Reviewed by: The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations ed. by Kathleen Ratteree and Norbert Hill Jr James W. Oberly The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations. Edited by Kathleen Ratteree and Norbert Hill Jr. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2017. xviii + 349 pp. Illustrations. $21.95 paper. The trust and enrollment committee of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin (OTIW) has organized this anthology by mainly Native writers and artists. Editor Kathleen Ratteree works for the OTIW committee, and her coeditor, Norbert Hill Jr., works as OTIW director of education. The editors begin their preface with the statement that “Blood Quantum imposed from within and without has shaped Native identity and has been the primary determinant of deciding ‘Who is an Indian’ [original italics] for more than a century.” The imposition from without came from federal officials making decisions about who was a tribal member, based on some fraction of descent. The imposition from within comes, since 1934, from tribal constitutions under the authority of the Indian Reorganization Act, by which tribes determine their members, also based on some fraction of descent. The two forces act in tandem today when the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs issues certificate of degree of Indian blood (CDIB) cards to individuals who qualify for tribal membership under ordinances determined by tribes. With more than 560 federally recognized tribes, there is variation in the ways that tribes decide their membership criteria. The editors chose the title of this anthology to indicate that any reliance on CDIB will doom tribes to disappear, because a child born to a tribal member and a non-Native has only half the CBID as the Native parent. A few generations of this practice and federally recognized tribes will have no members, hence the title, The Great Vanishing Act. The editors have organized the anthology in four parts: cultural representations of blood quantum; the history of blood quantum as a standard for tribal membership; the mechanics of counting blood quantum today, including DNA tests; and alternatives to CDIB/ blood quantum thresholds for determining tribal membership. The first section, “Cultural Metaphor,” includes a blog post from Adrienne Keene, “Love in the Time of Blood Quantum,” which recounts the pressure on Native women to marry and have children with other tribal members so as to preserve membership for the next generation. Essays by Richard Hill, Leslie Logan, and Olivia Hoeft recount how different tribes understood family relations in a more complicated way than mere lineal descent. This section of the anthology also includes playwright Reed Bobroff ’s script for a stage production of Fraction of Love. The next section, on history, begins with a 2001 essay by Suzan Shown Harjo making the point that blood quantum and CDIB came from a specific time in US history, the allotment period, and can thus be abandoned. In a fine essay, “Bleeding Out: Histories and Legacies of ‘Indian Blood,’” historian Doug Kiel sets forth an outline of how and when blood quantum measures appeared in federal Indian policy. He points especially to one of the legislative authors of the Indian Reorganization Act, Senator Burton Wheeler, as someone who thought federal policy should be directed to making the “Indian problem” vanish through high blood quantum standards. Julia Coates has an especially thoughtful essay on how Cherokee Nation voters decided in 2007 that they wanted to amend their constitution in a way that included the word “blood,” not so much as a way to discriminate against African American descendants of the Cherokee freedmen, but rather because the tribal members simply “did not know who the descendants of the freedmen were.” She finds community solidarity, not racism, was the reason to include an “Indian blood” standard for how a tribe identified itself in the 21st century. The third section of the anthology features an important essay by Kim TallBear on how lineal descent, without an arbitrary fraction as the basis for tribal membership, continues the allotment-era idea of blood quantum. She closes her essay with a provocative call for tribes to move away from the concepts of “nation” and “citizen.” TallBear’s essay is followed by...