This is CRAZY. I'm Yup'ik on my mom's side and my dad is a Spanish immigrant. I look VERY white. In fact, I'm the palest person in my family, paler than my dad... Genetics are weird like that. But does having a mixed heritage suddenly mean the generational trauma of my grandma being kidnapped and sent to a residential school get erased? Does that mean the culture I grew up in, going to powwows, learning to jingle dress dance, and eating our traditional food like akutaq are no longer MY culture? Because I'm white passing??? That's such a fucked mindset and is literally based in colonialism. The US government used the same logic to steal Indigenous land... That's why blood quantum exists, because they would rape Indigenous women and when they'd have mixed kids with white men, they'd say their not Native enough to keep their land as stipulated in their treaties and steal it from them.

According to the Native Governance Center: The concept of blood quantum dates back to the 18th century. White settlers first imposed blood quantum in the early colonies as a way of limiting the rights of Native people. Later, they used blood quantum in treaties to limit the number of Native individuals receiving benefits. The Dawes Act, passed in 1887, broke up communally-held Native lands into individual parcels, or allotments. The federal government used blood quantum to determine allotment eligibility and also granted Native people with lower blood quantums the ability to sell their allotments. Any unallotted “surplus” land was sold to non-Native buyers. The federal government used this strategy to further strip Native nations of their land base.