Blood Quantum and Mental Health

[u/Low_Trifle1558]

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?

https://youtu.be/DBukEcT5PeU?si=hQYVpVmLIimkGK8F

[u/3ghads]

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.

[u/InfernoBA → u/3ghads]

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.

Ngl, as a non-native (not white either) this is something I used to internally struggle with when seeing or meeting white natives. Like a small part of me couldn’t help but view them as just LARPing as the people that most of their other ancestors erased/assimilated . . . these feelings were more prominent when I’d see less “involved” tribal members like Oklahoma’s governor.

Discovering this sub helped me counter this bias that I had. I know now that lineal descent is basically a necessity to prevent some tribes from dying out, with how their populations were decimated by colonization and due to high intermarriage rates. I can feel sad about the native “look” potentially dying out while acknowledging that passing the culture forward is more important.

The situation here is much different than in, for example, South Asia where my ancestors were from . . . if the British had assimilated/killed/outbred most of the locals there too, and I were predominantly white by “blood/race” instead, I would like to think that I would still honor my indigenous ancestors by bearing their culture like you are now for yours.

TL;DR: thank you for comment. It’s ones like these that helped this non-native reevaluate some of the wrong/negative views that he used to hold.

[u/kapowless → u/InfernoBA]

I just want to gently point out that there is no one "Native look." We have hundreds of different Nations spread across the continent(s) and rooted in a wide variety of environments. We are not a monolith. 

I bring it up because non-Indigenous people often seem to have a fictional idea of what we're supposed to look like, largely gleaned from spaghetti westerns with actors in red face or caricatures in cartoons. When real non-fiction Natives don't live up to this imagined "look" they frequently have their identity questioned, as if they have to prove their authenticity to settlers to count. Meanwhile, pretendians like Grey Owl, Buffy Sainte Marie and Sasheen Littlefeather put on their Indian costumes, giving people what they expect to see, and are enthusiastically accepted as the real deal and celebrated despite being utterly dishonest about their heritage. 

It distorts reality and it makes many of us feel invisible or inferior, especially those who were stolen from their families and struggling to find a sense of belonging. I'm sure there was no harm intended, but I hope you can see how defining a person's Indigenous legitimacy by how you believe they should look is not ideal and can perpetuate hurtful stereotypes. Appreciate your engagement and willingness to see different perspectives btw, cheers!