Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South by Mikaëla M. Adams (review)

Mikaëla M. Adams's Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South is a much-needed exploration of the complexities and stresses that Native nations face in their efforts to maintain control over citizenship and national identity within their communities. In an era when these nations are again threatened by federal and congressional attempts to subvert their sovereignty in order to gain access to extractable fuel on reservations and Native lands, this text is a timely reminder of the legal and political strength of that sovereignty in matters as apparently straightforward as defining one's own citizenry.

Who Belongs? focuses on six Native nations in the southeastern United States: the Pamunkey Indian Tribe of Virginia, the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. Adams expertly frames the stresses that these nations faced while maintaining cohesive communities between the post–Indian removal era of the mid-nineteenth century and the present day.

Using oral histories and an impressive number of archival collections, Adams seamlessly blends tribal, settler, and state histories with an impressive analysis of federal Indian law to provide an exhaustively researched examination of the contours and strictures of belonging that have framed identity and community within these six Native nations. As members of isolated and surrounded communities in the American South, they have struggled to remain in their indigenous territories since the Jacksonian era of westward expansion and Indian dispossession. Each of these nations faced pressures that were unique and yet strikingly similar as settlement and slavery gave way to the Jim Crow South. Strict racial stratification demanded that American Indians differentiate themselves from African Americans as clearly as they defined their connections to their own communities.

These pressures required these Native nations to face multiple challenges to their sovereignty, as they sought to distinguish themselves from larger communities that had been relocated elsewhere. Adams shows how each nation had to constantly defend its right to remain or return to its original territories. Facing continued threats of state intrusion, settler trespass, the deliberately complex routes to federal recognition, and the seemingly endless challenges to legal landownership, each nation sought to define citizenship within its own historical and cultural frameworks.

Interspersed with personal stories of people challenging enrollment and citizenship rules due to exclusion or failure to prove eligibility, Adams's examinations of the various criteria set by these nations—from blood quantum, to lineal descent, to blood quantum and lineal descent—showcase each nation's unique cultural and community identity.

One of the many strengths of the text is that Adams maintains an evenhanded view of the different nations' citizenship criteria, expertly laying out how and why each one came to its respective decision, policy changes over time, and the contemporary cultural and political significance of each decision to each particular nation. She does not compare or contrast but instead examines each nation within the context of its own geography, history, external pressures, and cultural norms.

Adams's Who Belongs? is a wonderfully detailed testament to the many complexities of identity, community, territory, and cultural connectivity that constitute not just the Native nations explored in this text but also others spread across Indian country. At a time when the federal court system is holding the Cherokee Nation to its own commitment to grant citizenship to the free descendants of former slaves, as per the 1866 Reconstruction Treaty, while also enshrining the right of the Cherokee Nation to define itself according to its own cultural norms, this book seems particularly pertinent. As such, it is a valuable addition to the historiography of the Native South, to critical identity and race studies in the United States, and to the wider canon of federal...