Self-indigenization, Genocide, and Native Resistance

Script of a talk given at the University of Vermont symposium, "Indigenous Sovereignty, Race-Shifting, and University Responsibility" (April 28, 2023)

I published part of this talk in an earlier iteration in the Aboriginal Policy Studies journal. You can download that commentary and citation information from the journal site. Here is a link directly to the open-access PDF. A portion of this talk was also given as a keynote at the gender studies conference, Feminist Matterings: Indigenous and Arctic Engagements, University of Oulu, Finland, on December 1, 2022.

Below is a video of the introductions to the panel on which I presented this talk, a video of my talk and my responses during the Q&A. The other speakers declined to have their portions of the panel filmed. So only my talk appears in this YouTube video, and it appears that I am the only one responding during the question and answer session; that was most certainly not the case. Because you can view the talk below, I have not posted audio of me speaking this post. My talk begins at about minute 26:10 in the video and ends at 53:00.  

An editorial note: I increasingly cringe at the frequent use of the term “Indigenous,” including my use of it in this commentary. I see the term being used so promiscuously of late that its risks to the sovereignty and livelihoods of First Peoples of the so-called Americas may be outweighing its benefits. Stay tuned. I’ll likely address the problem with “Indigenous” in another Unsettle post.

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The Vanishing American 1925 advertisement

I gave a keynote in October 2022 at the University of Southern California at the symposium “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples,” in which I argued that self-indigenization is an act of genocidal elimination. As a reminder, Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” The five broad techniques include:

1. Literal killing;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm;

3. Inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births; and

5. Forcibly transferring children to another group.

Talks at the USC symposium discussed systematic application of UN-defined genocidal techniques on Indigenous nations of the Americas. Speakers unflinchingly documented 19th-century massacres, forced sterilization of Indigenous women, seizure of our children, horrific conditions of starvation and malnourishment, over-crowding, lack of access to healthcare, and myriad forms of abuse in prisoner of war camps, residential schools, and on reservations that also lead to disease epidemics. The current epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women was also confronted at USC.  

My argument at USC and here is that self-indigenization—also sometimes called race shifting, “pretendianism,” or playing Indian—is a significant contributor in the twenty-first century to the project of Indigenous elimination and settler thriving upon the spoils of Indigenous death.

Self-indigenization as Indigenous Elimination, Reanimation, and Replacement

Dressing up in Indian flesh and costume in order to emotionally and morally manage settler state complicity in Indigenous genocide has three-hundred-year-old roots in settler law, politics, and self-understandings. Historian and member of a well-known Dakota family, Philip J. Deloria, in his book Playing Indian traces the origins of dressing up and performing Indianness in the United States.^[1] Deloria’s historical account begins in the eighteenth century and winds through the late twentieth century as he recounts incidents of playing Indian from the Boston Tea Party, in scouting and fraternal orders, and romanticized literature that eventually informed anthropology. Finally, he discusses New Age appropriation of Indigenous spirituality that ramped up in the 1980s.

Deloria quotes early twentieth-century British writer D.H. Lawrence’s description of an “essentially ‘unfinished’ and incomplete” U.S. American consciousness that produced “an unparalleled national identity crisis.” Lawrence saw the Indian as “at the heart of American ambivalence…Savage Indians served Americans as oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self. Coded as freedom, however, wild Indianness proved equally attractive, setting up a…dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion.”^[2] Deloria summarized:

“The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape, they had to destroy the original inhabitants…half-articulated Indianness continually lurk[s] behind various efforts at American self-imagination.”^[3]

According to settler nationalist ideology, it is inevitable that Indigenous peoples are always dying in the face of western civilization, yet Indigenous existence is crucial for US American (and Canadian?) coherence,^[4] and for the production of the multicultural citizen subject. This produces a conundrum for the settler state. It has found a clever solution.

Before I explain that solution, I remind you that I belong to Dakota people who faced a genocidal settler assault beginning in the mid-19th century. I am of the fifth generation to be born post-Dakota apocalypse. Perhaps not unrelated to that, I am a horror film aficionado with a macabre sense of humour. So while I am informed in my analysis by the late Patrick Wolfe and his serious work on Indigenous elimination published in the Journal of Genocide Research, I combine it with an idea taken from a comedy horror film: “reanimation” of the dead.^[5]

The settler state addresses that “dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion” by bringing Indigenous peoples to the point of death while preserving or resurrecting us within the colonial state’s body, its institutions, and in the bodies and lives of individual non-Native citizens. Even while settler nationalism works to produce the death of Indigenous Peoples via all of the aforementioned violence, Indigeneity must simultaneously be made to live within settler bodies.^[6] Settler science and law disembody Indigenous people’s blood, bones, and DNA from our individual organisms and from our collective governance. Settler society then uses those biologicals and data derived from them as cryopreserved[7] and re-animated proxies for us. Adding to the ghoulishness of settler science and law, individual citizens sometimes drape their ontological skeletons in the vanished metaphorical Native’s skin, clothing, and accoutrements in a final assumption of our “identities.”^[8] How clever. Settler state citizens can retain the benefits of our elimination, but deny those benefits when they don “red skin.”

We see the culmination of “Indigenous-death-to-make-settler-life” when settler state citizens with no belonging to living tribal nations take a DNA test and pronounce, “I AM 5% Native American.” Playing Indian along with assuming definitional control and property rights in our biologicals and kinship relations, enables settler society to appropriate even more of our resources.^[9]  

Eight Stages of White Settler-Colonial Denial.

 The visual on this slide, “Eight Stages of White Settler-Colonial Denial,” shows the phenomenon of self-indigenization as the final act of colonial theft and attempt at Indigenous replacement. I originally saw the “Eight Stages” posted in 2020 by a now deleted Twitter account.^[10] I never knew who the account-holder was, but the eight stages resonate too with other researchers schooled across disciplines including history, political theory, Indian law, and Native studies. I use the Eight Stages to remind me and others of how interconnected are the techniques of a white supremacist settler state to eliminate actual Indigenous people.

We can readily see where UN-described genocidal techniques intersect with the eight stages of denial:

• Centuries of physical exterminations through massacres and bounties were justified by concepts such as the great chain of being and doctrine of discovery that place Indigenous peoples lower in the hierarchy of planetary life.

• Outright physical extermination is justified by terra nullius and the right of conquest.

• Forced sterilizations of especially Indigenous women and the removal of children from Indigenous families and collectives—whether through adoption, state custody, or incarceration in residential schools—is also justified by racial hierarchy thinking facilitated by the great chain of being concept. The great chain of being is foundational to settler religious, scientific, and bureaucratic thought.

• Efforts to extinguish Indigenous languages, kinship and governance systems, gender and sexual relations are also rooted in race hierarchy thinking.

• And all of these historical and ongoing assaults on our individual lives and Native nations are justified and barely redressed by settler legal systems founded on those core principles. Settler societies advocate “moving on” or “getting over it” while pursuing yet further extinguishment of Indigenous collective governance as they water down Native peoples’ claims with their liberal multiculturalist doctrines.

It is common for people to rank Indigenous elimination techniques in a hierarchy of importance instead of understanding them as co-constitutive and simultaneously occurring to varying degrees over time and space. Attention police accuse thinkers focused in one area of distracting from other areas: “Why are you focused on race shifting, or representations of Indigenous people in sports when we have an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women?” But strategies of Indigenous physical and symbolic extermination come all together in a package; they’re mutually reinforcing. Our collective resistance must tackle the clever entanglements of the settler state’s eliminatory and reanimating strategies.

The Elizabeth Warren Case

It was precisely the growing entanglement of biological resource appropriations and the centuries-old practice of Playing Indian that brought me to be a reluctant expert on self-indigenization. The media has frequently called on me since 2012 when I first commented on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s mythological Cherokee claims when she ran for Senate in Massachusetts.^[11] My book Native American DNA was finished and in press that year.^[12]

The media called again in 2018 and 2019 when Warren announced her Presidential run. Elizabeth Warren’s genealogy was done by professionals; she has no documented Cherokee ancestry. The Cherokee are a well-documented nation. Warren was warned by Cherokee experts not to attempt a genetic ancestry test of a type that is not capable of connecting her to a tribe or to named individuals on tribal rolls. Her taking a test and publicizing results implied to a clueless American public that a genetic technology that only shows probable ancestral connection to un-named “founding populations” in the Americas, not to a particular tribe, is of greater truth value in defining what it is to be Cherokee than the facts of Cherokee citizenship and kinship. Cherokee people’s own definitions of who they are and who belongs to them require connection to named, documented Cherokee individuals. As I wrote in High Country News in 2019:

“The personal genomics industry unwittingly retains older racist and colonial ideas of the unassimilated Native—notions that shape scientists’ search for the supposedly biologically distinct, or ‘unadmixed,’ Native, which privileges the ‘purer’ Native in research in order to gain a better view into an ancient, less-civilized humanity. Living Indigenous people sampled in the course of research become proxies for ancient humans…In the settler colonial belief system, genetic ancestry is expressed as a defining trait of what it is to be ‘Native American,’ or even ‘Scandinavian,’ for that matter. Yet Native people’s own notions of belonging, in addition to contentious but vital tribal political definitions of citizenship emphasize lived social relations, both with human relatives and with our nonhuman relatives in our traditional lands and waters. Genetic ancestry alone is a shallow definition of who we are…”

Other Self-indigenization Cases

I have by now done dozens of interviews for print, radio, and television on various self-indigenization cases that include politicians, academics, actors, musicians, and film directors in both the US and Canada. Thus, I have followed such stories closely for a decade. In October 2022 alone, we witnessed breaking stories about three high profile self-indigenization cases in the US and Canada, people who earned lucrative and prominent positions as so-called Indigenous women. They grabbed opportunities and the mic and displaced and overshadowed actual Native women’s voices:

1. Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, an attorney and legal scholar, formerly at UBC and suggested nominee to the Supreme Court of Canada;^[13]

2. Marie Cruz AKA Sacheen Littlefeather, a former high-profile Hollywood icon, albeit minor actress;^[14] and

3. Elizabeth Hoover at UC Berkeley, a food sovereignty scholar.^[15]

As demonstrated by investigative reports and community complaints years in the making, these three individuals made their claims absent credible evidence to support them. In November 2022, the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) broke a story about our Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith’s, unsupportable claims to be “mixed-race” and descended from the Cherokee Nation.^[16]

A 2019 LA Times investigative report documented false claimants to Cherokee identity being awarded hundreds of millions in business contracts that were designated to support minority businesses who have been systematically excluded from business development opportunities. In such cases, white people appropriate opportunities, not only from Native nations and their citizens, but from other people of colour in the US.[17]

Widespread Indigenous identity fraud—by individuals and groups—is a serious risk to Native nation sovereignty and well-being. Not only are false claimants taking professional opportunities and salaries. But in the US, self-indigenizers have attempted to claim our ancestors via the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In Canada we have had the recent Gitxsan custody case in which an “Eastern Woodland Metis” family challenged custody of a First Nations girl by her Gitxsan family.

In summary, individuals and groups self-indigenize to gain control of land, hunting rights, ceremonial practices, children, human remains and cultural patrimony, educational and professional opportunities, moral authority, and as Circe Sturm discovered in her anthropological study of fabricated Cherokee tribes in the US south, to transcend what self-indigenizers see as the cultural emptiness of whiteness.^[18]

Narrative Strategies of Self-Indigenizers: Blood Quantum, Indians in Hiding, Indian Preserves

When prominent self-indigenizers (who are most often white people) are challenged on their claims, tribal “blood quantum” rules are often blamed and accusations of biological essentialism or “reverse racism” abound. This is an ironic accusation from people who customarily point to one long ago (actual or mythological) ancestor—their Indian needle in the settler haystack. Blood quantum rules are not at play in these situations; the individuals who make such claims are not excluded from any form of tribal belonging by blood rules, but rather for the fact that their claims to ancestry are either baseless or so archaic that they do not map onto actual and living Indigenous nations. Their situations are nothing like the exclusions some of our close relatives suffer for not meeting certain blood rules of the tribes within which they have close social-biological kin.

But stealing actual Indigenous people’s stories of trauma and disconnection is a chief strategy that self-indigenizers use to gain authority. They conflate their exaggerated and fabricated claims with the struggles of actual Native people whose parent, for example, is a tribal citizen, but their offspring don’t meet blood quantum requirements. Self-indigenizers conflate their stories with those of actual Native people who were kidnapped as children, adopted out to white families, or forced into residential schools and who sometimes did not return to their Native families for decades, if ever. Self-indigenizers build their authoritative voices by grabbing the mic and speaking from false historical foundations about actual Native people’s lives and what should be done to and about us.

Self-indigenizers also boost their moral authority by claiming to be less colonized than actual Indigenous people. Self-indigenizers commonly claim that they and their ancestors have been Indians in “hiding” for generations,^[19] a sort of Indian preserve stored in a hidden cellar away from the eroding forces of the colonial state. It is true that First Peoples have been forced to reckon daily for generations with settler racial laws, policies, and institutions. But instead of preserving authentic Indian-ness, the self-indigenizer with the very long-ago or mythological ancestor has most often lived as white for generations with all of the attendant privileges and lack of exposure to settler laws and institutions meant to kill the Indian.^[20] Romanticized narratives of hiding in plain sight are used by self-indigenizers to discredit and further dislocate Native people from the landscape of the living. Whereas actual Native nations who have managed to survive these vicious colonial nation states must articulate our relational rules and laws as best we can within the compromised spaces available to us. Self-indigenizers, in good colonizer fashion, denigrate our efforts as they seek to replace us as Indigenous upon the land.

Self-indigenization is an ultimate act of colonial appropriation. Self-indigenization co-evolves with recognized genocidal strategies. It is predicated on centuries of racial science across disciplines co-constituted with settler state laws and policies designed to kill the Indian within the human. Individuals may survive, but actual “Indigenous” collectives must remain conquered, controlled, and only sufficiently alive to provide the biological or cultural material necessary for the vampiric thriving of a settler state, including its individual self-indigenizer citizens.

Indigenous “identity” appropriation is a continuation of the Indian Wars

I have to credit my co-conspirator in what I call the self-indigenization resistance, Cedar Sherbert, for the line that is the title of this section. Sherbert is a Kumeyaay filmmaker and citizen of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel in San Diego County, California. In 2006, he was instrumental in outing a major literary fraud, so-called Nasdijj, real name—Timothy Patrick Barrus. The “Nasdijj” case broke in The LA Weekly January 23, 2006, written by non-Native reporter Matthew Fleisher. Cedar was the primary and anonymous informant for the article simply called NAVAHOAX.

Initially believing Barrus to be genuinely Navajo, Cedar Sherbert accepted an offer to write a screenplay adaptation of one of Barrus’s three supposed memoirs, in actuality a disturbing fantasist account of “Nasdijj’s” supposed life as the son of an alcoholic Navajo mother and an “abusive white cowboy” father. Timothy Barrus wrote completely fabricated accounts that included child rape and incest.[21] The stories Barrus wrote were, as Sherbert describes them in the March 2022 symposium Unsettling Genealogies, accounts that are “rife with suffering...it was almost beyond human endurance to the point it…felt like a parody of abuse.”[22] “This is something Pretendians do,” Sherbert continued, “they have these narratives of suffering and abuse.” Indeed, an over-focus on despair that flattens the lives of Native people into a sea of suffering is a classic pattern in self-indigenizer accounts.

On April 26, 2023 Sherbert gave testimony to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs related to proposed amendments to the Indians Arts and Crafts Act. He elaborated on the treatment he received from Barrus when he confronted his fraud:

The two years that I was in this man’s periphery were a kind of hell…He was not forthcoming with any degree of cultural knowledge nor was he able to explain familial ties. He would grow defensive and violently lash out when confronted with inconsistencies, threatening me with legal action and physical violence. Through the intervention of journalists at the New York Times and the LA Weekly, we were able to definitively determine that there was no Nasdiij, just a deeply troubled Anglo writer from Lansing, Michigan by the name of Tim Barrus.[23]

In the Unsettling Genealogies symposium, Sherbert described the backlash he also encountered from colleagues in the film industry, both non-Native and Native, when he refused to be silent after discovering Barrus’s fraud. Those colleagues either threatened Sherbert, “Be quiet,” or coldly ignored and downplayed his anguish—the personal and professional risks he endured in taking on a major literary figure. Sherbert explained:

The overall feeling was that I had been pulled into a crime of some kind. It…weighed really heavily on me.…This was…a harrowing time. I’m waiting to be sued. I was given a gag order by the person I trusted, who I thought was on my side [a director colleague]. I was scared to death…I’m alone…I can’t go to anybody. It was a different time.[24]

And Sherbert relayed to the Senate Committee this past April, the harm self-indigenizers do to Native peoples en masse:

I know intimately the damage ethnic frauds do to others, both at the personal and collective levels. They have no commitment to the communities they claim—their only concern being their own personal aggrandizement and career advancement. Moreover, the Native people from the communities these opportunists exploit do not see themselves in these works. They have reflected back at them, a distorted and incorrect version of their cultures, and are being falsely represented to the world at large, robbing real Indian people of agency and voice.

“Please Consider this,” Sherbert said to the Senate Committee, “for the span of three books, Nasdiij/Barrus was the pre-eminent Navajo writer in the world…Until he was outed, a white man was the most widely read ‘Navajo’ writer in the world.”[25]

Cedar Sherbert and I were talking recently, and we recounted together the aggression that Native people endure as we assertively confront this self-indigenizer phenomenon. He described what he called a “Cowboys vs. Indians response,” wherein we actual Native people are painted as the aggressors. Following is a final powerful insight from Cedar Sherbert:

It’s like a cowboys and Indians movie. We’re going to take your land, and when you fight back, you are savages and aggressors. They call us names, make ad hominem attacks. This is the 2023 version of an old racist western that made us the savages when they invaded land that wasn’t there’s. We are painted as unintelligent…as brutes when we fight back, especially Native women who use their technological weaponry against them, i.e. social media. How dare they attack us for standing up for ourselves when all they do is take, take, take. This is the newest iteration of the Indian wars.

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ADDITIONAL TEXT NOT IN LIVE TALK

Protecting First Peoples’ Collective Rights and Sovereignty Helps All of Us Live

I left this final section and argument out of my talk at the University of Vermont. I had a slide ready with the three points I’m about to make. But I figured the audience in that east coast location that is so very emptied of actual Indigenous people, in comparison to western geographies, might find these final points too impossible to imagine, too radical. I didn’t want to distract from making my fundamental point about the despicable colonial theft that is self-indigenization. That point is already challenging for so many. Would I have totally lost my audience by proposing as a solution to planetary crisis the return to actual Indigenous peoples of stolen land? Would I lose my audience if I told them the world needed to privilege Indigenous place-based relational frameworks and governance? Following are the three quick points I prepared on a final slide just in case we got there during the question and answer period. We didn’t.

In this present moment of environmental apocalypse and the attendant global social crises, self-indigenization—that last stage of settler-colonial denial—is especially dangerous. Why? Because it seeks to eliminate and supersede the governance authorities of the people with the deepest knowledge of apocalypse and the deepest experience of grief in that apocalypse, yet still the strongest cultural precepts for living relationally with the planet. In this moment of growing awareness of the role of self-indigenization in ongoing colonization, we have an opportunity to grasp the co-constitutive nature of diverse genocidal techniques and to respond assertively. As we respond, I see three tasks before us:

1. We should privilege First Peoples’ anti-colonial and relational precepts and governance frameworks, not settler mythological multiculturalist theories and frameworks that uphold colonial structures and undermine Indigenous governance.

2. Our broader society should choose such anti-colonial frameworks in order to come into better relation with Indigenous peoples and with the land. This means that non-Indigenous people abandon self-indigenization and other tempting strategies to access yet more Indigenous resources.

3. Coming into relation rightly does not only require stopping appropriation of more authorities and resources, it requires return of already stolen resources. “Landback” is not only a contemporary anti-colonial slogan, but a core function of decolonization that the act of self-indigenization resists.

With those ideas for your consideration, I close this post. Thank you as always for reading and/or listening.

Sources

[1] Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

[2] Deloria 1998, 3.

[3] Deloria 1998, 5.

[4] Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear, “’Your DNA is Our History’: Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property,” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): S233-S245.

[5] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research Vol 8 (4) (2006): 387-409; Re-Animator, Empire International Pictures (October 18, 1985). In the in-person talk, I use a visual of the poster for the Re-Animator film on my PowerPoint slides.

[6] It will be obvious to some, that I am influenced in my reading of the relationship between Indigenous life and death in a settler-colonial society by Michel Foucault’s reading of biopower. But for the benefit of flow and a wider audience reach, I don’t want to insert an explicit Foucauldian focus into the main text.

[7] See Kim TallBear. Beyond the Life/Not Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking and the New Materialisms. In Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, eds., Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017: 179-202.

[8] Audra Simpson, “Indigenous identity theft must stop: White women who lie about their heritage reap untold benefits…” Boston Globe, November 17, 2022. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/17/opinion/indigenous-identity-theft-must-stop/. 

[9] I prefer and insist on the collectivist concept of relations, over the individualistic notion of identities. For more on this idea, see my essay, “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating: Genetic Ancestry, Critical Polyamory, Property, and Relations.” In Brendan Hokowhitu, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, eds. Critical Indigenous Studies Handbook. London: Routledge, 2021: 467-478.

[10] See my original tweet here at

https://twitter.com/KimTallBear/status/1339956410545795072

. The account was @pazuzumycete.

[11] GQ. “What Elizabeth Warren Keeps Getting Wrong About DNA Tests and Native American Heritage.” By Mari Uyehara. https://www.gq.com/story/elizabeth-warren-dna-tests?fbclid=IwAR18qCzkl7BSGTjExCS3_F_E5EI-vI068nMt7s4UWWVqpwu4P2rzHyqAwr8. December 11, 2018; Rolling Stone. “Why Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Fiasco Matters.” By Jamil Smith. WYNC Studios, On the Media with Brooke Gladstone. “By Blood, and Beyond” Interview with Kim TallBear. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/blood-and-beyond-blood?utm_medium=social&utm_source=tw&utm_content=otm&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=spredfast&utm_content=sf93926531&utm_term=onthemedia&sf93926531=1. October 19, 2018; Washington Post. “Just About Everything You’ve Read on the Warren DNA Test is Wrong.” By Glenn Kessler. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/18/just-about-everything-youve-read-warren-dna-test-is-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR3jFgozNYeu7-7TugYhzRT7G4PAOsLtCqVH69KhTSChAZUICsQWUdU-ifE&utm_term=.49549b11d72e. October 18, 2018; BBC. “US Senator Elizabeth Warren Faces Backlash After Indigenous DNA Claim.”  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45869804. October 16, 2018; CBC Indigenous. “Canada Research Chair Critical of U.S. Senator’s DNA Claim to Indigenous Identity.” By Rhiannon Johnson. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/kim-tallbear-elizabeth-warren-dna-results-indigenous-identity-1.4863903. October 15, 2018; KUOW. “Senator Warren Takes the DNA Test.” By Bill Radke. Interview with Kim TallBear and Rick Smith. https://www.kuow.org/stories/senator-warren-takes-the-test. October 15, 2018; Forbes. “What Do Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test Results Actually Mean?” By Jennifer Raff. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferraff/2018/10/15/what-do-elizabeth-warrens-dna-test-results-actually-mean/#6aa7f23612df. October 15, 2018; Indian Country Today. “Strike Against Sovereignty? Senator Warren Asserts Native American Ancestry Via DNA.” By Vincent Schilling.  https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/news/strike-against-sovereignty-sen-warren-asserts-native-american-ancestry-via-dna-5mJJTl_79ESAQLX8hCckZA/. October 15, 2018; Boston.com. “The Myth of Native American Blood.” http://www.boston.com/community/blogs/hyphenated_life/2012/06/the_myth_of_native_american_bl.html, June 1, 2012.

[12] Kim TallBear. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

[13] CBC News Saskatchewan, “Disputed History.” By Geoff Leo. https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims. October 12, 2022.

[14] San Francisco Chronicle, “Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud.” By Jacqueline Keeler. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Sacheen-Littlefeather-oscar-Native-pretendian-17520648.php. October 22, 2022.

[15] Pretendian Country Today. “Native food sovereignty figure comes clean about ‘identity.” By Indianz.com., October 21, 2022. Also see: Indianz.com, “Controversial scholar walks away from Native food organizations.” By Acee Agoyo. https://www.indianz.com/News/2022/10/27/controversial-scholar-walks-away-from-native-food-organizations/. October 27, 2022; The Daily Californian. “Campus associate professor Elizabeth Hoover rescinds claim to Native American ancestry.” By Amber X. Chen. https://dailycal.org/2022/11/01/campus-associate-professor-elizabeth-hoover-rescinds-claim-to-native-american-ancestry. November 1, 2022.

[16] Danielle Paradis, APTN News. “Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she has Cherokee roots but the records don’t back that up.” November 16, 2022. Also see “Alberta chief critical of Premier Danielle Smith’s claim of Indigenous roots,” By Angela Amato, Global News, November 18, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/9290889/alberta-chief-danielle-smith-indigenous-roots-cherokee/.

[17] Adam Elmahrek and Paul Pringle. “Claiming to be Cherokee, contractors with white ancestry got $300 million. Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-na-cherokee-minority-contracts-20190626-story.html, June 26, 2019.

[18] Darryl. Leroux. Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019.

[19] Sturm 2011.

[20] Jacqueline Keeler. “On Sacheen Littlefeather, Pretendians and what it means to be Native American.” San Francisco Chronicle, https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Sacheen-Littlefeather-Pretendians-17602244.php, November 26, 2022. 

[21] Matthew Fleischer, “NAVAHOAX,” LA Weekly, January 23, 2006.

[22] Cedar Sherbert. Unsettling Genealogies, 12:20 and 12:05.

[23] Cedar Sherbert testimony. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs: A Listening Session on ‘The ARTIST Act: Updating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act,” April 26, 2023. (23:45-24:30). See SoundCloud link to the listening session.

[24] Cedar Sherbert. Unsettling Genealogies, 15:07-17:45

[25] Cedar Sherbert testimony. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs: A Listening Session on ‘The ARTIST Act: Updating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act,” April 26, 2023. (24:30-24:55). See SoundCloud link to the listening session.