The process doesn’t care (or even have reason to know) what race the applicant is; the only thing that matters is whether the applicant can prove a biological descent from a person documented as having been enrolled as a member of a particular tribe at a certain point in time. At most, you can say the process actually discriminates against applicants on the basis of the actual|perceived race of their ancestor(s).
If you don’t use the extant records, however, what are you going to use to document who is eligible for benefits? For example, there have been some substantial settlements/judgments between the feds and various tribes over the past several decades relating to lands unfairly or illegally seized by the feds; who gets the money? If you assert “the records are too corrupt to be used,” then either nobody gets the money and the racist seizures are allowed to stand uncontested, or everybody who wants to file a claim gets the money even if they have no relationship or interest (which would mean lots of whites could get money, and lots of Native Americans would miss out).
In some cases, there are alternative records or other sources of information that could be used in place of or as supplement to what has been accepted, but in other cases there are not: you can’t dig up long-dead people and ask them whether they identified as or were accepted as members of the tribe, for example.
Whether some downstream institutions have discriminated against minority applicants isn’t seriously in doubt: see for example this 2010 study. Wells Fargo agreed to pay the City of Philadelphia $10 million just last year to settle claims that the bank discriminated against minority borrowers by pushing them into riskier and more expensive mortgages than similarly-situated white borrowers. Without the feds (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc) buying and bundling those mortgages, would the banks (and non-bank lenders such as Countrywide) have been so eager to push them?
If anyone is interested in the applications of the certificate, I suggest they read CDIB: The Role of the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood in Defining Native American Legal Identity, American Indian Law Journal, Volume 6, Issue 2, Article 4. Here is a link to that article: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1185&context=ailj
From that article:
" [T]he CDIB is a key that unlocks educational loans, medical services,
employment preference, or other federal benefits unique to Native Americans,
and, in some circumstances, even enrollment as a member of a tribal nation. [citations omitted]"
It’s intended to show genetic lineage to qualify for said services. Of course adoption would have nothing to do with lineage. Unless you’re confused as to how genetic inheritance works?
Turki-lurki: Here are cites to a couple of more texts you might be interested in:
W. Churchill, “The crucible of American Indian identity: native tradition versus colonial imposition in postconquest North America,” American Indian Culture and Resource Journal , vol. 23, pp. 39–67, 1999
K. Tallbear, “DNA, blood, and racializing the tribe,” Wicazo Sa Review , vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 81–107, 2003
I would say the process actually discriminates against applicants today based on discrimination against mixed-race children when the rolls were made. It is not the reliance on tainted rolls that taints the current process, it is the exclusive reliance on them when there are other ways to verify genealogy.
In the specific case of the Riggs, if it is stipulated that Will Rogers was a Cherokee Indian whose descendants are entitled to a certificate, and that Bernice Rogers Riggs is a descendant of Will Rogers, it follows that Bernice is entitled to a certificate. But if she could not obtain the certificate solely because of racial discrimination in select historical documents, given the previous stipulations, she suffers an injustice today solely because the certification process unnecessarily relies on racist documents. QED.
I don’t believe an organization or program may avoid racism by merely turning a blind eye to the racist low-level operations. I’m not familiar with the federal mortgage programs, however. If it is an automatic process, that is, if the federal government does not review downstream practices at all and thus exercises no discretion whatsoever, it would not be racist.
The problem is that it is NOT stipulated that Will Rogers (supposedly her great-grandfather, although I’m not sure even that much is proven by more than her affidavit [and no, not the famous one]) was a full-blood Cherokee. In order to prepare a certificate attesting to her degree of Cherokee ancestry, the preparer needs to know the degree or blood quantum of the ancestors from whom she claims Cherokee descent, and Will Rogers doesn’t appear on the rolls (because he was dead) and his alleged son Joseph Rogers isn’t documented as having any Cherokee ancestry at all. Yes, racial discrimination likely was a significant factor in the latter, but what degree of Indian Blood would you put on her Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood?
But this is precisely what happens with the issuance of a CDIB: the federal government does not review the practices behind the roll creation, but automatically issues a certificate if you provide documentation proving descent from a person listed on the appropriate roll, and denies a certificate if you don’t or can’t, without exercising any discretion or judgment as to why you can’t.
Ynnad presented the claim in post #27, and I stipulated to it in post #29. I did so because “I have no want to independently verify [Ms. Rogers’s] (plausible) claims”. The argument I made in the very next paragraph, and the argument which you responded to in post #30, is built on the assumption that Ms. Rogers’s claims are actually and verifiably true.
Once you remove that assumption, I will admit, my argument becomes inapplicable. Indeed, I would revert back to my former position in this debate.
Think about it this way, what is the purpose of issuing a Certificate of Degree of Indian or Native Alaskan Blood? What exactly does that document certify?
If the document certifies Indian or Native Alaskan ancestry, the government exercises discretion when it defines an Indian ancestor as one listed on certain rolls; certainly there are Indian ancestors who were not listed or descended from people listed on those rolls, for example, those who died before the rolls were created. Such is the apparent case of Will Rogers.
If the document certifies ancestry to the group of peoples listed in certain historical rolls, then the certification process exercises no such discretion and therefore is not racist. But this only defers the question of racism: every program that uses the certificate as a means of exercising discretion runs the risk of actual and unnecessary discrimination on the basis of race. If a program were to provide benefits to Indians or Native Alaskans, and then define Indians and Native Alaskans as people with this certificate, that program would be racist.
The claim in post 27 is that Will Rogers was a Cherokee Indian. However, one could be a Cherokee and so listed on the Dawes Rolls without being a full-blooded (100%) Cherokee, and in fact by 1900 a huge percentage of those listed on the rolls were of mixed ancestry and listed with a percentage. How can we stipulate to a percentage for this man? Without a degree of Indian Blood assigned to him, however, you can’t assign a percentage to his descendants. Bernice Rogers Riggs does not claim he was 100%.
The government is exercising no more discretion than when it says a mortgage must be accompanied by an appraisal, even though the appraisal process is known to be flawed.
The theory is that even though Will Rogers died before the roll was created, if he had any descendants then at least one descendant was alive during the years when the rolls were created and would be listed thereon. We now know the process was flawed and that the last clause may not be true, but what’s the alternative?
I had assumed she claimed that her paternal grandfather, Joseph Rogers, was half Cherokee by his father Will Rogers. The actual text reads “part black and part Cherokee Indian” so perhaps I read too much into it. She also says her father claimed to be “at least half Cherokee Indian”. I had presumed that this means her paternal grandmother was at least half Cherokee, too. Probably another Cherokee slave.
Needless to say, if I am mistaken and no tangible degree of blood is claimed or supported by evidence, my arguments are baseless.
I think the analogy would be more applicable if a federal mortgage loan program defines an eligible mortgage as one accompanied by a valid appraisal. The question of discretion is answered by asking when and why the government might reject an application. If an application is rejected only when there is no appraisal filed at all or when the appraisal fails to give a dollar amount, I don’t think that counts as discretion for the purpose of determining racism. If an application is rejected because the government does not think the downstream appraisal process is fair, that counts as discretion. And once discretion is exercised, it is almost certainly inexcusable to overlook racism, especially overt racism.
By analogy, if the government only rejects applications which lack any supporting evidence whatsoever, or rejects applications which lack evidence to support a tangible degree of blood, that doesn’t count as discretion for our purposes. But if the government rejects applications because they don’t trust the evidence submitted, that counts as discretion. Here the government apparently rejects evidence which does not match a collection of tribal rolls, yet the government acknowledges that the rolls are incomplete due to overt racism. And I have already assumed that the government will concede that other forms of evidence can prove Indian or Native Alaskan ancestry, to a tangible degree of blood. By rejecting applications which provide evidence of the latter kind, while certifying applications supported by evidence of the former kind, the government exercises discretion.
