Answering the question of who is an Indian is difficult.
There is blood quantum which helps but is running out quickly. Those babies, some of whom are in my own family, are not Indian enough to be registered with their tribe due to thinning Indian blood.
BQ is an insufficient test of Indianness especially since the vast majority of Indians live off reservation and marry outside of Native DNA. However, what else do we have?
We have community and family. We have a community that claims us, but there are others who have been adopted out of their tribe before NICWA policies, children taken based off spurious claims, who have no real connection, and sometimes no provable record, to the Native nation they are from.
It's a mess, exacerbated by government Indian policies, with no real solution that makes the “Pretendian” issue hard to discern.
Nancy Rommelman writes about Pretendians and her experiences raising a Native daughter.