SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Writer Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz says that she's always been a data nerd. So when she started writing about Native American identity, that's where she turned.
CARRIE LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: And so I started looking at the Census data, and it's hard to miss the fact that the number of people in this country checking the box for American Indian, Alaska Native has just skyrocketed.
DETROW: That got her thinking about what it means to be Native American in the U.S. and the history of how that came to be. The result is her new book, "The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America." It's the story of how the federal government came to categorize Native identity, things like blood quantum, land allotments and tribal enrollment, policies that she argues have not been great.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: And so I thought, you know, I should write something that talks about my own struggles with my Native identity and my feeling of disconnection.
DETROW: She explores the disconnection through the personal stories of people whose lives have been shaped by these forces and begins with her own story, when she had to consider renewing the card that says she's an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: I remember sitting in my condo in D.C. all those years ago, when I was contemplating renewing my enrollment, just sort of, like, rolling the card over and over in my fingers, thinking, where in the world did this come from? This is not something that my, you know, generations-ago ancestors would have held in their wallet. And so why is it that we do it now?
And so I think all of those things sort of converged into this idea of, I got to do research. I got to figure out the answers to some of these questions. And also, you know, my story is one story, and it's somewhat unique in the sense that my tribe, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, is not federally recognized. And so I thought that it was important to include other voices, not because they represent the entire universe of experience, but they certainly give us a sense of the patterns that we see.
DETROW: There's a lot of your book that's about just the broader idea of community and shared experience and belonging and this particular tension when it comes to Native communities that. for many people, it's not a geographic community. It might not even be a community that's immediately present in their lives. And yet, it is a very important part of community for them.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: The federal government enacted a lot of policies in the 20th century that actually resulted in this sense of disconnection for a lot of Native people today. One of those was relocation, the Relocation Act, where Native people were sent to urban centers that they had never been to and that were far away from their Native communities, and then expected to sort of get a job and create their own community. I mean, there are people who are still suffering from those policies today.
And so the idea of disconnection, the idea of being a long way away from your tribal community is something that I think we're seeing the consequences of today. And to be clear, some people choose to move, and that's fine, too, right? But I think as it relates to sort of these structural policy moments that have created the situation that we find ourselves in today, that's really problematic that now, all of a sudden, we have all of these Native people who have ended up thousands of miles, you know, from their Native community because of policies that the federal government has enacted.
DETROW: I'm wondering if, as we talk about how these decisions made decades ago affect people's lives today, can you tell us about one of the people you met and interviewed?
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: One that has really sort of stuck with me since writing the book was the story of not just my friend, Karen Diver, who was formerly President Obama's senior adviser in Native policy, but her uncle, Don (ph). He's 84 years old. And he was stolen to boarding school at age 5, Indian boarding school, and really didn't return home until he was 18, went straight into the military and then went straight to Cleveland, Ohio, hundreds of miles away from his tribe up in northern Minnesota as part of the...
DETROW: He didn't see his parents for years and years at a time.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: He didn't see his parents for years and years at a time, and then ended up in Cleveland as part of the Indian Relocation Act, and still today lives there. He doesn't feel a lot of connection to his tribe because of all of these policies that have been, you know, forced upon him as a Native person. But what's really interesting about Don and sort of that story is he spent the vast majority of his life - he's 84 - thinking that the boarding school era was just something that his parents let happen, that he was stolen away to boarding school and no one ever tried to bring him home.
Well, doing some historical deep diving into the archives, I was able to find Don's Indian boarding school records. And in those records, we found handwritten letters from his mother and sister begging officials to send him home. I mean, these are things he never saw, he didn't know existed. And there's all of this stuff that exists for Native people that they have no idea. It's, you know, catalogued somewhere in the National Archives. That was a game-changer for Don. I mean, that's something that's going to - not right the wrong of what happened, but it's certainly going to help bring some closure to that awful period of his life.
DETROW: It really struck me when you write about finding the cold, inpersonal bureaucratic paperwork about his removal from his family.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: It's something that, at age 5, certainly he didn't understand, but that he came to terms with the older he got. But without any sense of -you know, he's never seen a picture of himself before he was 18 years old.
DETROW: Wow.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: He has no childhood relics. He has nothing from childhood, no finger paintings, no nothing. And he also has no stories from his family. He can't ask anyone what he was like as a kid because he was at boarding school. And so it's just - it's so much lost everything, lost information, but also lost experience and lost childhood that has happened as part of, again, these federal policies, and in this case, Indian boarding schools.
DETROW: What are one or two things that you thought about much differently at the end of this process than the beginning?
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: You know, it's interesting. I started writing a book about identity, and the only thing I could think of coming out of it was land (laughter).
DETROW: Yeah.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: And so one of the things I've been thinking a lot about, and I've been working on a project through the Native Policy Lab, which I direct at the University of Iowa, is, how much land has been stolen through each of these treaties and each of these pieces of legislation? Who owns it now? And how can we make it so that tribes get it back?
And certainly I'm not suggesting that we go door to door to private citizens and say, hey, you need to give your land back to the tribes. What I'm saying is, certainly there are large swaths of land owned by the federal government today that don't belong to them. And so how can we achieve sort of a reality where tribes get their ancestral homelands and then also are able to do the same sorts of things that any private citizen who owns land can do, things like monetize the land? And so I think that, interestingly, that is sort of where my mind has shifted in the last several months.
DETROW: That is author Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz. Her book is "The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America." Thank you so much.
LOWRY SCHUETTPELZ: Thanks so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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