Pretendians and charlatans a growing problem

RAPID CITY—Every August hundreds of thousands of non-tribal bikers descend upon the Black Hills all looking to be part of something larger than themselves, all looking to be a part of the Sturgis Rally Biker Tribe. Membership is easy. You just dress like a biker and ride a bike. All around this socially engineered tribal gathering are real tribes, living on Indian reservations, and the 20,000 strong Rapid City Indian Community.

Membership in these tribes requires you to be an enrolled tribal member, or the blood relative of an enrolled tribal member, and then only if that blood relationship comes from the Indian side of the family. There are about 100,000 people meeting that criteria, and those with claims outside that criteria are now being called Pretendians. These past few years, the main force behind the move to out Pretendians has been Navajo Journalist Jacqueline Keeler.

An example of a Pretendian outed by Keeler is acclaimed science fantasy author Rebecca Roanhorse. Adopted at birth, Roanhorse claims descent from a Pueblo family but the tribe has no such records and no relatives can be found. Still, she is touted as a Native author and her fantasy stories are credited with Native authenticity.

Roanhorse met with Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo Lieutenant Governor Dr. Matthew Martinez in 2018, and Martinez said: “By not engaging in any form of cultural and community acknowledgement, Roanhorse has failed to establish any legitimate claim to call herself Ohkay Owingeh. It is unethical for Roanhorse to be claiming Ohkay Owingeh and using this identity to publish Native stories.”

Even if Roanhorse was actually Native, she was not raised Native and so what authenticity would her life experience genuinely provide?

Another prominent Pretendian is Ward Churchill. He is an author and political activist and was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado from 1990-2007. He is an honorary member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee but because he does not have a Certificate of Indian Blood, he can never become an enrolled member. Why the Keetoowah made him an honorary member is puzzling, given that in 2005 the Rocky Mountain News published an article in which they stated, that among 142 direct ancestors, their research “turned up no evidence of a single Indian ancestor.”

Churchill hides behind accurate and eloquent essays decrying the use of blood quantum to define a person’s Native identity. But in his essays, he never establishes he is one of the marginalized and disenfranchised, he only implies he is. Every argument Churchill makes against blood quantum could be true, but it does not address his claim to be Native, and he has established no more evidence he is Native than evidence he is a direct descendant of Winston Churchill.

The University of Kansas (KU) has three Pretendian professors on staff (Kent Blansett, Raymond Pierotti, and Jay Johnson) and has done nothing to address their fraudulent claims.

A photograph of History Professor Kent Blansett indicates he is African American, but he claims Native heritage as well. On their website, the KU History Department describes Blansett as “a Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Shawnee and Potawatomi descendant from the Blanket, Panther and Smith families. He is the Langston Hughes Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and History…”

Langston Hughes was a legendary Black jazz poet and his claims of Native ancestry are extremely tenuous, enough to make him a prime candidate for Pretendian status himself, and so why would a university connect his name to anything Indigenous for any reason, especially just to validate a faculty member already outed as Pretendian?

Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee Tribal Council said, “All of the five (tribes) confirmed that he’s not a citizen. I wish I could honestly tell you what is going on at KU, because I have not got a satisfactory answer.”

On the surface, it appears KU hires and empowers Pretendian professors, and then disrespectfully ignores alarm bells from the actual Native community.

Before she became infamous for claiming to be Black, Rachel Dolezal claimed to be Native. Sacheen Littlefeather, who took the stage at the Academy Awars to turn down Marlon Brando’s award for Best Actor, certainly fooled Brando. She even kept fooling the Academy, for almost fifty years, because they issued an apology to her in 2022. Littlefeather’s real name is Maria Cruz, and her own family has outed her as a Pretendian.

Society’s ignorance of Indian identity creates a tempting platform for charlatans to misrepresent themselves as Native to a gullible public.

Two major problems present themselves concerning Pretendians: why do major universities hire and defend these charlatans, while at the same time disrespectfully ignoring tribal objections? The other problem is not every Pretendian is an individual.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report that over $100 million went to 26 non-federally recognized Indian tribes between 2007-2010.

“There’s over 100 fake Cherokee groups.” Barnes said. “There’s more than 80 fake Shawnee and a likewise number of fake Delaware.”

A 2019 LA Times article indicated that Native American companies are overrepresented compared to other minority groups.

“The disparity is particularly stark in Alabama,” the Times said, “where Native Americans comprise less than one percent of the state’s population but Native American businesses were awarded more than $2 billion through the Small Business Administration’s minority program since late 2007. By comparison, while African Americans make up 26 percent of the state’s population, Black businesses in Alabama received about $827 million…”

The Times article concludes that this disparity happens because many of the Native American businesses are probably fake.

Whether by individual Pretendians, or federally non-recognized tribes, to outright fake tribes, hundreds of millions of dollars are siphoned off yearly which would otherwise go to legitimate tribes and enrolled tribal members. This does not even address the damage done to tribal interest and identity, nor does it address the growing and threatening movement by African Americans to claim they were the tribes present when Columbus landed at San Salvador, and that the tribes people think are Indians, are really Mongoloid invaders from Asia. These African American groups are asserting they were never brought over in slave ships but were always present in the Americans for what one radical spokesman claimed was “two billion years.”

A thoroughly debunked 1977 book by Ivan Van Sertima, a Rutgers University Associate Professor, They Came Before Columbus, ignited the black consciousness movement, and set many on a determined and concerted mission to steal the identity and culture of Native American tribes.

Tribes have done nothing to collectively acknowledge, let alone address these threats to tribal identity and tribal interest across so many different fronts.

(James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

The post Pretendians and charlatans a growing problem first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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