Of course, as much of the previous research has shown, federal lawmakers who initially enacted blood quantum statues and Bureau of Indian Affairs administrative officials who drafted blood quantum rules and regulations did so, in large part, because of reasons related to property. That is to say, the seemingly cut-and-dried math of blood quantum was a cynical, underhanded way to minimize the funds, benefits, and resources expended on behalf of Native nations and their citizens. The formula seemed to always end up as subtraction, magically reducing the actual number of communities and individuals eligible to receive federal financial support. As the population was fractionated and subtracted, the expenses associated with the trust obligation diminished in tandem. These bureaucratically vicious yet bloodless means sought to erase entire peoples and thereby reduce the federal budget allocated under treaties and statues to native affairs.
Interestingly, and not surprisingly, federal and state officials creative applied precisely the opposite social and racial arrangement to African Americans. In that instance, blood quantum was all about addition. By devising the infamous one-drop rule that maintained a single drop of African blood made a person Black, the government sought to increase the number of persons who could legally be held in bondage, thus setting up a maniacal system to maintain slavery as an economic institution in perpetuity. After emancipation, the calculation continued to support patently discriminatory Jim Crow legislation that severely constrained the civil and human rights of African Americans even after the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitutions had been ratified in 1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively, in the way of the US Civil War.
As Vine Deloria Jr. succinctly put in 1969 in Custer Died for Your Sins, “Because the Negro laboured, he was considered a draft animal. Because the Indian occupied large areas of land, he was considered a wild animal.” In a society that valued property over virtually everything else, more draft animals were required to maintain and grow the economy, and fewer wild animals were necessary because they were considered nuisances or threats. Thus, blood quantum was a powerful economic tool created by the US government to control resources and property by simple addition or subtraction, depending on the need. It was never about kinship or humanity.
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