Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race

8. Realms of Biocertification

8 / Realms of Biocertification We have seen how blood quantum constitutes a powerful historical and current fantasy of identification, as well as the resistant counter- and disidentifications realized through artistic revisions of blood quantum discourse . Yet this discussion remains incomplete without a consideration of the enmeshed histories of blood quantum and disability categorization in the United States. Such a consideration allows us to understand why, in the United States today, both Native and disabled people are required to carry and produce government certification that purports to validate their biological being in order to access certain rights and resources.1 Such biocertification has become a persistent and powerful version of the “interventions and regulatory controls” characterizing the modern biopolitical state (Foucault, History of Sexuality 139). In this chapter I explore the shared origins of disability and Native biocertification in the United States to demonstrate that a comparison between the two goes far beyond analogy and into the realm of mutual constitution, and thus a resistant response will be most effective if structured to address that mutuality.2 The framework of biocertification explains why the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood is not instead named the “Certificate of Tribal Membership” or even the “Indian ID Card.” As biocertification, the CDIB symbolically provides a window into the very arteries and veins of the card’s possessor, and thus imbues the civil servant checking the card with the pseudo-authority of the diagnostic gaze. Similarly the numerous certificates of impairment that people with disabilities must 162 / fantasies of measurement obtain throughout their lives depend upon a metonymic and actual link between the diagnostic authority of the medical practitioner and the regulatory authority of the bureaucrat. Just as the discursive stability of the CDIB can be disrupted when the person receiving (or being denied) certification has a physical appearance interpreted as Indian or non-Indian, the power of the medical certificate is at once displaced and reinforced by the occasional willingness of the state to accept the appearance of certain bodies as evidence of impairment.3 Yet my point is not to draw a simple analogy between biocertifications of disabled and Native people, thus running the risk of conflating their crucially different (though sometimes intersecting) histories of colonialism , institutionalization, and resistance.4 Rather I seek to redirect one likely critique of this comparison—that biology is simply more fundamental to definitions of disability than it is to Native status—by exploring the hitherto unremarked origins of blood quantum certification in the same historical, legal, and cultural processes that produced modern understandings of “disabled” and “normal” bodies and minds. I seek to demonstrate a deeply embedded and mutually constitutive relationship between the emergence of biocertification for Native and disabled people in the United States in order to draw new insights and suggest future coalitions for these groups, as well as to shed light on the pervasive and multilayered functionings of fantasies of identification in the current day.5 Counting Competency While blood quantum has been used since the 1930s to delimit which individuals can claim tribal membership and access to various tribal and federal rights and resources, its original institutionalization in the tribal enrollment records produced in the period following the General Allotment Act (often referred to as the Dawes Act) of 1887 was quite different.6 The Dawes Rolls, as the first mass recordings of blood quantum, were part of the federal effort to divide the lands formerly held in common by various sovereign Indian tribes, for the stated purpose of better integrating Indian peoples into an American society based on principles of private property and individual agency. As many historians have noted, allotment also served to free up large parcels of land for sale to white interests and settlement by white Americans, and thus is often highlighted as a central device by which Indians were disempowered in the late nineteenth century.7 Since the Dawes Act allotted 160 acres of land realms of biocertification / 163 to each recognized Indian, it became necessary for the first time to create formal records of “official” Indians. The Dawes Rolls, along with subsequent enrollment documents, still serve today as a documentary basis for validating blood quantum and tribal membership, despite a variety of acknowledged flaws and omissions.8 The primary purpose of the blood quantum records compiled during the enrollment period, however, was not to distinguish between valid and invalid Indian claimants. Nor were land allotments...