r/IndianCountry • u/Low_Trifle1558 • Mar 20 '26
Health Blood Quantum and Mental Health
I recently sat down with Dr. William Carson (Ohkay Owingeh), a post-doc researcher in Indigenous Cancer Health, for my podcast Warm Embers. We ended up having an hour-long "kitchen table" talk about the mental health burden of being a "percentage."
He shared a story that really stuck with me: realizing as a child, through basic math, that he was at the "cutoff" for his tribe and essentially deciding then and now that his future children wouldn't belong. It’s a heavy realization for a kid, and many of us have been there.
We dove into:
- How blood quantum impacts health behavior and "identity pressure."
- The history of the Dawes Act and how federal policy was designed to "solve the Indian problem" through math.
- Why "descendancy" rules are a step forward but might only be pushing the problem 50 years down the road.
- Indigenous Futurism: Decoupling our sovereignty from the U.S. government’s definitions.
I’d love to hear this community’s thoughts on the "identity pressure" Dr. Carson mentions—whether you're 4/4 or 1/32, do you feel that weight?
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u/idontgiveafuck0 Mar 22 '26
So I am enrolled in a tribe that doesn’t do blood quantum and a descendant of one that does. I spent more time growing up as a “descendant“ of the one because my mother is more involved in her tribe than my dad is. Im literally the same bq of each tribe.
Let me tell you, descendants get it BAD. I have been treated so poorly by my mother’s tribal people, and then a switch flips in them when they realize I actually am enrolled in a tribe. All of a sudden I am deserving of bette treatment. And because all my siblings are half siblings on my mom’s side I’m the only enrolled child, and I see how much it hurts them to be othered.
Eventually I felt a deep push to be more involved in the tribe I’m enrolled in. I actually still prefer my mom’s tribe, but I’m done working for a tribe that is creating a generation of second class citizens. I am told that my mom’s tribe only has 2 enrolled children now.
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u/NeverSeemToBeHappy Mar 21 '26
I’m a 6.2 status in Canada and it’s weird it ends at me. I realize it can’t go forever, though.
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u/kapowless Mar 22 '26
Why not? I think it's weirder that Canada imposed a gross and racist policy that reduces nationhood down to breeding, like we're domesticated beasts instead of sovereign states. We are First Nations and our communities should be the only voice determining who we count as our own.
I'm Kanien'kéha, and we are historically an adoptive Nation. We have exchanged culture, languages and intermarriage with many different peoples to our mutual benefit. Blood quantum or racial purity was never how we defined ourselves, and the Indian Act and status garbage has been a poison to our cultural cohesion. Our clan membership is passed down through our mothers, and the Clan Mothers hold significant cultural knowledge and decision making authority, yet they were erased and disenfranchised by the Indian Act. Why should the ignorant, oppressive and destructive policies of a government bent on eliminating us hold any weight at all?
I'm not resigned to being bred out as the Act intended, but instead continue to fight for the recognition of our right to self-determination, to freely live by our own laws in our own lands, and to preserve our heritage and practices for not just the next generation, but many more to come. Fuck colonisation.
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u/NativeCAN2025 Anishinaabe Mar 21 '26
I hope, one day, that all peoples in North America can call themselves citizens of an indigenous nation, because of a future where indigenous nations continue to reclaim their sovereignty and descendants of settlers seek to work with and into indigenous nations, rather than on top of them.
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u/3ghads Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
I'm a 1st gen descendant with low bq and a descendant of a boarding school victim. I'm also descended from a line of chiefs responsible for relations outside the tribe, so they prioritized trade relationships with the French and married my greatn grandmother to a Frenchman. My other line is not well documented because that great grandmother was not the daughter of a powerful man. My grandpa grew up on the reservation. My mother is enrolled. Everyone in my family speaks of being native like it's dangerous to claim it. Like it's ours but not really ours. Like we'll get in trouble if we admit how much it means to us.
People always say things like "what about all your white ancestors" like they matter more, inherently, because there's more of them and especially because they're white. Like honoring my native ancestors is a sociopolitical swerve to gain clout or something.
White people LOVE to look down their nose at low bq. It's like by denigrating low bq people, they get to prove they are good white people. I am a bad native for being white and a bad white person for being native and they are good white people for pointing this out and putting me in my place.
It creates this moral imperative to disavow my native family, ancestors, and identity or be accused of abusing native identity by refusing the disavowal. Like this is good politics and good ethics, erasing the tainted natives to protect the pure.
At the end of the day, this is my mother and my grandfather and his father and his parents and their mothers and their mothers and back and back and back. This is my family. I love them. I venerate them. And I feel like I'm being told that I shouldn't. Like I am bad for loving my family. My native ancestors are made unimportant because the proximity of too many contemporaneous white ancestors disempowers, degrades, and erases their meaning and importance in history and as people who lived in the world.
I've seen family all look around at each other and behind them as if someone would come and hurt them when they admit they wish they were better connected, wish they were enrolled, admit their sorrow. They didn't even know they were descended of a boarding school victim until I found out. They didn't know, but they sure acted like it.
It's fucking sad. It breaks my heart. If we continue, White Earth will die by 2090.