They’ve been called wannabes, identity thieves, indigi-nots. They’ve been accused of “playing Indian.” The most common term, though, is Pretendian. Short for “pretend Indian,” the term refers to people who claim Indigenous heritage without any substantive evidence to support the assertion.
In recent years, a number of public figures have been accused of being Pretendians, including Buffy Saint-Marie, Joseph Boyden, and Michelle Latimer.
But how do you determine whether someone is lying? Why do people make false claims of Indigenous status? And perhaps most important: Why does it matter?
TVO Today’s NDN POV examines the issue.
What are Pretendians — and what’s their motivation?
Indigenous author and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor says that Pretendianism is the next step from another familiar phenomenon: “Cultural appropriation has moved on to actual identity appropriation,” he says.
Essentially, Pretendians assume Indigenous identity, often for personal or professional gain.
It isn’t enough, the thinking goes, simply to borrow elements of Indigenous culture. Instead, Pretendians have to own it. “They first tried to get rid of us, right? And then they tried to assimilate us,” says Anishnaabe writer Riley Yesno. “And when all of those things fail, they said, ‘Well, if we can't get rid of you, we'll just become you.’”
The phenomenon has a long history. For example, Grey Owl, the famed Apache writer and conservationist of the early 20th century, was actually Englishman Archibald Stansfeld Belaney. American actor Iron Eyes Cody, who rose to prominence in the same period, was actually of Italian descent.
But the frequency seems to have picked up dramatically. For the first time in Canadian history, there are structural advantages to being Indigenous. “People can get job opportunities. They can get scholarships and bursaries. They get roles in television and film,” says Indigenous scholar Kim TallBear.
“In many cases, you apply for a job in government or big corporation, there is a box there that says: are you Indigenous, Metis, Inuit, etc.,” says Hayden Taylor. “You tick it off, and nobody follows up.”
Yesno says that some industries are more prone to attracting Pretendians than others. “Industries where you can capitalize on an Indigenous aesthetic are particularly vulnerable.”
But the motivating factors aren’t always financial or professional. “People do not want to feel complicit in colonialism, in the kind of violence that has been done to Indigenous peoples,” says TallBear. “They want to feel that they're the good guys, that their ancestors were the good guys. There's a real incentive to say: I am part Mi'kmaq, I am part Cree, I am part Cherokee. Then people don't have to feel like they are literally living in these lands and benefiting from the dispossession and violence that happened to Indigenous people and from the theft of Indigenous land.”
Sometimes, Pretendian claims can stem from an honest mistake — the result of unchecked family lore and wishful thinking. “You hear from your uncle, your grandparents that, yeah, supposedly great-uncle so-and-so was part Native,” says Hayden Taylor. “And it gets passed down through the generations. People just believe it without taking the time to accurately assess its validity.”
But that comes with complications. We all come from two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. If you go back 20 generations, we're talking thousands of ancestors. Today, there are cases of people scouring historical records claiming to be Indigenous based on an ancestor generations ago. “You've got many generations of your family and ancestors living as white people, not subject to the laws that Indigenous people were subject to — the oppressive racist hierarchy laws,” says TallBear. “And then you're going to claim one ancestor among all of those? It's really a way of disowning one's white privilege and the experience of many generations of one's family.”
This is different from someone who is trying to reengage with legitimate Indigenous heritage, long disconnected due to genocide. “There's a big difference between somebody whose parent left the reserve or the community or whose grandparent was forcibly relocated or went to residential school,” says TallBear.
Why does it matter?
Whenever a new case of Pretendianism comes to light, some ask: So what? But experts say that’s the wrong way to think about it. “Pretendian is a controversial term,” TallBear says. “Some people have decided that ‘pretend’ is too gentle a word — they're actually doing something a lot more dangerous than just playing pretend.”
There are direct harms. Hayden Taylor sees it first-hand in the arts. “They're taking grants. They're taking money designed for Native advancement, Native arts, Native business — and using it for their own expenses,” he says.
But there are also indirect harms. Pretendians delay or set back the process of true reconciliation. “We see people that are normatively attractive and intelligent according to settler-white standards. They look and move and talk the way that settlers want people to talk,” says TallBear. “[Settlers] don't want to have to work hard to relate to people who they are actually really uncomfortable relating to. And so it allows them to say that they're doing inclusion, that they're making substantive changes, when in fact they're just bringing people in and holding people up and putting people on platforms that are just white people.”
“It's extremely frustrating,” says Yesno. “I think every Indigenous person who has lived through trauma, generational trauma, ongoing colonialism: we don't get to just pick up and put down Indigenous identities when it benefits us. And it makes me angry that anybody, any actual Indigenous person, also has to feel that they have to prove themselves in this way.”
At times, the seeming ability of these Pretendians to overcome historical trauma is used as a weapon against Indigenous people, says TallBear. It can lead societal questions like: “Why aren't all these other Indigenous people overcoming [obstacles]” in the way a well-known Pretendian is. “When in fact these people haven't overcome anything that Indigenous people have had to overcome, because they're white people.”
What comes next?
Proving Indigenous heritage is an inexact science. Determining whether or not somebody belongs to an Indigenous nation is a matter of Indigenous sovereignty. It's about our ability to choose who our people are by whatever means we see fit. Unfortunately, proving that somebody isn't Indigenous is complicated. But proving that you are can be pretty straightforward.
“People will say, ‘Oh, you're Indigenous — where are you from?’” says Yesno. “Maybe I know your grandpa or something like that. And then this exchange happens where, yes, we're chatting and we're getting to know each other. But through that, also I'm telling them who I am, who I'm accountable to, where my knowledge comes from. Those are all part of that exchange. I think some people would call that protocol.”
Indigenous issues are taking up space in the mainstream more than ever before. Pretendian exposés are now nationwide scandals, and they seem to happen more and more. There could be hundreds, if not thousands of cases yet to be uncovered.
But we should be wary of scandalous headlines. “When we're having these conversations, it's also important to check in not just with Indigenous people writ large, but displaced people, people who have those complex histories, who have been raising alarm bells for a really long time,” says Yesno. “We could be hurting some of our own people when we don't have these conversations with care.”
In these conversations, the first question that typically gets brought up is one of identity. But, according to TallBear, that might not be the right one. “I don't think that's fundamentally the question at play here or the problem that we are confronting,” she says. “It's white people. What is their problem? Why are they intent on appropriating our identities in the same way that they have appropriated the land and disrupted our governance systems? It's one more act of colonization. We really need to turn the camera back onto the settler. Why are they continuing to appropriate every last thing and take the gaze off Indigenous people?”
NDN POV tackles Indigenous issues from an Indigenous perspective. For more from the series, check out our YouTube channel.
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