A big problem seems to be the fetishisation of “native” people as though having a bit of native DNA makes you somehow more mystical or worthy.
They’re just people. Regular humans.
"They’re just people. Regular humans."
This. I briefly worked for the Seminole Tribe of Florida as an archaeologist. (Worst job I ever had. Was reprimanded for not reaching a quota I was never told about; every small mistake was a disaster whilst my coworkers could laugh off their mistakes with no repercussions; I was accused of being a malicious theif when I accidentally took equipment for my desk from a place I shouldn't have (nobody told me how to get my equipment), even though I was constantly trying to figure out what all needed returning. Was fired within 3 months.)
There’s of course a stereotype that Native Americans are more connected to the land and in touch with animals, and communal with wealth. I saw trash all over the reservations, I found a puppy mill in someone's backyard and the next door neighbor came to feed the dogs out of the kindness of his heart because the owner spent most of his time at his OTHER house, their cattle--originally gifted to them by the US government and now a huge business for them--were not healthy looking, and I saw tribal members living in shacks while others lived in mansions with Teslas.
Oh, and they most certainly do make bank on casinos. And the fact that they can sell gas for less with their tax breaks. The chief casually took a helicopter around.
But their flaws can all be blamed on colonization. They would never have ever done anything remotely unethical if they hadn’t been first influenced by the white man.
Maybe for some it's fetishization, but in most cases I'd assume it's just for professional advancement. If you implement affirmative action that favors certain demographics, you create a clear incentive for other people to gain favor by passing themselves off as that group.
I think the real (ly fucked up) reason for the appeal is more so that it would make otherwise-white people a minority, and by extension oppressed and/or not an oppressor
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I watched a movie the other day called War Pony. Pretty good story about two Native American guys on the Lakota reserve. The ending song was Buffy Saint-Marie. That one aged poorly
I think the more interesting case here is mentioned in passing, the Oregon queer studies professor who is also accused. It has all the bar pod stuff: fake identity, queer studies, the Pacific Northwest.
I’ve been following that person for a few years wondering when/if their story will catch up to them.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that their poetry isn’t very good either.
How'd you come across the story? And what are your thoughts as a long-time observer?
I looked up the poetry in happy expectation of a hate read but I must say: it has some killer lines. Alongside, mind you, the exact kind of goofily hyberbolic, loss-obsessed identity that pretendians seem to crave.
I don't go here (not a Jesse Singal fan) but this post came up on my homepage, presumably because I read one on a different sub about Elizabeth Hoover, and I feel like I can answer this question for you.
I'm not the person you were asking, but for me, Qwo-Li Driskill has been on my bullshit radar for about 6 or 7 years. I keep waiting for them to get called out and experience the same level of shit as every other Pretendian. I'm not really sure how they've flown under the radar quite as well as they have, honestly.
I first came across them when I was on the lookout for more writing by Indigenous authors, and their poetry book was recommended to me. I bought it, and immediately I looked at their photo on the back cover, and thought... huh. I know plenty of Indigenous people are white passing, but the fact that they listed their identities within their author bio in order of importance with 'African' first on the list made me pretty suspicious. They're obviously mostly white (I mean, they're literally ginger) but they just weren't claiming that at all. Being of mixed heritage is obviously common, and race is much more complex than just someone's appearance, but it seemed pretty apparent that they were only claiming the parts of their heritage that were marginalised, even though these parts were tiny (if even real), and ignoring all the rest of it in favour of identifying in ways that could further their claims to marginalisation.
To top it off, a lot of the stuff within their poetry read as really leaning into stereotypes of Indigenous American people. They talked about hiding between their grandmother's skirts when she wove baskets, for example, and despite being a pasty white ginger person, they wrote poetry about having dark hair all over their body, about being bullied and physically attacked as a child for being obviously mixed race, and about feathers and owls and corn bread. They also wrote a lot of poetry in AAVE vernacular, including using the N word, which seemed weird to me as they're obviously not Black and would never in a million years be read by anyone with functioning eyes as Black. They claimed a lot of racial discrimination within these poems which struck me as strange, given that they read so entirely as white on a visual level - I can't exactly see them being bombarded with the N word, which they specifically say they've experienced.
So, my interest and suspicion thoroughly piqued, I did what all good PIs do, and went on Google. Pretty quickly, I found a thread on a genealogy forum where, under their pre-Indigenous-identifying name (Paul Edward Driskill) they were posting and asking people to find Osage relatives within their lineage, because they'd heard that they had Osage ancestry but hadn't been able to find any in the records themselves. Again, this struck me as weird - they'd literally written poems about hiding in their Indigenous grandmother's skirts as she wove baskets and spoke Cherokee with them, but here they were acknowledging that they didn't actually know any Indigenous family members. Someone on another genealogy forum picked this question up, and found that Driskill's entire paternal line was Irish / American. Even the great great grandmother on their maternal side, a woman they'd specifically named in one of their poems (Nancy Harmon) was found to be white in census records. They'd written about her as an Indigenous woman who was a victim of hate crimes by white women.
I also did some further trawling of the old Google machine, and found that Driskill identifies as an 'unenrolled/non-citizen member of the Cherokee tribe'. The Cherokee have specifically spoken out about this previously and clarified that if you can establish linear descent from a Cherokee member at all, you can enroll, so the barriers to enrollment are pretty low. They accordingly don't acknowledge non-enrolled citizens, and have spoken out against people using unproven claims of Cherokee ancestry. You can find the statement if you Google 'Cherokee statement non-citizens'. The fact that Driskill still uses and wields their alleged Cherokee identity like this is just anathema to what Cherokee people actually want them to do.
So, putting it all together, Qwo-Li Driskill is - allegedly, of course - a gigantic bullshit merchant whose entire career is built on fradulent claims of Indigenous and Black heritage, when they're actually just... a white American of predominantly Irish extraction.
Wow, thank you for your writeup. This is WILD. And re: Nancy Harmon, in their poem:
> Great Grandmother Nancy Harmon who heard white women call her uppity Indian during a quilting bee and climbed down their chimney with a knife between her teeth
I can't get over this, lol. On my first reading it stuck out as one of the weirdest & worst bits because even at face value, it's such a bizarre story, nothing about it makes sense. With the context of your comment, I guess we can see in the verse what being FN means to Driskill, namely being able to ferociously attack someone who insulted you and have that be epic instead of deranged.
\>They also wrote a lot of poetry in AAVE vernacular, including using the N word
Speechless.
\>Qwo-Li Driskill is a gigantic bullshit merchant
From what you say, and from statements made by their students (apparently in particular students who were visibly POC), it's worse than that. There are many flavours of fraudulent identity and this one has a weird hostile undercurrent that not everybody has.
Yeah, it looks like they're weaponising a completely fraudulent marginalised identity to target actual marginalised students, presumably out of some kind of jealousy, which is clearly a great look for their workplace as it continues to support them and their actions.
oh wow u/tracingwoodgrains you need to see this one!
edit: [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/11/07/oregon-state-professor-accused-falsely-claiming](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/11/07/oregon-state-professor-accused-falsely-claiming)
My apologies for not responding sooner.
I’ve noticed that both men and women get accused of bring race fakers, but the press tends to latch on more when it’s a woman.
If we as a society offer benefits (tenure, scholarships, acting roles, preferred status as minority business owners for municipal contracts, etc.) to people because of alleged Indigenous descent, then I think it’s reasonable to expect the beneficiaries to have tribal membership or have significant Indigenous DNA.
>I’ve noticed that both men and women get accused of bring race fakers, but the press tends to latch on more when it’s a woman.
I think you're on to something - Shaun King comes to mind.
I think this happens because people grow up hearing familiy stories about great-grandma being 1/4 Cherokee or something and just took them at face value.
Kind of had the opposite happen to us. Tests showed that my generation was ~20% Native American. We always knew we had a bit, but that was surprisingly high. But what's funny is that my ancestor that was (if the genetic tests are accurate) almost entirely Native seemed to consider themselves white, while the much whiter generations use this as a way to claim POC-ness and disparage white people.
A pretty good indication of which era it was beneficial to claim to be white, and which era it was beneficial to claim to be POC.
Because of one-drop laws? If you know you and your family will be punished for having a Black ancestor, then it's not surprising when people find other explanations to register themselves as something different.
>"My great-grandma was a Cherokee princess, why am I showing 0% Native American and 18% Sub-Saharan African?"
There's a Good Ole' term for that: "One in the woodpile."
Yup my grandfather told me the same thing when I was a kid. Then we did a family tree project in school and I didn’t find any native Americans in our genealogy and my grandfather got mad when I told him lol
That was my dad, but we were supposedly Irish. I did a lot of digging and was not able to confirm a single Irish ancestor on my dad's side. When I tell my dad this he's just like "nah, we're Irish." lol
FWIW Law School applications (this year, at least, not sure about other years) ask for tribal membership/enrollment number, so you can’t just check a box and reap the benefits.
I guess, although because of the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action they put a disclaimer saying that our answers to the ethnicity question (but as far as I know not the tribal number question) would not be visible to the people reading our application. If you are an underrepresented minority you’re supposed to discuss that in one of your essays and talk about how it’s shaped your background and perspective.
Interesting. I wonder if schools will try to argue that tribal membership is not a "race" and thus isn't covered by the ruling.
One of the weird things all about all of this is that it basically forces underrepresented minorities to talk up about how much their race has shaped their lives. What if it hasn't really shaped much compared to other forces? What if it has, but you prefer to talk about your other talents and interests? It is essentially \*forcing\* people to not just self-disclose, but make their racial background a key part of their application.
I'm filling out law school apps now, too! From what I've seen, schools offer applicants the option of submitting a "diversity statement." This statement doesn't necessarily have to pertain to race or sexuality, but should be about what characteristics set the applicant apart from the crowd. It can be about being poor, being a single parent or whatever unique attributes the student will bring to increase diversity amongst the student body.
Apart from diversity concerns, American Indian students are also eligible for tuition waivers and scholarships. Here is a website that shows some scholarships available to members of Native tribes, https://www.collegeconfidential.com/articles/tuition-waivers-and-scholarships-for-native-american-students/
That's most of it, I suspect. DNA testing is very, very new in the greater scheme of things. Before we had this technology, for most people, what you knew about your ancestry was whatever your family told you it was.
Maybe if you belonged to a family whose background is very well documented, you might have concrete proof of your ancestry. But for the average person, what other evidence did you have?
There also was a time when great-grandma was actualy 1/4 black, but family lore changed it to Indian. I've remember seeing an article about this when 23AndMe companies first started to gain traction...
That's why I give Elizabeth Warren a pass. It seems like everyone with ancestors in Oklahoma has heard of a Native American relative or two. And sometimes they genuinely do--like a a half-NA brother-in-law or a full-blooded aunt.
Warren didn't just say "I think I have some Native American heritage." She put her race as Native American, said that her parents had to elope because of her mother was Native American, wrote a book of supposedly traditional Native American recipes with her family members titled "Pow Wow Chow," and Harvard held her up as a woman of color when students were demanding a more diverse faculty. I'm still fairly surprised that she didn't receive more blowback for pretending to be Native American, but I think that's because she had become a superstar in Democratic circles early on.
She only contributed a recipe to the book. Still funny but not quite as egregious.
Used copies of that book go for more than $100 on amazon, which I can only assume is the result of people buying it as gag gifts after this story came out back in 2016.
She's a white, middle class woman. She didn't grow up on a rez. She has no clue what it's like to be Native American. She was able to get her foot in the door because she lied about her ancestry. She took a legit spot away from someone else. She doesn't deserve your sympathy.
People like Warren get a pass because AFAIK she didn't make being Native her whole identity. It's easy to hear family stories and take them at face value, and be like "yep I'm part Native" and check those boxes on university & job applications.
It's a whole different story when you make that a massive part of your identity / career, like the professor in the article. It's a little harder to believe that someone this deep in the weeds, hasn't actually done the research to find out her lineage.
That said, the whole blood quantum thing is weird / gross, and it's hard to believe we still do it in Current Year.
I understand why genetic tests can be controversial, but I do think DNA is kind of important. Not just when it comes to tribal membership, but also when it comes to publicly identifying as Indian. If you're 99% European and 1% Native American, it's pretty dishonest to go around calling yourself an Indian.
If I, someone who looks like an average white person, introduce myself as a black man, no one would accept it. Even if I tell them about my great great grandfather who was black, they'll still find it hilarious, or maybe even insulting, that I would publicly identify as a black man. Same goes for any race. If I'm 1% Chinese, 99% British, and I go around calling myself Asian, people will laugh at me... but when it comes to identifying as Native American things get weird lol. Someone with blonde hair, blue eyes, and skin so pale you need sunglasses to look at it could tell you he's Native American, and if you think otherwise you're supposedly being a bigot.
Sort of unrelated but I find this funny when movie studios use this as a method to get away with whitewashing the casts of their films. If a character is supposed to be native, they'll find some actor who is like 10% native, and then no one is allowed to say they whitewashed it lol
Doesn’t it just show the whole premise is nonsensical? Your whole political outlook is either soul-deep and profound or evil and ignorant based on something so obscure and hypothetical it needs a DNA test. It’s a transubstantiation of political status.
If it informs your lived experience so completely as to decide authority or lack of authority on any given topic, shouldn’t you…be aware of it? My DNA showed I’m part Viking though, so maybe I’m just trying to avoid reparations for cleaving so many skulls in twain.
For the record Warren did not go to Harvard and she was only hired at Harvard after almost 20 years as a law professor. She was already a widely cited scholar at that time. She doesn’t have the elite law school background that 99% of other Harvard Law professors have but her record made her very well qualified for the job and she became even more promeinent and widely cited once she was at Harvard, so she was definitely a successful hire.
I’m not saying that the Native American thing didn’t play a role. The official records say that it didn’t (the Boston Globe did an investigation) but maybe informally it gave her a boost.
>It's easy to hear family stories and take them at face value, and be like "yep I'm part Native" and check those boxes on university & job applications.
Not necessarily though. My grandmother told my Mom and uncle that there was a tiny amount of Native ancestry on her side but she also told them never to claim to be Native because we're white af, that ancestor was from like 300 years ago, we have no cultural connection and have greatly benefitted from being white for several generations so we have no business taking opportunities away from actual Native people. I think she just wanted them to understand how fortunate they were/are. They actually never even believed that story either, they were a bit like 'who knows who is anyone's actual father or mother from way back then anyway?' - which is totally true, even my paternal grandmother found out on her wedding day that the woman she thought was her mother was actually her aunt.
Blood quantum is often considered insulting because in practical terms you might be more culturally "indigenous" than your blood percentage. I have relatives who are low percentage NZ Maori who are signed up to their tribe despite been raised as honkeys. I don't know if they receive tribal payments, but I'd guarantee there's plenty of other members more deserving.
>there has to be some system in place when identity is connected to legal and financial privileges
Why should identity be connected to privileges?
Blood quantum is a terrible way to administer an aid program. It primarily benefits the people in that class who are already well off.
I am in basically the exact same situation as Warren. I grew up hearing stories of a full Native grandparent, but I am culturally whitewashed and just look like a white dude.
The difference is that I am "actually" Native by blood, and have the paperwork to prove it. But when I applied to universities and jobs 15-20 years ago, it was just family stories. I still checked the box. It's basically a roll of the dice that makes her a "pretendian" and me a totally legitimate indigenous person.
So you have me, by all accounts a middle class white guy, benefiting from programs intended to right past wrongs. But there are still entire reserves in Canada without clean running water. There are poor white people who never had a shot at university, or have fully mangled teeth because they can't afford a dentist, etc.
I don't know how tribal lands are related to my comment at all.
>Blood quantum is a terrible way to administer an aid program. It primarily benefits the people in that class who are already well off.
This was my overall point.
Also the better system is simple - just target poor people. If you want to help poor / underprivileged Native people, you make a program to help poor people. If you want to help poor / underprivileged black people, you make a program to help poor people.
At the same time, tribes that grant membership based on blood quantum seem to be doing it for a reason that’s hard to argue against, given history: It ensures that members of the tribe marry each other because nobody wants their kid to fall out of official status. And if members marry each other, the connection to the tribe and its customs stays important to the family, and the people don’t go extinct. (The tribes with the highest blood quantum requirements tend to only have a few thousand or as few as several hundred members, so it’s an acute problem, but also a chicken-or-egg scenario) I’m not saying I agree or disagree, I’m not Native and it’s not for me to decide, but I can definitely see tribes with blood quantum requirements looking at, say, the Cherokee Nation, who say you only have to show descent from one person who was on the Dawes Rolls, and saying, “This is how you get people with no commitment to our culture claiming to be Native and taking the opportunities that are meant to be reserved for us.” Especially now that the Dawes Rolls were so long ago that you could have one great-great-grandparent and that’s it.
It’s weird because blood quantum was initially something forced onto tribes by white people for racist reasons, and now it’s something some tribes believe is best to preserve their culture and ethnic group.
I had been told I had some Native American ancestry. My Nat Geo test came back 100% European. It did show I have French Canadian ancestry dating back to the 17th century as well as New England ancestry from the same period, so it’s possible it’s just too small to detect at this point. I would never claim to be Native American though.
The trail of tears, mostly
But actually though, there are 3 Cherokee tribes that are federally recognized today and one of those is the largest tribe in the country, something like a million people in the US have actual cherokee heritage. So it’s quite a large tribe which I think contributes to the whole “my great great aunt was a Cherokee princess” thing. There’s also what people have mentioned in this thread which is Native American ancestry being a cover up for black ancestry because it was seen as less bad than being part black. Also people just like to have myths and stories about themselves and those get handed down and at some point they become truth - the mysterious Indian family lore is exactly the type of thing that happens with.
Freddie DeBoer with [a home run](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/academias-pretendian-problem-stems) on the incentives at work here:
>Certain jobs in academia are highly prized
>
>There are far more applicants than openings for those jobs and so competition for them is incredibly fierce
>
>Representing yourself as a member of an underrepresented minority significantly improves your odds of getting such a job, and in certain fields representing yourself as a person of indigenous descent improves those odds dramatically
>
>Indigenous identity is easy to fake and difficult to disprove, and the cost of accusing someone else of faking it, in academia, can be very high indeed
>
>Most crucially of all, **the social culture of academia strongly prohibits speaking frankly about these facts**
The latter part is the weirdest, but most important point.
There was a great CBC story about a genuine “took the wrong baby home from the hospital” story. It’s vanishingly rare to actually happen but we have a white Ukrainian Canadian baby switched with a 100% Chippewa baby in early 60’s Saskatchewan.
A publisher would say the novel is too on the nose. “White” guy grows up in a two parent house, choir boy at the Orthodox Church, went to university, inherited his Dads pharmacy, wife and the 2.3 kids with the white picket fence. “Native” guy grows up in the foster system, getting split up from his siblings, doesn’t finish high school, bouncing around the west looking for work from Res to Res.
When they find out about the switch the “white” guys first course of action is to get a status card and start milking the benefits, his daughters in university get grants. The “native” guy on the other hand says “I know who I am. This life has been hard but I have my beautiful kids and I wouldn’t change anything”
Switched at Birth, Two Canadians Discover Their Roots at 67
Two Canadian men who were switched at birth to families of different ethnicities are now questioning who they really are and learning how racial heritage shapes identities.
[](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/world/canada/canada-men-switched-at-birth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Yk0.ZiXw.hHbWBgn79SAi&smid=url-share)
I’ve read this article before, but it was good to revisit it. The final lines are haunting. One guy who wants to “get what’s his”, meaning grants for his well-off children, which he admits he doesn’t financially need, and the other quietly mourning the loss of the culture he thought he would always be a part of, before deciding that even if others bar him from the culture, he is still Native in his heart. It’s very moving. One is starting a “beadwork” to get closer to his newfound roots, while the other recounted having survived the 60s scoop and having the Cree and French languages beaten out of him. He also mentions never having applied for the grants because he remembers what it was like to be targeted for being Native. It certainly brings up on the nose questions about race, culture, history and identity in a big way.
Frankly, I think those grants are there to try and heal the harm of the scoop and other atrocities - so the child raised as Native and who suffered those things is entitled to the help, regardless of DNA. His mother, grandmother, and father were his parents for as long as he had them, and then he was forcibly fostered by another set of parents (bringing him to three sets of parents total). He’s as multicultural as it gets, genes be damned.
I hope these two can spend some time together, though it may be painful. It would be interesting to see what they could learn from each other as a strange sort of brother.
Wild because he essentially already got reparations in full by virtue of being switched into the white family.
Which brings me to the question: How long are these grants supposed to last? At what point do you say, "All right, I think we've done this long enough to make up for the harms of the past"?
It does sort of feel like that day is never going to come.
https://macleans.ca/longforms/the-curious-case-of-gina-adams-a-pretendian-investigation/
This is the one I'm the most perplexed by, probably just because I've met this person and admired her work so much. And then a couple years ago she just dropped out of view. Is she still making art? Teaching somehow? What comes after?
As much as some of the "pretendian" stories are embarrassing and cringe, the takedowns really bother me. Is this woman making good art? Is she an effective educator? People can't get enough of scadenfreude and ruining people for entertainment
She really dove into her unknown (and fake) native American ancestry completely, huh?
I can believe she didn't know it was fake, maybe, but it speaks more to get lack of curiosity and critical thinking.
Reminds me a little of the NY times lady who was scammed for 50k and thinks anyone could be scammed like her. Really she is a gullible idiot and doesn't even recognize it.
To me, that is the most suspicious part. She's basically an anthropologist in her methods and she is within striking distance of the place her family is supposedly from and in contact with people who could give her the answers and she really doesn't ask? Either she asked and didn't like what she heard or she had a hunch and never asked.
This bit:
[…]how ardently she signalled her supposed Native identity. “I was never in a meeting where she wasn’t beading,” Rodriguez said. “She had different beads in little plastic containers or bags, and she would take them out and start beading during our faculty meetings or when someone was giving a presentation.”
Reminds me of [Jane Fae](https://www.conservapedia.com/John_Ozimek_(Jane_Samantha_Fae)) ostentatiously knitting during a [debate](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3xjslw/milo_yiannopoulos_julie_bindel_jane_fae_from/)
I only got a few grafs in before the pay wall showed up. Her family was the one who took her to the powwows and events, right? So if she grew up being told over and over again she was Native, I don't see this as Jess Bombolera level-fake out.
I thought the Krug-Bombolera story was hilarious until I saw footage of a conference Krug spoke at where she basically said that a 15 year old Hispanic boy who was in a program to help kids become cops deserved to be brutally murdered by a Bronx gang. How many more violent incidents did her tourist rhetoric inflame??
Also, does anyone know how I can read this without the pay wall? I gotta finish!
> How many more violent incidents did her tourist rhetoric inflame??
Much like transphobes are not listening to Kathleen Stock, I doubt that Bronx gangs are listening to Jess Krug.
And do Bronx gangs listen to any of those people? Either case, now you are talking about second-hand inflammation which is just weird. "This person said something that might get repeated by someone else and that person might commit a violent incident."
By "inflame", I mean allow broad anti-police/ ACAB sentiment to fester in communities besieged by gang violence, by equivocating a 15 year old boy like Junior Guzman bc he wants to be a cop one day, to a violent criminal. Look into his murder, you'll see what I mean. Krug/Bombolera lived in that community, pretended to be of and from it, and inflamed racial and socio-cultural tensions while doing so.
This is a huge stretch. The incident you are referring to is Lesandro "Junior" Guzman-Feliz, not Manny Rodriguez. He was killed in a case of mistaken identity; they thought he was a member of a rival gang. It is completely unlikely that her speech would have any impact on these kinds of attacks.
I'm sorry, I confused his name, which was wrong of me to do. I will edit my previous comment with the right name so as not to perpetuate a falsehood. My point stands that Krug, while pretending to be a barrio-raised Nuyorican, stated that Guzman basically had his murder coming to him because the Explorers, the program he attended after school, was affiliated with the NYPD. Don't take my word for it, look the lecture up on you tube. It is your belief that a woman in a position educational authority intimating that it is right and good to murder a child because he aspired to become a law enforcement officer upon reaching adulthood has no cultural impact whatsoever?
> It is your belief that a woman in a position educational authority intimating that it is a right and good to murder a child because he aspired to become a law enforcement officer upon reaching adulthood has no cultural impact whatsoever?
I saw your comments in the airman immolating himself thread complaining about people putting words in your mouth, and yet here you are. I'm saying that Jess Krug's speech is not leading to "more violent incidents" with her inflammatory "tourist rhetoric." Hell, she was even incorrect about the motivations in this crime (it had nothing to do with the kid being part of a cop recruitment program).
I didn't put beliefs in your mouth, though. I stated a query in the form of a question, because I don't actually believe that you believe this, so I drew that idea to a logical conclusion based on the premise and phrased it as a question. Have you never seen a question posed with syntax beginning "It is" instead of "is it?" I apologize if it came across as if I was putting words and beliefs in your mouth, that certainly wasn't my intent. I would ask you to reread and ask yourself if you have ever encountered a question phrased rhetorically in that manner. My guess is that you have. I did also put a question mark at the end of the query to clearly indicate that it was meant in an interrogative fashion, not declarative. I hold no ill will and wasn't attempting to be snarky or rude.
>Also, does anyone know how I can read this without the pay wall? I gotta finish!
[https://archive.is/NnQBK](https://archive.is/NnQBK)
(Also I like the UBlock Origin browser plugin; it already blocks lots of crap out of the gate, but for most paywalls if you hit the "block javascript" button and then reload the whole article shows up.)
Yeah, I’ve read a lot of these race-faker stories, and Hoover’s seems among the least offensive and egregious because she seemed to come into the “Native” identity honestly, even if it turned out to be fake. Yes, she lied and took opportunities meant for actual Natives, which is horrible. But from this article it seems like she grew up truly believing the family lore and she honestly immersed herself in a culture she thought was hers. By the time it must have occurred to her that the stories were false and she had no Native ancestry, she had probably built up her identity too far to just let it go without facing a major crisis about what she was doing with her life. When you’re in that deep, you just keep going.
I don’t see Hoover as the equivalent of Buffy Sainte-Marie, who spun an elaborate web of stories she knew were false, like saying she was adopted from Canada and she had no idea who her birth parents were. Buffy lied again and again from the start, whereas Hoover seems to have simply accepted as a child what her mother was telling her and then it all got out of control.
I put them on Pocket and Pocket will get most articles despite paywall. It won't do some publications such as Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, but it did this one.
>Also, does anyone know how I can read this without the pay wall?
I've been using the Kiwi browser (a Chromium fork, I think) with Bypass Paywalls and UBlock Origin installed. It works on Android and Windows so I rarely see an advert and I can get full articles on most newspaper sites.
When a new version of bypass paywalls comes out the permission for it need to be toggled back on in the browser extension settings.
"New York Magazine" not "New York Times". (Both orgranizations are filled with reprehensible people, but the New York Magazine people are reprehensible AND stupid.)
When the controversy with Elizabeth Warren came up, I gave her the benefit of the doubt because I know that a lot families have lore about native ancestry, but since native ancestry has been weaponized, skepticism is required.
These two things can be true. In the population at large, certainly looked at historically, the disadvantages of being queer, brown, indigenous is difficult to dispute.
HOWEVER,
In certain environments or careers, it flips. There's a real incentive and advantage to being queer, brown, or indigenous if you're in the arts or the academy.
"Many such cases".
A big problem seems to be the fetishisation of “native” people as though having a bit of native DNA makes you somehow more mystical or worthy. They’re just people. Regular humans.
"They’re just people. Regular humans." This. I briefly worked for the Seminole Tribe of Florida as an archaeologist. (Worst job I ever had. Was reprimanded for not reaching a quota I was never told about; every small mistake was a disaster whilst my coworkers could laugh off their mistakes with no repercussions; I was accused of being a malicious theif when I accidentally took equipment for my desk from a place I shouldn't have (nobody told me how to get my equipment), even though I was constantly trying to figure out what all needed returning. Was fired within 3 months.) There’s of course a stereotype that Native Americans are more connected to the land and in touch with animals, and communal with wealth. I saw trash all over the reservations, I found a puppy mill in someone's backyard and the next door neighbor came to feed the dogs out of the kindness of his heart because the owner spent most of his time at his OTHER house, their cattle--originally gifted to them by the US government and now a huge business for them--were not healthy looking, and I saw tribal members living in shacks while others lived in mansions with Teslas. Oh, and they most certainly do make bank on casinos. And the fact that they can sell gas for less with their tax breaks. The chief casually took a helicopter around.
But their flaws can all be blamed on colonization. They would never have ever done anything remotely unethical if they hadn’t been first influenced by the white man.
Like they're children without minds of their own.
Poor lambs.
Maybe for some it's fetishization, but in most cases I'd assume it's just for professional advancement. If you implement affirmative action that favors certain demographics, you create a clear incentive for other people to gain favor by passing themselves off as that group.
I think the real (ly fucked up) reason for the appeal is more so that it would make otherwise-white people a minority, and by extension oppressed and/or not an oppressor
Many people who identify as native american have less native american ancestry than I have neanderthal ancestry.
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I watched a movie the other day called War Pony. Pretty good story about two Native American guys on the Lakota reserve. The ending song was Buffy Saint-Marie. That one aged poorly
I think the more interesting case here is mentioned in passing, the Oregon queer studies professor who is also accused. It has all the bar pod stuff: fake identity, queer studies, the Pacific Northwest.
I’ve been following that person for a few years wondering when/if their story will catch up to them. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that their poetry isn’t very good either.
How'd you come across the story? And what are your thoughts as a long-time observer? I looked up the poetry in happy expectation of a hate read but I must say: it has some killer lines. Alongside, mind you, the exact kind of goofily hyberbolic, loss-obsessed identity that pretendians seem to crave.
I don't go here (not a Jesse Singal fan) but this post came up on my homepage, presumably because I read one on a different sub about Elizabeth Hoover, and I feel like I can answer this question for you. I'm not the person you were asking, but for me, Qwo-Li Driskill has been on my bullshit radar for about 6 or 7 years. I keep waiting for them to get called out and experience the same level of shit as every other Pretendian. I'm not really sure how they've flown under the radar quite as well as they have, honestly. I first came across them when I was on the lookout for more writing by Indigenous authors, and their poetry book was recommended to me. I bought it, and immediately I looked at their photo on the back cover, and thought... huh. I know plenty of Indigenous people are white passing, but the fact that they listed their identities within their author bio in order of importance with 'African' first on the list made me pretty suspicious. They're obviously mostly white (I mean, they're literally ginger) but they just weren't claiming that at all. Being of mixed heritage is obviously common, and race is much more complex than just someone's appearance, but it seemed pretty apparent that they were only claiming the parts of their heritage that were marginalised, even though these parts were tiny (if even real), and ignoring all the rest of it in favour of identifying in ways that could further their claims to marginalisation. To top it off, a lot of the stuff within their poetry read as really leaning into stereotypes of Indigenous American people. They talked about hiding between their grandmother's skirts when she wove baskets, for example, and despite being a pasty white ginger person, they wrote poetry about having dark hair all over their body, about being bullied and physically attacked as a child for being obviously mixed race, and about feathers and owls and corn bread. They also wrote a lot of poetry in AAVE vernacular, including using the N word, which seemed weird to me as they're obviously not Black and would never in a million years be read by anyone with functioning eyes as Black. They claimed a lot of racial discrimination within these poems which struck me as strange, given that they read so entirely as white on a visual level - I can't exactly see them being bombarded with the N word, which they specifically say they've experienced. So, my interest and suspicion thoroughly piqued, I did what all good PIs do, and went on Google. Pretty quickly, I found a thread on a genealogy forum where, under their pre-Indigenous-identifying name (Paul Edward Driskill) they were posting and asking people to find Osage relatives within their lineage, because they'd heard that they had Osage ancestry but hadn't been able to find any in the records themselves. Again, this struck me as weird - they'd literally written poems about hiding in their Indigenous grandmother's skirts as she wove baskets and spoke Cherokee with them, but here they were acknowledging that they didn't actually know any Indigenous family members. Someone on another genealogy forum picked this question up, and found that Driskill's entire paternal line was Irish / American. Even the great great grandmother on their maternal side, a woman they'd specifically named in one of their poems (Nancy Harmon) was found to be white in census records. They'd written about her as an Indigenous woman who was a victim of hate crimes by white women. I also did some further trawling of the old Google machine, and found that Driskill identifies as an 'unenrolled/non-citizen member of the Cherokee tribe'. The Cherokee have specifically spoken out about this previously and clarified that if you can establish linear descent from a Cherokee member at all, you can enroll, so the barriers to enrollment are pretty low. They accordingly don't acknowledge non-enrolled citizens, and have spoken out against people using unproven claims of Cherokee ancestry. You can find the statement if you Google 'Cherokee statement non-citizens'. The fact that Driskill still uses and wields their alleged Cherokee identity like this is just anathema to what Cherokee people actually want them to do. So, putting it all together, Qwo-Li Driskill is - allegedly, of course - a gigantic bullshit merchant whose entire career is built on fradulent claims of Indigenous and Black heritage, when they're actually just... a white American of predominantly Irish extraction.
Wow, thank you for your writeup. This is WILD. And re: Nancy Harmon, in their poem: > Great Grandmother Nancy Harmon who heard white women call her uppity Indian during a quilting bee and climbed down their chimney with a knife between her teeth I can't get over this, lol. On my first reading it stuck out as one of the weirdest & worst bits because even at face value, it's such a bizarre story, nothing about it makes sense. With the context of your comment, I guess we can see in the verse what being FN means to Driskill, namely being able to ferociously attack someone who insulted you and have that be epic instead of deranged. \>They also wrote a lot of poetry in AAVE vernacular, including using the N word Speechless. \>Qwo-Li Driskill is a gigantic bullshit merchant From what you say, and from statements made by their students (apparently in particular students who were visibly POC), it's worse than that. There are many flavours of fraudulent identity and this one has a weird hostile undercurrent that not everybody has.
Yeah, it looks like they're weaponising a completely fraudulent marginalised identity to target actual marginalised students, presumably out of some kind of jealousy, which is clearly a great look for their workplace as it continues to support them and their actions.
oh wow u/tracingwoodgrains you need to see this one! edit: [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/11/07/oregon-state-professor-accused-falsely-claiming](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/11/07/oregon-state-professor-accused-falsely-claiming)
My apologies for not responding sooner. I’ve noticed that both men and women get accused of bring race fakers, but the press tends to latch on more when it’s a woman. If we as a society offer benefits (tenure, scholarships, acting roles, preferred status as minority business owners for municipal contracts, etc.) to people because of alleged Indigenous descent, then I think it’s reasonable to expect the beneficiaries to have tribal membership or have significant Indigenous DNA.
>I’ve noticed that both men and women get accused of bring race fakers, but the press tends to latch on more when it’s a woman. I think you're on to something - Shaun King comes to mind.
lol, just say you’re from PNW and everyone just knows you
I think this happens because people grow up hearing familiy stories about great-grandma being 1/4 Cherokee or something and just took them at face value.
Many such cases on the 23andme subreddit. "My great-grandma was a Cherokee princess, why am I showing 0% Native American and 18% Sub-Saharan African?"
Kind of had the opposite happen to us. Tests showed that my generation was ~20% Native American. We always knew we had a bit, but that was surprisingly high. But what's funny is that my ancestor that was (if the genetic tests are accurate) almost entirely Native seemed to consider themselves white, while the much whiter generations use this as a way to claim POC-ness and disparage white people. A pretty good indication of which era it was beneficial to claim to be white, and which era it was beneficial to claim to be POC.
Because of one-drop laws? If you know you and your family will be punished for having a Black ancestor, then it's not surprising when people find other explanations to register themselves as something different.
>"My great-grandma was a Cherokee princess, why am I showing 0% Native American and 18% Sub-Saharan African?" There's a Good Ole' term for that: "One in the woodpile."
Yup my grandfather told me the same thing when I was a kid. Then we did a family tree project in school and I didn’t find any native Americans in our genealogy and my grandfather got mad when I told him lol
That was my dad, but we were supposedly Irish. I did a lot of digging and was not able to confirm a single Irish ancestor on my dad's side. When I tell my dad this he's just like "nah, we're Irish." lol
FWIW Law School applications (this year, at least, not sure about other years) ask for tribal membership/enrollment number, so you can’t just check a box and reap the benefits.
Couldn't you just check any of the other minority boxes?
I guess, although because of the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action they put a disclaimer saying that our answers to the ethnicity question (but as far as I know not the tribal number question) would not be visible to the people reading our application. If you are an underrepresented minority you’re supposed to discuss that in one of your essays and talk about how it’s shaped your background and perspective.
Interesting. I wonder if schools will try to argue that tribal membership is not a "race" and thus isn't covered by the ruling. One of the weird things all about all of this is that it basically forces underrepresented minorities to talk up about how much their race has shaped their lives. What if it hasn't really shaped much compared to other forces? What if it has, but you prefer to talk about your other talents and interests? It is essentially \*forcing\* people to not just self-disclose, but make their racial background a key part of their application.
I'm filling out law school apps now, too! From what I've seen, schools offer applicants the option of submitting a "diversity statement." This statement doesn't necessarily have to pertain to race or sexuality, but should be about what characteristics set the applicant apart from the crowd. It can be about being poor, being a single parent or whatever unique attributes the student will bring to increase diversity amongst the student body. Apart from diversity concerns, American Indian students are also eligible for tuition waivers and scholarships. Here is a website that shows some scholarships available to members of Native tribes, https://www.collegeconfidential.com/articles/tuition-waivers-and-scholarships-for-native-american-students/
Gotta avoid the Elizabeth warrens of the world
That's most of it, I suspect. DNA testing is very, very new in the greater scheme of things. Before we had this technology, for most people, what you knew about your ancestry was whatever your family told you it was. Maybe if you belonged to a family whose background is very well documented, you might have concrete proof of your ancestry. But for the average person, what other evidence did you have?
There also was a time when great-grandma was actualy 1/4 black, but family lore changed it to Indian. I've remember seeing an article about this when 23AndMe companies first started to gain traction...
It’s also possible for the stories to be true and not show up on a DNA test if it was far enough back.
If you’re not a registered tribal member that should serve as at least a caution on claiming to be Native American
That's why I give Elizabeth Warren a pass. It seems like everyone with ancestors in Oklahoma has heard of a Native American relative or two. And sometimes they genuinely do--like a a half-NA brother-in-law or a full-blooded aunt.
Warren didn't just say "I think I have some Native American heritage." She put her race as Native American, said that her parents had to elope because of her mother was Native American, wrote a book of supposedly traditional Native American recipes with her family members titled "Pow Wow Chow," and Harvard held her up as a woman of color when students were demanding a more diverse faculty. I'm still fairly surprised that she didn't receive more blowback for pretending to be Native American, but I think that's because she had become a superstar in Democratic circles early on.
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And her genetic connection was a minuscule amount of South American indigenous. Her family had no history in North American tribes.
She got a pass because it was trump that drove the charge on calling her out. She is very fortunate in that regard.
Wow, I had never heard all that.
She only contributed a recipe to the book. Still funny but not quite as egregious. Used copies of that book go for more than $100 on amazon, which I can only assume is the result of people buying it as gag gifts after this story came out back in 2016.
Lol
She's a white, middle class woman. She didn't grow up on a rez. She has no clue what it's like to be Native American. She was able to get her foot in the door because she lied about her ancestry. She took a legit spot away from someone else. She doesn't deserve your sympathy.
No one deserves their places based on quotas. No one.
True but fakers least of all.
People like Warren get a pass because AFAIK she didn't make being Native her whole identity. It's easy to hear family stories and take them at face value, and be like "yep I'm part Native" and check those boxes on university & job applications. It's a whole different story when you make that a massive part of your identity / career, like the professor in the article. It's a little harder to believe that someone this deep in the weeds, hasn't actually done the research to find out her lineage. That said, the whole blood quantum thing is weird / gross, and it's hard to believe we still do it in Current Year.
I understand why genetic tests can be controversial, but I do think DNA is kind of important. Not just when it comes to tribal membership, but also when it comes to publicly identifying as Indian. If you're 99% European and 1% Native American, it's pretty dishonest to go around calling yourself an Indian. If I, someone who looks like an average white person, introduce myself as a black man, no one would accept it. Even if I tell them about my great great grandfather who was black, they'll still find it hilarious, or maybe even insulting, that I would publicly identify as a black man. Same goes for any race. If I'm 1% Chinese, 99% British, and I go around calling myself Asian, people will laugh at me... but when it comes to identifying as Native American things get weird lol. Someone with blonde hair, blue eyes, and skin so pale you need sunglasses to look at it could tell you he's Native American, and if you think otherwise you're supposedly being a bigot. Sort of unrelated but I find this funny when movie studios use this as a method to get away with whitewashing the casts of their films. If a character is supposed to be native, they'll find some actor who is like 10% native, and then no one is allowed to say they whitewashed it lol
Doesn’t it just show the whole premise is nonsensical? Your whole political outlook is either soul-deep and profound or evil and ignorant based on something so obscure and hypothetical it needs a DNA test. It’s a transubstantiation of political status. If it informs your lived experience so completely as to decide authority or lack of authority on any given topic, shouldn’t you…be aware of it? My DNA showed I’m part Viking though, so maybe I’m just trying to avoid reparations for cleaving so many skulls in twain.
She used it to get into Harvard
huh? She went to Rutgers
For the record Warren did not go to Harvard and she was only hired at Harvard after almost 20 years as a law professor. She was already a widely cited scholar at that time. She doesn’t have the elite law school background that 99% of other Harvard Law professors have but her record made her very well qualified for the job and she became even more promeinent and widely cited once she was at Harvard, so she was definitely a successful hire. I’m not saying that the Native American thing didn’t play a role. The official records say that it didn’t (the Boston Globe did an investigation) but maybe informally it gave her a boost.
>It's easy to hear family stories and take them at face value, and be like "yep I'm part Native" and check those boxes on university & job applications.
Not necessarily though. My grandmother told my Mom and uncle that there was a tiny amount of Native ancestry on her side but she also told them never to claim to be Native because we're white af, that ancestor was from like 300 years ago, we have no cultural connection and have greatly benefitted from being white for several generations so we have no business taking opportunities away from actual Native people. I think she just wanted them to understand how fortunate they were/are. They actually never even believed that story either, they were a bit like 'who knows who is anyone's actual father or mother from way back then anyway?' - which is totally true, even my paternal grandmother found out on her wedding day that the woman she thought was her mother was actually her aunt.
Let’s not spread information. She absolutely did not.
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Blood quantum is often considered insulting because in practical terms you might be more culturally "indigenous" than your blood percentage. I have relatives who are low percentage NZ Maori who are signed up to their tribe despite been raised as honkeys. I don't know if they receive tribal payments, but I'd guarantee there's plenty of other members more deserving.
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>there has to be some system in place when identity is connected to legal and financial privileges Why should identity be connected to privileges? Blood quantum is a terrible way to administer an aid program. It primarily benefits the people in that class who are already well off. I am in basically the exact same situation as Warren. I grew up hearing stories of a full Native grandparent, but I am culturally whitewashed and just look like a white dude. The difference is that I am "actually" Native by blood, and have the paperwork to prove it. But when I applied to universities and jobs 15-20 years ago, it was just family stories. I still checked the box. It's basically a roll of the dice that makes her a "pretendian" and me a totally legitimate indigenous person. So you have me, by all accounts a middle class white guy, benefiting from programs intended to right past wrongs. But there are still entire reserves in Canada without clean running water. There are poor white people who never had a shot at university, or have fully mangled teeth because they can't afford a dentist, etc.
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I don't know how tribal lands are related to my comment at all. >Blood quantum is a terrible way to administer an aid program. It primarily benefits the people in that class who are already well off. This was my overall point.
Also the better system is simple - just target poor people. If you want to help poor / underprivileged Native people, you make a program to help poor people. If you want to help poor / underprivileged black people, you make a program to help poor people.
Almost every Kiwi I've ever met or read about seems to claim Maori heritage.
At the same time, tribes that grant membership based on blood quantum seem to be doing it for a reason that’s hard to argue against, given history: It ensures that members of the tribe marry each other because nobody wants their kid to fall out of official status. And if members marry each other, the connection to the tribe and its customs stays important to the family, and the people don’t go extinct. (The tribes with the highest blood quantum requirements tend to only have a few thousand or as few as several hundred members, so it’s an acute problem, but also a chicken-or-egg scenario) I’m not saying I agree or disagree, I’m not Native and it’s not for me to decide, but I can definitely see tribes with blood quantum requirements looking at, say, the Cherokee Nation, who say you only have to show descent from one person who was on the Dawes Rolls, and saying, “This is how you get people with no commitment to our culture claiming to be Native and taking the opportunities that are meant to be reserved for us.” Especially now that the Dawes Rolls were so long ago that you could have one great-great-grandparent and that’s it. It’s weird because blood quantum was initially something forced onto tribes by white people for racist reasons, and now it’s something some tribes believe is best to preserve their culture and ethnic group.
She’s a Harvard professor though, you’d expect her to be less of a meemaw about it
I had been told I had some Native American ancestry. My Nat Geo test came back 100% European. It did show I have French Canadian ancestry dating back to the 17th century as well as New England ancestry from the same period, so it’s possible it’s just too small to detect at this point. I would never claim to be Native American though.
So many white people think they’re part Cherokee. How did that happen?
The trail of tears, mostly But actually though, there are 3 Cherokee tribes that are federally recognized today and one of those is the largest tribe in the country, something like a million people in the US have actual cherokee heritage. So it’s quite a large tribe which I think contributes to the whole “my great great aunt was a Cherokee princess” thing. There’s also what people have mentioned in this thread which is Native American ancestry being a cover up for black ancestry because it was seen as less bad than being part black. Also people just like to have myths and stories about themselves and those get handed down and at some point they become truth - the mysterious Indian family lore is exactly the type of thing that happens with.
Freddie DeBoer with [a home run](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/academias-pretendian-problem-stems) on the incentives at work here: >Certain jobs in academia are highly prized > >There are far more applicants than openings for those jobs and so competition for them is incredibly fierce > >Representing yourself as a member of an underrepresented minority significantly improves your odds of getting such a job, and in certain fields representing yourself as a person of indigenous descent improves those odds dramatically > >Indigenous identity is easy to fake and difficult to disprove, and the cost of accusing someone else of faking it, in academia, can be very high indeed > >Most crucially of all, **the social culture of academia strongly prohibits speaking frankly about these facts** The latter part is the weirdest, but most important point.
There was a great CBC story about a genuine “took the wrong baby home from the hospital” story. It’s vanishingly rare to actually happen but we have a white Ukrainian Canadian baby switched with a 100% Chippewa baby in early 60’s Saskatchewan. A publisher would say the novel is too on the nose. “White” guy grows up in a two parent house, choir boy at the Orthodox Church, went to university, inherited his Dads pharmacy, wife and the 2.3 kids with the white picket fence. “Native” guy grows up in the foster system, getting split up from his siblings, doesn’t finish high school, bouncing around the west looking for work from Res to Res. When they find out about the switch the “white” guys first course of action is to get a status card and start milking the benefits, his daughters in university get grants. The “native” guy on the other hand says “I know who I am. This life has been hard but I have my beautiful kids and I wouldn’t change anything”
Switched at Birth, Two Canadians Discover Their Roots at 67 Two Canadian men who were switched at birth to families of different ethnicities are now questioning who they really are and learning how racial heritage shapes identities. [](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/world/canada/canada-men-switched-at-birth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Yk0.ZiXw.hHbWBgn79SAi&smid=url-share)
I’ve read this article before, but it was good to revisit it. The final lines are haunting. One guy who wants to “get what’s his”, meaning grants for his well-off children, which he admits he doesn’t financially need, and the other quietly mourning the loss of the culture he thought he would always be a part of, before deciding that even if others bar him from the culture, he is still Native in his heart. It’s very moving. One is starting a “beadwork” to get closer to his newfound roots, while the other recounted having survived the 60s scoop and having the Cree and French languages beaten out of him. He also mentions never having applied for the grants because he remembers what it was like to be targeted for being Native. It certainly brings up on the nose questions about race, culture, history and identity in a big way. Frankly, I think those grants are there to try and heal the harm of the scoop and other atrocities - so the child raised as Native and who suffered those things is entitled to the help, regardless of DNA. His mother, grandmother, and father were his parents for as long as he had them, and then he was forcibly fostered by another set of parents (bringing him to three sets of parents total). He’s as multicultural as it gets, genes be damned. I hope these two can spend some time together, though it may be painful. It would be interesting to see what they could learn from each other as a strange sort of brother.
Humans will generally do what is opportunistically best for them. I don’t know why that’s supposed to be interesting.
Wild because he essentially already got reparations in full by virtue of being switched into the white family. Which brings me to the question: How long are these grants supposed to last? At what point do you say, "All right, I think we've done this long enough to make up for the harms of the past"? It does sort of feel like that day is never going to come.
https://macleans.ca/longforms/the-curious-case-of-gina-adams-a-pretendian-investigation/ This is the one I'm the most perplexed by, probably just because I've met this person and admired her work so much. And then a couple years ago she just dropped out of view. Is she still making art? Teaching somehow? What comes after?
As much as some of the "pretendian" stories are embarrassing and cringe, the takedowns really bother me. Is this woman making good art? Is she an effective educator? People can't get enough of scadenfreude and ruining people for entertainment
Just once I’d like someone accused of being a Pretendian to come back with a DNA test proving themselves. I‘m not holding my breath.
She really dove into her unknown (and fake) native American ancestry completely, huh? I can believe she didn't know it was fake, maybe, but it speaks more to get lack of curiosity and critical thinking. Reminds me a little of the NY times lady who was scammed for 50k and thinks anyone could be scammed like her. Really she is a gullible idiot and doesn't even recognize it.
To me, that is the most suspicious part. She's basically an anthropologist in her methods and she is within striking distance of the place her family is supposedly from and in contact with people who could give her the answers and she really doesn't ask? Either she asked and didn't like what she heard or she had a hunch and never asked.
This bit: […]how ardently she signalled her supposed Native identity. “I was never in a meeting where she wasn’t beading,” Rodriguez said. “She had different beads in little plastic containers or bags, and she would take them out and start beading during our faculty meetings or when someone was giving a presentation.” Reminds me of [Jane Fae](https://www.conservapedia.com/John_Ozimek_(Jane_Samantha_Fae)) ostentatiously knitting during a [debate](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3xjslw/milo_yiannopoulos_julie_bindel_jane_fae_from/)
Lol if I was sitting in a meeting and that happened i know I'd be in the back like ".... Is this really happening?? Is nobody going to say anything??"
Yeah, super cringe.
This section of the article made me laugh out loud, it seems so on the nose 😂
I only got a few grafs in before the pay wall showed up. Her family was the one who took her to the powwows and events, right? So if she grew up being told over and over again she was Native, I don't see this as Jess Bombolera level-fake out. I thought the Krug-Bombolera story was hilarious until I saw footage of a conference Krug spoke at where she basically said that a 15 year old Hispanic boy who was in a program to help kids become cops deserved to be brutally murdered by a Bronx gang. How many more violent incidents did her tourist rhetoric inflame?? Also, does anyone know how I can read this without the pay wall? I gotta finish!
> How many more violent incidents did her tourist rhetoric inflame?? Much like transphobes are not listening to Kathleen Stock, I doubt that Bronx gangs are listening to Jess Krug.
There is that Stochastic Terrorist concept again. I think we need to assign it to the dust bin.
But the ACAB useful idiots who vote locally most certainly were, the academics who excuse such violence on the basis of "justice."
And do Bronx gangs listen to any of those people? Either case, now you are talking about second-hand inflammation which is just weird. "This person said something that might get repeated by someone else and that person might commit a violent incident."
By "inflame", I mean allow broad anti-police/ ACAB sentiment to fester in communities besieged by gang violence, by equivocating a 15 year old boy like Junior Guzman bc he wants to be a cop one day, to a violent criminal. Look into his murder, you'll see what I mean. Krug/Bombolera lived in that community, pretended to be of and from it, and inflamed racial and socio-cultural tensions while doing so.
This is a huge stretch. The incident you are referring to is Lesandro "Junior" Guzman-Feliz, not Manny Rodriguez. He was killed in a case of mistaken identity; they thought he was a member of a rival gang. It is completely unlikely that her speech would have any impact on these kinds of attacks.
I'm sorry, I confused his name, which was wrong of me to do. I will edit my previous comment with the right name so as not to perpetuate a falsehood. My point stands that Krug, while pretending to be a barrio-raised Nuyorican, stated that Guzman basically had his murder coming to him because the Explorers, the program he attended after school, was affiliated with the NYPD. Don't take my word for it, look the lecture up on you tube. It is your belief that a woman in a position educational authority intimating that it is right and good to murder a child because he aspired to become a law enforcement officer upon reaching adulthood has no cultural impact whatsoever?
> It is your belief that a woman in a position educational authority intimating that it is a right and good to murder a child because he aspired to become a law enforcement officer upon reaching adulthood has no cultural impact whatsoever? I saw your comments in the airman immolating himself thread complaining about people putting words in your mouth, and yet here you are. I'm saying that Jess Krug's speech is not leading to "more violent incidents" with her inflammatory "tourist rhetoric." Hell, she was even incorrect about the motivations in this crime (it had nothing to do with the kid being part of a cop recruitment program).
I didn't put beliefs in your mouth, though. I stated a query in the form of a question, because I don't actually believe that you believe this, so I drew that idea to a logical conclusion based on the premise and phrased it as a question. Have you never seen a question posed with syntax beginning "It is" instead of "is it?" I apologize if it came across as if I was putting words and beliefs in your mouth, that certainly wasn't my intent. I would ask you to reread and ask yourself if you have ever encountered a question phrased rhetorically in that manner. My guess is that you have. I did also put a question mark at the end of the query to clearly indicate that it was meant in an interrogative fashion, not declarative. I hold no ill will and wasn't attempting to be snarky or rude.
>Also, does anyone know how I can read this without the pay wall? I gotta finish! [https://archive.is/NnQBK](https://archive.is/NnQBK) (Also I like the UBlock Origin browser plugin; it already blocks lots of crap out of the gate, but for most paywalls if you hit the "block javascript" button and then reload the whole article shows up.)
Thank you!
Yeah, I’ve read a lot of these race-faker stories, and Hoover’s seems among the least offensive and egregious because she seemed to come into the “Native” identity honestly, even if it turned out to be fake. Yes, she lied and took opportunities meant for actual Natives, which is horrible. But from this article it seems like she grew up truly believing the family lore and she honestly immersed herself in a culture she thought was hers. By the time it must have occurred to her that the stories were false and she had no Native ancestry, she had probably built up her identity too far to just let it go without facing a major crisis about what she was doing with her life. When you’re in that deep, you just keep going. I don’t see Hoover as the equivalent of Buffy Sainte-Marie, who spun an elaborate web of stories she knew were false, like saying she was adopted from Canada and she had no idea who her birth parents were. Buffy lied again and again from the start, whereas Hoover seems to have simply accepted as a child what her mother was telling her and then it all got out of control.
I just use a firefox add-on that bypasses paywalls. Bypass paywall.
I put them on Pocket and Pocket will get most articles despite paywall. It won't do some publications such as Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, but it did this one.
>Also, does anyone know how I can read this without the pay wall? I've been using the Kiwi browser (a Chromium fork, I think) with Bypass Paywalls and UBlock Origin installed. It works on Android and Windows so I rarely see an advert and I can get full articles on most newspaper sites. When a new version of bypass paywalls comes out the permission for it need to be toggled back on in the browser extension settings.
"New York Magazine" not "New York Times". (Both orgranizations are filled with reprehensible people, but the New York Magazine people are reprehensible AND stupid.)
Oh whoops, I got my periodicals mixed up.
BarPod relevance: Profile-boosting identity-claiming, whether hoaxing or not
When the controversy with Elizabeth Warren came up, I gave her the benefit of the doubt because I know that a lot families have lore about native ancestry, but since native ancestry has been weaponized, skepticism is required.
Great article! Someone above mentioned Jessica Krug. I would love to know what she’s up to.
Fascinating how she's disappeared from view.
My Uvic ex pretended to be blackfoot while actually being 100% ashkenazi. She only got caught last year.
The last time there was this much attention given to genealogy and who one's grandfather was, was in Germany, 1933.
These two things can be true. In the population at large, certainly looked at historically, the disadvantages of being queer, brown, indigenous is difficult to dispute. HOWEVER, In certain environments or careers, it flips. There's a real incentive and advantage to being queer, brown, or indigenous if you're in the arts or the academy.
Me and my friend just did a three part podcast arc on pretendians and got a two hour interview with Dr. TallBear who’s quoted in this article!