What does blood have to do with being Anishinaabe?

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John Borrows is the Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law at the Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, and a Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of The Seven Cycles of Life: Seeking Healing, Connection and Justice in Anishinaabe Teaching, from which this essay has been adapted.

When my daughter Lindsay was four or five, she asked a question: “What kind of money Indian am I?”

The question perplexed me enough to ask what she meant. She said something like, “What kind of money Indian am I – a nickel, a penny, a dime?” I still didn’t understand what she was asking me, so I probed for details. She thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I know I’m some kind of money Indian – my teacher said so.”

Her teacher or someone had told her she was a quarter Indian. It was a little funny, but it was mostly sad. At her young age she was trying to understand what it meant to be Anishinaabe, and someone had “helped” her by fractionating her parentage. They reasoned that since I had an Anishinaabe mother and an English father, I must be half Indian. By extension, since Lindsay had a father who was a so-called half-Indian and a mother whose ancestry was generally Western European, she must be a quarter Indian.

I now had to explain to her that for some, blood was a symbol or proxy for belonging. Having this kind of conversation with a five-year-old is not easy. I seem to remember that Lindsay wondered why people would judge her based on what she had running through her veins. It’s a good question. What does blood have to do with being Anishinaabe?

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My daughter is not the first person who has struggled with questions of identity. Issues of belonging and citizenship plague many communities, including Indigenous ones. First, let’s acknowledge that there are “money Indians” in this world ‐ those who pretend to be part of our communities for financial or other kinds of gain. This is a sad fact of life, and children must face hard truths. Pretending to be Anishinaabe or a so-called Indian is dishonest, deceptive and fraudulent. It breeds suspicion and distrust of those of us who are so-called Indians. It leads to questions about whether anyone is sufficiently Native. It also raises doubts about the truthfulness of our declarations about who we “really” are.

This is why every community needs rules to protect and express themselves. We should banish the money Indians, those who feign belonging for financial gain, along with the idea that belonging can be fractionated.

But banishing money Indians might be almost impossible. We have long lived with tricksters. It’s easy to imagine the Anishinaabe trickster Nanabush pretending to be an Indian academic, artist, entrepreneur or government employee. After all, in other contexts, he has also been a rabbit, deer, heron, stump, toad, goose, fish and snake.

Nanabush, like most cultural heroes, embodies deep contradictions. His inconsistencies reflect our own conduct, conveying the truth that humans are the real tricksters. This helps us see that money Indians are a part of our community; they will always be with us, even as we reserve the right to learn from, censure and repudiate their conduct.

Yet despite the trickster’s undying presence, we have a long history of contesting attempts to misrepresent, eradicate, assimilate or diminish us. We must continue to press for appropriate boundaries concerning citizenship. These efforts must go hand-in-hand with efforts to be more inclusive. As we act, let’s proceed with love, humility, honesty, courage, wisdom, respect and truth.

Anishinaabe people, like every human community, are genetically diverse. We may have mixed Indigenous roots. Most of us also have ancestors from other continents too. Despite these truths, some don’t see Anishinaabe as multi-ethnic, self-determining political communities with constitutional rights as First Nations. We are racialized by percentages, and this diminishes us in the process.

Blood quantum is the vampire of our people. I am wholly Anishinaabe, just as I am wholly a Canadian citizen. I should not be required to divide, apportion or segregate myself into smaller units. No one, including five-year-olds, should be considered more or less Anishinaabe because of their genetic heritage. We must insist on our rights to self-determination, to freely choose who we are and who we will be.

Our children must be made and become whole.