As a detailed study of the development of ideas of blood and blood quantum as determinants of indigeneity in the United States of America, Blood Will Tell provides a valuable resource for those who seek a deeper understanding of the politics of indigenous identity. The recent controversies that surround the claim of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to a Cherokee and Delaware identity in the United States and those of the award-winning and internationally celebrated novelist Joseph Boyden to Nipmuc and Ojibwe identity in Canada make Blood Will Tell an extremely timely and useful publication. Blood Will Tell provides much-needed context to contemporary debates about how indigeneity is or should be defined and what constitutes a valid claim to Indian-ness in the United States today. Such context is provided through a series of detailed historical case studies that are aptly used to demonstrate how definitions of Indian identity based in notions of blood were developed, applied, and articulated by settler-colonial governments of the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This focus locates Blood Will Tell as a history of legislative and public-policy discourses of race based in ideas of blood and their application in settler-colonial constructions of Indian identity. Importantly, Blood Will Tell might also be described as a historical study of discourse in that Ellinghaus reveals how notions of blood and blood quantum derived from popular-culture understandings of settler-colonial America slowly but surely came to influence and later underpin official definitions of the racial category “Indian.”The case studies contained in Blood Will Tell span the decades between the 1880s and 1930s, with each themed to focus attention on particular issues and concerns that impacted settler-state efforts to determine Indian identity with reference to blood. In the first case study, “The Allotment of the Anishinaabeg,” Ellinghaus focuses on the issue of fraud that influenced the settler-colonial process of land allotment and state recognition by the granting of “status” at the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. She does so to argue that government officials deliberately used narratives of fraud to target and effectively undercut the Indian-ness of the many mixed-descent people at White Earth who identified themselves as being Anishinaabeg. Significantly, Ellinghaus also shows how the settler-colonial obsession with blood quantum and notions of racial purity were ruthlessly imposed on the Anishinaabeg, whose own conceptions of group membership was more dynamic and negotiable and based on family descent, kinship, association, and cultural practice. The process of allotment that was imposed on the Anishinaabeg made blood quantum the key determinant of the authentic Indian, and tribal membership as sanctioned by the settler-colonial state. As a result, settler-colonial discourses of blood also functioned to undermine the validity and authenticity of Anishinaabeg people of mixed descent. As Ellinghaus explains, the consequences of this for the White Earth people were dire: The allotment period was one of overwhelming loss for the Anishinaabeg, a time when the discourse of blood, and the implicit assumption that Anishinaabeg of mixed descent did not deserve government protection or tribal assets, set in motion policies and practices that were devastatingly unjust. It was not just that the US government explicitly excluded people of mixed descent from the nation or from their share of its resources, but the assumption that people of mixed descent were not entitled to tribal membership pervaded the many policy decisions of the period and gradually shaped a tendency to deny them recognized Anishinaabeg status. (21)In the second case study, “The Dawes Commission and the Five Tribes,” Ellinghaus continues to document how Indians of mixed descent were viewed with increasing suspicion by government official and ultimately as undeserving of status and the access to resources this provided. Focused on the theme of chaos, Ellinghaus demonstrates the many practical shortcomings in the enrollment and allotment process carried out by the Dawes Commission, arguing that many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Muscogee people were excluded by administrative inefficiencies and the barriers to enrollment imposed by time and location restrictions as much as by settler-colonial narratives of the “undeserving Indian.”In the next two case studies that follow, Ellinghaus shows how the settler-colonial obsession with blood quantum and the narrative of the undeserving Indian that emerged from this idea came to underpin federal-government agendas through both the assimilationist period shaped by the policy of competency and the cultural-preservation thinking that was initiated by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Applying her meticulous archival research of these policy eras to the theoretical insights of Wolfe, Ellinghaus makes a compelling case that competency and reorganization were ultimately driven by the settler-colonial desire to eliminate the native. In the case of competency, Ellinghaus argues that the settler-state policy sought to define and exclude Indians of mixed descent on the basis that they were “practically white” and therefore capable of a high level of assimilation into the mainstream of settler-colonial society. Their capability was determined by the degree of white blood they were said to carry, blood which made them undeserving of state recognition of their Indian identity. In the case of reorganization, the same category of Indian found themselves excluded because they had failed to maintain their cultural traditions and links to their tribe. Here the seemingly nonracist emphasis on culture was used to eliminate Indians regardless of evidence derived from blood. As Ellinghaus notes, “A number of applications [seeking status] demonstrate the irony of a situation in which the federal government, which had spent the last four decades attempting to assimilate Native Americans, now refused to identify people as Indians because of the perceived extent of their acculturation. One man, who applied to be recognized as a Kawick of full descent, answered the question ‘Have you abandoned tribal life and adopted the habits and customs of the white community’ by writing ‘No, except as compelled to do so by economic necessity’” (90).Whereas most attempts by the federal government to eliminate Indians sought to do so with reference to the degree of white blood people of mixed descent were said to carry, the final case study outlined in Blood Will Tell—“The Indian Nations of Virginia and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act,” which draws attention to the theme of color—provides an intriguing twist in the story of blood as a key determinant of Indian-ness. In this case study, Ellinghaus shows how the Commonwealth of Virginia attempted to eliminate all Indians within its jurisdiction on the basis of tribal intermarriage with African-Americans and the one-drop rule, which determined their race as “colored.” This was a policy of blood prosecuted by Walter A. Plecker, an overzealous public official in charge of the State Bureau of Vital Statistics. The description of his racial agenda that Ellinghaus is able to construct is the most captivating contained in Blood Will Tell. In the context of Southern politics and society, the indigenous peoples of Virginia were viewed as a problem because their existence undermined the racial dichotomy of black and white. “Plecker did all he could to establish that there was no Native American person in Virginia who was ‘untainted’ by African American blood” (97). As Ellinghaus shows, “the Rappahannock, Chickahominy, Pamunkey, Mattaponi and Monacan peoples mounted a courageous and unrelenting campaign, collectively and individually, against Plecker's efforts” (100). In many ways, this is the most important of the case studies included in Blood Will Tell because the combined Indian nations of Virginia refused to submit to settler-colonial attempts to impose discourses of identity based in notions of blood and blood quantum. Their rejection of external intervention in determining indigenous identity is a testament to their assertion of self-determination in the face of the coercive and corrosive power of the settler-colonial state.Blood Will Tell provides an extremely useful reference that provides historical context to contemporary debates about indigenous identity that continue to take place in the United States today. This book will be particularly useful to Indigenous studies scholars outside the United States since it does much to explain why the language of blood and blood quantum has become widely accepted, embedded, and embraced by Americans in ways that might be considered incomprehensible as well as odious and offensive.Although it is a highly recommended resource on the topic of indigenous identity, Blood Will Tell is not an easy read. In part, this is an outcome of the emotional responses this book may evoke. Engagement with such histories are likely to leave readers with feelings of sadness, anger, and bewilderment. It is also not easily read because Ellinghaus is so extremely careful to evidence her argument with primary source material, which at times feels overwhelming and intrusive to the historical stories that she tells. Nevertheless, the analysis of public-policy discourses of blood and their application to indigenous peoples in the United States that Ellinghaus develops is complex, subtle, and insightful. She successfully shows that the history of settler-colonial state efforts to eliminate the natives through racial definition were messy, incomplete, and influenced by a variety of factors that included much more than grand theories of racial hierarchy, including the parochial agendas and personal caprice of local officials and a myriad of inconsistent outcomes delivered by the inept and inefficient workings of bureaucracy.