U.S. Tribes Redefine Heritage as Intermarriage Thins Bloodlines

With his blue eyes and sandy blond hair, Richard Snelding hardly resembles the classic American Indian of Hollywood films and history books. But he may be the Indian face of the future.

Snelding has one-sixty-fourth Kaw blood--enough for membership in Oklahoma’s Kaw Nation tribe, if not for complete acceptance from Indian friends who call him “Casper” and “Wonder Bread.”

There’s more to being an Indian than a pedigree, the 22-year-old says: “What you feel inside of you is what’s important.”

He doesn’t have to look far for an argument. With gambling profits raising the stakes of tribal membership, deciding who is a “real” Indian has become one of the most divisive issues facing American Indians today.

Never mind the New Age pretenders who claim kinship to a Cherokee princess they saw in a dream. More nettlesome for the nation’s 554 federally recognized tribes is what to do with their own sons and daughters.

Often, their Indian ancestry is unquestioned, but generations of intermarriage have crowded their family trees with non-Indians as well.

Many tribes are easing membership requirements just to survive, prompting worries that tribal traditions will fade along with blood levels.

“If tribes aren’t careful, they can turn into big business corporations that say to hell with culture,” said Jerry Bread, a professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma. “I’d like to see the physical traits of American Indians remain, but it’s not happening.”

One federal study estimated that the percentage of Indians who are full-blooded--60% in 1980--will fall to 34% by 2000 and to 0.3% by 2080.

But even as bloodlines thin, being Indian has never been so popular. The number of people identifying themselves as American Indian has nearly tripled since 1970, rising from 827,000 to more than 2.2 million, census figures show.

A renaissance of Indian pride is partly responsible. So is an upturn in the fortunes of some tribes, notably those involved in gambling.

In Connecticut, the 383 members of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe share profits from a casino that clears more than $1 million a day from slot machines alone.

The tribe gets about 50 calls a month from people who figure they must have Pequot blood in them. “Some of them can’t even pronounce the name of the tribe,” tribal spokesman Bruce MacDonald said.

It’s easy to brush off such wannabes. But when the Pequots looked at their own families, they realized that many of their children and grandchildren wouldn’t qualify for membership.

In November, the tribe dropped its eligibility requirement of one-sixteenth Pequot blood. Applicants now must prove only that they are descended from someone listed on the tribal census rolls of 1900 or 1910.

It was a quiet resolution compared to bitter membership feuds dividing tribes from the Maliseets of Maine to the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux of Minnesota.

At Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, dissidents have occupied the tribe’s barricaded headquarters since August 1995. Saying the tribe has strayed from its cultural roots, the dissidents claim tribal leaders have lined their pockets with casino profits and stripped the voting rights of those who challenge them. The leaders, replying that many of the dissidents have dubious claims of membership, set up new offices in the casino.

Even without big money complicating things, a decision to relax membership requirements can prompt soul-searching. Oklahoma’s Ft. Sill Apache, a tribe of 379 members descended from Geronimo’s band, looked into the future and saw its own demise.

“Everybody was saying that before long, we’re just not going to have any people left,” tribal chairwoman Ruey Darrow said. The tribe voted in November to reduce the level of Ft. Sill Apache blood needed for tribal membership from one-eighth to one-sixteenth.

“If we’re stark white, we’re still going to be Apache,” said Darrow, 70. “It’s not so much blood as it is you know who you are, and you feel in your heart and your spirit that you belong to this group.”

Some tribes still toe a hard line on membership. The Miccosukees of Florida, for example, require one-half Indian blood. But more are heading the way of the Cherokee Nation, which has no blood requirement and which, since 1987, has more than doubled its membership to 182,000.

Outsiders who fret about Indian purity should remember that tribes are political entities with a federally recognized right to govern themselves, said Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.

“We would be incensed if Canada or Mexico tried to tell the United States who its citizens should be,” Wildcat said. “If tribal sovereignty means anything, it means the right of a nation to determine who its members are.”

Of course, legal membership doesn’t guarantee social acceptance. In some tribes, light-skinned members aren’t invited to sacred ceremonies, Bread said.

Some parents tell their children they’ll disown them if they marry outside the tribe, even to other Indians.

But such purists are bucking the trend. With half of all Indians living off reservations, continued intermarriage is likely.

Snelding, the blue-eyed Kaw, has a white father and a mother who is one-eighth mixed Indian, including Kaw. He grew up a Mormon and has lived in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Louisiana and Florida--but never on a reservation.

He qualifies for membership in the Kaw Nation because the tribe stopped looking at blood levels years ago, now requiring only proof of descent from a 1902 tribal roll. Among the tribe’s 2,186 members, the only full-blooded Kaws left are two old men.

“It’s a pretty scary thing when you think about it,” Snelding said. “It’s a passing on of a whole nation, a whole culture.”

Snelding is a student at Haskell, a melting pot for Indians from across the nation. His fair skin makes him stand out there, though not as much as it once would have.

Sure, the “white bread” jokes get old. But Snelding said tolerance outweighs discrimination on campus. He was elected student senate president last spring, which he took as a sign that Haskell students are more tuned in than most Americans about what it means to be Indian.

“There are two stereotypes in this country,” he said. “One is you’re an honorable Indian like something out of ‘Dances With Wolves.’ The other is you’re a drunken Indian on the reservation. There aren’t a lot of images in between.”