I recently listened to back to back audiobooks that featured bureaucracy and government work in radically different ways.
The Indian Card
by Carrie Lowry SchuettpelzSetting: Iowa
Genres: Social Science / Indigenous Studies
Length: 7:52
Published on October 15, 2024
Pages: 304
Format: Audiobook Source: Library
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.
The author uses the story of her life to frame what it means to be Native American today. She grew up in Iowa, far away from the Native part of her family in North Carolina. She always felt too Native in Iowa and not enough in North Carolina.
Her research as an adult is on the way different tribes handle the issue of who is part of their tribe. Why do they handle it this way? Spoiler – it is always because of something messed up that the U.S. government did to them.
Some groups use the percentage of blood from that tribe but that can exclude people who descend from multiple nations. Some need to have an ancestor on a particular document in the past but those weren’t always accurate and/or records between now and then weren’t always easy to obtain. Others require people to live in a certain geographic area but children were taken and moved to boarding schools and out of the area. It isn’t easy to decide who belongs.
That has major ramifications in people’s lives. There are people who hold major offices in tribes who can’t enroll. People whose families have lived on tribal land for generations are unable to buy the land but their half-brother can. Who can get health care or scholarships? Who decides who is Native enough?
For a more light hearted look at government work, I went next to some science fiction.
Constituent Service
Genres: Fiction / Science Fiction / HumorousLength: 2:30
Published on October 3, 2024
Format: Audiobook Source: Audible
Ashley Perrin is fresh out of college and starting a job as a community liaison for the Third District—the city’s only sector with more alien residents than humans. Ashley’s barely found where the paper clips are kept when she’s beset with constituent complaints–from too much noise at the Annual Lupidian Celebration Parade to a trip-and-fall chicken to a very particular type of alien hornet that threatens the very city itself.
And if that’s not terrifying enough, Ashley is next up at the office karaoke night.
This was a nice find. It was free with Audible. John Scalzi stories are always fun and weird. That made it a nice palate cleanser after the seriousness of the last book.
It is the first day of a human’s job as an aide at the local office for a politician. She needs to handle complaining constituents, most of whom are aliens living on Earth. Her coworkers are supportive but humans don’t seem to last long in this job.
I loved this story. Amber Benson (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) did a great job with the narration.
