| While both enrolled and non-enrolled Indians live on reservations, the much greater diversity within urban Indian communities can raise unique blood quantum issues.
How Blood Quantum is Used
Different tribes, government agencies, and social service organizations which provide benefits to Indians often have different blood quantum requirements. A few examples:
Minnesota Indian Scholarship - The MIS "stacks" blood quantum. That is, anyone with one-quarter blood quantum from any combination of tribes is eligible, and tribal enrollment is not required. The scholarship provides up to $3300 toward public or private colleges and universities in Minnesota. Administered by the Minnesota Department of Children, Families and Learning. (Source: MnDCFL)
White Earth Service Unit, near Bemidji - Facility of the Indian Health Service, administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Out-patient health care at no charge to anyone of any tribe who can verify any degree of Indian descendancy. (Source: White Earth Service Unit, Indian Health Service.)
Little Earth housing project, Minneapolis - Public housing unit with formal preference for tribal members, which usually means one-quarter blood quantum from one tribe. One of the only off-reservation projects in the country with such a preference in place. (Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Minneapolis)
Enrollment at most tribes (including the five bands of Minnesota Chippewa, which make up most of the Indian population in Minnesota) - one-quarter descendency from band required for enrollment. Some tribes may have additional requirements, such as residency.
Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma) - Anyone who can trace an ancestor to the Dawes Roll of 1870 is eligible for full tribal membership. The Cherokee are among the largest tribes, with membership over 220,500 and growing by 1,000 each month. The Dawes Roll was compiled at the turn of the century and contains the names of more than 101,000 members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole Nations of Oklahoma. (Various sources.)
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"IN URBAN AREAS, THE MIXING OF NATIVE BLOOD,
either with other native blood or other groups' blood, has brought the dilution of the particular tribes," says Tony Looking-Elk, a community builder with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in St. Paul who focuses on urban native communities.
"We have instances of people who, if you add it all up, are close to full-blooded as a native person but unfortunately, they don't have enough of one particular tribe to become a member," says Looking-Elk.
Often the differences between half- and quarter-blood, enrolled and non-enrolled, go unnoticed. But Looking-Elk says they arose when discussions about an American Indian Commission to advise the Duluth City Council turned to the method of selecting commission members.
"That was probably one of our biggest arguments as a planning committee," Looking-Elk says. "The American Indian community members were saying, all nine have to be Ameican Indian. But then we asked, 'how do we prove it?' And that's when we got into an argument nobody wanted to get into," he says.
"Part of the group's saying you have to be an enrolled member. And there were a few people saying, 'I'm American Indian, I'm not enrolled - are you saying I can't be a part of this?' No one wanted to make a definitive role in locking out American Indians - doing basically what the outside community has been doing to them," says Looking-Elk.
Looking-Elk points out that urban Indians face a paradox when it comes to social services. On one hand, he says, Indians have not readily assimilated into mainstream housing, welfare, and health service programs. As a result, there is a substantial need for off-reservation services directed at native peoples.
But off the reservation, government and private social service programs are much less ready or able to draw a cut-off line with blood quantum, or otherwise devise concrete ways to limit their programs only to Indians. For one thing, such a policy looks a lot like discrimination under U.S. law - even though certain restrictions may be legal.
Minnesota is home to one of the only public off-reservation projects in the country allowed to discriminate based on tribal enrollment. A 1983 Minnesota Supreme Court case, St. Paul Intertribal Housing Board v. Reynolds, found that the Little Earth housing project in St. Paul could legally restrict its programs to enrolled tribal members. The court found that because tribes are political entities to which the government has a unique obligation, current law permits discrimination in favor of tribal members that would not be permissable in the case of other races or ethnic groups.
Few other projects have followed Little Earth's example. Both internal non-discrimination guidelines in government agencies, and other contradictory court cases suggest it would be not be a simple process. In any case, the problem remains that geneology-based limits like those at Little Earth still exclude many of the same non-enrolled, self-identified Indians who need the services.
Given the complications of defining and targeting Indians in urban areas, Looking-Elk says government money and initiatives to serve Indian people are often directed at reservations rather than urban areas. And some tribes may hold back money they could spend in urban areas.
"The particular problem urban Indian organizations have is that it's very tough for them to link with tribes to get that flow of dollars," Looking-Elk says. "Because when they put an investment into an organization, they want the money to go to their people living in that town."
Services can still use marketing tools and targeted referrals to signal their intent to serve Indians. In the case of housing, there are three projects in St. Paul, one in Minneapolis, and two in Duluth that serve Indians in this fashion - though non-Indians can and do use them.
Affirmative action programs are another area of off-reservation life where determining who is and is not an official Indian is still thoroughly ambiguous. Looking-Elk says when a civil rights commission on which he was serving looked into the "Indians" who had been hired under the Minneapolis fire department's affirmative action policy, they found only one who was actually enrolled.
"One actually claimed American Indian because when he was young, his grandmother told him he was, and that was the only evidence he had," Looking Elk says. "Another form of evidence he brought forth was that when he was young and played cowboys and Indians, he always wanted to play the Indian."
He says the city has not responded about what standards it might set.
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