Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Tatum Beverly;

Author:Tatum, Beverly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

What Do We Mean When We Say “Indian” ?

It is conservatively estimated that prior to 1492 there were 3 to 5 million indigenous people in America. Following the disastrous contact with Europeans, the populations were greatly reduced, and by 1850 there were only about 250,000 Indians in North America. Now there are almost 2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives living in the United States.35 They represent more than 500 different cultural communities federally defined as sovereign entities with which the United States has a government-to-government relationship.36 In addition there are an estimated 250 Native groups that are not recognized by the U.S. government.

Each of these cultural communities has its own language, customs, religion, economy, historical circumstances, and environment. They range from the very traditional, whose members speak their indigenous language at home, to the mostly acculturated, whose members speak English as their first language. Most Native people identify with their particular ancestral community first, and as American Indians second.37

The Native population grew slowly in the first half of the twentieth century, but has grown rapidly in the second half, due to a high birth rate and reduced infant mortality. Another source of the population increase, however, has been the fact that since 1970 a significant number of people have changed their Census identification to American Indian from some other racial category on the Census forms. This shift in self-identification raises the questions, who is an American Indian and how is that category defined?

The answers depend on whom you ask. Each Indian nation sets its own criteria for membership. Some specify a particular percentage of Indian ancestry (varying from one-half to one-sixty-fourth), others do not. Some nations specify native language fluency as a prerequisite for service in their government, others do not.The U.S. government requires one-quarter blood quantum (as indicated on a federal “certificate of Indian blood”) in order to qualify for Bureau of Indian Affairs college scholarships. Other federal agencies, such as the Bureau of the Census, rely on self-identification. Declining social discrimination, growing ethnic pride, a resurgence in Indian activism, and the pursuit of sovereign rights may account for the growing numbers of racially mixed U.S. citizens who are now choosing to identify themselves as American Indian.38

Despite the stereotypes to the contrary, there is great diversity among this population. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, a professor of American Indian Studies, makes this point very clearly when she writes:A fluent member of a Cherokee Baptist congregation living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, is different from an English-speaking, pow-wow-dancing Lakota born and raised in Oakland, California, who is different from a Hopi fluent in Hopi, English, Navajo, and Spanish who lives on the reservation and supports her family by selling “traditional” pottery in New York, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale galleries. The idea of being generically “Indian” really was a figment of Columbus’s imagination. 39

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