The Indian Card

May 1, 2024

Schuettpelz, vice president of the Native American Council at the University of Iowa, writes about what it means for Indigenous people to prove their identity, as they are often forced by governments to validate who they are. Schuettpelz considers the shifting meaning and history of Indigenous identity from before colonization to the latest census. Prepub Alert.

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September 1, 2024
In her debut book, Shuettpelz delves into the complicated questions around who gets to be considered Native American. By combining personal anecdotes and family history with tribal enrollment logs, census data, and other government records, Shuettpelz crafts a narrative that is warmly humanizing of its subjects and scaffolded by research. The author recalls her mother bringing a VHS tape on the history of the Lumbee to show her third-grade class and points out significant if not surprising discrepancies between census data and tribal enrollment records (e.g., fewer than one-third of the 1.6 million people who identify as Cherokee are actively enrolled in a federally recognized tribe). Shuettpelz is funny without being f lip and extremely well-informed without f launting erudition. This approach emboldens Shuettpelz to tackle such sensitive topics as the widely differing criteria tribes use to determine inclusion, evolving notions of sovereignty within Native communities and without, and the influence annuities exercise over Native people's decisions about reservation life. This deep dive into difficult questions should be required reading for all who want to understand Native American life past and present.

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October 15, 2024
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.

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Starred review from October 21, 2024
The U.S. government’s restrictive requirements for tribal membership were designed to eradicate, not support, Native communities, and to this day they continue to undermine Native sovereignty, according to this brainy and illuminating debut from Lowry Schuettpelz, a professor of urban planning at the University of Iowa. Noting that the number of Americans claiming Native ancestry in the U.S. census is increasing even as the number of enrolled tribal members stays constant, Lowry Schuettpelz pores over archival population records and synthesizes a finely drawn portrait of Native Americans’ three centuries’ worth of struggle with colonizing powers’ attempts to define them in ways that destabilized their shared identity. Along the way, she surfaces fascinating details, like how wealthy turn-of-the-19th-century Choctaw households were recategorized as “Free White Persons” on the census, obfuscating Native prosperity. She also profiles contemporary Native people who are attempting, and often failing, to navigate the labyrinthine federal tribal enrollment process, and recounts her own experience with enrollment in the non-federally recognized Lumbee tribe. Grappling with the competing problems of “pretendians” (people who pretend to be Indian) and restrictive “blood quantum” enrollment qualifications that undermine Native self-determination, she lands on an intriguing solution: “indigenous data sovereignty,” or the handing over of control of genealogical data to Native communities. It’s an innovative exploration of a thorny issue.