Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy

By Katherine Ellinghaus
University of Nebraska Press (2017)
199 pages

Review by Bradley Shreve

No academic press today publishes more books in American Indian studies than the University of Nebraska. The press’s disciplinary breadth is nothing short of astonishing; a casual look at their list will reveal tomes in American Indian literature, ethnography, history, law, sociology, anthropology, political science, and on and on. Many of the books are so highly specialized they will never make it to paperback and probably put the non-profit press financially in the red. The press’s series, New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies edited by Margaret D. Jacobs and Robert Miller, offers up a selection of “first-rate research in Native American history and Native American legal and policy studies.” One of the series’ more recent efforts is Australian scholar Katherine Ellinghaus’ book, Blood Will Tell.

Heretofore, Ellinghaus has focused her scholarship on transnational and comparative Indigenous history, exploring common trends and differences between the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Australia and the United States. Blood Will Tell is her first monograph that examines American Indians exclusively. Methodologically, her study is based largely on secondary sources and archival research, where she sought to “interrogate government records” in an effort to show that policymakers were obsessed with blood quantum when making important decisions on land allotment and tribal enrollment.

Ellinghaus recognizes that such a task is difficult, as blood quantum is rarely mentioned in codified federal law. Take for instance the General Allotment Act, which broke tribal lands into individual parcels that were assigned to tribal members. As many tribes did not have official enrollment lists, government officials working with the tribe had to devise a strategy to determine who would receive an allotment lest non-Native opportunists exploit the process. Ellinghaus posits that blood played a crucial role, but acknowledges, “The use of blood in the administration of allotment is, however, often so slippery, surreptitious, or arbitrary that [it] is impossible to regard it as a deliberate government policy. It was not enshrined in legislation, discussed in Congress or in Indian Office publications.”

The author has more success in interrogating the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, where blood is specifically cited as a means to determine tribal enrollment. But, alas, the purpose for even mentioning blood in the IRA was to expand tribal enrollment and to incorporate those who were initially left off the list. Nevertheless, Ellinghaus, operating through a Western, highly ideological framework, smells a rat. Although she recognizes that the IRA and the Indian New Deal brought about a total reversal of the assimilation policy as they sought to preserve Native culture and language, promote tribal sovereignty and self-determination, secure Native nations territorial integrity, and remodel Indian education to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, she skewers its chief architect, John Collier, as someone suffering from “deep romanticism” about Native peoples. She reiterates the tired old claim that “Collier failed to understand the diversity of Indian nations,” yet rest assured that John Collier spent much more time in tribal communities engaging with Indian people than either Ellinghaus or most any other archive-shuttered, non-Native academic who has made this claim against him.

To her credit, Ellinghaus does illuminate the myriad difficulties and stereotypes that Native people of mixed ancestry have encountered. And she reminds readers that blood has also been important to Native people themselves, as “descent, kinship, family, and relatedness are crucial to Indian identity.” To this end, Ellinghaus has cracked open the door to further study that could prove insightful and beneficial for Native peoples and tribal communities.

Bradley Shreve, Ph.D., is managing editor of Tribal College Journal.