I am an enrolled member of the Sappony Tribe, one of North Carolina’s seven state-recognized tribes. “Card-carrying” is a little NRA for my taste, but I do have one. An eighth tribe, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, is recognized by the federal government. The distinction in federal versus state recognition is complex but is in part a matter of whether the federal government recognizes your tribal sovereignty, which then opens a series of other questions about land, governance, and resources.

And last week, I signed a letter in solidarity with Cherokee Nation citizens who believed that Senator Elizabeth Warren—who dropped out of the presidential race on Thursday—needs to further address her past claims to Cherokee ancestry. Two days after the letter was published, I received a call from one of its authors informing me that my name would unfortunately be taken off the list. The reason was because the Sappony Tribe is recognized only by the state of North Carolina, which has been the case since 1911. Back then, the state just called us the “Indians of Person County.”

What happened to us is what happened to hundreds of tribes along the East Coast. We, the Saponi people, were a historically small band that often joined with other small bands to form larger commerce-based communities, and so when the British Empire barreled through, hundreds of these smaller tribes were split up, forced to be absorbed into other tribal nations or disappear entirely. But some tribes, like the Saponi, stuck together, forming our own towns and farming communities, which were subsequently segregated and then integrated. There are now three Saponi bands in North Carolina: the Haliwa, the Occaneechi, and the Sappony.

As much as it stung, the request to remove my name from the letter made sense to me. I was being asked because of the fraught relationship between the Cherokee Nation and a slew of state-recognized tribes that claim ancestral ties. Even in North Carolina, the Lumbee Tribe and the EBCI have a long-standing disagreement regarding past claims of common ancestry by some Lumbee citizens. All of this—determining who gets federal recognition and sorting out histories that were often scrambled by colonization—plays out in the political theater, with tribes leaning on members of Congress and the Department of the Interior to help them protect both their cultural identity and their financial interests.



Native citizenship and nationhood is often messy, or at the very least vexing, a direct result of the jagged violence of colonization. If you try to look up the population numbers for Native Americans and Native Alaskans, you’ll get anywhere from 6.8 million people claiming ancestral ties to the shaky 2010 census count of those who solely identified as Native that clocked in at 2.9 million. This was the central theme in Warren’s own DNA test, which she took as part of an ill-considered effort to address her previous claims to Cherokee heritage. She was not claiming to be a citizen; she only ever claimed that one of her ancestors was. But her vague decades-long claim alone was enough to set off the alarms, because it continues to be such a nagging issue for tribal nations. Anti-disenrollment campaigns, fighting against efforts by tribal nations to prune citizens from member rolls, exist because disenrollment does, too. It has since the Europeans arrived: High Country News recently featured a report on how the ancestors of Oklahoma Republican governor and Cherokee Nation citizen Kevin Stitt were once sued by the Nation for attempting to work their way onto the rolls under false pretenses in the nineteenth century. Again, it’s messy and nontraditional, but it’s the system colonization left us with. And it all boils down to the same basic problem as the one that undermines the dreadful polls on racist team names: Even when standing in solidarity with Indian Country, there remains the question of who gets to say they’re Native.