Those Who Belong
Subtitle: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 217
ISBN-13: 9780887557965
Copyright date: 2015
First sentence: We create and re-create ourselves in the past, present, and future in story.
Description: Despite the central role blood quantum played in political formations of American Indian identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are few studies that explore how tribal nations have contended with this transformation of tribal citizenship. Those Who Belong explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understand identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century, how it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood quantum criteria with lineal descent.

Those Who Belong illustrates the ways in which Anishinaabeg of White Earth negotiated multifaceted identities, both before and after the introduction of blood quantum as a marker of identity and as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship. Doerfler's research reveals that Anishinaabe leaders resisted blood quantum as a tribal citizenship requirement for decades before acquiescing to federal pressure. Constitutional reform efforts in the twenty-first century brought new life to this longstanding debate and led to the adoption of a new constituion that requires lineal descent for citizenship.
Table of contents: label: Preface
title: ix; label: Acknowledgements
title: xvii; label: Introduction
title: xxi; label: Chapter 1. No, No There Was No Mixed-Bloods: Mapping Anishinaabe Conceptions of Identity
title: 1; label: Chapter 2. Consider the Relationship: Citizenship Regulations of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe
title: 31; label: Chapter 3. It is Time to Take Our Own Leadership: The Constituiton of the White Earth Nation
title: 61; label: Conclusion
title: 91; label: Appendix 1. Revised Constitution and Bylaws of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota
title: 97; label: Appendix 2. The Constitution of the White Earth nation
title: 113; label: Notes
title: 139; label: Bibliography
title: 179; label: Index
title: 193