Luther Snagel

Political Science 390

Professor Lee Merseth

1 June 2021

Native American Racial Identity: Origins, Activism, and the Present

Native Americans living in the United States are variously understood as a racial group,

ethnicity, cultural affiliation, and members of separate sovereign states. Depending on where

and when questions regarding the racial status of Native Americans are asked, some or all of

these factors might be emphasized to varying degrees. The goal of this annotated bibliography

is to account for the historical basis for this multiplicity which lies at the heart of Native American

racial identification. This account will include the early relationship between Native Americans

and the policies of the US government, and what consequences this had at the time for

construing Native Americans as a race. This history in many ways describes the simultaneous

development of Native American and White American racial identities through violence and

economics, and it involves subjects of gender and ideology alongside race. It will also be

necessary to analyze the self-identification of Native Americans, and its development over time

based on interaction with foreign forces, and the changing social climate as history moved

forward. The phenomenon of sovereignty, the way it is limited, regulated, and inherently

interconnected with the federal and state level governance by the US will be a necessary

element of this account. Sovereignty provides a unique framework for understanding and

determining identity which Native Americans possess in contrast to other racial groups. From

these foundational analyses new questions arise. In what ways have Native Americans

advocated for rights or bargained as a race historically? What factors might contribute to or

impede race-based activism for Native Americans when compared to other groups?
 The history of Native Americans does not begin and end with the early events of

colonialism. Although the economic and social policy of colonialism determines greatly the racial

formation of Native Americans, the history of Native Americans extends far into the past, and

stretches far into the future. The way in which Native Americans understand their own racial

identity is shaped by cultural artifacts and the unique legal position of Indian nations. The goal of

this annotated bibliography is to provide an account of those events critical to the racial

formation of Native Americans, while also analyzing existing forms racial activism in the present

and recent past. This topic bears researching because of the potential for importing tactics and

coordinating struggles between groups struggling for racial equality in the US, and the ways

colonialism complicates this importation. The history of genocide, expropriation, forced

assimilation, and continued economic depravation of Native Americans in many aspects is

unique, but it is important to emphasize points of overlap where struggles for racial equality

converge, such that powerful activism can draw on various groups to effect change which helps

them all. Taken together this annotated bibliography will first provide an account of the racial

formation of Native Americans in relation to settlers at the start of colonialism. Then it will cover

the racial policy affecting Native Americans, and institutionalizing aspects of their racial identity

in the following centuries. This will serve as a foundation for an exploration of more

contemporary experiences of racial identity for Native Americans. This will lead directly into a

discussion of activism by and for Native Americans which centers on racial identity, the

challenges facing it, and the possibilities moving forward.

1. Smith, Andrea. "Indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy." Racial Formation in

the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daniel HoSang, University of California Press, 2012,

pp. 66-91.

This article argues that politics sufficient for decolonization requires a tripartite analysis of white

supremacy along three poles: Slavery/capitalism, Genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism/war.

White supremacy operates through each of these relations to make differently racialized groups

complicit in the oppression of the others. This model opposes the dominant understanding of

organizing POC through shared victimhood, which leads to comparisons of severity and

emphasis on the uniqueness of the group being analyzed. Settler colonialism is a necessary

component of any serious theorization of the US as a racial state, since otherwise the

permanence and immutability of the US as such is assumed within the struggles for liberation.

The inclusion of settler colonialism in discussions of white supremacy invites the possibility of

fully decolonized governance, ‘transcendent change’ which is not confined to the US state.

Collapsing indigenous peoples into immigrant populations in discourses which center blackness

has the side effect of erasing their relationship with this land and “reifying the settler colonial

project”. Similarly, seeing high rates of interracial marriages of indigenous people as simply

‘racial progress’ ignores the history of genocide associated with assimilation for indigenous

people. The point is to attack white supremacy and the conditions of the settler state itself.

2. Garroutte, Eva Marie. "The racial formation of American Indians: Negotiating legitimate

identities within tribal and federal law." American Indian Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 2, 2001,

pp. 224-239.
Tribal identity within the US is regulated by the nations themselves. This leads to myriad

strategies for determining citizenship, the most common being “blood quantum” or the degree of

Indian ancestry and individual possesses. This is problematic because it is determined by

generational proximity to individuals whose names appear on lists which were created over a

century ago, and reflect the European understanding of race at the time, aimed at the eventual

goal of assimilation. Many names appearing on these lists or ‘base rolls’ were white people

claiming to be Indian, or names which were fully fabricated, and many natives simply boycotted

the list and refused to be marked and categorized, or died during the process, making for a very

inaccurate system in the present day. Significant advantages and protections are offered to

people who identify as Indian and are judged legitimate. This makes the regime of racial

identification of Native Americans by large blood quantums largely the opposite of that of Blacks

who are subject to hypodescent or the “one-drop rule”. The legal frameworks for determining

inclusion and citizenship in Native American nations is fraught with many shortcomings, making

the state a uniquely dissatisfactory locus for analysis and activism when considering Native

Americans.

3. Kitch, Sally L. “The specter of sex: Gendered foundations of racial formation in the

United States.” SUNY Press, 2009, pp.68-76.

In the initial interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, a discourse of inferiority

was disseminated through gendered frameworks. It argued that the Christian Europeans

possessed a “special brand of masculine vigor” which would overcome the feminized, innocent,

inferior Indians through civilization and Christianization. The Indians experienced a reversal of

this perception, seeing Europeans as “awkward” and impotent, and derided their tendency to die

without stoicism. Kitch gives the example of Powhatan who imported the patriarchal

organizational structure from the Europeans to impress and defeat them, which in turn taught
Indian women that assimilation into English style society would disadvantage them. English

settlers saw themselves as fully possessing the property and bodies of native peoples,

mimicking the law of coverture husbands had over wives under English law. The reason was the

inherent irrationality of the group being subjected (women or Indians), and the God-ordained

authority of white men to manage their affairs for them. Each defeat suffered by the Indians

proved their feminine dependence to white settlers. This extends to the definition of Indians as

wards of the state in the 1880s, the policy of reservations beings an expression of this gendered

coverture relationship.

4. Goldstein, Alyosha. "Where the nation takes place: Proprietary regimes, antistatism, and

US settler colonialism." South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 107, no. 4, 2008, pp. 833-861.

The US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were the only countries who voted against the

2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These countries have a clear incentive

to combat these rights in order to maintain the apparent coherence of settler colonial states. The

legal posture in the US is decidedly against Native American national sovereignty. This can be

seen in the Sherrill ruling which argued that the subsequent residency of land by settlers

annulled territorial claims by the Oneida Indian Nation of New York. These attempts to stifle and

deny the ability of Indian nations to be fully sovereign places them constantly in the legal

framework of domestic politics, preventing international interaction that would be intrinsic to any

typical sovereign state. The US is committed to the idea of private property rights in these

deliberations, because they cover over the initial expropriation of land and resources, and

frames as unreasonable and impossible the return of stolen lands to Indian nations who did not

conceive of ownership in the same way, making the explicit legal separation between the ideas

of occupancy and ownership. Although some legal battles were decided in favor of Indian

nations, the structure as a whole is upheld when grievances are presented in this way, and the
denial of the US declaration was a strategy to prevent international law from interfering with this

structure.

5. Nagel, Joane. “American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Politics and the Resurgence of

Identity.” American sociological review vol. 60, no. 6, 1995, pp. 947-965.

Between 1960 and 1990 the population identifying as Native American increased more than

threefold, not due to increased birthrates or new data-gathering techniques, but instead due to a

process of ethnic renewal. This is a move into nondominant ethnic identity which had been

surpressed in the past. Nagel argues that since World War II, many Native Americans consider

themselves part of a “supratribal” pan-ethnic “Indian” identity. In analyzing all the available data

to attempt to understand these “New Indians”, they were far more likely to live in urban areas, to

be intermarried, and to speak only English. These are all signs of assimilation, which was the

explicit policy of the federal government toward Indian populations, from boarding schools, to

World War II, to later programs for job training and urban relocation. This great increase in the

reported Indian population also coincided with the mainstream ethnic politics of the period, and

an outpouring of public resources earmarked for minority programs. The protest climate of the

60s and 70s also helped in this rise, since the American Indian Movement began to protest and

raise awareness of the unjust treatment of Native Americans historically, and likely helped

activate a renewal of Indian ethnicity for the urban assimilated Indian population.

6. Okamoto, Dina G. “The ethnic-panethnic dynamics of collective action” Redefining race:

Asian American panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries. Russell Sage Foundation,

2014, pp 85-111.
This chapter covers the forms of organizing Asian American activists engaged in between the

1970s and 2000s. Specifically, it focuses on the competing or complimentary strategies of ethnic

and panethnic organizing. The difference between these organizing strategies is that ethnic

organizing focuses on a specific country of origin and ethnicity, while panethnic organizing is an

assertion of a broader boundary around a whole set of ethnic groups similarly victimized by

white supremacy. From the 1970s onward these two strategies were inherently intertwined.

Ethnic organizations created networks of information, resources, and access to power which

were “complementary and mutually supportive” of panethnic goals. Segregation in labor markets

led leaders to forward a pan-Asian narrative to unify the population and mobilize people toward

mutually beneficial ends. In the Native American context, although the same concept of

panethnicity is useful for organizing the nations as a unified force, the logic of

genocide/colonialism is different from orientalism/war. Native American nations and cultures

have already been subsumed and homogenized by the foundational myths of America and their

culture is already perceived as extinct, in contrast to the vibrancy Asians can organize around in

relation to their ethnic homeland.

7. Wilkins, David E. “Indian peoples are nations, not minorities.” American Indian Politics

and the American Political System. Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 41-62.

In its dealings with tribal peoples the US repeatedly has confirmed the fact that these are

sovereign nations and not minority racial groups. This is because from the very beginning of the

country and the writing of the constitution they were recognized as such, and through the very

existence of documents like treaties this is proven, since nothing other than a sovereign political

body with jurisdictional authority over a specific territory can enter into this type of agreement.

This means that the US government has repeatedly engaged in practices which would be easily

challenged on the basis of violating the Constitution against Native Americans, but due to their
extra-Constitutional status, are subsumed under the doctrine of plenary powers which Congress

holds over Indian nations. These treaties between the federal government and Indian nations

were not racial in nature, but political, since the nascent US had the desire and need to deal on

equal terms with these nations which held significant military and economic sway at the time.

This can be clearly seen in much of the language used in treaties and charters in the 18th and

early 19th centuries.

8. McClain, Paula D., et al. "Group membership, group identity, and group consciousness:

Measures of racial identity in American politics?" Annual Review of Political Science 12,

2009, pp. 471-485.

The goal of this paper is to understand the nature or racial identity, balancing ascription and

self-identification, and navigating the differences between groups racialized differently. It is also

attempting to find explanations for the relationships between racial identities and political

behavior as it relates to the individual’s racial identity and their group’s position in the racial

hierarchy. The paper argues that African Americans have been treated as a group rather than

individuals historically from the outside, contributing to a feeling of linked fate. Attempts to bring

these concepts of group consciousness and linked fate outside of the African American context

has proven problematic. This paper argues that different racial groups can have radically

different histories of racialization, and therefore it is not necessary to find one universal heuristic

for understanding political mobilization for all, and individual heuristics for separate groups are

desirable and necessary. Although some individuals or groups may use race as a heuristic for

understanding their position in the world, this may not hold to a significant degree the way it

does for African Americans.

the rise of the American Indian Movement. University of Oklahoma Press, 2005 pp

181-195.

This chapter recounts the story from the perspective of a first-hand witness of the attempt of the

Oglala Nation to declare full sovereignty from the US. The declared “This is no longer a

perimeter, it is a border.” Taking the contradictory notion of sovereignty under US jurisdiction to

task, and demanding recognition as a fully-fledged nation. They fielded an “army of equals” who

would defend the territory from foreign invaders and spies, and began to set up all the

necessary committees and bodies for a functioning government. There were live firefights

happening continually, as the US shot to kill, and the Nation sought to defend itself with the aid

of the American Indian Movement. They were making their stand at Wounded Knee, and

Leonard Crow Dog decided to start a Ghost Dance, just as had been done in 1890 before the

US murdered the Ghost Dancers. In his statement he announced “There won’t be, ‘I’m a Sioux,

I’m a Chippewa, I’m a Mohawk.’ We’ll be dancing as one tribe.” The panethnicity of Native tribes

is exemplified in the armed resistance to the US policy of nullifying the treaty of 1868. This is not

a petition for equal respect under the law, but is an assertion of full sovereignty outside of those

institutions.

10. Raheja, Michelle H. “Visual sovereignty, indigenous revisions of ethnography, and

Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)” Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and

Representations of Native Americans in Film. University of Nebraska Press, 2010, pp

190-.

In the context of this chapter, visual sovereignty is the practice of creating moving images for the

purpose of placing Native Americans in a particular historical context and emphasizing tribal
specificity. This is distinct from ethnographic film made by white filmmakers who tend to

emphasize the primitive or savage nature of Indigenous peoples, and use the language of

cinema to recontextualize behaviors and expressions of their subjects as inferior. The

expropriation by Native people of the techniques of photography and videography allow them to

create counternarratives which do not frame their communities as “archaic, primitive, and

doomed peoples.” Earlier films made through the white lens can also be captured by visual

sovereignty, recapitulating and revising the reception of a film toward a narrative privileging

Indigenous participation, knowledge, and preserves cultural memory in the present. The

purpose of the term sovereignty in this context is to draw out the articulations of

“self-representation and autonomy” which connect to the mass media, specifically film in this

case, but are not beholden solely to Western context and form.