Who Belongs? looks at struggles around tribal citizenship in the southern United States and specifically at who is included in or excluded from tribes and for what reasons criteria for in- and exclusion were created as consequences of historic interactions. In the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, tribes like the Pamunkeys of Virginia, the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina, the Seminoles of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida insisted on tribal political identities and rejected efforts to reduce them to being merely a racial minority. To protect their land, resources, and identity from outsiders, including other tribal members who had removed from their southeastern lands, each of these six tribes constructed new and specific citizenship criteria which they hoped would fulfill the specific needs of their situation. To do so, tribes looked towards a number of methods. “They chose rules that they felt best reflected their traditional values and ideas of belonging,” Adams suggests, “but they also borrowed from concepts and documentation used by the federal government to make their citizenship criteria intelligible to white America” (19). In order to avoid being classified as black in the segregated South, tribal communities attempted, to varying degrees, to identify themselves as Indian to the government. For instance, to prevent the erasure of their legal existence in a society premised on the divide between black and white, Indian communities sought to prove their Indianness by manipulating those racial categories like blood quantum which the state had forced upon them and which it used to judge them. Adams's impressive and illuminating study thus shows that tribal citizenship is historically constructed and constantly evolving, but that it always sought to exercise their tribal sovereignty by engaging in the political act of self-determination.

Prior to the nineteenth century, tribes mainly knew who belonged through kinship ties, shared cultural practices, and a common language, and because they resided in the same area. However, when it came to removal, as well as to access to land and other resources, historical developments and especially the way the US conflated race and nation and forced its views onto Native American tribes came to affect tribal notions of belonging. Those tribal members who remained in the Southeast following the 1830 Indian Removal Act increasingly had to fight for access to land and resources and also to defend the access of legitimate tribal citizens against those without a genuine connection to the communities. To persuade the federal and at times also the state governments, tribes were forced to engage with governmental ideas about race and came to utilize the concept to further their own goals, such as in the case of the Mississippi Choctaw, who used “‘full blood’ as an index to make their Indianness intelligible to the federal government” (121). Adams concludes that southeastern tribes “hoped that if they spelled out their requirements in a language white Americans understood, officials would accept tribal decisions on citizenship” (213). For several of the tribes studied, this included the language of blood, even though others rejected it, mainly to maintain their numbers. Those who did adopt the parlance of blood quantum, Adams suggests, did so to redefine kinship in a way that was compatible with Euro-American expectations and not in order to abandon it. However, as she also acknowledges, this strategy had consequences, and “by the early twentieth century, many Indians had internalized notions of blood” (213).

Who Belongs? provides six insightful case studies which demonstrate how history has influenced, and continues to influence, the lives of southeastern tribes even today. Social changes made it difficult to maintain older notions of belonging, and in response tribes had to modify their citizenship rules. They did so to “protect the political cohesion and economic base of the tribes” (210). These case studies and the book as a whole are well written and engaging. They sympathetically document challenging situations and difficult decisions facing the tribes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At times, these choices came to exclude some of those who formerly might have been included. While she takes great pains to explain why tribes had felt compelled to do what they did, Adams holds that “tribes did not abandon older ways of reckoning belonging in favor of bureaucratized and racialized criteria,” and rather quickly passes over those instances when the choices that had to be made were somewhat less traditional (214). However, this is probably the only substantial criticism that can be made about this important book which adds much to our understanding of the Native South.