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Adventure Guest Blog: Indian Enough?

Forrest Borie, intrepid cultural observer and writer living and working with the Mono Indians in California reports, “RM sits behind a desk sorting papers for a Tribal Council meeting. I have my feet up and am neglecting work. We’ve gotten in one of those long discussions where neither party is listening to the other. Like two independent threads that just happen to cover the same subject, our conversation twirls through the proper way to record an electric guitar, into running a business, and finally settles on the government dependency that RM sees as debilitating to Indians.
Perhaps, it is my general ignorance of this subject, but we seem to start connecting more and after he expresses his desire to steer the tribe towards government independence (buying land instead of getting it in trust from the government etc…) he tells me something very disturbing:

“The government requires 1/4 Indian blood to be considered Indian, but see that doesn’t work. In a few generations, with the blood diluting, there won’t be anyone with that much.”

On some of the bigger reservations this isn’t as much of a problem. With economic independence and a thriving tribal culture, some large reservations have radio stations in the tribal language and issue their own passports, but for the Rancherias of California with small populations this kind of government decree means complete eradication.

There’s no need to spell out the consequences of this or the disturbing rationale that one can’t help but assume the government is using to ensure that one day the BIA can be drastically scaled back and reciprocal benefits to Native Americans cut.

When I bring this up to LB later on, he corrects me:

“No, see, that’s determined by the tribe. Some up North are down to 1/16th required for somebody to be Indian. But I look around me, at some of my little cousins, and they’ll never be able to be members down here,” he says, “you know, people like to do what they want, but you know if I got a white woman pregnant, that baby would only be a quarter Indian. Down here, I’m only considered half because my dad’s people split from these people, they lived up there,” he gestures towards the hills, “one guy made a decision for all of them.”

I had wondered why LB’s father, SB, who is fluent in Mono and also the father of CB, the tribal administrator, was never mentioned when I was compiling a list of the Elders down on the Rancheria. Despite near full blood, he’s not Indian.

The tribal policy meant to exclude individual benefit leeches with negligible Indian blood and the BIA policy that federally recognizes tribes threaten the future of the California Indians. I couldn’t help but think of the running Indian joke about the Cherokee. While I don’t entirely understand it, one of the first things people joked with me about down here was that I was one eighteenth Cherokee. No sooner did they say this than the man I was living with at the time claimed he was in fact one eighteenth Cherokee.

“Might be able to claim benefits, man,” he said”.

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