Am I Cherokee enough?

A Dawes Enrollment Card. If you cannot trace your family back to someone on this roll, 

you cannot be an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation

I always worried I wasn’t Cherokee enough. Never having been to Oklahoma, I worried I was a “thin blood” and all the “thick bloods” would view me as a pretendian.

It wasn’t until I branched out from recording my direct line and started adding distant cousins to my family tree on Ancestry.com that I noticed that I had a higher Blood Quantum (BQ) than many Cherokees back in the 1800s. I have a higher BQ than many prominent Cherokees from back in the day. That was a shocking realization.

I struggle with Blood Quantum because I understand that it is a colonial construct made to erase our traditional ideas of citizenship, kinship and belonging. At the same time, it made me feel better that I have as much Cherokee blood as some people who were very much considered Cherokee at the time of the Dawes Act. Could there be a world where I feel like I’m “enough?” Could there be a world where I am accepted by those that stayed on the rez, or at least in Oklahoma?

I feel like it’s important to point out that I am certainly not trying to say that BQ, alone, makes me Cherokee. I do not want to take anything away from the lived experiences of people who grew up in our culture and I understand the privilege I have as a white-passing woman. Indian country has the right to be skeptical of outsiders & I understand that the difference between me and those with similar (or less) BQ on the Dawes Roll is that they were living the Cherokee experience every day and I have not. In my mind, all of those people are very much more Cherokee than me. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I still had hope. I just want to figure out where I fit in, reconnect, and maybe pass on what I’ve learned to generations after me.

I will stumble and fall. I'm sure I will, at times, not explain my point well and say things incorrectly. But I want to be open and vulnerable because as Matika said, "Many people feel like you."

Wait. Who's Matika?!?