The Indian Card

Who Gets to Be Native in America

By: Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

Narrated by: Amy Hall

A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States

“Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life.” —The Whiting Foundation Jury

Who is Indian enough?

To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded—increasing 85 percent in just ten years—the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe.

In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity—the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children—she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today’s Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

Worth the Read

If you have any interest in Native American History and learning about Native identity, then this is a book you need to read!! Extremely powerful and motivating, making it a desire to learn more.

Against all odds

I learned so much about the challenges and complexitives of native American identity, and the indomitable spirit of those individuals who seek to claim and preserve their identities against the formidable odds past and present that have tried to erase their culture and existence - most of which have been imposed by the government of the United States.

Excellent book and excellent narration about a subject many people and privileged whites probably know nothing

This book was so gripping I couldn’t put it down, and it clearly and in great detail was able to dissect and clarify all the many ways that native Americans were treated so horribly by the European colonists and the US government. We should all be inspired to search out complacent racism in our own hearts with the same intensity as for Blacks and descendants of slaves.

A passionate author

The narrator mispronounced a number of words. This caliber of book deserves a professional narrator.

An excellent primer

I enjoyed learning about how Native nations are functioning and how determining someone belongs or is claimed by tribe and how utterly unique each group functions. Learning how the census process worked against the Indians as described by untrained rangers and how the census changed as the US government needed to manipulate data. Simply horrible. The experience was very conflicting and very needed as my education did not include many of details I learned in this book.