There are a lot of very good assessments of the Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl decision, and I will not attempt to add to that thoughtful analysis of the holding. Instead, I’d like to focus on a different aspect of the Court’s opinion, which is its misplaced and worrisome obsession with whether Veronica is Indian enough. While not the stated basis for the Court’s decision, the repeated references to Veronica’s percentage of Cherokee ancestry display a misunderstanding of tribal citizenship laws and (ironically, given the Court’s color-blind bent) reinforce an inchoate racialization of Native people. The Court’s message seems to be: if children like Veronica lack sufficient “Indian blood,” they do not warrant the legal protections that their political status as American Indian tribal members otherwise affords.

What’s in a number? More than you would think. Justice Alito began his majority opinion with this statement: “[t]his case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee.” Thankfully, the Court references Baby Veronica’s blood quantum by BOTH fraction and percentile for those math challenged readers. This has the effect of attempting to reiterate that Baby Veronica really isn’t that much of an Indian, so this isn’t really that big of a deal. Under Cherokee membership requirements, Veronica’s so-called blood quantum is irrelevant, however. The only thing that matters is whether she descends from an ancestor on the Cherokee Nation’s Dawes Roles. Justice Alito later acknowledges this, referencing Baby Veronica’s “remote ancestor” which, again, attempts to delegitimize her Indian-ness.

However, Baby Veronica’s actual quantum of blood is simply irrelevant, which Justice Sotomayor points out in her vigorous dissent. (slip op. at 23-24). The plain fact, which the Majority gets wrong, is that Baby Veronica is a Cherokee Indian—no matter the extent to which this fact challenges their own personal notions of who an Indian is and what an Indian looks like. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her citizenship in the Cherokee Nation is not up for debate, diminution, or question. Indeed, this is one of the many purposes of the Indian Child Welfare Act, to prevent non-Indians from making these types of judgments about who is/isn’t/might be/looks like an Indian.