‘ Pretendians’: Who can claim Native ancestry?
Falsifying heritage can yield social, economic perks
PHOENIX – After President Trump mockingly called Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” at a Navajo Code Talkers event thisweek, layers of outrage swept Native American communities.
Navajos and others in Arizona denounced the remark as an unmistakable slur, saying it minimized the tragedies that marked the real Pocahontas’ lifewhile distracting fromthe veteran Code Talkers’ contributions.
They also skewered the tone- deaf backdrop for the comment: a portrait of former president Andrew Jackson, who earned the nickname “Indian killer” on reservations for his deadly policies.
But the debacle also revived Warren’s controversial Native American ancestry claims, “something we deemed a problem a long time ago,” according to Native American- issues advocate Amanda Blackhorse.
Warren — a Massachusetts Democrat who claimed Cherokee and Delaware tribal heritage based on family lore — isn’t the first person to make questionable claims of Native American ancestry.
The term “Pretendians” was coined to mock those who engage in the practice, from Johnny Cash and Miley Cyrus to Bill Clinton and Johnny De pp.
In 2015, a full 68% of people who identified as multiracial in a national Pew Research Center study said they were part American Indian.
“There’s this sort of fantasy or ideal type of Native people want to be, based on what they see in Hollywood,” said Blackhorse, a Navajo Nation member who lives in Phoenix. “When it comes to our land issues, to ourwater rights, to the constant battle we have to face every single day, where are these people that claim to be Native?”
Tiya Miles, a University of Michigan professor specializing in Native American, Afro- American and African studies, said the U. S. “has a long tradition of non- Native people performing as ‘ Indians’ and/ or publicly laying claim to American Indian identities, especially in the aftermath of dispossessing actual indigenous people of their lands.”
False claims of Native American ancestry date back at least 120 years, when a federal commission required Native Americans to register on the Dawes Rolls as part of a land- allotment plan.
“Mainly white men with an appetite for land” saw the Dawes Rolls as an opportunity, according to a report by Indian Country Today. They paid $ 5 each for fake documents declaring them Native American on the rolls “to reap the benefits that came with having Indian blood.”
In 1971, an iconic “Keep America Beautiful” ad featured Iron Eyes Cody as a Native American lamenting the destruction of his land. The actor claimed Native American heritage and took on Native American roles in hundreds of films before being exposed as Espera Oscar de Corti, a SicilianAmerican with zero Native ancestry. “The romanticization of American Indians, including stereotypical ideas about royalty and savage nobility, is a longstanding American cultural practice,” Miles said.
When early literature didn’t paint Native Americans as “savages,” it depicted them as free- spirited and almost magical — concepts reinforced by Disney’s version of the Pocahontas story.
“Some Americans today might still feel the desire, consciously or unconsciously, to capture a piece of that romance,” Miles said.
Another explanation involves not wanting to “be on the side of the oppressor,” according to writer Anna Pulley, who is half white and half Tewa.
Given the atrocities committed against Native Americans by Europeans and later the U. S. government, “ethnically aligning oneself with a historically oppressed people makes one feel less guilty,” Pulley wrote last year.
Others have charged that those who declare Native American heritage are trying to advance via opportunities given to minority applicants.
White people who falsely claim Native American origins might obtain aid they have no right to.
“There’s this sort of fantasy or ideal type of Native people want to be, based on what they see in Hollywood.” Amanda Blackhorse a Navajo Nation member