Circe Sturm, with aplomb and sensitivity, has dared to delve into the slippery issue of American Indian identity in her new book Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Sturm sets out to “examine how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race that permeate discourses of social belonging in the United States.” She does so by paying full attention to and giving intricate ethnographic and ethnohistoric detail of the lives of multiracial members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (CNO) (p. 2).

Sturm does an excellent job of synthesizing various writings on phenotypical difference, from the pronouncements of Pope Paul III in the 16th century to Linnaeus’s 18th-century categorization of such difference in an all too simplistic color-coded hierarchy of white, yellow, black, and red (p. 45). She offers an explanation of how Europeans cum Americans, who once thought of the indigenous inhabitants of this “new land” as equals, came to view them as barbaric “redskins.” Sturm’s analysis of the Cherokee meanings of “red” and “white” is drawn from the fact that “in referring to [King George] as a white father and to the Cherokees as his red children, [a] speaker invoked metaphors of both Cherokee kinship and town politics to assume certain social relationships with the British. The British would be the white peacemakers, the diplomats, the fatherly providers, while the Cherokees would be the red warriors in need of material goods” (p. 46). European traders intermarried with the Cherokee as early as the 17th century, and by the time African slaves began to be the preferred objects of chattel slavery--because Indians tended to run away to go home--the multiracial Cherokee person was already in existence (pp. 50-51).

Sturm effectively chases the 100-year evolution of race from a concept that she alleges was used by the Cherokee in nation building early in the 19th century to a concept used by the United States federal government to find a “final solution” to the “Indian Problem” (pp. 52-53). Sturm points out that laws were passed by the first constitutional Cherokee Nation (ca. 1820) that brought harsh punishment to any Cherokee who married a “negro slave” (p. 54). Such laws and associated language, however, were those of the elite, plantation- and slave-owning Cherokees, and Sturm later points to the complexity and perplexity of “constitutional law” versus “clan law” with the case of a negro slave named Molly, adopted into the Deer Clan (pp. 57-58).

The case of Molly can be interpreted as the 19th-century harbinger of the contentiousness of racial identity for the Cherokee Nation throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Sturm states that this “has involved two competing notions of race” (p. 86). Both are Euro-American. One is the sense of “ethnonationalism linking blood, race, and nation” (p. 86). The second is the notion that “racial identity was tied to blood quantum” (p. 86). Yet family and community ties continually undermine these notions and force the question, “Who is Cherokee?” No matter how strong one’s ties are to family, community, and cultural systems, however, Cherokee Nation law requires some form of proof of blood quantum. Sturm points out that, contrary to “traditional” ways of belonging, “the significance of blood quantum was internalized and then codified by tribes themselves . . . in the wake of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act” (p. 87).

Sturm succinctly explains the evolution of the rocky political course to Cherokee nationhood throughout the 20th century. From a principal chief in mid-century who was marginally Cherokee as well as the CEO of Phillip’s Petroleum, to the current principal chief (ca. 2002), who is the grandson of Redbird Smith of Keetoowah fame, the political changes within the nation have been remarkable. Sturm points out, however, that “by electing tribal leaders who are increasingly Cherokee in a cultural and phenotypical sense . . . the public face of the Cherokee Nation reflects not the tribe’s demographic reality but its imagined center” (p. 107).

As a fellow researcher on the Cherokee, doing both ethnohistorical and contemporary ethnography, I find chapter 7, “Challenging the Color Line: The Trials and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen,” the most profoundly important and exciting section of the book. Sturm’s in-depth analysis of black-Cherokees is a strong statement of what identity means for a person of African and Cherokee descent. Since the late 19th century, the CNO has resisted the efforts of black-Cherokees to attain Cherokee citizenship (p. 171). This, despite the fact that the legitimacy of the black-Cherokees’ claim was demonstrated by inclusion of their names on a U.S. government recognized tribal roll, has held true through present day (pp. 194-200). Through individual cases Sturm effectively presents the depth and complexity of racial politics in the Cherokee Nation. One day, she alludes, the rejection of black-Cherokees may come back to haunt the CNO (p. 200). This is true because many of the black-Cherokees are native speakers and have, in many ways, maintained “traditional” lifeways more successfully over the centuries than the white-Cherokees. I maintain that the CNO cannot afford to ignore these people and lose their political and social support in the widely dispersed communities in northeastern Oklahoma.

I would recommend Circe Sturm’s book to anyone who researches and tries to navigate the labyrinth of American Indian identity in context with covert and overt racial politics in the United States. The difficulties inherent in such research are products of more than two centuries of a colonial force that is still in the business of determining “who is an Indian.” It will continue until the federal government and U.S. “mainstream” society actually come to terms with and accept the fact that as a nation-state the United States has left a trail of broken treaties.