The ones I grew up around felt and enforced that it is more about how you live and respect other lesser life than how you look. They adopt white brothers into their lodges often, after a bit of shared life struggle together.
I will never be able to earn the right to wear an eagle feather in my Apache brothers' eyes, but I am (was once - lost touch, somewhat) welcome at their fire. I have earned the right to wear a crow feather, though and actually IN my hair! That is no small thing.
I am not Apache.
IF there is ANY Indian in my blood stream, it would have come from my grandmother whose family lived for several generations in Missouri alongside a few Cherokee families who had left the reservation. You have to realize what that means. Leaving the reservation meant some serious shit, like turning your back on your entire culture at the time.
As an Indian, you could not just choose to pop over to Yale or Princeton and get yourself a high dollar education, no mattter how smart you are. In those days, you had to give up EVERYTHING you ever were to enter the world of the whites.
I am not ashamed of who I have become, but that fucking shit ... --- ... I am ashamed to have to admit.