Federal Statutory and Regulatory Definitions of 'Indian'

I took Federal Indian Law in the fall of my 3L year of law school. It was a course that changed the trajectory of my career and my life. I remember vividly reading in my textbook, the 6th edition of Professor Getches and colleagues’ Federal Indian Law published by West, about how heavily federal law regulated the rights of Native people. This included, I soon discovered, numerous definitions of “Indian.” <br><br>Countless times throughout my practice and academic career, I’ve searched for a comprehensive list of federal statutory definitions of “Indian” with no avail. I believed such a list existed but that it was eluding me. I even took to Twitter and begged some of my colleagues for help. No luck. I had found a law review article from 1991 that cited a 1978 congressional survey of all the definitions. I searched and searched for this 1978 survey. I even contacted the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration, who could not find a record of it. I recruited the help of my law librarian colleagues, who were also unsuccessful. <br><br>In the summer of 2022, I was working on an article on the impact of various definitions of “Indian” on public health surveillance and I needed that list. I, begrudgingly, resolved to generate it myself. Numerous practitioners, scholars, advocates, and courts have described and critiqued the various definitions of Indian status under the law. Here, I humbly offer the results of my research, without commentary, to support the research, writing, and advocacy of others interested in this topic. <br><br>In December 2022, I conducted searches on WestlawNext for definitions of “Indian” under federal statutes and regulations. I reviewed several thousand provisions and, while I tended toward overinclusion, inevitably excluded some relevant provisions. I found over eighty unique definitions of “Indian” under the statutory code, mostly defining Indian status by membership in a federally recognized Tribe (Appendix 1). The federal statutory and regulatory code definitions of “Alaska Native,” “Urban Indian,” and “Native American” are also provided in Appendices 2-4, respectively. My thoughts on the impact of these and other definitions can be found in my article, Indigeneity in the Public Health Surveillance Maze.