The New Yorker:

How did the U.S. government become involved in “adjudicating Indianness”?

By Rachel Monroe

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, a former Obama Administration official, was six years old when she became, as she puts it, “a card-carrying Indian”—an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, from whom she is descended on her mother’s side. The occasion was marked by the delivery of a typewritten card, issued by the tribe’s enrollment office. It was the size of a driver’s license, but it was much more symbolically freighted; her mother made Schuettpelz wash her hands before she was allowed to touch it.

Schuettpelz’s Lumbee relatives are mostly concentrated in the tribal seat of Pembroke, North Carolina, a town of around twenty-eight hundred people, two-thirds of whom are Native American. In Pembroke, her family “live in a circle,” on a looping gravel road where various cousins and aunts and uncles reside close to one another. “If you stood in the middle of this circle and yelled loud enough, I’m certain you could call everyone to supper,” she writes.

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