Blood Quantum: A Colonial Tool We Were Never Meant To Carry

A look at where it came from and why it’s hurting us

At Hisgexji Horak, we believe truth-telling is an act of care. Sometimes that means naming things that are uncomfortable, not to shame our people, but to understand how certain ideas entered our communities and why they continue to cause harm.

Blood quantum is one of those ideas.

It is often treated like it is a traditional Indigenous way of defining who we are. It is not. It never was. Blood quantum comes from colonial systems, not our kinship systems, and it was created for control, not belonging.

Knowing this history matters. If we do not question blood quantum, we risk continuing a system that slowly erases our people on paper while dividing us in real life.

Before Colonization: Belonging Came From Relationship

Before Europeans arrived, Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island knew who belonged through relationships. Identity came from kinship, clan, adoption, responsibility, language, and community. Belonging was something you lived every day.

People were not fractions. No one was a percentage of a person.

For Ho-Chunk people and many other Nations, clan systems guided care, responsibility, marriage, leadership, and balance. These systems were meant to sustain the people, not reduce them.

Where Blood Quantum Really Comes From

Blood quantum comes from European racial thinking.

In the 1600s and 1700s, European societies were built on ideas of racial hierarchy, blood purity, and fear of mixing. These beliefs were used to justify domination, land theft, and slavery. Identity was treated as something that could be measured, ranked, and controlled.

When colonizers encountered Indigenous Nations with kinship-based systems, they did not respect those systems. They replaced them.

Blood Quantum Enters U.S. Policy

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, as the United States negotiated treaties, the federal government began deciding who counted as “Indian” under U.S. law.

This was not about honoring Indigenous Nations. It was about limiting responsibility.

Blood quantum was used to control treaty obligations, manage payments, decide who could receive land, and reduce the number of people the government was responsible for. Indigenous identity was turned into a racial category instead of being recognized as political and relational.

Allotment and Land Theft

Blood quantum became firmly embedded during the Allotment Era, especially after the General Allotment Act of 1887.

Communal lands were broken into individual parcels. Any land left over was labeled “surplus” and opened to non-Native settlement.

Blood quantum determined who qualified for land, who was considered legally competent, and whose land could be sold or taken. Millions of acres were lost this way. Blood quantum became a tool for land dispossession.

Census Rolls and Made-Up Fractions

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, census takers and Bureau of Indian Affairs officials were instructed to assign blood quantum fractions to Indigenous people.

Even the government knew there was no real system behind it.

Fractions were guessed. They changed from one census to the next. Appearance and personal opinion often played a role. There has never been a biological or genetic basis for fractional blood. Blood quantum does not reflect how ancestry actually works.

It was a paperwork tool. Nothing more.

How It Was Pushed Onto Tribes

In the early to mid-1900s, tribes were pressured to adopt written constitutions and enrollment systems, especially under policies like the Indian Reorganization Act.

Blood quantum was encouraged because it fit U.S. racial classifications, reduced enrollment numbers over time, and lowered federal responsibility.

Many tribes adopted it under pressure or because survival inside colonial systems required it. That reality deserves honesty and care. Surviving colonization does not make something Indigenous.

What started as outside control slowly became internal policy.

When the Tool Turns on Us

Genocide does not only happen through violence. It also happens through systems that slowly reduce a people until they disappear on paper.

Blood quantum fits into that process. It classifies. It excludes. It discriminates. And when it becomes internalized, it no longer needs outside force.

When we use blood quantum to question each other’s identity, to decide who belongs, or to say who is “Indian enough,” we continue the work the system was designed to do.

This is not because our people lack love or care. It is because colonial systems trained us to survive by their rules.

Blood quantum teaches us to divide instead of relate. To gatekeep instead of gather. To shrink instead of sustain.

This Is Not About Blame

Naming this is not about blaming our people. It is about understanding how deeply colonial thinking replaced our ways of knowing.

Our ancestors did not define belonging through math. They defined it through responsibility, relationship, and care for one another.

Blood quantum interrupts that.

Choosing a Different Path

If blood quantum is not Indigenous, then we have to ask what is.

For our people, it has always been descendancy and relationship. Who your people are. Who claims you. Who you are accountable to. Who you show up for.

One of the biggest fears people raise when talking about descendancy is that a larger population means fewer resources. Less help. Less support.

That fear makes sense, but it comes from a scarcity mindset shaped by colonial systems.

Indigenous societies were not built on individual accumulation. We survived through collective care. Resources were meant to circulate. Responsibility was shared. Identity was never about who got more than someone else.

When we frame belonging around access and benefits, we adopt an individualistic logic that was never ours.

Moving away from blood quantum does not mean giving up sovereignty. It means rooting sovereignty in Indigenous values instead of colonial ones.

Why This Matters Now

Blood quantum decreases with every generation. If we do nothing, many Nations will disappear on paper within a few generations, even while our people continue to live, love, and carry culture.

No Indigenous Nation would ever design a system meant to erase its own future.

That truth asks something of us.

A Question for Our Community

If blood quantum was created to reduce and erase Indigenous Nations, why do we continue to use this tool against ourselves?

What might change if we returned to kinship, descendancy, and relationship as the foundation of who we are?

In Closing

It’s important to say this clearly. The fear around changing blood quantum is real.

For generations, the government has held power over our identity, our land, and our survival. Many families learned that staying within those rules was the only way to be safe. That stepping outside of them could mean losing what little protection existed.

That fear comes from historical trauma. From removal. From allotment. From boarding schools. From punishment for living outside colonial systems.

So hesitation deserves care, not judgment.

But safety has never come from shrinking ourselves.

Our ancestors survived by holding each other close. By building systems rooted in clan, kinship, responsibility, and collective care. By understanding that identity is about belonging and accountability, not paperwork.

Returning to those ways does not mean ignoring the world we live in. It means refusing to let colonial logic be the only guide we trust.

This work asks us to slow down. To listen. To hold space for fear and disagreement. To learn together. To heal together.

It asks us to return to each other.

We are not being asked to become something new.
We are being asked to remember who we have always been.

- Sunshine Thomas-Bear
Hisgexjį Horak