Cultural identity thieves abound

 

It has been 47 years since Rutgers University Professor Ivan Van Sertima’s controversial book—They Came Before Columbus—ignited a dormant but viscerally powerful need in Black America to reimagine, embellish and validate their cultural history, given the perceived accepted abject history of slavery, exploitation and segregation.

Van Sertima’s assertion was simple but brazen: Blacks were here before Columbus, that they were the true Native Americans and the forgotten creators of major Pre-Columbian Native civilizations, like the Olmecs. Various groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Israelites have seized upon Van Sertima’s writing, and the movement continues to grow, as pow wows and reservations across the country, including Pine Ridge, have been visited by Black groups disseminating literature to Natives, informing them that Blacks are the real Indians, and as one Facebook commenter wrote, the people mistaken for the First Americans are “actually Mongoloid invaders from Asia.”

Van Sertima was born in Guyana in 1935. He died in 2009. At first, his book was hotly debated by scholars, but it eventually filtered down to lay people, and as the decades passed, lay groups claiming to be Cherokee or Blackfoot or some other tribe began cropping up, demanding recognition, even issuing tribal IDs, for a fee. Blatantly photoshopped images escalated across social media (example: a Black face photoshopped into a publicity photo of Graham Greene for Dances With Wolves). One old lithograph was asserted to be Black Natives on the Atlantic Coast before Columbus, but in the background was a photoshop overlook, as you can clearly see elephants.

While not every proponent of the pre-Columbian presence of Blacks in the New World stoops to such transparently false and contrived evidence, the growing wave of lay conversion in the Black community to Van Sertima’s claims has resulted in hostile attitudes towards not only Natives but Jewish people as well. According to Tik Tok sources, the Black Israelites were recently escorted off the Pine Ridge Reservation, but according to CNN, in 2019, a man suspected of murdering a police officer and several other people in Jersey City, New Jersey, “was linked Wednesday to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, a law enforcement official said.”

Although violence has yet to be directed by Blacks at Natives at pow wows and on reservations, the mission statements of these groups indicate that violence has its place in their belief systems.

The psychological reasons behind Pretendianism, the desire to falsely claim Native ancestry, are open for debate. Trevino Brings Plenty, Minicoujou Lakota, writes: “To wear an underrepresented people’s skin is enticing. I get it: to feast on struggle, to explore imagined roots; to lay the foundational work for academic jobs and publishing opportunities.”  

Whether it is to establish an inner identity to give the person a sense of purpose or belonging, or whether it is a cynical attempt at misrepresentation for personal gain, or both, Pretendians abound over the decades, from Grey Owl, an Englishman pretending to be a gentle Native of the northern forest a hundred years ago, or Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian famous for a 1970’s TV commercial where he shed a tear over the destruction of the environment. Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be Black, and rose high in the hierarchy of the NAACP, but was proven to be white, first claimed she was Native.

The difference between Pretendianism and the assertion of a pre-Columbian presence for Blacks, is Pretendianism is usually confined to one person, an activist, a professor, a writer, whereas the macro-Pretendian assertion Black presence predates Columbus, can involve thousands, even millions of adherents, and prompt aggression and violence, and when it is coupled with a religious belief that Blacks are the true Israelites, it can result in murder.

Navajo journalist Jacqueline Keeler released a list of Pretendians, from academics like Ward Churchill to alleged Native writers like Rebecca Roanhorse. Applying the basic standard, that you are Native if you are a member of a federally recognized tribe, or the blood relative of a member of a federally recognized tribe, then you are Native, completely eliminates people like Churchill. Problems arise even with that basic litmus test, because many tribes have lost federal recognition through no fault of their own, like the Wyandot of Kansas, Their blood relatives down in Oklahoma are federally recognized, but the Wyandot in Kansas are not simply because they refused to relocate from the reservation provided for them, in Kansas, to a new reservation in Oklahoma. In addition, it is possible to have a blood relative from the non-Native side of the family.

Native writer Joy Harjo asserts tribal lineage can be established by science—DNA testing, but this is disputed as well (Kimberley Tall Bear [2003],”DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” University of Minnesota Press), despite the fact DNA tests tend to reflect blood quantum records.

A rising tide lifts all boats, but that tide can be a negative tide, as the Black groups claiming to be the real Indians, claiming to be Cherokee or Blackfoot or some other made-up name or affiliation, now have followers numbering in the millions, and these followers have internalized doctrine and narrative not opened to reasoned correction. For example, on Facebook a commentator disputing Blacks were ever slaves, wrote, “If we came here as slaves, then where are the slave ships?” This has been repeated across social media, so no doubt an illogical manufactured narrative, that works on the minds of lay people, and gins up the pseudo-science susceptible base.

No social science has surfaced that addresses at what stage these Black identity movements intent on appropriating Native and Jewish identity are at; has the movement crested, or will it expand and intensify in the decades to come? The allure of a fresh, romanticized identity of empowerment, that replaces the old identity of slavery, segregation, and marginalization, is understandable, but many of these groups tend to be gravitating toward religious extremism. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified Black Israelites as a hate group advocating race war, segregation from whites, homophobia, and Holocaust denial. All of those views based upon a radical reinterpretation of Biblical scripture.

The concern for tribes is how many of these groups will visit reservations, will it escalate? How much will this social movement distort history and reality to the detriment of actual Natives and Native identity?

Perhaps the greatest ally tribes will have when it comes to identity theft are Black organizations like the National Black Cultural Information Trust, an organization dedicated to ethical research and historical truth. They write of Sertima’s book: “The problem is that hyper-diffusionist theories cannot coexist with a belief that people are equal; for one race to be the creators of history, another race must be weaker, smaller, and less driven. This is what Van Sertima implies by arguing that Africans shaped the Olmec culture—that the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica were intellectually incapable of making similar technological advancements as the ancient Egyptians on their own.”

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

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