As a card carrying Choctaw, the benefits are OK. In no way was my school close to paid for. All the benefits came from the tribe. I probably could have found some more if I tried really hard, but I would have felt guilty cooking up an essay.
The "you can get a card if your family's name is on the role" is BS. To get my kids citizenship I had to supply my mom's & my birth certificate. I also had the legality of my Texas birth certificate challenged because for a short time in the 80s they proxied state authority to the counties. It was a huge pain in the ass for my kids as children of multiple generations of living citizens. You basically have to reprove two generations of citizenship.