Blood quanta is based off of your previous generations amount of Al/AN heritage. Say your mother is 100% Cherokee (or full-blooded) and she marries a man of another race. When they have you, it makes you 50% Cherokee. As more people marry and have children of other ethnicity the blood quanta goes down. In my opinion so does your rights as a full human with it. This is why.
Both of my parents are Cherokee citizens, and even if I only had one parent that was, it makes me a citizen, but my blood quanta is not a given. Someone, probably at the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), figured it out mathematically when my parents enrolled me as a Cherokee citizen. Systemically, at the same time, I became subjected to racism of other Americans an the United States government.
You see no longer can I freely marry whom ever I wish and have my children be considered just as much a Cherokee as me. Not to the Supreme Court of the United States, not to a few brainwashed members of my own nation or other Indigenous and definitively not to everyone in America at large.
It was apparent to me as a child and it is why the question of 'How much' made me so uncomfortable. I considered myself a Cherokee girl. It's what my only surviving "full-blooded" grandmother & mother told me I was. "Eat all your green beans so you can grow up to be a strong Cherokee girl," they would say.
I don't remember the first time my parents explained to me what blood quanta was. Sometimes, I imagine it was after a day of school where a classmate asked me and I probably didn't know what he was asking me. I do recall finding it difficult to understand just "how much" was because both of my parents were percentages themselves. On top of that, heritage wise, my mother was equally Cherokee-Creek-White. So early on I got to divide myself up to stop the tireless questions of my classmates on "So how much are you?"
I look back and I get so disgusted by the wrongness of it. How long can we continue subjecting humans to this abuse of not being accepted as a whole human? When to me, I love all that I am, but I was raised a Cherokee citizen by my parents and them by their mothers and my children by me to be a full human with full rites to heritage and also citizenship.
Enter adult American society, product of these same children who never saw American Indians as whole people but percentages. They hear from us that we are not percentages, that is a private matter. Then they hear from white supremacists and PR people representing factions of society still trying to deny our rights that - "Yes, they are percentages. Not only that, but they don't even count as Indians anymore. They need to join us (like that will restore our humanity to its fullness)."
They do this knowing that the system is set up in favor of their racist view winning any argument otherwise. I can think of no better recent example than the Baby Veronica case. In it the PR was heavy to focus on her heritage and not her citizenship, splitting her up as a human and thereby making her a property. Five Supreme Court justices joined in as happy as a 3/5 compromise and started out their judgements of Baby Veronica's rights by boiling them down to percentages!
It is very serious that I say to you reading this. In my own country that I love so dear, I am not considered a human being. Each generation loses the free right of humanity to marry where they choose. We are forced to consider not just race, but made to split ourselves up in order to secure protection of citizenship under the law. We fool ourselves to think otherwise, and those that exploit this crime against human beings are the worst sort of racists. I beg of you as human people to help us and not let them keep destroying others for their personal or political gains.
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