The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals

7. American Indians: Clues to the Future of Other Racial Groups

189 7 AMERICAN INDIANS: CLUES TO THE FUTURE OF OTHER RACIAL GROUPS C. Matthew Snipp Racial classifications serve as the framework for what is known about the social and cultural diversity of American society. Since 1790, the federal government has kept track of the racial composition of the United States, albeit with a system that has evolved slowly and has been shaped by notions about the substance of racial differences. In 1976, the federal government issued a document, known as Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive 15, that sought to impose a standard set of categories to be used by all federal agencies, its grantees, and its contractors for the collection of racial data. Two decades later, the OMB amended this classification. Perhaps the most significant change was the revised instruction that allowed respondents to claim membership in more than one race. Directive 15, interestingly enough, said little about the criteria by which persons might be assigned to one or another of its specified categories . The 1997 revision implies fairly clearly, though it does not explicitly state, that self-identification is the intended method for eliciting racial ancestry . Perhaps more significantly, it does not explicitly forbid criteria or methods other than self-identification from being used to classify individuals into one or another of its specified categories. This chapter focuses on American Indians to examine several different criteria that might be used to allocate individuals to these categories and the public policy considerations that are attached to them. American Indians provide a valuable test case for at least two reasons. First, a variety of different criteria are in place for designating persons as American Indians. Furthermore, there is not always a great deal of consistency across these criteria with respect to the populations who are designated as American Indians. Second, the American Indian population includes a large number of persons of mixed ancestry. This heterogeneity leads to a great deal of THE NEW RACE QUESTION 190 volatility in the reporting of American Indian race that has been well documented by demographers for nearly twenty years (Passell 1976; Passell and Berman 1986; Snipp 1989; Harris 1994). This volatility is almost certain to foreshadow a similar experience for other groups with rapidly rising rates of intermarriage and a growing number of mixed-race persons—notably, Asians and Latinos. The instability in the reporting of racial heritage entails a number of thorny legal and political issues, many of which are of deep concern within the American Indian community, and they may soon spread to other communities, as well. Although the experiences of American Indians are unique, nonetheless they offer a glimpse of the future for other racial and ethnic minority groups in American society. American Indian Taxonomies In the years since the federal government first tried to identify and classify American Indians, the American Indian population has become larger and more diverse. The federal government and the public policy edifice devoted to American Indian issues has also grown larger and more complex. It should be no surprise that federal efforts to identify and classify American Indians have taken a number of different directions to meet a variety of administrative imperatives. Today, there are at least three different ways of being recognized as an American Indian—blood quantum, tribal membership , and self-identification—each with different nuances for public policy (O’Brien 1989; Wilkins 2002). Each of these approaches carries certain advantages and disadvantages as tools for the implementation of public policy. Blood Quantum The concept of blood quantum became popular in the early to mid-nineteenth century in connection with ideas associated with eugenics and scientific racism. “Blood” was a convenient metaphor to describe racial heritage. “Blood quantum” denoted the amount of racial heritage that could be ascribed to an individual. In this era, it was widely believed that ethnicity and cultural practices were mostly the result of inheritance. Thus, blood quantum also indicated the degree to which certain behavioral characteristics might be manifested in individual behavior. The proponents of eugenics, including Lewis Henry Morgan, one of the founding fathers of anthropology , argued that the most efficient means for civilizing American Indians was to encourage them to intermarry with whites (Bieder 1986). The dilution of Indian “blood,” he believed, would eventually result in a race of people who would possess few, if any, of the traits regarded as representative of American Indian culture. AMERICAN INDIANS: CLUES TO THE FUTURE OF...