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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 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)!

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.

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