As idiotic as it sounds, not so very long ago, every child born in Louisiana with at least 1/32nd degree of African-American ancestry was categorized as black.

It was with some surprise that I found out, when staying in South Carolina, that this "1/32nd degree of ancestry" rule still applied to the official US Federal definition of Indianness, to use an awkward but succinct term. If you met that criterion (and no other) for a particular, and "recognised" Indian tribe you were acknowledged in law to be a member of that tribe. [I apologise for the use of terms that may offend but I've now lost touch with the acceptable ones.] At the time, it struck me that this was not only an imposed racism, it also had the effect of institutionalising a form of genocide; some of the tribes now have such small populations of people that members must "marry out", reducing the "proportion" of the Indian part of their offspring's ancestry to less than the legislated "1/32" for recognition.

This perception was behind what I referred to above as an "agricultural" construction of identity, popular among various sections of the UK and those countries formed from colonisation from the UK; I'm not particularly targeting the UK in this but this particular meme has had a long life among Anglophones.

I thought Mudcatters might be interested in how the matter of Indigenous identity has been constructed (against the same agricultural meme in the background) in Australia, and found the following, as presented by members of the Indigenous community.

We are the Indigenous people of Australia. Aboriginal people are those traditional cultures and lands lie on the mainland and most of the islands, including Tasmania, Fraser Island, Palm Island, Mornington Island, Groote Eylandt, Bathrust and Melville Islands. [*] The term "Aboriginal" has become one of the most disputed in the Australian language.

The Commonwealth definition is social more than racial, in keeping with the change in Australian attitudes away from racialistic thinking about other people. An Aboriginal person is defined as a person who is a descendant of an Indigenous inhabitant of Australia, identifies as an Aboriginal, and is recognised as Aboriginal by members of the community in which she or he lives.

This definition is preferred by the vast majority of our people over the racial definitions of the assimilation era. Administration of the definition, at least by the Commonwealth for the purposes of providing grants or loans, requires that an applicant present a certificate of Aboriginality issued by an incorporated Aboriginal body under its common seal.
Sometimes non-Aboriginal people get confused by the great range and variety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait people, from the traditional hunter to the Doctor of Philosophy; from the dark-skinned to the very fair; from the speaker of traditional languages to the radio announcer who speaks the Queen's English. The lesson to be learned from this is that we should not stereotype people ; that people are different, regardless of race.

* The indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands are not categorised as "Aboriginal" but as "Torres Strait Islanders" and recognised separately by the Commonwealth.

This doesn't mean that we have avoided exactly the same behavioural issues raised in themost recent posts by Richard, M.Ted and McGrath; our indigenous people suffer exactly the same insults and attitudes about 'blackness' and 'nonwhiteness', mostly from people who think the 'whiteness' of their ancestry is pure, but even from some whose ancestry includes Indigenous peoples. The term "Coconut" is, occasionally applied to someone who, in the US, might be called an "Uncle Tom"; it refers to someone who, in the opinion of the labeller, is "brown on the outside but white on the inside". At the moment, because of the hope with the change of government and the rapidity with which the PM produced the "Sorry" statement in Parliament, most people are putting most of their efforts into cooperation. Long may it be so.

Cheers, Rowan