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Survival of Tribes at Stake

By Andrew Metz | Staff Correspondent

Indian Township, Maine - The Nicholases are buried here. So are the Stevens and the Danas. The Soctomahs and the Socobasins.

The bloodlines of these families and a few more touch nearly every soul on this reservation at the rim of America, year after year perpetuating the people known as Passamaquoddy.

For these American Indians of Maine, the tombstones on the banks of Big Lake are landmarks of their identity, reminders of who they are and where they come from. Yet when Jodi Socobasin stands in this graveyard on Peter Dana Point, sandy blond hair raked by the wind, blue eyes watering from the cold, her foothold on the ancestral ground is shaky.

"My grandparents are buried here. All my family is here," the 27-year-old teacher's aide said on a recent day. "I know I am Passamaquoddy, but it is so difficult to be here, to feel that I am, but not get the recognition."

The product of an interracial marriage -- her mother is Indian, her father is white -- she can't prove her blood is at least one-quarter Passamaquoddy and so under tribal rules is barred from membership. She works at the tribe's school, but has to live off the reservation because she's not entitled to housing.

"Gimme a moose and I'll skin it," she expels in frustration. "I can hunt and fish. I am involved with the kids, the community, the basket making. I don't know any other side of me than the Passamaquoddy side. It's all I have."

Like many Americans of Indian lineage, Socobasin is a cast-off of an ethnic calculus that equates blood with authenticity. To visit her netherworld here in the raw Maine timberland, where centuries of intermingling have imparted Catholic convictions and a northeast brogue, is to enter some of the most sensitive terrain in Indian country.

As the nation's complexion is blurring, the Passamaquoddy and most tribes are struggling to maintain their distinctiveness, using a 19th century U.S. blood policy to regulate modern Indian identity. In this crucible of history and race, it's often not enough to have aboriginal heritage or speak a native language, live on a reservation or adhere to Indian ways.

"It is like a pedigree. We don't do this with any other group in the country," said Jeff Corntassel, a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who has written extensively on the topic. "It is a really easy way of assessing someone's identity without going into someone's identity, without going into the real indicators of what it is to be Indian."

Reconfiguring themselves out of the embers of oppression, native people face a burden of proof at every level of life, from the assignment of blood levels to newborns to the battles by nearly extinguished tribes, such as Long Island's Shinnecock, to win federal recognition -- the turnkey to entitlements and casino gambling.

Indeed, sharing gaming profits and federal funding has sparked bitter disputes coast to coast: Tribes have manipulated membership rules to oust rival factions; bodies have been exhumed to prove ancestry.

But in many places and certainly here in Indian Township, where casinos don't exist and checks from a land claim settlement have dwindled to about $200 per person annually, the debate is ultimately about the direction and the hue of the future.

"If we leave the system the way it is now, when I'm 70, there aren't going to be many of us around," said Joseph Socobasin, 31, Jodi's uncle and lieutenant governor of the reservation of about 800. "There won't be enough Passamaquoddy blood left."

The blood quantum rules used by the majority of Indian tribes arose out of U.S. pressure in the 1930s to abandon traditional governance and adopt American-style constitutions. The regulations, most commonly at a minimum of one-quarter blood level, are based on census rolls created by the federal government in the late 19th century when it was forcing assimilation and breaking up tribal land.

U.S. agents estimated blood concentrations usually on nothing more than appearances or even hair samples and rub tests -- where a subject's chest was rubbed to determine the degree of redness. Many Indians insisted they were mixed race because full bloods were considered incompetent to manage land; others resisted being registered at all.

"It is meaningless," said C. Matthew Snipp, a prominent Indian demographer and visiting professor at Harvard University. "They are a notoriously sloppy set of records with a lot of slippage that have become the benchmark."

To this day, the United States uses the blood measurements in its myriad interactions in Indian life, from eligibility for federally subsidized health care and housing to the right to market native crafts and collect eagle feathers. In general, the government requires proof of at least one-quarter overall Indian blood or membership in one of the 562 federally recognized tribes. The Bureau of Indian Affairs even issues wallet-size identification cards that list blood breakdowns in intricate fractions.

"They count you down to the last corpuscle," said Eva Marie Garroutte, a sociologist at Boston College and author of a new book, "Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America." "It is a crude tool, but at the same time suited to the needs of a bureaucratically ordered society where Indian identity is tied to a whole range of very valuable resources ... You've got to have a way to know who has a legitimate claim."

A glance at the most recent U.S. census figures hints at the complexity of the problem. Overall, 2.4-million people reported American Indian as their sole race and listed one tribal affiliation, a dramatic gain from a decade ago. But another 1.7 million said they were Indian and at least one other race and tied to one or more tribes. And with more Americans embracing native heritage, demographers estimate there may be as many as 10 million people with Indian backgrounds.

In Indian Township, a smattering of low budget houses off a backcountry road, the growing multiethnic makeup means every year around eight new children don't meet the blood requirements -- a phenomenon Denise Polches, the tribal clerk and keeper of the census records, calls "bleeding out."