I've been mulling over this a bit more. There are ways to learn more about and to be of assistance to the modern day nations/tribes your ancestors were members of even with very diluted percentages of Indian ancestry. For each person who has knowledge of their American Indian origins, they have a piece of a puzzle that other people are probably also trying to work out. American Indians included. One way to explore this history and perhaps contibute something meaningful would be to contact the tribe in question and find out if they have a historian or geneological clerk or some other such title. Your family history might help someone else with the documentation they need in relation to the same tribal member or his/her family. Dig out the family papers and make good copies (it might be good to have them notarized), write down what you know of the family history as pertains to this person, making it a useful capsule of information. Be sure to name as many places as possible when identifying people (house addresses, parts of town, parts of the county, county, etc, narrow it down as close as you can get to where they were born or lived).

Some tribes, like the Cherokee of Oklahoma and North Carolina (there is no longer a reservation in Oklahoma since the land was set aside in North Carolina) have scholarships available for individuals with even very minute amounts of Indian blood. It's a stretch, and I'm probably not alone in having seen articles about strapping young white men who were able to claim scholarship money based on 1/32 amount of Cherokee. But if the tribe is okay with this I'm not going to argue it. Your paperwork, as it links back to the indiviual(s) stretches between you and that ancestor, and might be of assistance to anyone whose own family is arrayed along that line.

If your tribe isn't recognized by the federal goverment (a source of continual irritation for many Indian people--my ex's tribe included) the papers may be all the more important. Through research you should still be able to find tribal individuals who are lobbying for recognition, and every bit of documentation is helpful.

SRS