How does the consideration of Indigenous identities in the US complicate conversations about tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research?

Towards the multileveled and processual conceptualisation of racialised individuals in biomedical research

“…Native Americanness is subtractive: Native Americans are constructed to become fewer in number and less Native, but never exactly white, over time. (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 12) It is also worth adding here that racial and ethnic political statuses rarely coincide with the racial self-identification of individual people and the conditions/environments in which these people function (Meissner, 2021).…”

“…For example, since the lands of Native American tribes have ‘been targeted by the US, government and the large corporations as permanent areas for much of the poisonous industrial by-products of the dominant society’ (Brooks, 1998 , p. 106; cf. Meissner, 2021 ), American Indians who live on these lands have a high likelihood of being exposed to cancer-causing environmental risk factors (Weaver, 2010 ). However, as about 78% 15 of American Indians do not live on reservations, analysis of this problem simply using the category of race (understood as institutional affiliation, self-declaration or in biological terms) ‘may not only fail to track environmental hazards to health, it may also obscure the effects of environmental racism’ (Meissner, 2021 , p. S2452).…”

“…Everyone with any known AA lineage was, owing to a lingering US custom, typically labelled as Black (following the ‘one-drop rule’). In the case of NA/AI, it was (and still is) exactly the opposite—most federally recognised American Indian tribes require the verification of some form of ‘Indian blood quantum’ for official membership (Meissner, 2021 ). This means that in order to obtain the political status of a NA/AI representative, one must be able to prove a greater or lesser degree of kinship with other official tribe members (although not in relation to actual biological ‘blood relations’ or genetics, but rather a broader social understanding of affinity) (Meissner, 2021 ; cf.…”

“…In the case of NA/AI, it was (and still is) exactly the opposite—most federally recognised American Indian tribes require the verification of some form of ‘Indian blood quantum’ for official membership (Meissner, 2021 ). This means that in order to obtain the political status of a NA/AI representative, one must be able to prove a greater or lesser degree of kinship with other official tribe members (although not in relation to actual biological ‘blood relations’ or genetics, but rather a broader social understanding of affinity) (Meissner, 2021 ; cf. TallBear, 2008 ): Through the one-drop rule, blackness in settler colonial contexts is expansive , ensuring that a slave/criminal status will be inherited by an expanding number of ‘black’ descendants.…”

“…It is also worth adding here that racial and ethnic political statuses rarely coincide with the racial self-identification of individual people and the conditions/environments in which these people function (Meissner, 2021 ).…”