ARE YOU NATIVE ENOUGH FOR OKLAHOMA?
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, wants to know how much Native makes a Native.
There are so many things wrong with this question I am having trouble figuring out where to start. Oh I know. Let's start with the fact there is no such thing as "blood quorum".
Blood QUANTUM is what the government uses to decide how much Native you're allowed to be. They literally certify our blood, like horses and show ponies. It's a government approved pedigree that is, in actuality, a construct put into place to dwindle our numbers by limiting citizenship. It's a continuation of our genocide and we get to carry a card called a Certification of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) around with us to remind us how much or how little they let us be. (It really is up to them. My BQ is wrong.)
CDIB does not guarantee tribal citizenship, though there are some tribes that use Blood Quantum for enrollment purposes. These measurements vary from tribe to tribe because we are all separate Sovereign Nations, each with our own governments and cultures. More on that in a moment.
Oklahoma is home to 39 different tribes and in order to have a productive and respectful government to government relationship with them the Governor should be well versed in issues such as sovereignty and self determination. That quote shows that he clearly is not.
The McGirt decision only directly impacts 5 of those 39 tribes: The Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole, better known by their colonized name The Five "Civilized" Tribes, though it will reverberate all through Indian Country.
When your ancestors manifested their destiny all over my ancestors it ended in Indian Removal to Oklahoma, our ancestral lands ripped from us as we were forced to walk away from them in service to the colonizer hunger for land, land, and more land. In doing so we displaced the tribes that are Indigenous to this unceded land: Kiikaapoi, Nʉmʉnʉʉ, Wazhazhe Maⁿzhaⁿ, and Wichita Nations. All this was as a result of settler and colonial policies that were designed to assimilate Native people.
Part of that assimilation was allotment. Historically the Nations had held land communally. Allotment divided up the land into individual plots with a certain amount of acreage assigned to any Native of the 5 Nations and Freedmen who appeared on The Dawes Rolls, the rolls that served as a count of who was Native to divvy up the land in order to further our "civilization".
The Dawes Rolls are also why Kevin Stitt has zero understanding of the Nations, even as he’s an enrolled member of one. Unlike other tribes the 5 Nations don’t use Blood "Quorum" to determine citizenship. In order to enroll one must trace back to a direct ancestor listed on those rolls. He should know this because that’s what he had to do in order to be enrolled as a Cherokee citizen.
It also underscores his fundamental misunderstanding of who and what we are. Blood alone does not make one Native. We as Peoples are committed to the protection and furtherance of our vibrant, living cultures. As such we live those cultures every day. We honor our ancestors whose fight to carry them on came at the cost of integral pieces of those cultures and so many, many lives. Kinship. Connection. Culture. These are things that make you a member of your Nation.
That concept is hard for society to understand as they view people through the colonized construct of race. That doesn't apply because Natives are not a single race. We are not monolith. We are individual sovereign Nations. We're just lumped in together as one "race" because that's the closest explanation of us that people in general understand so that's what society went with instead of taking the time to understand us as we really are.
There are currently 574 federally recognized tribes, hundreds of state, and untold numbers of unrecognized. As separate sovereign Nations we have our own unique cultures and customs. We each have our own governments, infrastructure, and court systems. That's why we have treaties with the US government, one of which was affirmed by the McGirt decision, handing back a portion of Eastern Oklahoma to The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, just as it should have been all this time.
Now Stitt the alarmist/fabulist wants to hear if anyone has been directly impacted by McGirt. This is disingenuous as he doesn't take into account the thousands of Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole citizens that have been favorably impacted by the decision, a fact he willfully chooses to ignore while finding ways to undermine our sovereignty by painting us as unable to handle our own court system when it's Oklahoma that refuses to work with us (much like with The Gaming Compact).
What he won't tell you in all his bluster and distortions is that all of this jurisdictional mess is not a failure of the Nations. It's the fallout of the governmental pattern of refusing to honor the over 500 treaties they agreed to. This could have all been avoided if, in the long history of the US, leadership had simply kept their word (or had not chosen genocide as a means to get land). That they didn't does not lay at the feet of the Nations no matter how hard Stitt tries to place it there. It lies squarely at those of the government and now the shoulders of Oklahoma who must learn how to work with our hardwon sovereignty that they should have respected all along.
Stitt, with his prevarication and questions of "blood quorum", does not understand even the basics of his own Nation or what it is to be part of a living culture whose celebration is the most important thing of all. Worse, he doesn't care to know.
So it comes to this. I don't know how much Native is Native enough for McGirt. I do know that learning, understanding, and respecting your culture makes you part of your People and that no CDIB or Enrollment Card can take the place of that.
Not even for Cherokee citizen Kevin Stitt.
