Tracey Deer grew up on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake with two very firm but unspoken rules drummed into her by the collective force of the community. These rules were very simple and they carried severe repercussions: 1) Do not marry a white person, 2) Do not have a child with a white person.

The consequences of ignoring these rules were equally simple: 1) Lose all status as an Indigenous person and, 2) Deny your unborn child their status as a Indigenous person. The larger tragedy, of course, was that by breaking either of these rules, she would be depleting the growth of ?the Nation? and, by extension, betraying everyone she loved.

In Club Native, Deer looks deeply into the history and present-day reality of Indigenous identity. With moving stories from a range of characters from her Kahnawake Reserve – characters on both sides of the critical blood-quantum line – she reveals the divisive legacy of more than a hundred years of discriminatory and sexist government policy and reveals the lingering ?blood quantum? ideals, snobby attitudes and outright racism that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community.

Indigenous 150+