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I don't know about Canada, but in the States there's often a financial question involved (casino royalties or whatever). I used to live near a rez and would occasionally overhear stories of tribal political squabbles when someone had a few too many beers. This lady over here gets her second cousin on the tribal rolls for a scholarship, this guy over here gets 30 people who've lived on the rez their whole life purged from the rolls because everyone gets an extra 30 cents a month or something trivial. Shit gets stupid.
I would think that should make people more likely to support pretendians not less. If you’re a minority ethnic group that gets money from the government, having fakes out there means less money. Even if you don’t, having more people convert is problematic simply because of a sort of quality control issue (for want of a better term) in which the people “converting” might have very little in common with the natives and know little about their beliefs or culture. They’d also have little interest in preserving or passing along that culture. Basically, it ends up being diluted and becomes a LARP by brown looking white people pretending to be natives and doing a terrible job at it while actual tribes struggle to teach their kids what being tribal is actually all about.
Reddit Native Americans may be disproportionately LARPers. There are relatively few Native Americans in the US/Canada compared to whites, and plenty of white people who would rather be Native American than white; whether the latter group is more common on Reddit is hard to know, but possible.
Actual native Americans I’ve met seem disproportionately not the uh, Reddit inclined set. But that could just be my filter bubble.
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