Unsettle

This post revitalized a post I draft over three years ago but never published. It discusses ideas I am still pondering and trying write about. But now if full-on menopause, which will be a theme I continue to write on as it adds new contours to relating monogamously and non-monogamously.

Dear followers, many apologies for my absence here for so many months. I appreciate most of you (my few stalkers and trolls excluded). Since August of 2025, I relocated home to Dakota traditional territory, to what is today Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s been a heavy workload to move back across the settlers’ border and to adjust to a new university system and new courses to teach. And it is good to be home after nearly four decades traveling and living around the world, including ten edifying years in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It feels especially important in this political moment to be home in the Twin Cities.

In this post is a YouTube link to an extended interview I did with fellow University of Minnesota American Indian Studies professor, Red Nation’s Nick Estes earlier this week. Nick and I had a wide-ranging conversation on the symposium I am co-organizing with the impressive Qianzi Cong, my University of Minnesota graduate student assistant. The two-day hybrid symposium, Holding our Ground: Voices and Strategies Against Self-indigenization, will convene over three dozen panelists and individual speakers to share research, journalism, activism, and policy-work that confronts the global phenomenon of “self-indigenization.”

From Extermination to Cosplay to Ethnic Fraud to ICE

The Holding Our Ground symposium will be held in Minneapolis, on the traditional homelands of the Dakota people, who were imprisoned and eventually exiled in 1863 to aid settler appropriation of “Minnesota,” a word also taken from the Dakota. On top of seizing land, US citizens have for centuries “played Indian” via sports mascots and appropriating Native nation names and iconography in scouting and in industries including the military.

In the twenty-first century, we see ballooning numbers of US citizens make mythological claims to belong to Native lineages and nations. Commonly known as “Indigenous ethnic fraud” or “pretendianism,” this form of self-indigenization involves individuals and groups alleging often scant, distant ancestry (almost always unsubstantiated) and capitalizing on such claims to appropriate resources, opportunities, and public platforms, diverting them away from living Indigenous individuals and historically continuous Indigenous nations. They cosplay us in order to seize governance of institutions where they make standards, policy, and allocate resources to govern our lives.

As multiple forms of self-Indigenization converge, not all are grasped as violent, yet they combine to further colonial extraction. In the past couple of months, another iteration of self-indigenization has been front and center in the North American media, although many of you may not recognize it as such. I refer to the Department of “Homeland Security’s” recent actions in Minnesota. Their agents have seized governance (all over again) of Dakota homelands as they intimidate, imprison, kill, and threaten to exile Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations from Minnesota, and from across these lands. The terror that people in our state have experienced should be understood as part of centuries of actions that converge in this moment to extend colonial extraction and control.

Those of us who study, report on, develop related policy, and advocate against self-indigenization, analyze Indigenous ethnic fraud as one of the most recent colonial structural efforts to appropriate Indigenous resources and authorities, which further undermines Native nationhoods and lives.

From Exposés Toward a Systemic Response

Much of our awareness of this widespread problem comes from more than a decade of mainstream and Indigenous media doing high-profile exposés of Indigenous ethnic fraud. In 2012, outlets around the world covered Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s challenged claims to be Cherokee. In 2016, the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) broke the story of Canadian literary darling, Joseph Boyden, making unverifiable claims to Métis, Mi’kmaq, Ojibway and Nipmuc ancestry. And in 2023, CBC presented extensive evidence that award-winning musician, Buffy Sainte-Marie, had for six decades made unsupportable claims to be Cree and to have other tribal ancestries. Resource-intensive media investigations of such cases have been crucial to raise awareness of this problem. But media alone is not a solution.

The Holding Our Ground symposium will speak to academia and to other institutions about what we can do to curb this problem. Diné/Dakota independent journalist, Jacqueline Keeler, has called academia a “pretendian factory.” As breaking stories show, self-indigenizers also infiltrate literary circles, the media and film industry, the business world, the child adoption industry, and foundations that control resources designed to enhance Indigenous communities.

Self-Indigenization presents a policy challenge for institutions; it affects hiring, resource allocation, and the integrity of Indigenous affiliation. This symposium provides a rigorous space to move beyond the common rule of Indigenous self-identification toward meaningful institutional policies that verify stated Indigenous claims in order to uphold the sovereignty of Native Nations. Symposium speakers will address harms to individuals, the role of media in exposing ethnic fraud, the role of universities to set policy, tribal and First Nation government strategies to push back against self-indigenization, and legal challenges and strategies for settler-state and for tribal courts.

We expect this symposium to attract worldwide attention through in-person and online attendance. Our broad goal is to intensify the conversation both in Minnesota and in the United States about the real harms that result from Indigenous ethnic fraud. We have received interest from Indigenous people overseas who also encounter this type of colonial appropriation in their territories. We hope this symposium helps seed similar conversations and policy agendas globally.

An Opportunity to Tell Your Own Story

Personal accounts are integral to combating a rising tide of cultural theft. Indigenous people bravely telling their stories and sharing their fraught personal experiences will help to illuminate the seriousness of this issue and the toll it is taking on actual Indigenous people.

In that spirit, symposium organizers are partnering with the makers of an upcoming feature documentary on self-indigenization. The symposium will host a private on-site forum where anyone who has been affected personally by this issue can share their stories on camera. We hope to hear from professionals in many fields, students, academics, and community members. Sit with us in a welcoming space and make your voice heard. If you will be on site in Minneapolis, you can make an appointment to be interviewed. Contact co-director Cedar Sherbert at [email protected] with questions. Cedar is an enrolled citizen of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, one of the communities that make up the Kumeyaay Nation of San Diego and northern Baja California, Mexico.

Symposium Registration & Cost

You can register at this link. Online registration is the only option. We cannot process registrations at the door on symposium days. For those with the personal or professional ability to pay, the cost is $200 for in-person registration and $125 for on-line. We have a deeply discounted student rate of $25 USD. Community members can request a complimentary registration code for in-person attendance in Minneapolis or on-line attendance. E-mail [email protected]. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your specific interest in the symposium. Substack followers, the interested community includes you, so please write with your request if you cannot afford the registration rate.

This two-day symposium will cost about $140K USD to produce, including facility rental, speaker transportation and accommodations, technology fees, catering, security, American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation (by Indigenous interpreters), graduate student and University of Minnesota staff assistance. Thus, we have implemented a tiered pricing scheme to help with fundraising, although paid registrations will finance only a fraction of the symposium costs. The rest is being fundraised from my individual research funds, other university departmental co-sponsorships, and individual and foundation donations.Thank you, as always, for reading or listening.

This post discusses my refusal to wave nation state flags as i try to nonetheless link arms with individuals and their institutions who work to lessen suffering and promote thriving of both humans and our planet. I argue for people to resist consolidating their desires to caretake relations with allegiance to a nation-state flag.

I cite two books that I've cited before.

Johan Galtung. The Decline of the US Empire -- And Then What? Transcend Books, 2009. (Out of Print, try second-hand bookseller).

Alfred W. McCoy. In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power. Haymarket Books, 2017.

I also cite a journal article.

Kim TallBear. "Standing with and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry" Volume 10 Issue 2 (2014): Giving Back in Field Research

I also link to or cite multiple media articles.

On February 12, 2025, the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (TAAF) issued a news release announcing their investigation into University of Texas anthropologist Circe Sturm’s claims to be of Cherokee and Mississippi Choctaw descent. TAAF’s genealogical documentation shows no such ancestry...

I have studied, written about, and commented publicly on multiple self-indigenization cases. After reading the TAAF report on Circe Sturm, I maintain my resolve to keep standing against the phenomenon of self-indigenization, or pretendianism.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate citizen), Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, www.kimtallbear.com

Dear readers and listeners, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. It was a fall semester of teaching students at the University of Alberta who understandably struggle with this world, have fascinating insights, and 50% can’t get their schoolwork done because of the distractions of a world in crisis. I also had multiple talks and consultations to help battle rampant self-indigenization (more colloquially known as pretendianism) across Canada and the USA. Intellectual battle against those with delusions that they are us has turned in the past four years into my main body of academic research. I co-edited a special issue of the journal Genealogy this past fall, (Un)Settling Genealogies: Self-Indigenization in Media, Arts, Politics, and Academia. There are two more articles to come, including a substantive introduction to the topic by me and my co-editor, Northeastern University Distinguished Visiting Professor and citizen of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota, Dr. Gordon Henry. Post-US presidential election, a deeper form of self-indigenization that we’ve been subject to since at least the Revolutionary War era—that is, white supremacist settlers believing they have “homeland” claims to stolen lands—proceeds apace with great zeal...

Content Warning: Photo of carved reindeer meat in this post.

June 23, 2024, Santa Cruz, California

I’m writing this from my daughter’s place in Santa Cruz, California after spending a month at home in St. Paul, Minnesota with a quick weekend drive to Flandreau, South Dakota, my other childhood home where my grandmothers raised me much of the time between the ages of five and fourteen. It is jarring to be in Santa Cruz after a month at home. The cool sea air, the sea bird sounds, the young, fit couple that walk their mohawk-cut dogs past the front window everyday are many miles of prairie and desert roads, treacherous high-up mountain roads, Bay area Tesla-racing roads away from South Dakota country roads. After years of travel—being in different places, having multiple places I can call home—feels uneasy.

Terminal C at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is pleasantly quiet. I scored a table near an outlet and near to the Dolores Park Café counter, where their cappuccino is an actual cappuccino, not a weak café latte like you’ll get half the time in the United States...

I begin writing this from Terminal A of the Sacramento International Airport, which is not too bustling today, with almost four hours until I board for Vancouver...

Los Angeles, CA, April 24, 2024

I’ve been hanging out with my partner in LA when I can between trips this spring. I don’t teach this term. He lives near to the University of Southern California (USC) in a neighborhood with taco trucks, broken down cars being worked on, gas stations, Mexican groceries, brow threading or waxing shops, and a really good little coffee shop. His apartment building is surrounded by working class families’ bungalows and also by heavily renovated and gentrified houses and apartment buildings—all advertising leases to USC students. Amidst the poor and working-class people’s cars, there are Porsches, Teslas, Audis, etc. I saw this car a few months ago sputtering through the neighborhood; it beat ANY rez car hands down for the way it was falling apart and ingeniously held together. I wish I had a photograph! I didn’t want to offend the guy driving it though by taking a picture of his incredible work without permission. It even beats the minivan I saw once on the Crow reservation in Montana with its headlights gouged out. That vehicle was booking down the access road next to the freeway, clearly trying to get somewhere before the setting sun disappeared. I laughed so hard as I whooshed down the freeway in the opposite direction in my little blue Toyota isolation capsule. I was headed back to Edmonton from Colorado where my daughter was in junior college high up in the Rocky Mountains...

Edmonton, Alberta and Moncton, New Brunswick March 13-14, 2024

I felt done with Canada this week, “Canada,” which I do not conflate with the land. I had my first acute moment of understanding what Indigenous critics mean when they say “Canada isn’t a country; it’s a resource extraction company.”

On Wednesday, March 13 at 1 a.m. I was on an Air Canada flight bound for Montreal where I was due to catch a 7 a.m. connection to Moncton, New Brunswick. We were taxiing to the runway at Edmonton International Airport (YEG). I was falling asleep in Business Class when a flight attendant suddenly and alarmingly commanded over the intercom: “Sit down! All passengers must be seated! We are moving.” Or something similar. I looked around. A white-looking guy, muscle bound and tatted up, unshaven, and in jeans, a t-shirt, and work boots staggered to the front of the plane. He fell sideways toward me in my seat. “What the f**k? Get off!” I pushed him back. He continued staggering to the bathroom and opened the door. The flight attendant yelled at him to sit down. He turned around to look at her and promptly passed out on the floor. The flight attendants collectively gasped or screamed and jumped into action. We were going back to the gate, of course. His similarly attired companion—the plane was 3/4 full with these guys—presumably oil workers? The plane, both business class and economy was raucous with them. Many of them had clearly been drinking a lot. A colleague told me that she’s been on many flights with these guys flying out of the north where Canadian companies suck everything out of the ground. They are known to drink their way across the country. I wonder now about the workers in their world who don’t do this harder living. How do they manage in the middle of this? And how long do these guys last in this kind of life?

Two hours we sat in that plane waiting for medics to arrive, and then more waiting while they assessed the guy. The work-boot men continued to animate the situation with their noise. One was complaining in the front row, not about his co-worker’s bad behaviour, but about how long it was taking the ground and airline crew to do the incident paperwork so we could try again to leave. He almost got thrown off by the fed-up flight attendant. I was hoping for some flight attendant kick-butt action. But he shut his mouth when she told him he could get off too, that he was annoying her. Inebriated guy, who stirred after 5-or-so minutes and a lot of nudging by the flight attendants, managed to crawl into a seat. He then tried to argue, head in hands, that he was fine now and could stay on the plane. Of course, he couldn’t stay. There are rules about that. He was finally escorted off by the medical team. The plane was absolutely quiet. I thought “What planet am I on?” Planet Canada. Lots of things bug me about the US, but if that plane were in Chicago or Dallas or Sacramento, drunk guy who delayed us until 3 a.m. and assured our next day’s misfortune would have been booed and then cheered off the plane. Good riddance! Nearly nine years in Canada and a lot of things, I just don’t get.

We finally left Edmonton at 3 a.m. I fell immediately asleep and woke a few hours later during the business class breakfast being eaten with beer by the men all around me. We arrived in Montreal to chaos at the customer service counter. Many of us missed connections. I had to fly into a different city in order to get to my talk destination in New Brunswick. My bag didn’t make it, of course. I had to attire myself out of the Champlain Mall in Moncton, New Brunswick where it would be a lot easier to find an outfit to go to a high school dance (crop top, faux ripped jeans, and sparkly sneakers?) than to outfit a 55 year-old woman who had to give an academic talk. Luckily there was a Sport Chek, where I finally found flared yoga pants, black and white runners, and a long-sleeved plain, but good quality black knit top. I probably looked like a well-pressed coach. I could do worse.

April 21, Easton Massachusetts (Stonehill College) and Cambridge, Massachusetts

I stopped writing at that point in my New Brunswick trip since I had a busy visit to Mt. Allison University, a small liberal arts-type college in rural New Brunswick. I loved spending time with Mi’kmaq staff, students, and faculty and others at the college. I had some fantastic salmon there too. I felt warmly welcomed and my talk was well-attended with many genuine questions, not all easy to answer. There was no academic grandstanding.

These smaller colleges have distinctly different academic cultures than do the big research universities. I have found that while I have always worked in big research universities—being oriented more toward research and program building than to teaching—that I mostly enjoy visiting the smaller colleges. The conversations with both students and faculty are more joyful and curious to best describe it off the top of my head. The bigger and especially more prestigious research university audiences speak very seriously, with less curiosity; they tend to poke and pry more.

I found that also at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, where I gave a keynote a couple of days ago at an undergraduate conference on race and ethnicity. I have two hats on being back in Massachusetts: 1) my nostalgic self who lived here from the ages of 20-26, such formative years; and 2) my anthropological self. I never went to Easton that I recall and certainly not to the small liberal arts college with the red brick buildings and less-cynical-than-usual undergraduate students. But the air felt familiar. The accents of locals were also comfortably familiar, as well as the partly grey spring skies, turnpike traffic, and triple deckers or colonial houses lining the streets depending on the neighborhood. At Stonehill this week, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to more than two dozen undergraduate research presentations over the course of one-and-a-half days. I could tell they were well-mentored; their presentations were tight. The young researchers were also collegial with one another, modeling for other academics how to encourage while asking challenging intellectual questions. I was impressed and touched.   

Perhaps very different things are at stake in these different academic cultures—small college versus big research university—thus the very different styles of relating intellectually? In theory, I prefer a joyful curiosity more than a poking intellectualism. But I am also thinking about a paper I peer reviewed for a journal recently—a paper like no other I’ve ever had to review. It was truly alarming in its insidiously anti-tribal governance propositions while written as if it were chiefly concerned with protecting tribal sovereignty. I was not joyful or curious in my response. The Native Studies intellectual world in which I am centered is not chiefly about joyful curiosity, although I personally feel those things frequently when I think and write. Many of us do, I am sure. And I do hear from many people as I travel around the world that my work has been edifying for them. I’m grateful for their words. But as I’ve written elsewhere, I came to research in order to support and defend Native sovereignty in our territories and societies, and that involves a persistent and often more assertive curiosity.

As I write today, I am sitting in a nice little café next to the MIT Museum on what used to be the backside of campus, which has hugely developed since I was here. There is an older European couple sitting across from me in their affluent-Sunday-casual. They are debating back-and-forth while looking at their phones about which flight to Zurich they need to book for later tonight. I remember being so poor when I lived here. Sometimes, I ran out of money for food a couple of days before payday. I did my Master’s degree at MIT in the early 1990s. I was thinking today as I walked through Kendall Square how thirty years ago today, I was six weeks from graduation, probably stressed out working on my thesis and from my rapidly deteriorating relationship at that time. I felt inadequate in the face of it all. That spring, I started vomiting spontaneously a few times a week. I’ve never let stress go that far again. I recognize what my stomach is telling me.

The thesis felt so daunting then, and so did a love that was probably 50% the comfort of family-learned-bad patterns (from both our sides). Being 25 for me was like swimming in an overgrown swamp. I couldn’t see but right in front of me. Yet I also felt relatively comfortable, even as a stressed-out student, with the no-nonsense vibe at MIT. I’m sure lots of nonsense happens here, but I mean that my impression of the students then and now is that they’re very busy and serious, sometimes too serious to talk and to pose around the place. As opposed to some other institutions around here. (Smile emoji). They’re playing 80s and early 90s music in this café. But I cannot feel like I’m back in the day. It’s much glossier around here than it was then. And my phone wallet with credit cards with plenty of room on them plus my late middle-age joints remind me we are nowhere near 1994.

I am about to get on the Red Line of the subway at Kendall Square and head to north Cambridge to meet a long-time friend for dinner, a poet and novelist. He was part of a big group of writers and performers I hung out with in Cambridge before I started MIT and put my head down into the books and computer keyboard. Some in our group got a little bit famous. Others left for L.A. or other in-between cities for family. A few have moved on to the spirit world. None but me, I think, left the writer-performer life behind. Maybe I didn’t completely; my teaching is more performance than pedagogical innovation. I look forward to hanging out with my passed-on friends someday in a far more glittery venue than we ever knew in the basement bars of Cambridge and Allston. Among the fantastical wormholes, we will gather; there will be a stage and a mic. My mind turns on Ashley McBryde’s “Southern Babylon.”

She said "Hey girl, where you been? Doncha know I been waitin' for ya?"You got a band up there just dyin' to play a little 'Hotel California'"And maybe it's not sinkin' in, but you'll learn to play along"Honey, you been gone since you walked into Southern Babylon"

"I'm not supposed to be here, bartender don't you see?"I took a gig down in Atlanta and the brakes gave out on me"She said, "We know all about ya. It's a little bit too late"She handed me a guitar and pointed to the flames

When I come to the Boston area rarely now, it’s to give a talk at a college or university. The venues we performed in are mostly gone. More respectable establishments stand in their lots. The first place I lived in Cambridge, an apartment up a narrow stairway in an old house near Central Square, is gone. It’s replaced by a shipping-container-inspired dwelling that looks much sleeker and with bigger, sunnier windows. Sheena Easton is on this café sound system. I almost feel like a spirit here from decades gone by. I assume, like me, spirits grow wiser too in this collective ever-present? I am sitting quietly in this café corner. No one looks at me. I like it that way. Thirty years ago, I couldn’t go anywhere in this town without running into a friend or acquaintance. Today, I walk and sit anonymously.