Only Approved Indians Summary

Jack Forbes, a Native American scholar, is the author of Only Approved Indians. This is a collection of seventeen short stories that take in to account the vicissitudes of life for modern-day Indians. The stories are full of humor and irony. The book gets its title from its lead story, ‘Only Approved Indians can Play Made in the USA’ (Howard, 1995).
‘Only Approved Indians can Play Made in the USA’ talks about a basketball match. The story is full of irony. I talks of an Indian basketball team that attends the tournament but it is not allowed to play because its players are allegedly not approved Indians. The story kicks of describing the situation at the second day of the championship. Conventionally, in a basketball tournament, each and every

To be a legible player, one had to be an Approved Indian. An approved Indian in this case had to be of a quarter or more Indian blood. If challenged on their origin, they were supposed to avail their BIA roll numbers. So this makes BIA roll numbers the sole way of determining whether the player in question is Indian or not. This makes it ridiculous since as stated, all official Indians were under the rule of the whites and only the “recognized Indians” were considered Indians regardless of their skin color, what they speak or where they come from. Having “Approved Indian” as the title of the piece creates ridicule and impacts curiosity to the

This would prove that they are approved Indians hence eligible to play the game. The origin of two players of one team was challenged and they could not produce the BIA roll numbers. One was allegedly Chicano – a person with the origin of Mexico but born in America – since he was heavily built and dark while the other one, apparently looked like an Indian but had a big goatee and a Spanish accent hence the suspicion. The player who was allegedly Chicano was able to speak Papago, and the other player with a goatee claimed that he was a full – blood Tarahumara Indian but still, their team was disqualified in the end. On the other hand, the opponent team had players, where most of them were very white. This brought about a lot of suspicion regarding their origin but all of them had BIA identification cards to prove they were true Indians. The team had one player who had blonde hair. Although in reality he was only about a sixteenth, BIA rolls had been changed for his tribe. There, he became a fourth legally. This shows and emphasizes how wide the term “Indian” could be. There was no much difference between this guys and the guy who was allegedly Chicano. But the difference sets in since he had a BIA card. This shows how important it was to be identified by the Bureau of Indian