Tribal Enrollment

Pre-Columbian Era to the Dawes Act

In pre-Columbian times, tribes did not conceive of themselves racially—this was a concept introduced through colonialism. Instead, tribes tended to view the world as consisting of “us” and “everyone else.” Intermarriage was a common means of forging political alliances between tribes, and ethnic boundaries tended to be fluid between different tribal groups. Membership in a tribe was based purely on social custom; it was [Page 2091]not until colonialism, particularly the expansion of the 1800s, that racial definitions of tribal membership began to take hold.

Beginning in the 1860s a number of census records were taken, distinguishing members of tribal communities via blood quantum measures. Blood quantum identifies racial membership as a product of ancestry. A person with two Indian parents, for example, is considered to be a “full-blood;” a person whose parents are Indian and white is considered a “half-blood;” and a person with a half-blood parent and a non-Indian parent would be considered a quadroon or “quarter-blood”; and so on. This means of judging a person's identity is seen as quantitative ancestry, and such distinctions were initially used by the U.S. government as a means of excluding individuals from being considered indigenous, thereby severing the government's obligations to them.

One particularly influential moment was the enactment of the Dawes Act in 1893, which marked the first instance when blood quantum was used as a means of assigning allotments of land. Documents, later called the Dawes Rolls, were created as a result of this process, and these rolls were the first instance when tribal enrollment began to officially exist as a legal form of tribal citizenship.

Although these methods of qualifying identity were first introduced by the U.S. government, many tribes began to use them willingly to determine their own membership during this period. The Choctaw government, for instance, began to use blood quantum in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This period, which saw the first indigenous adoption of colonial definitions of tribal citizenship, marked an important point in history; Choctaw definitions of membership within the tribe changed completely as a direct result of the enrollment process, with older, more amorphous notions of belonging being eradicated in favor of legal classification.

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