washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

Learning history of key policies

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In Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, Patty Krawec gets specific on pages 66-67 about:

Then the dastardly blood quantum was harnessed for notions of legitimacy and competence of private property ownership. As Krawec describes:

These allotments were also given on the basis of blood quantum, that strange calculus that determines what percentage Indian you are based on your parents and grandparents. If you were mostly white, you owned your land outright. If you were mostly Indian, it was held in trust for twenty-five years while you learned how to manage land.

Krawec, Patty. Becoming Kin. Broadleaf Books. 2022. Page 68.

Dastardly defined: (adjective) cowardly; meanly base; sneaking.

D for dastard. R for rapist.

I am motivated to make a list of laws out of the 1800s because how formative those written words are. How far away the 1800s seem yet how proximate the laws are on our current lives and very much our lives experiences.

I also note how the blood quantum calculations quantified either White or Indian, another binary presentation of the White and the Other, willfully disposing of the Black and other races that would messy and complicate and add many nuances to such draconian rules that oversimplified in order to bestow privilege or to deny humanity.

I’m still reeling from the profound absurdity of a 25 year trust that required people and their ancestors and community who lived in right relationship with the land yet according to the White man’s world had to learn how to care for the land and the natural elements in accordance with European colonizer ideas of how to live and how to exploit the living around them.