfhood.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, November, 2024, Deborah Mason, review of The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2024, review of The Indian Card.
ONLINE
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz website, https://www.carrielowryschuettpelz.com (January 29, 2025).
Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/ (October 18, 2024), Lorraine Berry, review of The Indian Card.
NPR website, https://www.npr.org/ (October 14, 2024), Scott Detrow, “New Book Looks at How the Federal Government Categorizes Native Identity.”
University of Iowa website, https://sppa.uiowa.edu/ (January 29, 2025).
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She spent seven years working as a policy advisor in the Obama Administration, focusing on homelessness and Native policy. In addition to an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark. She currently teaches public policy at the University of Iowa, where she is also the Director of the Native Policy Lab
She was awarded the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2023. Her debut nonfiction book, The Indian Card, is available wherever books are sold.
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
Associate Professor of Practice and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Biography
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is a writer and policy practitioner.
Carrie currently serves as an Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Planning and Public Affairs (SPPA) at the University of Iowa. She is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies for SPPA. Her policy areas of expertise include Tribal policy, homelessness, and affordable housing. As a practitioner, she works with communities across Iowa to create plans to prevent and end homelessness, and develop more sustainable models of affordable housing. She has also undertaken projects with organizations across the country to create more equitable Native policy.
Prior to joining the faculty at Iowa, Carrie was a policy advisor in the Obama Administration, focusing especially on homelessness and Tribal policy. Prior to that, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a Master in Public Policy degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Carrie's debut nonfiction book, The Indian Card, is forthcoming from Flatiron in October 2024. For that project, she was awarded the Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She is represented by Ayesha Pande Literary.
CV:
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz CV Spring 2023
Research areas
Social Policy
Homelessness
Poverty
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient
Author of
The Indian Card (Flatiron, 2024)
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is an Associate Professor in the School of Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Iowa. She holds a Master in Public Policy from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark. She is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
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New book looks at how the federal government categorizes Native identity
October 14, 20245:59 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
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NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Carrie Lowry Schuttepelz about her new book The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native In America.
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SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Writer Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz says that she's always been a data nerd. So when she started writing about Native American identity, that's where she turned.
CARRIE LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: And so I started looking at the Census data, and it's hard to miss the fact that the number of people in this country checking the box for American Indian, Alaska Native has just skyrocketed.
DETROW: That got her thinking about what it means to be Native American in the U.S. and the history of how that came to be. The result is her new book, "The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America." It's the story of how the federal government came to categorize Native identity, things like blood quantum, land allotments and tribal enrollment, policies that she argues have not been great.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: And so I thought, you know, I should write something that talks about my own struggles with my Native identity and my feeling of disconnection.
DETROW: She explores the disconnection through the personal stories of people whose lives have been shaped by these forces and begins with her own story, when she had to consider renewing the card that says she's an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: I remember sitting in my condo in D.C. all those years ago, when I was contemplating renewing my enrollment, just sort of, like, rolling the card over and over in my fingers, thinking, where in the world did this come from? This is not something that my, you know, generations-ago ancestors would have held in their wallet. And so why is it that we do it now?
And so I think all of those things sort of converged into this idea of, I got to do research. I got to figure out the answers to some of these questions. And also, you know, my story is one story, and it's somewhat unique in the sense that my tribe, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, is not federally recognized. And so I thought that it was important to include other voices, not because they represent the entire universe of experience, but they certainly give us a sense of the patterns that we see.
DETROW: There's a lot of your book that's about just the broader idea of community and shared experience and belonging and this particular tension when it comes to Native communities that. for many people, it's not a geographic community. It might not even be a community that's immediately present in their lives. And yet, it is a very important part of community for them.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: The federal government enacted a lot of policies in the 20th century that actually resulted in this sense of disconnection for a lot of Native people today. One of those was relocation, the Relocation Act, where Native people were sent to urban centers that they had never been to and that were far away from their Native communities, and then expected to sort of get a job and create their own community. I mean, there are people who are still suffering from those policies today.
And so the idea of disconnection, the idea of being a long way away from your tribal community is something that I think we're seeing the consequences of today. And to be clear, some people choose to move, and that's fine, too, right? But I think as it relates to sort of these structural policy moments that have created the situation that we find ourselves in today, that's really problematic that now, all of a sudden, we have all of these Native people who have ended up thousands of miles, you know, from their Native community because of policies that the federal government has enacted.
DETROW: I'm wondering if, as we talk about how these decisions made decades ago affect people's lives today, can you tell us about one of the people you met and interviewed?
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: One that has really sort of stuck with me since writing the book was the story of not just my friend, Karen Diver, who was formerly President Obama's senior adviser in Native policy, but her uncle, Don (ph). He's 84 years old. And he was stolen to boarding school at age 5, Indian boarding school, and really didn't return home until he was 18, went straight into the military and then went straight to Cleveland, Ohio, hundreds of miles away from his tribe up in northern Minnesota as part of the...
DETROW: He didn't see his parents for years and years at a time.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: He didn't see his parents for years and years at a time, and then ended up in Cleveland as part of the Indian Relocation Act, and still today lives there. He doesn't feel a lot of connection to his tribe because of all of these policies that have been, you know, forced upon him as a Native person. But what's really interesting about Don and sort of that story is he spent the vast majority of his life - he's 84 - thinking that the boarding school era was just something that his parents let happen, that he was stolen away to boarding school and no one ever tried to bring him home.
Well, doing some historical deep diving into the archives, I was able to find Don's Indian boarding school records. And in those records, we found handwritten letters from his mother and sister begging officials to send him home. I mean, these are things he never saw, he didn't know existed. And there's all of this stuff that exists for Native people that they have no idea. It's, you know, catalogued somewhere in the National Archives. That was a game-changer for Don. I mean, that's something that's going to - not right the wrong of what happened, but it's certainly going to help bring some closure to that awful period of his life.
DETROW: It really struck me when you write about finding the cold, inpersonal bureaucratic paperwork about his removal from his family.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: It's something that, at age 5, certainly he didn't understand, but that he came to terms with the older he got. But without any sense of -you know, he's never seen a picture of himself before he was 18 years old.
DETROW: Wow.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: He has no childhood relics. He has nothing from childhood, no finger paintings, no nothing. And he also has no stories from his family. He can't ask anyone what he was like as a kid because he was at boarding school. And so it's just - it's so much lost everything, lost information, but also lost experience and lost childhood that has happened as part of, again, these federal policies, and in this case, Indian boarding schools.
DETROW: What are one or two things that you thought about much differently at the end of this process than the beginning?
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: You know, it's interesting. I started writing a book about identity, and the only thing I could think of coming out of it was land (laughter).
DETROW: Yeah.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: And so one of the things I've been thinking a lot about, and I've been working on a project through the Native Policy Lab, which I direct at the University of Iowa, is, how much land has been stolen through each of these treaties and each of these pieces of legislation? Who owns it now? And how can we make it so that tribes get it back?
And certainly I'm not suggesting that we go door to door to private citizens and say, hey, you need to give your land back to the tribes. What I'm saying is, certainly there are large swaths of land owned by the federal government today that don't belong to them. And so how can we achieve sort of a reality where tribes get their ancestral homelands and then also are able to do the same sorts of things that any private citizen who owns land can do, things like monetize the land? And so I think that, interestingly, that is sort of where my mind has shifted in the last several months.
DETROW: That is author Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz. Her book is "The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America." Thank you so much.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: Thanks so much.
By Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
We All Shine On
By Elliot Mintz
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe and a former advisor on home-lessness and Native American issues in the Obama administration, loves data. When she noticed that the number of people self-identifying as "American Indian or Alaska Native" on the U.S. Census has more than doubled since 2000, while the number of enrolled members of federally recognized tribes has remained low, she wanted to know why. In The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250903167), Schuettpelz not only details how these records hide a history of racism, genocide and erasure, but also how they continue to affect Native people.
The federal government has recorded the number of Native Americans throughout its history. Before ejecting Natives from their land and forcing them on death marches to reservations, the counts were expansive. But when records were used to mete out some kind of reparative benefit, the government's definition of "tribe" or "Indian" was contracted to exclude as many people as possible. These rules also dictated tribal policy: To receive recognition from the federal government, tribes must have a constitution with similarly restrictive qualifications for membership.
Schuettpelz uses archival records to divulge insights into America's disastrous history with Native people, while her in-depth interviews with present-day Indigenous Americans reveal how their lives and identities continue to be shaped by that history. For example, the Meskwaki constitution requires its members to trace their ancestry patrilineally. Tricia Long, one interviewee, is "the epitome of what it means to be part of a tribe," yet she cannot pass her Meskwaki membership onto her older son because his father is white. He is not entitled to tribal benefits like land rights, per capita payments or access to health care.
Schuettpelz herself has questions about her own identity. She is enrolled as a Lumbee member because one of her grandparents was Lumbee, but she did not grow up in the Lumbee community. Is she, she asks herself, Native enough? Her questions are open-ended, and her responses are invitations to further conversations in this powerful and important read.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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Mason, Deborah. "The Indian Card." BookPage, Nov. 2024, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812941827/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6b138eb7. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Schuettpelz, Carrie Lowry THE INDIAN CARD Flatiron Books (NonFiction None) $29.99 10, 15 ISBN: 9781250903167
The complexities of claiming a Native American identity.
In this brief study, Schuettpelz explores how a long, troubled history of dispossession has contributed to the vexed status of Native selfhood in contemporary America. While the number of people who identify as Native has been steadily increasing over the past several decades, Native people "[have] been forced into a corner of needing constantly to prove our identities to ourselves and others, to carry around a card in our wallet [providing] not just validation, but also protection from those who'd like us to believe we're not Indianenough." The author provides an accessible historical overview of the various military, legal, and social factors that have blocked and complicated assertions of Native identity, along with illuminating case studies of individuals struggling to affirm their identities against cultural and bureaucratic resistance. Interspersed throughout are accounts, too, of the author's own evolving sense of what it means to be Native and what full federal recognition of the Lumbee, her tribal nation, would mean to her and others. Particularly engaging here are the summaries of how different tribal nations continue to negotiate with government authorities over self-definition and how "the federal government is still actively tugging at the puppet strings of Native identity." Also intriguing are the discussions of how different tribal nations are working out the conditions of membership on their own terms, often in the face of entrenched prejudices from non-Natives, and how fraudulent claims to Native identity have impacted those efforts. The personal and collective stakes for Native peoples are ably set forth here, and one gains a vivid sense of why establishing more sensible and fair criteria for tribal belonging is so urgent. Greater Native sovereignty is, the author aptly concludes, a worthy and realizable goal.
A clear and frank analysis of the challenges that define Native selfhood.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Schuettpelz, Carrie Lowry: THE INDIAN CARD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898445/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=68bbca26. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
The open question of ‘who gets to be Native in America’
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, author of "The Indian Card."
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, author of “The Indian Card.” (Courtesy of Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz)
By Lorraine Berry
Oct. 18, 2024 3 AM PT
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Book Review
The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America
By Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
Flatiron: 304 pages, $29.99
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
“The Indian Card” begins with a statistical puzzle: In the 2000 U.S. census, 4.1 million people indicated Native American heritage. But in 2020, that figure had swelled to 9.7 million. And yet there had been no baby boom.
Here’s another wrinkle: There were only about 1.9 million enrolled members of tribes in the contiguous U.S. in 2020.
Cover of "The Indian Card"
(Flatiron)
In these gaping discrepancies, author Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz saw a need for stories to be told. An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina who served in the Obama administration, Schuettpelz is an expert on Native policy and homelessness. Data has been her stock in trade. So how does she find meaning in these anomalies? By finding context.
“The Indian Card” amplifies the accounts of many who have been affected by a flawed one-size-fits-all notion of identity. Following along, one can begin to imagine how the number of Americans claiming Native identities might fluctuate by millions, even in a decade.
Chris La Tray, author of "Becoming Little Shell."
Opinion
The journey of a tribe, and an individual, seeking recognition and identity
Aug. 16, 2024
Schuettpelz gathers the testimonies of individuals about bonds that tie them to their tribe and how membership grounds them. She also recounts experiences that led to greater alienation and isolation, as some people were denied membership in tribes with which they identified or as whole tribes were denied federal recognition.
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To be meaningful, a conversation about Native American heritage must take place at this level of granularity, Schuettpelz writes, because there are 347 recognized tribes in the contiguous United States: “Treating ‘Native America’ as a monolith is a bit like claiming interest in ‘Asian culture.’ There isn’t just one.”
The federal government has its own complicated processes for recognizing tribes. Regardless of that status, each tribe and nation can determine whom to include. Decisions could hinge on patrilineal or matrilineal descent, a direct relative’s name on a 19th century federal list of tribal members or other documents that tie an individual to a tribe. Some tribes determine the fraction of one’s bloodline that justifies membership. Historically, others have defined their people through shared oral traditions or shared languages, or consanguinity or habitation.
This photo made available by the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia shows students at a Presbyterian boarding school in Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1883. U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Native American and Alaskan Native children were regularly severed from their tribal families, customs, language and religion and brought to the schools in a push to assimilate and Christianize them. (Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia via AP)
Opinion
A book that revealed the ‘entire story’ of Indian boarding schools would be important. This isn’t it.
Oct. 7, 2024
Questions of identity are personal for Schuettpelz. She grew up in Iowa, more than a thousand miles from the territory of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Her parents enrolled her as a tribal member when she was a little girl. Her family’s trips back to North Carolina brought her into a community of kinship, a permanence tied to a homeland, personal stories that gave her a sense of belonging that contrasted with her family’s isolation in Iowa.
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As the book opens, she is trying to make a decision about her own two young children. What would it mean in their lives to be recognized for their kinship in that tribe? In what ways does it matter that the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is not yet recognized by the U.S. government?
At the heart of tribal recognition is the notion of sovereignty, a word this book describes as a love language full of cultural and historical meaning. In simplest terms, it’s the ability of a tribe to govern itself, to have jurisdiction over its lands, a right to determine its own future. In this country’s bloody history, tribal sovereignty is a testament to survival and a source of pride.
For the federal government, however, defining tribes and counting Native Americans became crucial only because of brutal policies under President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, evicting individuals who had been enumerated on “muster rolls.” But the rolls themselves were shoddy, often based on cursory observations of supposed racial markers such as the color of skin, facial structure and hair texture, or on lists of members that tribal leaders provided under treaty terms.
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After World War II, the government began a new policy that simply terminated recognition of hundreds of tribes, stripping any claimed tribal sovereignty over their lands. Despite a later effort at correcting this, in California alone, 12 tribes were terminated and still have not had their tribal rights restored. A tribe’s struggle for recognition can be arduous.
Individuals’ relationships with their own Native identity are complicated in their own ways. Consider the almost 8 million Americans who identified as Native on the 2020 census but are not members of recognized tribes. Why would they check the “Native” box? Some are members of unrecognized tribes. Some may be embracing unverified family lore, perhaps of a distant Cherokee ancestor. Others might claim a minority identity in the hope of preferential treatment in hiring or college admissions, or for cultural cachet. Whether most of these people descend from pre-Columbian Americans is anyone’s guess.
Some “pretendians,” historically, are motivated by greed. One pernicious old myth is that being Native American brings abundant federal subsidies or income from mineral rights or casinos — think “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Osage oil money. Tribal offices receive calls from strangers claiming Native American DNA and demanding some of that mythical money, Schuettpelz relays.
The reality, however, is that Native Americans endure rates of poverty and homelessness many times higher than those of white-identified Americans. “The Indian Card” finds real benefits that can derive from tribal membership, but instant wealth is not among them. And the pursuit of belonging can be painful.
Calculations of “blood quantum” are still common among many tribes, but the formula has been rigged against Native Americans from the start. Unlike racist crackpot notions such as the supposed “one drop” rule that determined who could be enslaved or who would be subject to Jim Crow apartheid, when it came to determining who qualified as Native American, the white supremacist government held itself arbiter of who wasn’t Native based on certain percentages of white ancestry. The government wanted to diminish the numbers of Native Americans and replace tribal identity with whiteness.
For more than 500 years, Native Americans and individuals from Europe and Africa have been blurring and redrawing the lines between their peoples, and across those centuries, millions of individuals have had millions of reasons for identifying with one or more sides of their ancestry. Before the 2000 census, that complexity was officially invisible, because each resident could declare only one race.
For 200 years, the federal government has wielded official recognition as a weapon and a wedge; in all that time, many tribes themselves have tried to abide by long-discredited old Eurocentric notions of race, with tragic results.
So of course Schuettpelz can’t offer a simple explanation for the book’s opening puzzle about what changed between 2000 and 2020. When it comes to Native American identity, change has been the only constant. Only the 7.8 million individuals themselves could explain why they identified as Native in 2020 but were not officially members of a recognized tribe.
The big questions that drove Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz to examine the data, to seek out individual stories and collective histories, can be only partially answered. The most satisfying explanation may lie in the microcosm she generously shares with readers: Unpacking the ways that she knows herself as Lumbee, she establishes the ways her kids will know and be known by her community.
Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.