Blood Quantum Laws

BLOOD QUANTUM LAWS
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Blood quantum laws are also known as the Indian blood laws. These rules were used in the former thirteen colonies and in the United States of America (USA) to define Native Americans by using their ancestry. The USA started applying these laws after the implementation of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934). An individual’s blood is defined by the fraction of his or her ancestor’s blood, who are considered to be full-blood Native Americans. Blood quantum laws were introduced by the federal government to limit the citizenship of tribes entering the USA. Some countries, such as the Turtle Mountain Band, Chippewa Indians, and the Navajo Nation use this law to regulate citizenship. For instance, the Navajo Nation requires one to have a minimum of 25% “Navajo blood” to be a citizen in that country (Chow 2018). Blood quantum laws restrict individuals who can be a citizen of a specific tribe based on the established tribe’s blood quantum standards.
Blood quantum laws have failed to give solutions to issues in the nations that use them. In particular, many Native Americans are used to the blood quantum laws, which means that they believe that one must have a minimum amount of blood to be considered a citizen of that country. Many families have suffered under these laws whose members were not recorded accurately since they have a partial or full change in descent from a specific tribe. For example, some states using the blood quantum laws classified individuals with a mixture of the Native American and African American as solely black people. The problem was prevalent after Reconstruction in South America (Schmidt 2012). As such, some opponents of the blood quantum laws argued that it helped create racism or discrimination among tribal members. That explains why some individuals from the Five C...