That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America by 
Erica Lord (Athabascan, Iñupiaq, Finnish, Swedish, English, and Japanese descent)
Blood Quantum (1/4 + 1/16 = 5/16)
Enrollment Number (11-337-07463-04-01)
Erica Lord’s photographs address the present-day realities for Native American people and bring to mind various historical circumstances when people have been dehumanized as numbers such as the Nazi practice of tattooing people in concentration camps during World War II or the treatment of African American people as three-fifths of a citizen in Article I, Section 2, of the US Constitution of 1787.
1/4 Athabaskan + 1/16 Inupiaq = 5/16 Native.
Blood quantum or the Certificate of Degree of Indigenous Blood (CDIB) is a system of registration administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) that states how much “Native American blood” a person has. Without sufficient Indigenous blood quantum, a person cannot be counted as an enrolled tribal member. Without an enrollment number, a person cannot access many social services or even legally call themselves Native American. This is another form of erasure.
"My origins include a lineage that I was born into and a land I was removed from. My cultural limbo has molded my identity and fueled my art. Constant moving and rootlessness are part of the American experience, but my near perpetual movement is an experience that lies within a larger history: the Native diaspora. This repetition of displacement, making homes, leaving and returning home cyclically, leads to a feeling of leading several lives or a multiplicity of selves. My experience may be multiple or mixed, but I am not incomplete."
- Erica Lord (Athabascan, Iñupiaq, Finnish, Swedish, English, and Japanese descent)
222-05 56 Avenue, Bayside, New York 11364
