What Does It Mean to Be Native American?

Schuettpelz explores a Native American person’s questions about belonging.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz MFA’18 is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, and she has the card to prove it. But for some Native Americans, claiming their tribal identity can be far more complicated. In The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, Schuettpelz examines the disparity between the number of Americans who claim Native heritage and those enrolled in tribes; the qualifications for tribal membership according to federal guidelines; and the challenges of identity within Indigenous communities.

Schuettpelz analyzes the ways in which the federal government controls membership in sovereign tribal nations by imposing standards, such as blood quantum, that effectively serve as tools of Native erasure. She interviews other Indigenous people about their efforts to develop their Native identity outside of the bureaucratic definitions of belonging and reflects on her own experiences with enrollment for herself and her children.

“Every person carries multiple identities. … And I know that blood cannot be divided into fractions like an apple — clean-cut and cored; separate and distinct pieces of a whole,” Schuettpelz writes. “But the validation; the evidence: I can’t shake the feeling that this is unique to Native people. That we, uniquely, have been forced into needing to constantly prove our identities to ourselves and others.”

For her work on The Indian Card, Schuettpelz was awarded a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, which recognizes ambitious and essential nonfiction book projects. She is an associate professor of practice and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa’s School of Planning and Public Affairs and was previously a policy adviser in the Obama administration focusing on homelessness and tribal policy.

Published in the Spring 2025 issue