How Grandma Kate Lost Her Cherokee Blood and What This Says about Race, Blood, and Belonging in Indian Country

Abstract:This article documents how the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) created the now ubiquitous minimum blood quantum requirement as a rule for tribal membership. In making this argument, received ideas about Indian blood are decentered by demonstrating how Indian blood is created through bureaucratic acts rather than biological processes. As a vehicle to these larger questions, I examine how the US government and the EBCI negotiated the boundary between Indians and non- Indians over the course of the nineteenth century. Central to these boundaries were rolls assembled by the US government in the context of Cherokee claims that were made before and after the Treaty of New Echota of 1835. Toward the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the EBCI politically operationalized these rolls as a foundation for defining their tribal membership requirements. In so doing, they created and became the first tribe to adopt a minimum blood quantum requirement as a criterion for tribal membership. A particular focus is given to the debates surrounding the efforts of Keziah Vann’s descendants to secure their place on the Cherokee rolls and acknowledgment by the US government and the EBCI of their Cherokee identity. Because this family was situated on the boundary between Indians and non-Indians from the time of the Cherokee Reservation Roll of the Treaty of 1817 until the Guion Miller Roll of 1909, debates surrounding this family have much to reveal about the Indian and non-Indian divide and the uses of blood and bureaucracy to construct Indian identity.