Indigenous Kinship as a Replacement for Tribal Citizenship Theory? Thoughts on the American Experience

September 15, 2025

[Editor’s note: This is the first of four posts on Aaron Mills’s article “First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality”, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 72, Issue 4, Winter 2024, Pages 892–932, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avae032]

Two Ojibwe tribal nations in northern Michigan recently engaged in an audacious act of tribal sovereignty that could change federal Indian law in the United States dramatically – the tribal nations changed the blood quantum of all tribal citizens to 100 percent Ojibwe as a matter of law.

Like many tribal nations, the Bay Mills Indian Community required a minimum quantum of one-quarter Indigenous “blood” (read: ancestry) to meet the tribe’s enrollment criteria as a tribal citizen. The other tribe, the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, like numerous other tribal nations, required evidence of lineal descendancy from a century-old federal annuity roll. For Bay Mills, the one-quarter blood quantum limit was slowly draining the tribe of its children as intermarriage with nonmembers depleted the numbers of eligible Ojibwewaag. For Sault, which had closed its enrollment office to new applications for many years, the numbers of tribal citizens had remained high, but many tribal citizens with low blood quantum were ineligible for important federal and state entitlements rooted in higher quantums.

In the United States, tribal citizenship is the standard. For tribal nations, either one is a citizen or not. Federal Indian treats tribal nations as federal contractors. If tribal nations want federal money, they have to play by the colonizer’s rules. And the colonizer demands that American tribal nations only spend money on tribal citizens (there are exceptions to this rule that largely reconfirm the rule itself). Indigenous relatives who did not meet the tribal citizenship standard for enrollment are left out. Inequities abound.

For too many American tribal nations, citizenship law and policy has become unbelievably toxic. Some tribal nations (mostly wealthy, but some that are not) have engaged in mass disenrollments designed to make more tribal resources available to the fewer tribal citizens that remain. After mass disenrollment practices received scathing criticism from other tribal leaders, federal and tribal judges, and even Members of Congress, tribal nations seeking to limit the number of citizens began to quietly impose moratoriums on new enrollments (although usually allowing newborns to enroll).

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Aaron Mills compelling new article, First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality, explores Canadian First Nations’ concepts of belonging by comparing citizenship and kinship as distinct models. It argues that while many First Nation individuals frame belonging debates through the lens of citizenship, often incorporating kinship, this approach is influenced by internal colonialism. The author proposes that kinship is its own model of belonging, rooted in First Nations law and defined by mutual aid and responsibility, rather than the liberty and rights emphasized by citizenship. The article aims to re-establish kinship’s legal significance, which has been conceptually and institutionally disconnected from legality due to colonialism, suggesting that embracing kinship on its own terms is crucial for Indigenous law revitalization and self-determination.

Dr. Mills’ paper reminds us that Indigenous Peoples once elevated kinship above mere citizenship, a notion rooted in western political philosophy that would have been comically unsettling to our ancestors centuries ago, after all, in the 14th century, “citizen” meant someone who was not enslaved or indentured. Now, “citizen” means a state of owing allegiance to a nation like Canada or the United States.

Kinship is reciprocal, an ordered system of social relations where “relatedness” is the organizing feature. The fundamental value driving kinship is mutual aid, which corresponds to a political community committed to the integrative flourishing of its members. Kinship positions facilitate this by structuring the exchange of needs and gifts throughout the community through dynamic sets of position-specific responsibilities.

Mills explains that kinship extends beyond blood or marital ties. Individuals who are willing to bear the responsibilities intrinsic to a kinship position can occupy it, even without a genetic link. This can include adopted individuals or community members who take on instructional roles, often referred to as “grandfathers” and “grandmothers”, or “aunties” and “cousins.” Furthermore, Anishinaabe kinship structure extends throughout creation, with the sun, moon, Earth, and animals being ascribed kinship positions, reflecting an understanding of their responsibility sets vis-à-vis humans.

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I am a veteran of many American tribal citizenship battles. As a tribal attorney, I have worked for my own tribe to exclude Anishinaabe relatives from enrollment because they wished to count their Canadian Haudenosaunee ancestry in our blood quantum calculation against my own moral compass. As a tribal judge, I handled cases involving disenrollments and efforts to bar Anishinaabe relatives who had been adopted by tribal citizens.

Recently, I wrote an opinion in a dispute involving a tribal nation that constitutionally defined its citizenship criteria to exclude anyone born before 2019, but prohibiting anyone already enrolled from being disenrolled. It is getting downright surreal in the United States.

Kinship theory would dramatically change the paradigm. My initial reaction to Dr. Mills’ argument was “Woohoo!” My second reaction was “It won’t happen here.”

But then I look to the Ojibwe tribal nations up north and I think with Anishinaabe ogemaag, anything is possible. There is hope.