Native Americans federal and state recognition depends, not on their racial or ethnic designation, but on the political designation as enrolled members of a community to which the state has a political arrangement that includes responsibilities and obligations.  Tribes have an overriding interest in developing skills in each generation that will allow for the realization of tribal sovereignty, which includes education in order to prosper politically, economically, and culturally. 

The group at the statistical bottom of all the scales thought to measure lack of opportunity is American Indians. A line of viable Supreme Court authority holds that equal protection of the law does not require strict scrutiny of laws singling out Indians for advantage or disadvantage, when “Indians” is understood to mean members of federally recognized tribes rather than Indians by ethnicity.
                                                                                                Judge Steve Russell

As California now approaches the ten-year anniversary of Proposition 209, an important legal and educational question has heretofore been largely ignored at the policymaking level: Can tribal membership, particularly membership in a federally recognized tribe, be a plus factor in public university admissions despite Proposition 209’s prohibition on consideration of race, color, ethnicity, and national origin? Within the UC system, the UCLA Law School and an affiliated graduate student program at the UCLA American Indian Studies Center allow tribal membership as an admissions factor.

A body of federal cases, dating back to the landmark 1974 Supreme Court ruling in Morton v. Mancari, treat membership in a federally recognized American Indian tribe as a political classification, distinct from classifications based on race, ethnicity and national origin. Whereas federal courts reserve strict scrutiny for classifications based on race, ethnicity and national origin (including affirmative action programs), classifications based on membership in a federally recognized tribe are subject to the rational basis test, a far less stringent standard of review.  Generally the federal government and related court cases recognize American Indians or Native Americans as all persons having origin in any of the original peoples of North America or the Hawaiian Islands, in particular American Indians, Eskimos, Aleut or Native Hawaiians.  This is based on their membership in what were originally independent sovereign nations.