Blood quantum, lineal descent and beyond: How do tribes define citizenship?

Reader-driven questions answered by the reporters of Montana Free Press.

Last week, the Crow Tribe’s Legislative Branch rejected a bill that would have dramatically redefined tribal citizenship. The debate resurfaced a politically and culturally fraught question that tribes nationwide are grappling with: Who gets to be a tribal citizen?

As sovereign nations with their own constitutions, legal codes and courts, tribes need a formal mechanism for defining tribal citizenship, which determines eligibility for certain health services, the ability to vote in tribal elections and access to educational scholarships, among other rights and privileges. Tribal enrollment also influences federal funding for tribal programs.

The proposed legislation, brought by Crow Chairman Frank White Clay, would have revised the tribe’s “blood quantum” standard for citizenship, effectively making more people eligible for tribal citizenship. Blood quantum, a concept created by White policymakers and rooted in federal assimilation tactics, refers to the fractional amount of tribal affiliation in an individual’s ancestry. 

Nationwide, most tribes use some variety of blood quantum calculation to determine eligibility for citizenship, often requiring at least one-quarter of a particular tribe’s “blood” to qualify. But many experts say the blood quantum concept is inherently flawed. In the late 19th and early 20th century, federal agents created tribal citizenship rolls, often assigning to Indigenous people fractional amounts of tribal “blood” based on their appearance. Jill Doerfler, who heads the department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, said federal agents at the time equated “mixed blood” with “competency,” meaning it was believed that “some amount of White blood made an individual have a higher level of intellect.” That presumption, Doerfler said, incentivized some people to minimize their blood quantum.

Any tribe that uses blood quantum as its sole metric of tribal citizenship, experts say, will have to face the fact that blood quantum tends to reduce tribal membership over time. As tribal members have children with non-Natives or members of other tribes, fewer people meet the blood quantum threshold for tribal membership. The Crow Tribe, which currently has more than 14,000 members, has recorded declining enrollment since 2023, according to Chairman White Clay. 

Most tribes in Montana use blood quantum to determine citizenship, though the Blackfeet Nation, the Fort Belknap Aaniiih and Nakoda Tribes and the Crow Tribe have recently engaged in community discussions about changing enrollment criteria. 

Some tribes have periodically revised their membership criteria within the blood quantum model. The Crow Tribe, which, according to its Constitution, requires “one-quarter Crow Indian blood or more” to qualify for enrollment as a tribal member, recently debated revising its policy so that all living current members would be considered to be 100% Crow. Other tribes, like the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, have lowered their blood quantum threshold to require one-eighth Cheyenne and Arapaho “blood” to qualify for membership. Other tribes, like the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, require one-quarter “total Indian blood,” or the sum of blood quantum fractions from multiple tribes, in addition to a genealogical tie to a tribal member.  

Changing enrollment requirements can be politically unpopular. Discussions force tribes to confront uncomfortable questions about who belongs, who doesn’t, and which signifiers of identity matter most. 

“A decision like this rocks the core of sovereignty,” said Desi Small-Rodriguez, assistant professor of American Indian studies and sociology at UCLA, referring to the issue generally. 

Decisions about whether to revise citizenship requirements — and how — are shaped by political, economic and cultural factors, a tangle of complex interests that can make it difficult to change policy at all. 

“A lot of tribes have talked about it and not been able to go forward,” said Carolyn Liebler, founder and executive director of Pika Insights, a consulting firm that works with tribes on demographic analysis and population projections. 

After October’s nearly two-hour debate among Crow legislators, some lawmakers said they voted against the bill because they were hesitant to revise enrollment criteria at all. Others said they voted against it because they thought the bill didn’t go far enough, providing only a temporary fix to a long-term problem. Some lawmakers wondered if the proposed policy change was really the best available option.

Blood quantum is not, in fact, the only method of defining tribal citizenship. 

Because tribes have the authority to define themselves, the options are technically endless. 

“In one way, the door is wide open, tribes can do absolutely anything they want,” Doerfler said. 

The most common alternative to blood quantum is lineal descent, a model in which tribal membership is determined by a person’s ancestry. Generally, to be eligible for citizenship under lineal descent criteria, an individual must be able to document their lineage to an ancestor on a tribe’s designated base citizenship roll, which can be historic or contemporary. The model follows biological kinship, though some tribes include an adoption provision as well.  

The Cherokee Nation, the most populous Native American tribe in the United States with more than 470,000 enrolled citizens, is one of many tribes that use a lineal descent model for citizenship. 

The most common critique of the lineal descent model forwarded by tribal members and leaders is that it can be too inclusive. 

“The fear is that the person who is enrolling is enrolling not because they want to reconnect with their relatives or culturally, but they want to reconnect for a financial benefit,” Doerfler said.

During the Crow legislative debate, several lawmakers expressed concern that a more liberal enrollment requirement could result in more people vying for fewer resources in a federal system where resources are already scarce. 

Kim TallBear, an American Indian studies professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said criticisms of lineal descent go beyond money, and center on identity and community. 

“People want to have a tribal nation in which they feel like they are cohabiting with other people who are a part of their culture and their nation,” TallBear said. “Yes, you can welcome people back, but if you open up those rolls like that, suddenly you’ve got a tribe in which the majority of the voting membership have not grown up in the nation, you don’t know who their family is, and they might be bringing all kinds of values and ideas in that are going to completely turn that tribal nation’s sets of policies and cultural concerns around.”

To prevent enrollment numbers from skyrocketing, some tribes that use lineal descent have added additional criteria for citizenship. Several tribes, like the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, use the lineal descent model but prohibit individuals from enrolling if they are enrolled as members of other tribes. The Tulalip Tribes in Washington require a tribal member parent to have lived on the reservation for at least 12 consecutive months prior to the birth of the applicant child for the child to be eligible for citizenship. But depending on the location of a tribe’s reservation and its proximity to services, a residency requirement can be overly restrictive, experts told MTFP. In Montana, tribal communities face severe housing shortages, and most Indian Health Service facilities in the state are not equipped to deliver babies.

Some tribes, experts told MTFP, have considered implementing culture or language tests as a condition of citizenship. That option, they say, is also fraught. 

“The big questions are who’s allowed to take it?” Doerfler said. “At what age do they take it? Who gets to decide what’s on it? How is it administered?”

During the Crow legislative debate, several lawmakers suggested the tribe “correct” its base citizenship rolls, which include documented errors. But auditing old census documents created by federal agents is also inherently difficult, some experts say.

“You had Indian agents looking at the same individual and coming up with two different fractions,” Small-Rodriguez said. “It was, ‘That person looks half. That person looks full, four-fourths. That person looks like a breed,’ which is what we call people who are mixed. These are all incredibly subjective, racist initial measurements of blood that had no scientific grounding. So this concept of correcting it, what does that mean?”

Crow lawmakers acknowledged that while the bill that would have expanded enrollment was voted down, the discussion about revising blood quantum and citizenship criteria is not over. 

“This is a start,” Crow Speaker of the House Velma Pickett told her colleagues after the vote. “There’s so many options. But I do believe that this body recognizes that enrollment is going to become a priority. We do need to address it.”