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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The San Francisco Chronicle has announced the discovery of a new Pretendian, the class of white women who pretend to be Native Americans to procure benefits ranging from job opportunities to social status. This story would be insignificant, since the public is now familiar with Warren and Dolezal. But the author has discovered what can be called the Chief Pretendian, none other than Sacheen Littlefeather, the most important female native American in the 70s and 80s. You might not know the name but you’re probably familiar with the clip of the pretty Indian woman making a speech on behalf of Marlon Brando at the Oscar’s. Turns out all the evidence points to her being a white Spaniard with no connection to any American Indian nation, and no connection to any indigenous Mexican group either.

The details are the details, what I find most interesting is: why? This is a pattern, not a one-off thing. White American lib women love cosplaying as Indians. Duplicitous Littlefinger Littlefeather went all in on the LARP, dedicating most of her life to her story as an Indian. The why is so much more interesting than the how.

My thoughts are that people, and especially young women, love costumes, specialness, and emotionally significant stories. The romanced notion of Indians is a whole wardrobe of social life that a person can put on and enjoy. Littlefeather had no interested in the non-romanced Mexican identity. Indians, however, had the connotation of being cool, one with nature, wise, and good. This costumed enjoyment is why the KKK larped as wizards and wore Spanish Catholic dress, why the Freemasons larped as they did, and maybe why the Liberal Woman -> Hijabi pipeline is running despite stretching more terrain than Nordstream. We live in one of the least costumed, ritualized, and play-tending time in Western history. The only thing we have left is Halloween (and liberal women love it too, rightfully so)!

Littlefeather had no interested in the non-romanced Mexican identity. Indians, however, had the connotation of being cool, one with nature, wise, and good.

I don't think that's fair actually. Elizabeth Warren very clearly only did it to advance her own career, but Littlefeather didn't. If anything it hindered her career in Hollywood. She kept fighting for Native Americans her whole life, and while it was in do doubt at least partly about her ego and prestige and all that, I don't think anyone would deny she had a positive impact on the treatment of Native Americans, especially in entertainment.

I'm not saying she did the right thing, but I would bet she deluded herself into believing it, and wasn't merely wearing it as a costume. Warren seems much more contemptible to me, because for her it was an obvious grift.

I don't think that's fair actually. Elizabeth Warren very clearly only did it to advance her own career, but Littlefeather didn't. If anything it hindered her career in Hollywood.

How can you suggest it hurt her Hollywood career? She had no credits until after her Oscar appearance, she had no career to speak of until the stunt gave her some publicity?

She had a minor career in commercials before the speech, including a shoot for playboy, and despite knowing two of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time (Francis Ford Coppola said he introduced her to Brando), only ever landed minor roles in a half a dozen or so movies after it. Would her career have followed the same arc without the speech? I don't know. I agree that - especially in Hollywood - any publicity is better than none, but I don't know if that was enough to offset upsetting powerful people in Hollywood like John Wayne and Howard Koch (who produced the awards), and it certainly wasn't a money making grift.

She had a minor career in commercials before the speech, including a shoot for playboy,

Notably Playboy didn't like her photos and decided not to publish them. It was only after the Oscar stunt that they ran a spread.

Rachel Dolezal also fought for the interests of black people. She was an effective NAACP regional leader and she never did wrong by her cause. But she was thrown to the wolves anyway.

Yeah I wouldn't put Dolezal in the same category as Warren either, and I find it kind of funny/sad that she is treated like racist trash for all she did to help black people.

I think you're missing the sweet grift factor. By doing this, you can get rewarded quite a bit, moreso than if you weren't special status.

Recently the "first 'first Nations' provincial Supreme Court Justice in Canada (for Saskatchewan) was revealed to be 'trans-racial'".

Canada has a bunch of juicy jobs only available to particular minorities. Get rid of those, or introduce mandatory DNA tests.

What does your second paragraph mean?

And yes, in the Arts in Canada, being native is license to do … whatever the fuck you want, and get paid for it. Even more so than being trans, but identifying as trans is the easier grift.

Sorry, wasn't meant to be cryptic, but it wasn't as easy to find again as I expected. I was referring to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who is/was a highly decorated (eight honorary law degrees) and celebrated maybe-first-nations judge.

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/world/canada/canada-indigenous-identity-pretendians.html

although I may have been blending it with Carrie Bourassa, who seems to also have faked her way into a senior post (also from Saskatchewan)

https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/carrie-bourassa-allegedly-faked-her-indigenous-identity.html

Didn’t Warren get in trouble for claiming a DNA test as evidence of being an Indian? Seems to me that the real filter would be requiring actual tribal membership, which the tribes in question usually don’t hand out to random white people.

The DNA test said 1/1024th Indian ~= statistical margin of error. But much of her career consisted of saying stuff that was nonsensical to any numerate person, but got credulously repeated and turned into political talking points by a media that existed to spread such talking points.

Now Mitt Romney or other cuckservative would have given up at this point, given that the media was against them. But Trump kept it up and people noticed how ridiculous her claim was.

I remember Trump calling her fauxcahontas before releasing the DNA test as "evidence", which, fair enough, Romney wouldn't have done, but I feel like most republicans would have made fun of a democrat claiming to be Indian on the basis of a DNA test showing less than one percent ancestry and in the face of a tribe repeatedly claiming that no, she wasn't one of them.

I think today more Republicans (e.g. DeSantis, Ted Cruz with a beard) would. But would Romney, McCain clean shaven Ted Cruz have done so in a pre-Trump world? Far from clear to me.

the class of white women who pretend to be Native Americans

While most of the examples mentioned are women, I'd also consider "Jamake Highwater", award-winning author and noted consultant for Star Trek: Voyager who was actually European. Note that he was originally exposed in 1984, a decade before the Star Trek involvement.

Well dang, this explains why Chakotay's character background was such a steaming mess. I thought it was merely the writers not knowing what the hell to do with him and just cramming in all the "Indian" stuff they could find, even if it was a mix of various traditions and both North American and Central/South American indigenous peoples, but if there was a Real Fake Indian 'consultant', that explains a lot.

I feel like it's probably unfair to blame technical consultants for anything that happens in Star Trek. She probably spent most meetings in the corner drinking out of the science consultant's hip flask while the writers did their thing.

"Chakotay needs to save the day with indian mystic bullshit to remind the viewers that Diversity Is Our Strength. Indians can telepathically communicate with the Sun, right?

"I... Uhh-"

"Awesome! Science consultant, can quantum consciousness and growth mindset use an antimatter explosion to open a subspace wormhole?"

"Sure they can, buddy, long as BURP as your checks clear"

"Great, we have a story here! Continuity director, how many proton torpedoes does Voyager have left?"

"Woof! Woof!"

"Damn it... Well, maybe no one will notice this time"

Duplicitous Littlefinger Littlefeather went all in on the LARP, dedicating most of her life to her story as an Indian.

As a footnote, even though Warren now plays it off as just a little family story, it was something that she LARPed hard enough that she was publishing recipes in Native American cookbooks. There's a pretty big disconnect between living it in that peculiar fashion while also saying that it's not a big deal.

As a footnote, even though Warren now plays it off as just a little family story, it was something that she LARPed hard enough that she was publishing recipes in Native American cookbooks. There's a pretty big disconnect between living it in that peculiar fashion while also saying that it's not a big deal.

For someone who was working on their identity so hard, it made no sense to apologize and beg for forgiveness that will never come, she knows the rules better than all of us together.

She should just double down and say: "I was taught my Native identity by my grandma who was taught by her grandma, and I trust living experience of my ancestors over any "genes" "DNA" or similar whiteman "scientific" mumbo jumbo."

Indeed, at the time I didn't understand why she failed to do exactly this.

My best guess is that Warren has pretentions of being an academic lawyer-economist as well as an Amerindian, which put her between a rock and a hard place. She couldn't rubbish "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the academy, but she couldn't accept "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the Black Hawk tribe. Faced with a stark choice between her two identities, she chose to keep the one that pays her $400,000 per teaching semester (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-warren-400k-teaching/).

How noble.

She couldn't rubbish "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the academy, but she couldn't accept "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the Black Hawk tribe.

She could have denied that cultural heritage is located in DNA, I suppose, or at least refused to engage with measures of heredity. All of that seems strategically preferable to publishing the data that proves that she's just a white lady.

It might be relevant that any Indian tribe would tell her to stuff the ‘white man science’ bits until she had the goods to prove descent from actual natives anyways, whether the white man science bit was producing a dna test or going on a rant about the colonialism of western ways of knowing.

Indeed, at the time I didn't understand why she failed to do exactly this.

Apologizing is a strong norm in her circles, despite the clear problems with non-acceptance of apologies (or apologies even potentially intensifying things).

I would say that Iron Eyes Cody is shedding a tear about the situation...

My thoughts are that people, and especially young women, love costumes, specialness, and emotionally significant stories.

When I was a kid, I loved dressing up as an Indian chief for Halloween. Full war bonnet and everything.

Wouldn't get away with that nowadays, but I think you're trying too hard to jam a generalized theory of gender evpsych into this particular phenomenon (of which, bear in mind, we have only a countable-on-one-hand number of prominent examples), when the simpler answer is that some people are crazy and/or delusional, others buy into a narrative they've crafted for themselves (perhaps prompted by family lore about having a Native American grandmother), and others are just grifting opportunists. This probably covers all the known examples, and is certainly not limited to women.

(I can't think offhand of any prominent white men adopting a full-fledged Native American identity for social justice points, though I know of at least one anecdotal example, but I'd be surprised if it never happens. There are certainly white dudes who tan a little darker than average going all-in on "I am a Person Of Color.")

There’s lots of 1/128 Cherokee white men pretending to be very Indian to get laid, at least. And upthread there’s a mention of a white guy who pretended to be Indian to get a job as a culture consultant for Star Trek.

Ward Churchill? Or is he too old to count?

I...don’t see why this demands a general theory. LARPing as Native Americans used to be “cool.” Media was down with token Noble Savage characters. Modern attitudes towards, ah, cultural appropriation hadn’t really developed. Seems to me that Littlefeather was on the extreme end of that curve.

Does that really provide explanatory power about hijabs? About, I dunno, makeup?

Yeah, I recall playing Cowboys vs Indians as a young boy and nobody as much as batted an eye. Appropriating native Indian identity is old news. What are the Apache and Comanche helicopters if not that?

I think these stories are just part of the new hypersensitive discourse on race.

But you didn't use your childhood games - which are arguably about as legitimate as a base of identity as any of these frauds - for financial benefit, for a political soapbox, to lambast the why-tie on their various political and social sins. It is on a grand scale the same crime as forum sock-puppeting, but with actual stakes. They are using the trappings of another ethnic group that others sympathize with for clout and platform.

That's true. But one has to ask the question why the sudden surge in these faux identities. I'd argue that it is linked to race-based discrimination in educational and increasing professional settings. You didn't see this before.

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