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It seems that NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an overachiever.

When NASA launched TESS in 2018, the satellite had one job: watch nearby stars for the tiny dips in brightness caused by planets passing in front of them. It has done that spectacularly well, discovering hundreds of new worlds. Now scientists have realized TESS was also collecting evidence for something it was never expected to find.

In a study published July 1 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers report that TESS captured the signal of Gaia23bra b, a planet orbiting a star nearly 40,000 light-years away—more than 250 times the distance of the nearby stars TESS was designed to study.

It’s a bit like pointing a backyard bird camera at your feeder and later realizing you also captured wildlife on another continent.

Even more surprising, TESS found the planet using a technique it wasn’t designed to use.

The discovery began in April 2023, when the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft spotted a brief brightening of a distant star. That flash was caused by gravitational microlensing, a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein.

When two stars align almost perfectly from Earth’s perspective, the gravity of the nearer one bends and magnifies the light from the more distant star, acting like a cosmic magnifying glass. If that foreground star hosts a planet, the planet leaves ripples in the magnified light.

Gaia recorded the stellar brightening, but it didn’t collect enough observations to reveal the planet itself. Fortunately, less than a month later, TESS happened to be staring at the same patch of sky.

“Gaia’s observations were too sparse to pick up on the planet,” Mallory Harris, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The TESS spacecraft happened to be monitoring the same area of the sky during the microlensing event, and its denser time coverage showed extra features in the light curve caused by a planet.”

But nobody noticed.

Why would they?

“When TESS launched, no one expected it to ever be capable of finding this kind of planet,” study co-author Diana Dragomir, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, said in the same statement.

The microlensing lineup between the two stars came and went in 2023, and the telltale planetary signal sat unnoticed in TESS’s archive for nearly three years before researchers connected the dots.

“The discovery implies that there are probably other so-called microlensing planets hiding in TESS’s data that we hadn’t previously thought to look for,” Dragomir said.

The find suggests one of NASA’s most successful planet hunters may still have plenty of surprises hiding in its archives.

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Hmmmm … Trump again!

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Because though there were fleeting moments of hope, this US performance paled in comparison to those that set the world on notice earlier in this competition. No US team has looked better at a World Cup. No US team before scored goals like the ones they did – goals of quality and ingenuity. No US team before defended quite this capably, over such long periods of time.

Yet it ended with missed defensive assignments, poor giveaways and a moment of pure panic from the goalkeeper Matt Freese that sealed the US’s fate.

“From the beginning, we didn’t connect with the game. Even when we scored the goal, we conceded the next action. Congratulations, Belgium, they were better than us,” Mauricio Pochettino, the US coach, said after the game. “We didn’t show what this team can show.”

Given the events of the previous 36 hours, the US lineup came as no surprise. There was Balogun, starting up top in the same XI that so impressed against Paraguay and Bosnia and Herzegovina. His presence was always expected after his controversial, Trump-driven reinstatement.

On this evening, though, it was the Belgium manager, Rudi Garcia, who provided the first surprise. Two of the team’s stars, Kevin De Bruyne and Jérémy Doku, were omitted from the starting XI even though they were both healthy. Nicolas Raskin came in as the Red Devils’ central playmaker and Dodi Lukébakio replaced Doku on the wing. Lukébakio had terrorized the US in a friendly between the sides in March, scoring two goals in a 5-2 win that raised serious questions about the US’s ability to deal with the world’s best teams.

Consider those questions answered.

The US can’t claim there weren’t warning signs. In the eighth minute, Amadou Onana shrugged off several challenges and slipped the ball through to Lukébakio. The winger knifed through the US defense, sending a nice ball across the face of goal that Youri Tielemans scuffed. The danger had passed, but not for long.

Soon after, Belgium connected. This time, it was a long ball up from the back behind Alex Freeman that Leandro Trossard controlled with a single touch. His deflected pass was met by Raskin with a brilliant first touch of his own. He bounced the ball into the ground and past a flock of US defenders, giving Charles De Ketelaere a simple finish. The finish was deflating for the US fans, who dominated the stadium. For the second time at this World Cup, a high-flying US team faced a healthy dose of adversity.

And just as they did in the dead-rubber group game against Turkey, they crumbled. Weston McKennie, usually reliable and safe at this World Cup, handed Belgium additional opportunities through loose touches and misplaced passes. Christian Pulisic was frequently dispossessed in the midfield. Chris Richards, an anchor at the back, nearly gave the ball to De Ketelaere on the doorstep of goal. It took desperate defending to prevent a second Belgian goal.

Malik Tillman’s equalizer came out of nowhere. Balogun was vital, winning a free-kick on the edge of the area with some nice hold-up play. Just as he had against Bosnia and Herzegovina last week, Tillman sent a looping ball over the wall, finding a kind deflection from Hans Vanaken to flat-foot Thibaut Courtois. With the goal, Tillman became just the second player in World Cup history to score twice from direct free-kicks in a single tournament.

That will be cold comfort for the US. Any hopes of Tillman’s strike kicking off a US fightback were quickly extinguished. Once again, the Belgian threat came from the US’s right. Trossard found space behind Freeman and played a well-weighted ball on to the head of De Ketelaere, who had done well to muscle between Tim Ream and Antonee Robinson.

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Folarin Balogun reflects as the US make their way to defeat against Belgium. Photograph: Sarah Stier/FIFA/Getty Images

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The dangers of the current moment have been underscored by China’s test of a long-range ballistic missile on Monday, the first such launch in nearly two years, and another huge Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv.

NATO leaders are expected to endorse continued support for Ukraine, with the non-American members pledging $80 billion this year and next. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will attend, to press his urgent desire for more air defenses against the Russian onslaught.

Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, is trying to walk a narrow line, prodding European member states to pay more for security while making sure Mr. Trump does not abandon the alliance in the process.

“We will breathe life into the concept of NATO 3.0: A stronger Europe in a stronger NATO,” he said last week.

But for several years at least, senior European officials say, the reality will be a gradually stronger Europe in a weaker NATO. There will be fewer American troops, fewer high-tech American capabilities and doubts that Mr. Trump would come to NATO’s aid in all circumstances, undermining deterrence.

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and a former defense minister, outlined the transformation of NATO after it was founded in the aftermath of World War II.

“NATO 1.0 was a clear defense against Soviet aggression and expansionism, and NATO 2.0 was a post-Cold War search for purpose,” he said in an interview, with the alliance looking outside North America and Europe and, after Sept. 11, especially, to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Russia was seen as a possible ally and certainly less of a threat, and some European NATO members effectively disarmed, he said.

But with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China’s rising ambitions and Washington wanting to shift resources to Asia away from Europe, Mr. Sikorski said, “NATO 3.0 will mean that Europe will take more of the burden for conventional defense and the U.S. will be more of a cavalry-over-the-hill kind of ally.”

Time may be short to prepare. German and many NATO officials say a battle-hardened Russia would be ready for a war against NATO by 2029, so the pressure is on Europe to become more “war-ready,” as the Germans say, and on the United States not to create unnecessary vulnerabilities in the meantime.

In Ankara, Mr. Trump and his officials are expected to keep the pressure on other NATO members to pay more for defense, and to stick to a commitment made last year to increase spending to 5 percent of gross national product by 2035. Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, warned allies last week that there may be benefits for those who pay up and difficulties for those who lag the others.

For a time, the Europeans hoped that American threats to reduce its contributions to NATO would fade, as they did in Mr. Trump’s first term. They now accept that the Americans are serious, and that they must step up in their own interests.

“It’s very clear that the U.S. role is changing,” said Claudia Major, an expert on trans-Atlantic security at the German Marshall Fund, a research group. She added that “the main hope is to do damage control and to get predictability.”

Europeans know they must do more, she said. The change “can be shaped but not avoided.”

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President Trump is expected to discuss American weaponry, NATO spending, and the Russia-Ukraine war during a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. CreditCredit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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Hmmmm … Enlightening!

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Then you need to wait for this video to load, to a picture entitled

‘WE LOST THEM ALL’! THEN hit the play button, it’s approx 54 mins long!

‘Please be patient’

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Thank you for watching and supporting Remembe! Discover the untold stories behind some of Hollywood’s most beloved talents in this powerful tribute. In this video, we honor 20 Black actors you may not have known have passed away — celebrating their legacy, unforgettable performances, and lasting impact on film and culture. From iconic roles to behind-the-scenes influence, these legends helped shape generations of storytelling.

Join Remembered Lives Channel as we reflect on their lives, careers, and the memories they left behind. This heartfelt compilation is a reminder of how their artistry continues to inspire millions around the world.

👉 Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more tributes and stories that deserve to be remembered. All materials featured in this video remain the property of their respective owners and are used with full respect and proper credit. This content is created in accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, Section 107, which allows fair use.

We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material included. All footage has been carefully repurposed under fair use guidelines for educational and inspirational purposes, with the intention of honoring legacy, resilience, and meaningful contributions throughout history. If any content owner has concerns or would like their material removed, please contact us directly.

✅ Thank you for being part of Remembered Lives Channel!

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As more professionals begin to rely on artificial-intelligence tools in their work, could their hard-earned skills atrophy?

That possibility is a growing concern for medical specialists, computer scientists and other workers. Seventy per cent of nurses and 77% of physicians, for example, are worried about losing their skills because of over-reliance on AI systems, according to a survey of US health-care workers published earlier this month.

Their fear might be justified. Evidence suggests that AI-driven ‘deskilling’ is starting to happen in medicine, computer science and other fields. Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the age of AI.

“Just being aware that this phenomenon exists hopefully provokes some self-reflection about which skills people want to maintain and which they’re willing to outsource” to AI tools, says Kevin Crowston, an information scientist at Syracuse University in New York.

Spoiled by AI?

A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.

Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.

The findings, published last October in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.

Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”

No lesson learnt

To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task. During the exercise, all 52 participants could search the web and access instructions on how to do the task. Half of the participants were prompted to use an AI assistant as well.

Afterwards, all of the software engineers were asked to complete a quiz about what they had learnt from the task. The participants who had used an AI assistant did significantly worse on the quiz than those who hadn’t: the average score was 50% in the AI group versus 67% in the non-AI group. The AI-assisted participants did particularly poorly on questions that required them to diagnose errors in the code, which suggests that they had failed to learn the concepts behind the code that they had just produced. The study was posted on the preprint server arXiv ahead of peer review.

The findings are of concern, especially for students and young professionals in the field, says Crowston, who is researching how the use of generative AI tools is changing the way that software developers learn and retain coding skills. “Now you have this very odd disconnect between performance and learning,” he says. “People can perform at a pretty high level, because they’re basically borrowing skills from the AI, but they are not developing those skills themselves.”

Outsourcing cognition

Other technologies have made particular skills obsolete in the past, notes Tapani Rinta-Kahila, an information-systems researcher at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. For example, GPS navigation systems have eroded people’s navigation skills. Generative AI tools, however, are “the first technology that automates various cognitive faculties around thinking and interpretation, which were long considered unique human skills.”

Rinta-Kahila’s own work reinforces these concerns. In 2018, he published a study on a group of accountants who had been using an automated, non-AI accounting system continuously for more than a decade. His team found that, when the tool was taken away, the accountants had forgotten how to do several routine work tasks. He anticipates that AI systems will affect work in various ways as they take over basic tasks that were once performed by early-career professionals. “Next generations of programmers may not understand the foundations of coding that well at all, if they lack the hands-on experience,” he says. “The same goes for many other knowledge-intensive professions, such as accounting and law.”

To prevent AI-driven skill erosion, people need to be aware of how much they are offloading to generative AI tools, he says. They also need to understand exactly how generative AI models work and what their limitations are — and should avoid trusting AI outputs without questioning them. “People need to manage the competing dynamics of relying on generative AI and staying mindfully vigilant.”

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The Trump administration will not seek new bids to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Sunday as he faced new questions about the troubled project and the taxpayer money involved.

Like President Donald Trump, Burgum said he was 100% sure that vandals caused the damage to the century-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Trump has charged that a 350-foot gash was cut into the pool’s liner in the midst of recent renovations, while Burgum described it as multiple cuts adding up to that figure. He also said the pool would have to be at least partially drained in the coming week to finish the repairs.

The repairs will not be opened up to new contractors, he said.

“We’ll use the same company, because they did a fantastic job,” Burgum told CNN’s “State of the Union.” ”Thankfully, the vandalism was small. It was bad. I mean, it could cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair, so then it could fall into a felony … just like damaging any other government property could. But the job that was done to fix the Reflecting Pool was done extremely well.”

Trump this spring pledged to beautify the Reflecting Pool before the nation’s 250th birthday celebrations on July Fourth. Water was drained, and the Republican president directed that the bottom be painted a color he called “American flag blue.” But after the site was restored, the water was plagued by an algae bloom for more than a week, and pieces of the new coating have appeared to be peeling off the bottom.

The pool was closed for the Independence Day celebration, but Burgum said that was due to a safety issue related to the fireworks.

The evolving debate over the Reflecting Pool has inflamed the broader fight over Trump’s aggressive push to overhaul Washington landmarks, including the White House, nearly two years into his final term in office.

Authorities have arrested more than a half dozen people in relation to Reflecting Pool damage, including former Olympian David Hearn, who was indicted last week on a felony of property destruction.

The top federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, said Hearn ripped up recently installed sealant on the pool in “a deliberate act” that caused more than $1,000 in damage. She accused him of “forcefully and violently” pulling up the bottom liner “with both hands” and acting belligerently toward an employee who told him to stop.

Hearn’s lawyers, Democracy Defenders Fund co-founder Norm Eisen and Mary Dohrmann, said the charges were “outrageous and should be alarming to every American.” Eisen and Dohrmann construed the case as representative of “the misuse of government power against an ordinary citizen based on a concocted narrative.”Burgum was asked and did not answer directly whether there was photographic evidence of vandals cutting the pool’s liner. He was also asked whether Hearn should face a 10-year prison sentence, which is the maximum legal penalty for his charge.

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Workers install fireworks along the edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of the America 250 July 4th celebration on the National Mall, Thursday, July 2, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard) © The Associated Press

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The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness, and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.

The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.

In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.

Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.

The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.

“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.

But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”

A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.

Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.

“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”

Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.

The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.

Since his first run for office, Mr. Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

By May 2025, the A.T.F. had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks, or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.

It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the F.B.I. were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.

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A gun show in Phoenix last January. New rules include ending the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales. Credit…Paul Ratje for The New York Times

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Be Safe

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250 Years

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

>>>Let Us Act On The Truths Written In The Document This Time Around!

Napoleon Sarony, “The Declaration of Independence,” 1843–1853. Harry T. Peters, “America on Stone.” Lithography Collection. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

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NASA is lighting the cosmos in red, white and blue in honor of the 250^th birthday of the United States—and the show even comes with sound.

The imagery shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the dusty nebula NGC 3603, the spiral galaxy Messier 94, and the galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and ground-based telescopes is portrayed in a patriotic color scheme.

Making this cosmic fireworks display not only visual, but auditory, optical data from three of the images was matched with the sounds of different instruments in a process called sonification.

Cassiopeia A, the only silent image of the new July 4 series, is a supernova remnant 11,000 light-years from Earth. It’s a true cosmic firecracker, a blown-apart star with a blast wave still visible in X-ray emissions. Here, that explosion is shown in blue from Chandra’s observations. Red and white infrared data from the James Webb space telescope shows the expanding stellar material from the explosion in red and white.

Meanwhile, the nebula NGC 3603 looks like a chrysanthemum firework burst in bright red. This star-forming region sits 20,000 light-years away from Earth. NASA scientists sonified the image of NGC 3603 by assigning different elements of the image to a sound. For example, neutron stars and black holes register as piano notes, while Hubble optical imagery becomes the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar. The background hum comes from X-ray emissions detected by Chandra.

In the image of Messier 94, a spiral galaxy that’s also known as NGC 4736, Chandra’s X-ray data becomes a whistling wind while dense features such as neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes ring in crystalline tones from a glass marimba. Piano notes ring out to represent stars and far-off galaxies. This stunning galaxy is 16 million light-years away from Earth, but is so bright that it can be spotted with a good commercial telescope (although not in red, white, and blue, as seen here). 

Messier 94’s distance is nothing compared to the trip it would take to get to galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652, which is 5 thousand million light-years from our solar system. This galaxy cluster is known for its unique dark-matter structure, which formed in a collision between two separate galaxy clusters. While dark matter structures often follow the contours of visible matter such as gas and stars, the ring of dark matter at ZwCl 0024+1652 stands apart. Here, it’s seen in Hubble data in brilliant blue. A synthesized sci-fi sound highlights the oddball nature of ZwCl 0024+1652, with the music peaking at the dark-matter ring and again at the cluster’s core of superheated gas. Piano notes highlight background galaxies, while background stars ping as notes on a glockenspiel.NASA’s sonification program began in 2020 to translate astronomical data into frequencies that can be heard by the human ear. It’s part of an attempt to bring outreach to blind and low-vision individuals, but also offers sighted people a chance to explore the universe with a new sense. There’s even a tool allowing anyone to convert space visuals into sound, creating their own song of the cosmos.

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Ask most people who they think Indigenous peoples are, and they will most likely say something like “they are natives who lived in America.” But who are they, and how is that determination made? These are questions with no simple or easy answers and the source of ongoing conflict in Indigenous communities, as well as in the halls of Congress and other American government institutions.

The Definition of Indigenous

Dictionary.com defines indigenous as:

“Originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native.”

It pertains to plants, animals, and people. A person (or animal or plant) can be born in a region or country, but not be indigenous to it if his or her ancestors did not originate there.

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues refers to Indigenous peoples as groups who:

• Self-identify as Indigenous at the individual level and are accepted by the community as their member.
• Have historical continuity with pre-colonial or pre-settler societies.
• Have a strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources.
• Exhibit distinct social, economic or political systems.
• Have a distinct language, culture, and beliefs.
• Form non-dominant groups of society.
• Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.

The term “Indigenous” is often referred to in an international and political sense, but more and more people who self-identify as Native American are adopting the term to describe their “native-ness,” sometimes called their “indigeneity.” While the United Nations recognizes self-identity as one marker of indigeneity, in the United States, this alone is not enough to be considered Native American for official political recognition.

Federal Recognition

When the first European settlers came to the shores of what local tribes called “Turtle Island,” there were thousands of communities and bands of Indigenous peoples. Their numbers were dramatically reduced due to foreign diseases, wars, and other policies of the United States government; many of them that remained formed official relationships with the U.S. through treaties and other mechanisms.

Others continued to exist, but the U.S. refused to recognize them. Today, the United States unilaterally decides who (what tribes) it forms official relationships with through the process of federal recognition. There are currently approximately 566 federally recognized tribes; there are some tribes who have state recognition but no federal recognition, and at any given time there are hundreds of tribes still vying for federal recognition.

Tribal Membership

Federal law affirms that tribes have the authority to determine their membership. They can use whatever means they like to decide who to grant membership to. According to Indigenous scholar Eva Marie Garroutte in her book “Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America,” approximately two-thirds of tribes rely on the blood quantum system, which determines belonging based on the concept of race by measuring how close one is to a “full-blood” Indigenous ancestor. For example, many have a minimum requirement of ¼ or ½ degree of Indigenous blood for tribal membership. Other tribes rely on a system of proof of lineal descent.

Increasingly, the blood quantum system is criticized as being an inadequate and problematic way of determining tribal membership (and thus Indigenous identity). Because Indigenous peoples out-marry more than any other group of Americans, the determination of who is Indigenous based on racial standards will result in what some scholars call “statistical genocide.” They argue that being Indigenous is about more than racial measurements; it is more about identity-based on kinship systems and cultural competence. They also argue that blood quantum was a system imposed on them by the American government and not a method Indigenous peoples themselves used to determine belonging, so abandoning blood quantum would represent a return to traditional ways of inclusion.

Even with tribes’ ability to determine their membership, determining who is legally defined as an Indigenous person is still not clear cut. Garroutte notes that there are no less than 33 different legal definitions. This means that a person can be defined as Indigenous for one purpose but not another.

Indigenous Hawaiians

In the legal sense, Indigenous Hawaiians are not considered Native Americans, but they are nonetheless Indigenous peoples in the United States (their name for themselves is Kanaka Maoli). The illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 left in its wake considerable conflict among the Indigenous Hawaiian population, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, which began in the 1970s, is less than cohesive in terms of what it considers the best approach to justice. The Akaka Bill (which has experienced several incarnations in Congress for over 10 years) proposes to give Indigenous people of Hawaiian descent the same standing as Native Americans, effectively turning them into Native Americans in a legal sense by subjecting them to the same system of law.

However, activists and scholars who study Hawaiian indigeneity argue that this is an inappropriate approach for Indigenous Hawaiians because their histories differ significantly from those who identify as Native Americans. They also argue that the bill failed to consult Indigenous Hawaiians about their wishes adequately.

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Native Americans participate in the inter tribal dance during the 7th Annual Indiana Traditional Powwow, April 7, 2018, at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Credit: Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images

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