You grew up on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. How did Native Americans view tribal membership back then? Before the second world war, most Native Americans lived on reservations. Biological children would be enrolled as tribal members, but so would adopted children and spouses, if you were legally married. But as people moved away to urban areas, tribes started to get more rigorous about documentation. That's when they also started to move towards only enrolling biological relatives. They were trying to figure out how to maintain the tribal population when everybody was living so far away.
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