Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South.Using theFifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.