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Jill Doerfler, Katherine Ellinghaus. Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1660–1661, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy247
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Blood quantum has long been an influential and contested issue, one that has divided and disenfranchised American Indians in a variety of ways. In Blood Will Tell, Katherine Ellinghaus clearly details and demonstrates how, time and again, the U.S. government utilized the discourse of blood as a means to rationalize the theft of Native lands and reduce the number of American Indians through redefinition. In addition, blood was used to promote division in Native communities as well as to undermine the authority of tribal governments. Ellinghaus convincingly argues, “It is time to add the discourse of blood with its devastating impacts to the other assaults—removal of children, boarding schools, forbidden languages, land loss, poverty—endured by Indigenous peoples during the assimilation period” (119).
Ellinghaus begins by providing an excellent summary of the various blood tropes that operated during the assimilation era and traces the complex ways in which blood became entangled with ideas about race. She does not answer the question, “Who is an Indian?” Instead, she astutely unpacks the colonial tropes that were created and employed from the 1880s to the 1930s. Importantly, she asks why the U.S. employed these tropes, both revealing and analyzing the history of this settler colonial phenomenon.
