On Sacheen Littlefeather, Pretendians and what it means to be Native American

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Sacheen-
Littlefeather-Pretendians-17602244.php

Why Sacheen Littlefeather’s ethnic fraud matters more now than ever
before.

Last month, I published a piece in The Chronicle that investigated claims
of American Indian identity by the late actress and activist Sacheen
Littlefeather. After speaking to her biological sisters and reviewing her
family tree back to the 1850s, I found that Littlefeather was not of
Apache heritage, as she presented herself the night she became
internationally known for taking the Oscar stage in March 1973 in lieu of
Marlon Brando. She was of white and Mexican descent — and had no
legitimate claims to a tribal identity.

I knew the piece would be controversial; taking down an icon, especially
in the wake of her death, was bound to raise anger from those who found
her work meaningful. But I will concede that I wasn’t fully prepared for
the debate that followed — one that posited Littlefeather’s identity, and
all Native American identity, as an existential question too complicated
to verify or fact-check. This line of argumentation largely conceded that
Littlefeather was dishonest in her self-presentation, but nonetheless
suggested that her claims to American Indian heritage, however threadbare,
were open to a wider and more fluid interpretation.

A New York Times story on my piece headlined, “Sacheen Littlefeather and
the Question of Native Identity,” quoted Littlefeather’s longtime friend
and Shoshone/Ojibwe poet, nila northsun (she lowercases her name), as
saying Native identity is “what you feel in your heart, and what your
belief system is.”

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, meanwhile, which recently held an
internationally publicized event to apologize to Littlefeather for how she
was treated at the telecast of the Oscars, told the Times it would not
reconsider how it characterized Littlefeather’s identity in response to
the findings of my article; The museum “recognizes self-identification.”

Perhaps most egregiously, a headline in the Washington Post — on the first
day of Native American Heritage Month, no less — asked, “Sacheen
Littlefeather may have lied about her identity. Does that matter?”

Yes. Yes, it does.

Muddying the waters of American Indian identity enables non-Native
opportunists to play Indian for clout or money. And you don’t have to look
very hard to find the evidence of the harm these “Pretendians” cause.

In 2019, the Los Angeles Times found that a fake Cherokee “tribe,” the
“Northern Cherokee Nation,” had wrongfully collected nearly $300 million
in government contracts intended for actual Native Americans.

Just days before my story was published, UC Berkeley Professor Elizabeth
Hoover, after questions had been raised regarding her claims to a Mohawk
identity, released a statement saying that she and her family had
conducted genealogical research and “found no records of tribal
citizenship for any of my family members in the tribal databases that were
accessed.”

In other words, she was a fraud.

In response, a group letter by some of Hoover’s former students demanded
her resignation, an apology to the Mohawk of Kahnawake and for Hoover to
stop performing Native American identity. They went on to insist that UC
Berkeley administrators “work with other departments on campus to
understand how the campus can adopt a better hiring and screening process
to protect Indigenous communities.”

All of that seems unlikely to happen, as a campus spokesperson said in a
statement that Hoover’s ethnic identity is a “deeply personal matter,” and
Hoover seems intent on continuing her work in the field of Native American
food sovereignty.

A failure by academia, the media and others to appropriately specify what
it means to be American Indian is the origin of this Pretendian grift —
and enables its prevalence. Refusing to define what it means to be Native
gives con artists free rein to exploit American Indian heritage, with no
accountability. After all, how is verification possible if anyone can
claim authenticity without any proof?

There is clearly a need for a definition that employers and allies can use
to weed out false claimants. The U.S. government’s legal definition of
American Indian is any member of one of 574 federally recognized tribes.
While there may be occasional outliers to this definition of American
indigenousness — people who qualify for citizenship, for instance, but for
whatever reason are not enrolled — tribal citizenship is indeed an
excellent place to start.

Tribal enrollment in the United States is predicated upon a relation to
immediate family members who have experience as nationals of a Native
nation that pre-existed European colonialism and whose homelands are in
the lower 48 states of the United States. This makes Native American
identity in the United States political –– not racial. American laws
surrounding tribal membership do not apply in Mexico or Canada, nor to
other indigenous nations of Hawaii or in territories like Puerto Rico.
Only American Indian tribes navigate a nation-to-nation relationship with
the most powerful country on Earth. Only citizens of these tribal nations
are subject to the political and legal consequences of this particular
relationship. Only we who are citizens have the standing to address the
resulting issues and trauma born of this relationship. It is therefore
perfectly reasonable that anyone seeking to advance their career through a
claim to Native identity, who isn’t a citizen of a tribal nation, should
be subject to scrutiny.

Many of Littlefeather’s defenders continue to trumpet her father’s Mexican
ancestry as a way of propping up her claim to American Indian identity.
This argument is based on a couple of assumptions: If you go far enough
back, many Mexican people are part indigenous, and tribes routinely
crossed borders, so being indigenous to Mexico should be no barrier to
calling oneself “American Indian” or “Native American” and claiming the
trauma of these tribes as their own.

In a Variety opinion piece addressing my investigation into Littlefeather,
Laura Clark, a Mvskoke citizen who works for Yahoo News, raised the
specter of blood quantum as a reason to tread lightly with suspected
fraudulent claims to American Indian identity. “Some Natives are
reconnecting with their tribes,” Clark wrote. “Some Natives don’t have
enough ‘Indian blood’ to register because of blood quantum minimums. And
some Natives have had their tribes nearly erased to the point that
organized citizenship records simply don’t exist.”

I would never deny the right of Littlefeather or anyone else to
respectfully “reconnect” with their Native ancestry so much as it exists.
But Clark’s argument lacks an accurate definition of “Pretendianism,”
something similarly missing from the broader coverage of Littlefeather. A
Pretendian is not someone who is privately and genuinely trying to find
their Native relatives. A Pretendian is someone falsely claiming Native
identity who uses this fraudulent claim for clout and in monetization
schemes. They write books and speak for American Indians on the national
and international stage, before Congress, the United Nations, or, as in
Littlefeather’s case, the Oscars. The moral weight of their voice is born
not from any singular ability, but from the power of a collective trauma
that is not theirs to wield.

Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Arizona Supreme Court
found that because American Indians were legally wards of the federal
government, they had the same status as insane people, and could not vote.
Only American Indians, citizens of Native nations, were subject to these
policies.

For my mother’s people, the Navajo or Diné people, as we call ourselves,
the trauma inflicted on us by the United States included being rounded up
and sent on the Long Walk to Hweeldi or Bosque Redondo, a concentration
camp. Thousands died there. For my father’s people, it led to Wounded
Knee, where the U.S. Army massacred Lakota people. My Dakota grandmother’s
uncle, the Rev. Charles Cook, a young Dakota Episcopal minister at Pine
Ridge, worked with Dr. Charles Eastman, the Dakota author, and medical
doctor, to save the survivors. The two young Dakota men rode out for days
during a blizzard, looking for anyone left alive. The church, decorated
for Christmas, was turned into a makeshift hospital, with wounded women,
children and elders lying beneath a banner that read “Peace on Earth, Good
Will to Men.” My great-great-uncle lost his faith that day. My grandmother
claimed he died of a broken heart a few years later.

Experiences like these are directly tied to being American Indian.

Littlefeather’s relatives were legally white. They were allowed to vote
six decades before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. They were never
subject to the federal or state policies and laws American Indians were
subject to when they lived in Arizona and California. The harm caused by
U.S. policies directed at American Indians never happened to them. Ever.

For many Americans, the notion of the “secret Indian” in the family hiding
out several generations ago is a compelling one. However, even if true
(and it often is not), this is not enough to confer a national identity —
any more than being an American of minuscule French descent gives one the
same status as a French national. To argue otherwise doesn’t just put
tribal sovereignty under threat, it undermines genealogy, the methodology
used to verify tribal claims.

Some schools of thought in academia suggest that tribal documentation is
inherently colonial, thus, using it to prove fraud is not “decolonial.”
But according to David Cornsilk, a renowned Cherokee genealogist, this
thinking is ahistorical.

“The genealogies upon which (Native people) rely are not a byproduct of
colonial constructs,” he told me. “Genealogies are often sacred to
specific populations including kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiians) and
Cherokees. Most indigenous populations place a high degree of reverence
for ancestors and the interrelationships between past and present our
genealogies represent. When genealogy is attacked to defend false claims
of tribal heritage, the attacker is actually besmirching the ancestors
that genealogy represents.

“For Cherokees, the most appropriated ethnicity by race shifters, what we
call the Great Spider Web of Families, representing every Cherokee family
and their connections to each other by blood, marriage, clan and
community, is torn apart when a Pretendian attempts to force themselves
into that web.”

This has particular relevance to two U.S. Supreme Court cases heard in the
past month, one regarding affirmative action and the other on the 1978
Indian Child Welfare Act, which demands that Native children placed for
adoption first go to immediate relatives, then to other tribal members and
then to other Native American households.

Conservative justices, including Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy
Coney Barrett, have questioned whether American Indians constitute a
“race” or a political affiliation based on tribe. If they decide we are a
“race” based on some notion of distant DNA, it will almost certainly
destroy the current political status of tribes and completely undermine
tribal sovereignty to the extent it exists today.

Tribal enrollment requirements are currently set by tribal nations and can
only be changed by the tribe’s citizens. Tribal citizenship, based on the
right of blood (jus sanguinis) rather than the U.S. standard of the right
of soil (jus soli), is an expression of the nation’s sovereignty to
determine its citizenship requirements. Kim TallBear, a professor at the
University of Alberta and citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe in South
Dakota, is the author of “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the
False Promise of Genetic Science,” which investigates how Native American
claims to land, resources and sovereignty that have taken generations to
ratify may be seriously — and permanently — undermined by those using
fractional DNA test results to support a claim to Native identity.

“Genetic ancestry tests are useless for tribal enrollment or even making a
definitive statement about one’s descent from a particular tribe,” she
said in an interview. “False claimants to Native identity may take a
genetic ancestry test. But it does not verify descent from a named
individual ancestor. Rather, such a test links one probably to distant
genetic ancestors that cannot be definitively affiliated with a
contemporary tribe.”

While a move toward a preferred Native identity — a real-life cosplay
experience — may be liberating for the individual, it dangerously erases
the political reality and history of oppression experienced by tribal
nations and their citizens. The confusion about Native American/American
Indian identity created by those who seek to eclipse our political nature
for personal gain is only providing ammunition to conservative Supreme
Court justices to complete the genocide of our nations.

On Oct. 31, at a Supreme Court hearing on the affirmative action case,
Justice Alito asked the attorney defending affirmative action policies at
the University of North Carolina what is preventing students from falsely
claiming to be Native American — a practice colloquially called “box
checking.”

When asked by Alito if family lore of Native ancestry would be enough to
be considered American Indian, North Carolina Solicitor General Ryan Park
responded by saying, no.

Alito rephrased the question: “I identify as an American Indian because
I’ve always been told that some ancestor back in the old days was an
American Indian.”

Once again, Park agreed that the student was unlikely to be telling the
truth.

This exchange was interpreted by news outlets as Alito referring to Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, who has been excoriated by the right-wing press
for marking herself as American Indian on her Texas bar registration card.
She was also identified by Harvard as a minority faculty member. In the
1990s, the university used her as an example of a diversity hire when it
was challenged for the lack of people of color on the law school faculty.

Warren is far from the only person non-Native in academia to benefit from
such an arrangement. And she isn't close to the most pernicious example,
as demonstrated by Hoover. I have been told by any number of professors
who are tribal citizens that even questioning a colleague’s vague claims
of Native identity can lead to accusations by college and university
administrators of “racism.”

“Hiring white people who self-identify as Cherokee or some other tribe but
with no lived experience as a Native person does nothing to redress
centuries of systematic exclusion of Native people from educational
opportunities,” TallBear said. “In fact, it constitutes another hand-out
of resources to white people stolen yet again from Native people.”

Pretendianism, therefore, is not just about replacing authentic Native
voices with mummers in red face. It constitutes a cynical stealing of
gains made by people of color in this country. It is a disturbing
financial theft from some of the poorest people in America. The cost of
Pretendianism is more than just the misleading play-acting of a role for
an unsuspecting American audience. It causes harm to Native nations,
communities and individuals who have already endured enough.

Fact-checking claims of Native identity may appear unseemly to some, but
it is a small imposition to reduce the continued trauma of Native
Americans and the theft of our culture.

A Lakota journalist I respect, Avis Little Eagle, who did reporting on
fake New Age “Native” practitioners in the 1990s, recently reminded me of
the old journalism adage: “If your mother says she loves you, check it
out.”

Jacqueline Keeler is a Diné/Dakota writer living in Portland, Ore., and
the author of “Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story
of Sacred Lands.”


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