When someone says the word ” Native” or “Indian”, what comes to mind? For some, they think of Pocahontas and Christopher Columbus. For others, they might think of the Native Americans living in the US and their painful history. For people like Leah Myers, they think of blood quantum laws, Indian boarding schools, and the Native population.
Before I begin, I just want to preface by saying that this article is not meant to be offensive in any way. I am simply taking the knowledge that I got from reading the book Thinning Blood and stating the facts about Native American History here. Of course, times have changed and people have changed their views on Native Americans, for better or for worse. However, I still feel that it is important to acknowledge what Native American people have gone through and the effects on future generations, especially since it was just Native American Heritage Month.
Let’s start with blood quantum laws. The US government first created this rule in order to identify Native Americans based on the fraction of Native Blood that they had in them. If a person had a smaller fraction of Native Blood in them than the requirement, they were not considered Native American.
The reason why the US government did this was because it was trying to limit the number of Native people who would be eligible to receive rights from US treaties. It was a way for the US government to indirectly reduce the Native Americans’ dependence on treaties to receive benefits, this way the US government could spend their money elsewhere, on other things.
Even though these blood quantum laws were effective, it had a negative effect on Native Americans. Due to their past, Native Americans used this blood quantum law to protect themselves against people who were not their own. As they bounced back from everything they had lost and started providing resources to their own, Native Americans started using these blood quantum laws to provide resources to those who were qualified to be Native American, and no other race.
Leah Myers, the author of this book, is one-eighth Native American and has at least one ancestor who is a full Native American from the S’Klallam tribe. Due to her current percentage of Native American blood, it is likely that her future children would not qualify as Native American enough. And the effects of this can already be seen in her nephew. Because he is one-sixteenth Native American, he had no access to all of the resources that he would have been able to get if he was native enough. He could not get funding for college, he could not participate in Native American traditions such as singing traditional songs and learning how to make beads, he could not be a part of something that the rest of his family was a big part of.
Which brings me to the next point, on Indian boarding schools. On one hand, we had Native Americans who were not qualified enough to be considered an American Indian. On the other hand, we had Native Americans who acted too much like one, so much so that they needed to be sent to Indian Boarding schools.
Richard Henry Pratt first came up with the motto,”Kill the Indian, Save the Man” when he started an industrialized Indian school that prompted other white Americans to do the same. Of course not all white Americans viewed Native American people this way, but this was a time when racism towards Native Americans was very prominent. During that time, Native Americans were labeled as dirty savages and alcoholics. The poverty rate was quite high and the number of illiterate Native Americans also wasn’t a small number. To the white Americans, building a Native American school made so much sense.
The child would be given a better life filled with loving staff who did not neglect the child because of alcohol. A better life with access to a good education that would enable them to eventually get a college degree and then get a good job with good pay. A better life, blessed with enough food on the table and warm blankets to sleep at night. All these factors made White people feel as though they were saving the Native Population, “saving the man”, by improving the lives of future Native American generations to come.
The unfortunate thing is how these Indian schools were all about “doing good”, when really they were taking Native children away from their homes, as well as abusing them while making them forget about their own culture. In these boarding schools,Native American children were forced to deny their own heritage and instead learn how to act like a white American, like everyone in American society at that time. Their lack of cultural knowledge meant that they were not able to pass down the Native American culture down to their offspring and future generations . It meant that future generations would have no resources to look at in order to learn and know more about Native American tradition. Slowly but surely, these industrialized boarding schools coerced Native Americans into letting their culture slowly die out.
What surprises me in this book is how much Native Americans were looked down upon, and the extent of that. Not only did the US government try to get rid of them by creating blood quantum laws to reduce the number of people who could identify as Native American, schools in America were helping the population’s future generations forget their identity. However, the worst was through sterilization and mass murders.
According to Leah Myer’s book, 9,575 Native Americans go missing every year. This is a large number of people from the already small , 3% of the United States population. It shocks me that so many Native Americans are disappearing, further reducing the size of an already small population.
In 1970, the government implemented a Family Planning and Population Research Act where they sterilized Native American women without their knowledge. These were doctors, medical professionals who took a Native American woman’s ability to reproduce and have children without her consent or knowledge of it. They used an opportunity, the fact that Native Americans were illiterate, to take advantage of the population’s women.
Leah Myers had faced the same issue when she went to her doctor to talk about birth control since she does not want to have kids. Instead of talking about what kind of birth control to use, this doctor has suggested sterilization out of the blue. Sterilization. Completely taking away a woman’s ability to have children. It surprised me. It surprised me because it made me think of how women had to fight for their right to abortion, while other women had their ability to give life taken away from them, without them knowing. After reading Thinning blood, I realized that Native American people have gone through so much over the past century. It made me realize that this was what resulted in them not teaching the culture to their children, out of fear for the safety of their children in society. I am thankful that people like Leah Myers are writing about their culture and its history, so that more people can be aware of what has happened to indigenous people. It shocks me that a lot of Native American culture is dying simply because it is not being passed down generations, and I hope that the remaining parts of the culture can be preserved through books like Leah Myer’s Thinning Blood.
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