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The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

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A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States.

“Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life.” —The Whiting Foundation Jury.

Who is Indian enough? To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded—increasing 85 percent in just ten years—the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe.

In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity—the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children—she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today’s Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging.

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Posts about this title from Boozhoo Books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Mar 8

[Reading Indigenous voices on identity is a great way to understand history that has been suppressed, to correct false narratives and to counter erasure. Here are some books by Indigenous authors, both fiction and non-fiction, that center on Indigenous identity to add to your TBR. \ \ Non Fiction\ \

The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz,\ \ \ A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States .\ \
Truth Telling: Seven Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada by Michelle Good\ \ \ A provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.\ \
Thunder Song: Essays by Sasha LaPointe\ \ \ Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.\ \ Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue from the miraculous to the mundane, from the spiritual to the physical, as they examine the role of art—in particular music—and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.\ \ 4: Making Love With The Land: Essays by Joshua Whitehead \ \ A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world\ \ In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. \ \ Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. \ \ Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.\ \
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec\ \ The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."\ \ \ \ Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps listeners see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. \ \ \ \ Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.\ \ \ \ This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught\ \ \ Fiction\ \
There There by Tommy Orange\ \ \ \ A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.\ \
A Girl Called Echo by Katerina Vermette\ \ \ \ Echo Desjardins, a 13-year-old Métis girl adjusting to a new home and school, is struggling with loneliness while separated from her mother. Then an ordinary day in Mr. Bee’s history class turns extraordinary, and Echo’s life will never be the same. During Mr. Bee’s lecture, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place―a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie―and back again to the present. In the following weeks, Echo slips back and forth in time. She visits a Métis camp, travels the old fur-trade routes, and experiences the perilous and bygone era of the Pemmican Wars.\ \
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (our bookclub read this month!)\ \ \ Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.\ \
Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowell\ \ \ \ Powerful stories of “Métis futurism” that envision a world without violence, capitalism, and colonization.\ \ “Education is the new buffalo” is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, “Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?”\ \ \ \ Inspired by classic and contemporary speculative fiction, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo explores science fiction tropes through a Métis lens: a Two-Spirit rougarou (shapeshifter) in the nineteenth century tries to solve a murder in her community and joins the nêhiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy) in order to successfully stop Canadian colonial expansion into the West. A Métis man is gored by a radioactive bison, gaining super strength, but losing the ability to be remembered by anyone not related to him by blood. Nanites babble to babies in Cree, virtual reality teaches transformation, foxes take human form and wreak havoc on hearts, buffalo roam free, and beings grapple with the thorny problem of healing from colonialism. \ \ \ \ Indigenous futurisms seek to discover the impact of colonization, remove its psychological baggage, and recover ancestral traditions. These eight short stories of “Métis futurism” explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Métis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.\ \
Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley \ \ Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.\ \ \ \ In order to reclaim this inheritance for her people, Perry has no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She can only count on her friends and allies, including her overachieving twin and a charming new boy in town with unwavering morals. Old rivalries, sister secrets, and botched heists cannot - will not - stop her from uncovering the mystery before the ancestors and missing women are lost forever.\ \ \ \ Sometimes, the truth shouldn't stay buried.\ \ \

Which ones have you read? Which ones are on your TBR? Which ones are you reading soon?\ \
To join the bookclub, join the Discord!\ \
As a reminder, any book purchased through my bookshop this month, benefits Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, Woman and Queer owned bookstore. Check these books out below!](https://boozhoo.binderybooks.com/item/vAojso0PfGkbps2dLo3u/)

Indigenous Books About Identity

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Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Dec 27 2025

2026 is the year of the brain and that means that we are reading more non-fiction!\ \ You know that I love a challenge, so I created this one on Storygraph!\ \ The challenge is to read a total of 6 non fiction books written by Indigenous authors. If you've already read a book, you need to reread it in 2026 for it to count. \ \ I've added just a few Indigenous non-fiction to this post for you to check out and many more on the challenge page itself. \ \ If you plan on buying any, please shop from the attached books below. I earn a small commission for each book you purchase (whether I listed it or not!)

2026 Indigenous Non Fiction Challenge

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Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • May 18 2025

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Indigenous edition! How many of these have you read and how many are on your TBR! Add them up and drop your score below! Also, if you’re seeing this and you haven’t followed me on Bindery yet for free, can you please do that? It’s quick and simple and would make an impact! #boozhoobooks #indigenous books #booksrecs

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Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Nov 30 2024

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Indigenous Book Bingo Round 2 Card and Links to Storygraph Challenge!

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Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Jul 26 2024

Hello friends,\ \ I've got four new Indigenous books on my shelf!\ \ My most anticipated arc came in! As you may have heard me talk about, the first traditionally published Indigenous romance comes out next month (it will also be my bookclub pick in September). The book is called The Truth According to Ember, by Danica Nava.\ \ I was also sent a copy of The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native in America, this is a non-fiction book by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz. This book is an exploration of Tribal enrollment and what it means to be Native in the US. I can't wait to read this one.\ \ I bought Good Medicine by Nedi Nezu. This is a book of sensual poems written by an Indigenous woman.\ \ I bought Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr. This is an Inidgenous western featuring two cousins who make a plan to capture bison for a national park and release them into downtown Edmonton.\ \ Let me know if any of these sound interesting to you!

Indigenous Book Mail

A list of Indigenous books that came into my house this week

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Posts about this book from across Bindery

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Mar 8