Unsettle

Content warning: Swears and acceptance of Covid-19 as an ongoing relation in human existence.

I am both an academic and everyday anthropologist of settler society, including mostly, but not only white people. White settler supremacy conditions the societal structures and narratives we all navigate and live with. All of us, “settler” or not, are potentially complicit in upholding settler supremacy, and we can all explicitly or implicitly challenge its narratives and norms. This post is a reflection on the ways that diverse inhabitants in my fields of observation, mostly the US and increasingly Canada, either shore up or challenge dominant settler state narratives in responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and public health measures to combat it.

I’m not going to jump into the feeding frenzy around federal research grant opportunities to study Covid-19, but I thought I’d put these hypotheses out there because they’ve been slow cooking in my head since early on in the pandemic. I hope someone is researching the varied responses across settler state society, not because I think such research will curtail the pandemic, but because it’s interesting. I wish such study would help disrupt the global threat to humanity that is Covid-19 and inept governmental management of this and coming pandemics, but I don’t think that is a realistic expectation given the scripts that many settler-colonial society citizens seem intent on acting out. I am, however, happy to entertain others’ more positive projections.

As I watch the ongoing Settlerflix reality series, Covid-19: Anglo North America, now entering wave four, I discern five categories of characters in the US (and to some degree in Canada) who exhibit differing responses to the risk that Covid-19 presents at home. I don’t think the majority of the cast thinks much about global risk. Following are the five hypothesized categories, which I humorously (to me at least) abbreviate with acronyms like this is a real research project.

Hypothetical Category #1: The Conservative Privileged Risk Denialists (CPRDs)

We are all familiar with the majority white public anti-maskers—a not insignificant number of them middle-class-looking Brads and Karens—who have an affinity in the US for stars and stripes garb. In both the US and Canada, they love to waive their settler-state flags when they march on the capitols, state houses, and legislative grounds just a short walk from their gargantuan trucks and SUVs. It is not uncommon for them to have on the rear windows of their gas guzzlers that row of nuclear family stickers arranged according to gender and human/animal binaries, and also by age from parents to the youngest child, then nonhuman “pets.” Putting their families on show according to the archaic Great Chain of Being is so telling. Given the relationship of the settlers’ God to their entitlement to dominion over the land and everyone else, it is unsurprising that among them are a healthy dose of evangelical and other conservative Christians.

If this were a real research project, I would ask questions that try to get at how Covid-19 risk-related behaviour correlates with geographic location, race, Indigeneity, gender, income, and “health” status of individual interviewees. I’d craft research questions related to differences between the US and Canada in their nationalist narratives, and I’d be interested in how those narratives intersect with interviewees’ definitions of and identifications with a range of demographic categories.

When I began drafting this post in early August, I was fascinated with a Twitter video of richer Brads and Karens at the Williamson County, Tennessee school board meeting. They were captured on camera yelling “Will not comply!” and “F**k you!” at health care workers exiting the meeting, who had been there to advocate for mask wearing in schools. When I watch these uber-white, clean cut, some of them fresh-from-the gym-buff white people scream at and threaten medical professionals who were attempting to walk and drive away, I think of what some historians and cultural studies scholars would say. I know there is good research out there on the links between individualism, fitness, and white supremacy, so I won’t attempt that analysis. But that’s the first thing I thought of as I consumed this video multiple times.

I am interested in numbers that relate a variety of factors—geography, the urban/rural divide, religious belief, race, and income to a range of Covid risk denial activities and their varying levels of violence. I may add citational links to this post as I come across them.

Let us consider the possible pain of privileged white Tennessee parents that leads to their verbal violence and threats of future physical violence against healthcare workers in this video. My hypothesis is that these Conservative Privileged Risk Denialists (CPRDs) who comprise sometimes the wealthiest top 5% and definitely the top 10% are accustomed to living with less risk in their lives relative to the growing numbers of poor in our society. I observe that they are outraged that they are being told they and their loved-ones are at risk of becoming seriously ill and possibly dying from a viral infection, a situation that they cannot simply buy their way out of. They tell themselves and the world that these epidemics and pandemics are only supposed to be the scourge of predominantly non-white and poor countries, the inevitable destiny of those countries and peoples. If the Covid-19 scourge is real—and many of them are not convinced, as that would require recognizing USA foundational cracks or the US as unexceptional—they tell the story that there is nothing to be done about it except more capitalism and white saviourism, more “freedom.” At any rate, the deaths are almost always across the ocean blue or among non-white urbanites or on “remote” reserves and reservations. No worries, they tell themselves. They don’t much care about risk to the poor and the non-white. But they also deny their own risk and that of their children. Medical care systems are cracking under the weight of the sick and dying, and only the truly wealthy and powerful have access to high-end treatments.

Hypothetical Category #2: The Liberal Privileged Outraged at Risk (LPORs)

I don’t think I have a single CPRD friend in real life or on social media. But I have plenty of Liberal Privileged Outraged at Risk (LPOR) friends or acquaintances, many of them very highly educated. My close proximity to this second group of settler society citizens, has made me take close notice of their particular responses to Covid-19 risk.

LPORs are probably less likely than CPRDs to inhabit the top 5%, but they are almost always among the top 10%. Like CPRDS, they too are accustomed to living with far less risk in their lives relative to poor people. And like the CPRDs, they are outraged that they are being told that they and their loved-ones are at risk of becoming seriously ill and possibly dying. They are health-insured, they do yoga and eat organic. They don’t have so many co-morbidities as poor people. Their socioeconomic status and often (not always) race privilege is usually more protective.

They express more regret about wealth and race disparities for sure, but they too believe that epidemics and pandemics are unfortunately the scourge of predominantly non-white and poor communities and countries. They hope it is not simply destiny for less “developed” countries and peoples to be sicker and die sooner. They don’t always agree that more capitalism is key to saving those parts of the world, but they do often have their own brand of liberal white saviourism on offer. They tend not to use the word “freedom” as much as CPRDs. They tend to “Vote blue no matter who,” and voice more worry about risk to the poor and non-white. They are starkly different from the CPRDs on one point: they absolutely do not deny their own risk and that of their children. They recognize that the medical care systems are cracking under the weight of the sick and dying, and even more now under the gluttonous capitalists (who must be mostly Republicans, right?) who take their sustenance first. While they do still retain some ability to buy their way out of the worst of the risk, it is not nearly as much as they are used to, and they are enraged. The all-inclusive rainbow nation is failing them. In fear of newfound risk, they often retreat to their nuclear families, which offered them status, economic rewards, and more. In the pandemic, however, the immobile, quarantined, even surveilled nuclear family can be a pressure cooker. Welcome to the pain long experienced by those who did not gain privilege, but were marginalized by the norms of white settler heteropatriarchal society.

Hypothetical Category #3: The Non-Privileged Risk Fatigued (NPRFs)

I admit, most of my observations among this group are among people of colour because that’s who in my circles is most risk fatigued. I have both bougie and non-bougie family—Indigenous, Black, and POC, both biological and made kin. I have some middle-class made kin who are white. However, I don’t tend to have many poor white friends and made family, and I have no poor white kin that I actually associate with. I imagine some of my bio-relatives on my white dad’s side are probably CPRDs or NPRFs, but I am not in touch with them. The whites who I fraternize with, as indicated in the above LPOR description, tend to be more privileged and/or educated, not that all of my white acquaintances are Outraged Pandemic Karens by any means. Some of them are Relational Risk Assessors (RRAs), which I’ll describe below.

But I do have close kin who are non-white NPRFs. I have two main hypotheses formed by observing and talking to them, especially when I try to tease and cajole them into vaccinating. None of the NPRFs I know are anti-maskers; they’re not so bad at mask wearing. I will discuss the more common public perception about this group’s anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitancy sentiments, that, I think, exist in good measure among them. But first I want to discuss the idea of risk fatigue and the risk math that can accompany their fatigue and perhaps lead to vaccine hesitancy or vaccine neglect.

To put it succinctly, poor people are at risk from so many assaults on their physical, emotional, and financial health day-in and day-out, both pre- and post-Covid, that for some, Covid-19 is just one more risk. Yes it can kill people. It is made more severe by high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart disease. But multi-generational racist trauma is killing them; poverty is killing them. Covid-19 can kill them like any unexpected disease or accident can kill them, especially in the US settler state that thinks healthcare is the privilege of the well-employed and their legal spouse or dependents. I don’t have to go on and on about this. Add Covid-19 to the gigantic multi-layered risk sandwich on the plates of the poor and under- or uninsured. Whereas LPORs might face what feels like a healthy dollop of additional risk, perhaps the poor and already severely risk-burdened judge the additional Covid-19 risk as a smaller part of their overall proportion of risk? They might want to parse their worry across the broader field of risk they live with.

I was also talking to a family member when I was home in August who noted that some Black and other people of colour say that in their communities, people are sometimes simply not accustomed to seeking preventative care in a white supremacist medical system. They go in an emergency, but have found other avenues for caring for themselves. Therefore, the white-controlled medical system’s calls for solidarity might not register, or might ring hollow. I’ll detail below my positive vaccination experience because it was an Indigenous-run vaccination clinic where I did not have to encounter anti-Indigenous sentiments and (lack of) care. There are so many questions I would ask diverse interviewees if I were going to do real research on this topic.

Finally, and in my limited personal experience of NPRFs, some do cite anti-vaccination conspiracy theories along with that explicit distrust of white-controlled medicine in the historical experiences of Black and Indigenous populations. And perhaps unlike non-expert white members of the public, they can often cite key cases/topics of bioethical violations, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or forced sterilizations of Indigenous people. I get their fear: racist researchers and institutions have shown themselves to be willing and happy to experiment or perform nonconsensual medical interventions on Black people and Indigenous people, the two types of non-white bio-kin I have.

A young relative wanted me to watch a conspiracy theory video clip with them this past summer. I told my relative that their political intuition is right on, and they might want to go back to school and perhaps take a class or two related to the topic of racism in medicine; they are obviously curious and willing to spend a lot of time watching, reading, and learning. In the right place and program (although access is another serious challenge), they could get better reasoned histories. The non-white “conspiracy theorist” in the video clip my relative showed me is not wrong when he talks about white society’s lies, distortions, and biases. But he undermines his structural critique with narrative threads based on sketchy evidence.

Is it surprising when individuals who experience throughout their lives structural and individual racism, including in health “care,” and when their communities have experienced racist medical practice, scientific research, and government policies, that some among them distrust what they see as a largely white medical system and authority? On the one hand, being guarded about the truths that white “civilization” has on offer is absolutely right. We should always be skeptical of their dominant narratives as I am doing in this essay. On the other hand, we non-whites regularly take calculated risks about the bitter pills we decide to ingest from settler society, be they conceptual or material. Evidence seems sufficient to me that Covid-19 vaccines help more than they hurt, although I too am not thrilled with the colonial, racist, (hetero)sexist, and classist medical industrial complex that produces them. I, in part, distrust their motives. But I also remember that white people mostly want the vaccines, including a lot of privileged ones. And our fellow non-white planetary citizens in many other countries want them too. That might be food for thought among our non-white and otherwise non-privileged kin who are leery of the vaccine narratives of powerful whites. There are not easy decisions here for those who with good reason distrust a structurally-racist-to-the-core medical infrastructure. I am obviously not a screamer on this front. I will not call especially non-white people “stupid” or gullible who are worried about racist big pharma’s incentives to produce and distribute vaccines according to highly corporatist models that reward the richest and don’t give a s**t about the poor.

Hypothetical Category #4: Stealth Vaccinators (SVs)

I expect there are individuals among the privileged risk denialists and non-privileged risk fatigued families and communities who are worried enough about Covid-19 and who are not as skeptical as their family and community members about vaccination. I suspect there is a not insignificant percentage among them who might be quietly/secretly getting vaccinated. If this were a real research project, I would have questions for them too. What information, incentives, or structural conditions (e.g. free or easier to obtain vaccines) made the difference in their (growing) vaccine acceptance? Where were they vaccinated? What was their experience? Did their decision to vaccinate sway any other family/community members? If they are partnered or coparenting with an anti-vaxxer, how are they managing that? Does having children and thinking about their risk influence their greater vaccine acceptance? What is the gender and ability disparity in broader anti-vaxxing or vaccine-hesitant communities related to those within their communities who are growing in their vaccine acceptance? Have workplace vaccine mandates made a difference? How many have weighed the pressing risk of losing a job as greater than their uncertainty about the vaccine or the virus?

Some Personal Thoughts on Risk, Rage, and Relations

Before I describe my fifth and final category of risk response to Covid-19, I have some personal thoughts on risk that help preface my explanation of that final category that I see as focused on the role of better relating to manage risk, and why I think I fall within its parameters.

Mononormativity and Covid-19 Risk

I have spent time in close proximity to risk assessment thinkers, both as an environmental policy worker in my first career, and also as a polyamorist. Somewhat akin to environmental risk assessors, those of us who mindfully practice open nonmonogamy tend to be highly risk aware and knowledgeable about risk reduction. We tend to talk openly and in an informed manner about risk tolerance for ourselves and with any potential romantic/sexual partners. We are accustomed to thinking and speaking in a measured way about risk in order to reduce it, but never with the idea that there can be zero risk.

I propose that an analysis of monogamy culture can help us also understand our ineffective societal management of Covid-19. Risky contact and denialism about the prevalence of other pathogens is already common across this mononormative society that views plural sexual relationships as ethically inferior, and privileges and conflates monogamous relationships with health and fidelity. In a mononormative society, a misperception flourishes that contracting a sexually-transmitted infection is a moral or biological failing rather than a statistically-common occurrence, especially in the absence of personal protective equipment (PPE). Such moral assumptions can hinder clear and honest conversation and negotiation of risk when mononormatives engage in sexual contact, thus making them vulnerable to infection. Common monogamist assumptions that one’s partner could not possibly be infected encourage non-regular testing and resistance to PPE, e.g. condoms.

I see failure narratives related to infection also shaping societal responses to Covid-19, and resistance not only to PPE, but to physical distancing guidelines. “All those safety practices are not necessary for moral and healthy subjects who are obviously less likely to be infectious, right?!” Unfortunately, we see these infection-as-failure narratives even among seemingly more rational societal actors like the Liberal Privileged Outraged at Risk. Perhaps a mononormative society is less intellectually and socially equipped to deal thoughtfully with risk of infection?

Why Not Rage?

Due probably to a combination of my risk assessment orientations and my age—where once angry conflagrations have burned into weary embers—I have not become pandemic outraged. My relative privilege and ability to both physically and emotionally distance at this later stage of life is also key. But given how many similarly privileged people I see being outraged, I also think my lack of rage is due to the fact that I grew up with far less privilege; I was not conditioned to expect distance from disaster. As a child and young adult, I lived in wait of the next crisis and developed a flight response to stay a step ahead of impending storms. Stopping fleeing has been a formidable life project. I have commiserated with a colleague in my Faculty of Native Studies that because we grew up in economically unstable Indigenous communities under colonial assault, we never feel quite safe. Formative years cut deep despite our current privileges compared to many of our relatives.

I also cannot find outrage because I am totally unsurprised by seemingly “irrational” risk behaviours exhibited around this contagion. I’ve noted, for example, the risk denial and associated outrage of some privileged people. I’ve also noted that some who are less privileged weigh Covid-19 risk more lightly against their histories and scars of medical racism and other daily dangers. I don’t think either response, though I judge the first more harshly than the second, is actually irrational. Both are responses, though fundamentally different in positionality and experience, to the failures of the settler state and its core exceptionalist narratives.

Like the Non-Privileged Risk Fatigued (some of whom are my relatives), I retain some risk weariness and trauma from my earlier life, while it doesn’t translate into deep skepticism about the efficacy of vaccines. I am deeply skeptical of the motives of pharmaceutical companies that seek profit first and foremost and perform their medical experimentation and drug trials in a geopolitically-, race-, and class-stratified world.

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve weighed personal risk and interests in relation to collective risk and interests. Given that I work at home, mostly live alone, and had already survived a bout of Covid-19 without much apparent problem, I did not rush to get vaccinated when Canada did early rollout of vaccines to a statistically-vulnerable Indigenous population in late winter and spring of 2021. I believe that we should put the most vulnerable first. At the same time, my knowledge of racist medicine led me to be a little skeptical on my own behalf. I wanted to observe vaccine side effects across the population, but I was also pretty sure that they provide more benefit than risk for most people. My willingness to wait was due then to both individual and collective risk calculations and interplay.

Better Relations at the Indigenous Vaccine Clinic

I am a person raised in Indigenous communities, both urban and reservation. That life experience developed in me a sense of obligation to Indigenous collective well-being. This commitment figured prominently in my decision at first not to go to the Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA) vaccine clinic in March of this year ahead of my eligibility-by-age in Alberta. My reasons had to do with not only my perceived level of vulnerability to Covid-19, but also my respect for geographic-specific definitions of Indigeneity. Since I am from the US side of the border, I am not officially identified as “Métis, First Nation, or Inuit,” the Indigenous categories specified on the MNA website as eligible for vaccination. I felt that those who are Métis, First Nation, or Inuit and who are at greater risk for a variety of reasons should go ahead of me.

I did, however, end up being vaccinated by the MNA as part of that initiative. An Indigenous healthcare worker acquaintance of mine informed me that there were appointments available and they would be happy to vaccinate me if I explained that I was a tribal citizen in the US and a resident of Alberta. At that person’s insistence, I went to the vaccination centre; it was one of the most pleasant medical experiences I’ve had. I was required to show my Alberta health card, but not my tribal ID, which I had on me just in case. The Métis cultural scene was integrated into a congenial and efficient vaccination clinic. We were given MNA swag (e.g a cute Métis sash design lanyard) and the post-vaccination waiting area was populated with Indigenous people my age and older. We watched a video of fiddling and jigging while we waited the post-vaccination requisite 15 minutes for the possible rare allergic reaction. I was delighted by the whole scene, as much by the Indigenous-centric healthcare delivery as by the thought of getting vaccinated. I need to emphasize the fact that self-identification as Indigenous was acceptable at the vaccine clinic. This is inclusionary for Indigenous people who for various reasons do not have official status as Indigenous, the upside to allowing for self-identification. The downside to self-identification, is it opens the door to fraudulent claims to being Indigenous to gain resources meant for Indigenous peoples, including early vaccine access.

I wonder if my vaccine-hesitant family members would have been vaccinated sooner if they were living on our reservation where there would be: 1) Indigenous community pressure to vaccinate; 2) more regular contact with more family members, some of whom are more vulnerable; and 3) if they could obtain vaccines from our tribally-controlled clinic. My vaccine-hesitant relatives live in urban areas. Vaccination is a cultural experience no matter where you do it, and not every venue is very comfortable or feels safe for populations who have been the object of medical racism for centuries. A history of bad relations matters as does the active presence of better relations.

Hypothetical Category #5: Relational Risk Assessors (RRAs)?

This final category of societal risk response is the one I see myself falling into, but with a healthy dose of cynicism about the possibility for good societal risk relations. I see relational risk assessment as characterized by:

1) considered attention to individual and structural risk, both historically and today; including

2) the idea that individual and collective risk (or lack of it) are co-constitutive—that they shape and facilitate one another in the moment and over time and space; and

3) an attention to learning individual and collective risk reduction strategies that help mitigate risk for the most vulnerable.

My understanding of relational risk assessment is not derived from some kind of universal emotional or spiritual love for all of humankind, but is more rooted in the materiality of my own past deprivations and exposures to suffering. I don’t want others to suffer as much, or in many cases far worse, than I, my family, and People have suffered. My material or physical aversion to my suffering and the suffering of others is linked, of course, to my profound regard for the specialness of this planet as a whole, even if I do not experience universal human love. I understand that my individual risk is entangled with collective risks. And I understand that the risks to persons and Peoples I do love are entangled with risks to other persons and populations across the globe, including both human and other-than-human persons. All of our fates are entangled.

In her May 2020 essay, “The Virus is a Relation,” non-Indigenous, feminist philosopher Alexis Shotwell explains what I think of as “relationally-constituted risk”:

Whether people live or die when they get sick depends on webs of social relations, the history of oppression carried in their bodies, what care is made available for them to receive, and so much that we don’t yet understand.

Shotwell also calls attention to the bad treatment by some humans of other-than-humans—what we can call “ecological” relations.

I read closely Shotwell’s caution regarding policing the virus as something that can be “kept out of a country, neighborhood, or body.” Shotwell suggests instead “that when people move from thinking about their own body boundaries as a domain they need to seal off and protect from viral intrusion and start thinking about their practices in terms of trying to not transmit the virus to the people they encounter, their activities change.” Masking, Shotwell explains, becomes about protecting others; staying home if possible is an act of generosity, not selfishness.

Beyond individual acts directed toward community care, Alexis Shotwell emphasizes the structural conditions that support Covid-19’s dangerous circulation in the human population: capitalist modes of consumption that make housing a commodity instead of a right, the nuclear family organized around the couple, and the organization of care around those unsustainable units. This kind of system leaves many vulnerable to deprivation and violence. Finally, Shotwell asks even as we consider the benefits to the earth of the temporary disruption to fossil fuel consumption brought by Covid-19, that we not succumb to the “heartless rhetorical move” that all of this death is some kind of universal retribution. Instead, we might consider a narrative of living with: “What relationship with this virus will proliferate survivance and flourishing, now and later?”

I have pondered Alexis Shotwell’s careful essay each time I’ve read it over the past 17 months. Yet I do not claim that my individual version of relational risk behaviour is as heart-generous as I know Shotwell’s to be. I am structurally caring and supportive. I believe as a society that we should house, feed, and provide care for our relations. But I also don’t want to be out circulating among all of my societal relations. I am prone to containment on a personal level primarily for social reasons. I prefer staying home and away from most humans. I need space, order, and quiet. Me staying home is very much about my personal aversion to overwhelming social contact. Lucky me, my self-interest in this instance also reduces Covid-19 risk for others. I want to be clear about this, because I don’t want to present myself as some kind of good Samaritan that I am not.

It is also true that I have been more concerned with not putting others at physical risk from Covid-19 than I have been concerned with not putting myself at risk of the virus, although I don’t put myself at risk for insignificant reasons. When I took my biggest Covid-19 risk during this pandemic, it involved both cold calculation—an informed knowledge of what I was risking, and an emotional need to see my loved one who I missed terribly, not having seen them in months due to Covid-19 border restrictions. So I traveled to the US from Canada and cohabited for a month with that person, a frontline worker, who was at serious risk. I also knew that if they stayed where they were, living with another vulnerable and immune-compromised person, that medically vulnerable person could instead catch Covid-19, and have a good chance of dying. I wanted my loved one with me and I also didn’t want them to live with the guilt. I thought I would likely come through the infection okay since I have rarely been sick in my life. I did indeed contract Covid-19. Luckily, my gamble paid off and I came through it okay as far as I can tell. Would I have done that if I were an immune-compromised person and I feared I might seriously risk my life? Nope.

We might be relational risk assessors in a variety of ways.

Future Scenarios?

I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching the zombie series Black Summer one night in August when I began drafting this post. This is why I will usually only watch films, not series. I binge on zombies; a film involves only moderate consumption of those usually predictable narratives of mostly settler society gratuitous violence and non-cooperation. I was asking myself when I finally finished the series and went to bed disgusted: “Would people REALLY BEHAVE LIKE THAT? I mean, why not cooperate?! Place your best few shooters at lookout points. Don’t let a random zombie just run around screaming for days, then send one of your guys out for wood with the zombie on the loose. While the shooters keep an eye on the property’s periphery, the rest of the humans cooperate to fortify the building they’re sheltering in. Why descend into suspicious, selfish chaos and….” LOL. Oh my god, what was I thinking? There was a point when it looked like the women in Black Summer would be the last standing humans, and I had a glimmer of hope that the pointless He-Man responses would cease, but then all but two of the women got shot and/or turned.

This Indigenous anthropologist of all things settler has no zombie apocalypse to observe. I’ll watch instead the settler supremacist civilization’s response to Covid-19. As a zombie film aficionado, I could hypothesize a possible sensationalist conclusion to Covid-19: Anglo North America, but I don’t want to carry the tongue-in-cheek too far. As for hypothesizing “more realistic” future scenarios, that will require sustained research across multiple fields: history of science and medicine, global and public health, epidemiology, critical race studies, political ecology, futurism studies, and many more areas of inquiry. I can’t quite say I’ll look forward to the reading, although I promise to be fascinated if I am still alive and capable of processing the insights; I am a “recovered” Covid-19’er, after all, with perhaps a viral time bomb in my brain.

Thank you as always for reading and/or listening.

Terminology note: Terms are always politically, geographically, and temporally contextual. You will notice me move between terms, especially when I refer to situations in the US vs. Canada. Between these two settler states, some terminology overlaps and some is quite different. My apologies if any terms used (e.g. “tribe” or “Native”) hurt your ears. Terms that make people cringe in some places, are widely accepted in others. In fact, even the most up-to-date “politically correct” term, “Indigenous,” is disliked for a variety of legitimate reasons by some. Language is a minefield; best to learn the map.

I do media interviews more than I would like (which would be never) about potential “race shifting” or “pretendian” cases in the US and Canada. Recently, a reporter asked me what are some of the “red flags” to watch out for when investigating a race shifter or “pretendian” case. I thought that was a good question, and so I made a list of not only things to watch out for, but also key questions to ask yourself before embarking on an investigation. The notes for that reporter seeded this essay. I hope it can be helpful for others who find themselves needing to learn more about the unfortunate phenomenon that is “race shifting” or “pretendianism.”

I’ve also written several essays in the last four months on this platform that will give you additional background on the topic if you’re that interested: 1) The May 9 essay, Playing Indian Constitutes a Form of Colonial Theft, and It Must be Tackled; 2) The June 14 essay, We are not your dead ancestors; and 3) the July 24 essay, What the Hell’s Wrong with You? Three Stories of White Bullies.

While I do more of these interviews than I want to, I do them for two reasons: First, this is a critical topic because it’s a growing and serious problem that risks further theft of cultural and material resources from actual Indigenous Peoples. Second, many scholars and Indigenous community members are unwilling to speak to reporters about this phenomenon, especially about specific cases where they may know and have to associate (say at work or university) with the people involved. It’s risky to speak publicly about this issue. At the very least, it can attract attacks on social media, ad hominem, by non-Natives, those with dubious claims to Indigeneity, and by actual Native people. At its worst, one can lose friends when speaking publicly about this issue, and professional and community opportunities. I’ve received personal messages from those who feel they cannot speak publicly and/or who feel better suited to work quietly behind the scenes on this problem. I recognize that I am better positioned than most to speak on this topic, both because of my extensive research work and lived experience among diverse Indigenous communities across the US and increasingly in Canada. I am also professionally as secure as one can be in this settler society in crisis.

Before I get to detailing the red flags, let me explain the terminology of “race shifting.” It’s obvious what the snarky term “pretendian” means. I use both terms, but that doesn’t mean they’re synonymous. “Race shifting” and “pretendianism” together, in the high-profile cases I’m called to comment on, involve usually, not always, white people who claim to be various kinds of Indigenous to lands currently called the USA or Canada. Alleged race shifters, a term that I first saw Circe Sturm use in her book, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century, might also claim to be vaguely “Native American” or “Indigenous.” Darryl Leroux also discusses race shifters in his book, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity. He defines the “white desire to be Indigenous” as “race shifting” or as “settler self-Indigenization” (15). Unlike Sturm, who writes about white race shifters to a Cherokee identity in a US context, Leroux writes mostly about white race shifters to a Métis identity in a Canadian context. He and many others in Canada regularly use the term “settler” for non-Indigenous people. But this term almost always explicitly excludes descendants of the enslaved and refugees. It is a mistake, however, to conflate “settler” with white people alone. Some non-whites too have emigrated and settled by choice on stolen Indigenous lands, and to great benefit. Two of the more common race shifter claims, as evidenced by Sturm’s and Leroux’s books, are Cherokee and Métis claims. In a US context, it is also not uncommon to hear questionable assertions to being of Choctaw, Apache, or Blackfoot/Blackfeet descent. One also hears a variety of other “tribal” or “First Nations” labels claimed, but the aforementioned are among the more common claimed. And claims occur for a variety of reasons documented by scholars and reporters who’ve taken these stories on. Those reasons can include relief from the ennui of whiteness and guilt for complicity in colonialism, the desire for cultural meaning and moral authority, and often it seems for access to material resources such as land and scholarship money, educational and professional opportunities.

Three questions reporters or other investigators should ask themselves

1.     Are you sure you are the one who should write this story? Where does your interest in this story stem from? How are you situated in relationship to it? Do you have, for example, expert knowledge of the institution in which the alleged race shifting is occurring? Do you understand and can your story perhaps influence its decision-making structures in order to combat this problem? There are many reasons you might be well-situated to do the story, but make sure to examine those reasons. One need not be Indigenous themselves to write or report on this topic, but those who have a passable sense of Indigenous community politics and especially the politics of affiliation and citizenship are also better situated to investigate it. Beware; getting a handle on that if you are a newbie to the topic will be very time-consuming. This story will be more doable if you already have Native country networks and have done other Indigenous-related stories. If you don’t, you have no idea what you’re getting into. You are going to be very confused. Helicopter research is unadvisable for academics working with/in Indigenous communities. I also assume that this particular story, maybe all Indigenous stories, are better served by reporters who build ongoing relations with Indigenous communities. But I’ll stop there with that particular advice giving since I am not an Indigenous journalist myself.

2.     Are the Indigenous “informants” you interview for the story also reliably Indigenous? It’s a laugh-cry situation, but I’ve seen “Indigenous” people quoted in race shifting stories whose claims to Indigeneity are also widely known in Native circles to be doubted. I realize this is kind of a chicken and egg problem. If a person informing your story on a potential race shifter case is themselves identifying as Indigenous/Cherokee/Métis, etc., are you sure they are? If you’re not absolutely sure, you better check. How do you check? Well that’s potentially complicated. If they claim band membership, Indian Status, or tribal membership it’s relatively easy to check on that. You can ask for ID, but people have faked tribal IDs; do you know how to read them? Are you familiar enough to spot a knock-off? You should ultimately check with the governmental authority in charge of issuing the ID and make sure it’s legit itself. I was quoted in a large mainstream news publication this year that ran a major race shifting story. They called my tribal government office to verify that I am indeed a tribal citizen. If the persons you are interviewing do not claim “enrollment,” “membership,” or “citizenship,” but rather claim community affiliation, checking will be harder. All of us who have some form of official Indigenous status also have relatives without status. They legitimately belong to us. They legitimately assert their tribal or Indigenous “identity” and family connections, but they are sometimes not tribal citizens due to convoluted and restrictive citizenship and status rules. I’ve written more about that in my 2011 Aboriginal Policy Studies article, “The Political Economy of Tribal Citizenship in the US: Lessons for Canadian First Nations?

3.     Third, is the race shifter claim simply a matter of an individual claim, or does it also involve a problematic collective claim? You must answer the collective question before you can answer the individual question. That is, is the “tribe” being claimed potentially fabricated? Some people, like Elizabeth Warren, claim to be affiliated via long-ago ancestry (often unnamed ancestors) with tribes whose veracity is not challenged, in Warren’s case, it’s the Cherokee Nation. The tribe or People is recognized as real; it’s the individual claim that is challenged.

But sometimes people claim ancestral links to tribes or Peoples whose collective legitimacy or modern-day presence is doubted or not recognized by others. They may be fabricated tribes such as detailed in Sturm’s Becoming Indian. Or maybe a group of people is using the name of an actual historical Indigenous People, but it is agreed by those in the know (living Indigenous communities, other governmental entities, and researchers) that the People whose name is being used is no longer in existence. Not all Indigenous Peoples (or “tribes”) that existed 300 years ago, exist today. Both because they were decimated by colonization and/or their surviving people merged with other Indigenous Peoples or nations. Genocide happened; some historical Indigenous Peoples no longer exist as Peoples while they may have genetic descendants who belong to other living Indigenous peoples, or who are no longer considered Indigenous. They might belong to family trees that have for generations grown as non-Indigenous. That said, there is also pushback to certain extinction narratives. You are in choppy waters on this topic.

In a few other cases, legitimate Indigenous Peoples have come into being post-contact in part because of responses to colonial dynamics, for example the Métis Nation. And just to throw one more complication into the puzzle, while the Métis Nation, whose ethnogenesis is in the 18th and 19th centuries in what became Manitoba, is widely recognized as legitimate, Leroux’s book is all about challenging the veracity of claims by eastern Canadian people with overwhelmingly white ancestry who call themselves “Eastern Métis.” Are you confused yet?

Red Flags (not necessarily listed in order of priority)

The red flags I will describe are not generated from systematic academic research on this issue. Rather, they are what come to mind after years of exposure to the race shifting or “pretendian” phenomenon, both as an academic researcher and as a Native person who has lived my entire life around Indigenous communities, reservation and urban. I’ve also been exposed to race shifting in multiple universities I’ve been affiliated with. And I read voraciously the academic literature and reporting on this topic. I may add to this list of red flags as I encounter them in further work and reading. Consider this a living document.

In describing their Indigenous ancestry or Peoplehood, do suspected shifters rely on unsubstantiated, vague, or stereotypical claims? Common red flags include the following maneuvers and terms. I will also point out exceptions to the red flags:

1.     When did the suspected race shifter start identifying in paperwork as Indigenous/Native/Cherokee/Métis, etc? If recently, or at an opportune academic/career/scholarship moment, this could be a red flag. There are, of course, the “scooped” or stolen generations who were forcibly removed from Native homes by Indian agents and residential school kidnappers, individuals who have had to work to figure out who their Indigenous bio-family and communities are, and who try to return to connect with their Peoples. They may start claiming later in life. But their stories will contain details related to their individual removal from a particular Indigenous family and community, adoption or other governmental records. Beware of the vague and shifting stories, especially those that feature classic noble Indian stereotypes, which I’ll detail below, and which are usually focused on ancestry many generations ago.

2.     Has the suspected race shifter changed their story over time? Do they change their claims of affiliation? Changes in terminology are not uncommon, e.g. my tribal affiliation went from Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe to Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate with language revitalization, but both names belong to the same tribal government and People. Or some Native peoples switch their “tribal enrollment” from one to another since some of us are multi-tribal, but dual enrollment or dual citizenship is unfortunately rarely allowed among US tribes. What I mean is has the person shifted over time from claiming one Indigenous people to another, say from Cherokee to Ojibway, particularly as their claims get challenged? Or do they claim their Indigenous lineage first on one genealogical line, then later switch it when challenged to another genealogical line? Red flag.

3.     Does the person name a specific “First Nation,” “band” or “tribe” that is part of a larger Indigenous People, or are their claims broader and more vague? If someone claims to be say Eastern Band Cherokee rather than just Cherokee, or if they say they are related to people from Rosebud rather than just saying they are of “Sioux heritage” (the old-timey word that non-Natives know and we no longer use very much), then I don’t have as much reason to think their ancestry claims are of the mythological type. When people mention specific places, those of us with lived relations too can start asking who people’s family are. It’s what we do; it helps us find shared connections out there in the relatively small Indigenous world. A related red flag is when the person claiming, for example, to be Cherokee, doesn’t want to or can’t answer any questions about relations or social life there. I remember being snapped at like I was asking an invasive question by one race shifter (years before I knew it) when I asked if they knew so-and-so, a friend of my Mom’s in Tahlequah, a person who was a pretty high-level Cherokee Nation employee.

4.     The use of “shaman” could be a red flag. This is a word largely used by anthropologists. In my experience, Indigenous communities in the US and Canada rarely if ever use this word to describe our medicine people or spiritual leaders. When we hear people use this term, it can signal a lack of insiderness in Indigenous community (at least here in the north; I don’t speak for Central or South America). The use of “shaman” tends to make us suspicious, as if the person using the term is more influenced by old-school anthropological or New Age discourse than they are by Indigenous nation-social relations that are both People-specific and sometimes pan-tribal. Pan-tribal or pan-Indigenous is not, of course, the same as just borrowing uncritically from anthropology. We do have pan-Indigenous conversations and experiences because we have histories of circulating in each other’s communities and our common experiences with colonial institutions. These include residential schools, and the federal-tribal relationship that results in federal-Indian law that many tribal legal thinkers are familiar with and practice—that’s resulted in national Native policy organizations where we all meet and advocate together on behalf of our collective interests. We’ve had federal relocation programs that have brought tribal peoples from all over the country together into urban communities like Denver, Chicago, and Oakland. So between different legitimate Indigenous communities we sometimes use similar words in English for things, like “medicine man” or “holy person.” “Shaman,” however, is a word that is recognized as an anthropological term not widely taken up by actual Indigenous peoples in the north.

5.     Beware of references to widely-known cultural events or ceremonies that seem inconsistent with other elements of the story. Does the person claim, for example, to have participated in important Indigenous community events at say times in their life when it would be unlikely given their story, or perhaps given the community rules surrounding that ceremony? Do they have not only cultural details, but political and economic details, specific geographic details to accompany their stories, details that are recognizable to people in community? Listen for nuance and texture in their story. Or are their stories of community experience vague enough to have been crafted with no more knowledge than they could get on the internet or in a Hollywood movie? Red flag.

6.     Related to point 5, beware of individuals behaving in a way that belies the ceremonial knowledge they claim. Do they claim for example, to be “adopted into an Indian tribe,” or to be a sundancer, but they brag or make a huge to-do about the ceremonies they say they’ve been privy to? Do they speak with much authority and little humility or discretion on ceremonial matters? In general, making ceremony-talk into dinner-party conversation is not viewed as appropriate, especially in mixed Indigenous/non-Indigenous company. Such behavior is not a guarantee of race shifting; we have our own inappropriate braggarts too, but it could be a red flag.

7.     “Full-blooded.” That means that 100% of both bio-parents’ ancestry is Indigenous, even potentially from ONE Indigenous people. Highly unlikely. Can I say that again? Highly unlikely. For any of us. This is why I laugh at genetic scientists who look for the “unadmixed” Native to sample. Get a grip on history, scientists. Beware the use of “full-blood” obviously if someone is relying heavily on claims through one parent’s genealogical line or are vague about their genealogies. Aside from the bad race science potentially involved in using “full-blood,” colonization happened and continues to happen and this includes forced relocations, the Indian Wars, the resulting political economy of the first half of the 20th century, the shifting political economy of post-World War II, incentivized urban relocations, residential schools, and the fact that Native peoples have among the highest rates of exogenous marriage; genocide makes it so there are few of us left relatively speaking. Estimates for Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada for 2020 depend on geography, but nationally numbers range from 3% in the US (I think this number, however, reflects race shifters) and 5% in Canada. The “unmixed” Native is probably non-existent. That said, you will hear the occasional chauvinistic Native (I have one in my family) who will call themselves a “full-blood” knowing damn well their great-grandfather had one parent from Europe and one Dakota parent. But they’re just being a chauvinist. They’re not ignorant of or denying their lineage. Those of us who grow up in tribal communities tend to know our lineages well; we have to avoid dating a cousin who lives across town with whom we share a great-great grandparent. But some of our family use that term to mean they are more traditional than you, haha. But be highly skeptical when a person without a lifelong connection to Indigenous community uses this term. They probably don’t mean what my chauvinist relative means. They might really believe in the potential fact of “full-bloodedness.” Red flag.

8.     “Cherokee or Indian princess.” This is a big-time colonial stereotype. Now we do have many talented “pow-wow princesses,” young women who have won dance titles at pow-wows all over the continent. And if you go to a pow-wow, or wacipi as Dakota call it, you’ll hear them called “royalty.” But this is a pageant-like title that emerged in the 20th century. This isn’t what potential race shifters or pretendians are talking about when they refer to their great-great grandma or even themselves being an “Indian princess.” Come on now. This is such a common and hilarious claim that in the early 1990s at a pow-wow, I bought a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase: “No! my great-grandmother was NOT a Cherokee princess!” RED FLAG.

9.     “Descendant.” Sometimes the more careful person who is making unfounded or exaggerated claims to Indigenous ancestry or affiliation will not say they are Cherokee or Apache, for example. They will say instead that they are a descendant. On the other hand, it can be legitimate to say this. I am descended from Cree and Métis peoples on the prairies of Canada through my great-grandmother. But I am very likely ineligible due to both Canadian state and Indigenous governmental regulations to any form of official belonging in any First Nation or Métis Nation community. I am also descended from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma through my mom’s father, and I am eligible for citizenship in that tribe. But I am a citizen of another tribe (remember, no dual citizenship?) While it is factually correct for me to say I am descended from those multiple Indigenous Peoples, I was not socialized to any meaningful degree by any of them. I don’t name such descent much in my bios, for example. And I would not mark especially my great-grandmother’s lineages on say an equity, diversity, and inclusion form in my Canadian university. What would I be trying to claim? That common line, “I am honoring all of my lineages” strikes me as indicative of the problem that over-use of “descent” can actually indicate—the conflation of ancestry with being Indigenous, or belonging to an Indigenous community. That conflation is a key problem that helps facilitate race shifting and pretendianism. Ancestry alone is not a robust claim. “Descendant’ can be used in careful ways. For example, a couple of academics I know—who have actual Indigenous ancestry and kin—use it as part of describing their positionality in publications, how they came to be interested in those topics, or gained the ear of Indigenous community members. But they also are careful to explain that they were raised in non-Indigenous cultures and by non-Indigenous family. Circe Sturm states this exceptionally well in Becoming Indian (25). Darryl Leroux’s research demonstrates his and many other French-Canadian people’s descent from one or two very-long ago Indigenous women. However, unlike the eastern “Métis” he investigates, he refuses to fetishize a long-ago ancestor and make her into an identity claim. Another recent and moving essay, KTAQMKUK in the periodical Maisonneuve, is by a Canadian reporter, Justin Brake. In that essay, Brake discusses his Mi’kmaw ancestry and his decision not to make it into an identity or status claim. Not everyone is so careful. You could say “descendant” is a pink flag. There are legitimate reasons to use it, but in moderation, and also many misuses of the term.

10.  Cheesy sounding “Native” names. However, a non-Native person probably won’t be able to tell the genuine but perhaps stereotypical-sounding Native names from the fake ones, but they do tip off Indigenous people inside community. In addition to simply recognizing a family name from one’s community, some authentic Native names reflect what I assume are frank historical observations of an ancestor’s physical qualities or personality. A lot of fake ones tend to sound overly noble or might focus on a romanticized animal or a lofty spiritual or elemental term. I won’t give you specific examples of authentic vs. fake-sounding names. I don’t know how to do that delicately. Also, there are family names that are characteristic of different tribes and nations, and they’re not all “Native” either. While my tribe, for example, has Native sounding names like my family, we also have French and German sounding names that are classic Dakota family surnames now. In fact, in South Dakota, almost all of the people I know with French surnames are Dakota or Lakota.

11.  I feel bad even mentioning this final red flag because its deployment by certain people makes me feel really bad for them. Beware their adornments that look like they were purchased from Amazon.com from their fall lineup of Indian Chief or sexy Indian maiden costumes. This could include off-the-shoulder Disney-like “Pocahontas” dresses (I’ve seen these at some east coast pow-wows), or headbands where the beadwork is all loose and terrible, or the beads look huge and plastic. Many people who Play Indian are far more sophisticated than that, but not everyone is, and you can still see people adorned like this who are making false or exaggerated claims. It speaks to their lack of genuine community connection and affiliation. Red flag.

In summary, using stereotypical language, stories, and visuals to shore up Indigenous identity or belonging claims are common red flags that should prompt careful skepticism.

Postscript on “race shifter”

The “race shifting” terminology and analyses by both Sturm and Leroux are significant contributions to the academic literature on this problem. However, “race shifting” does not capture the total terrain of the phenomenon. “Race shifting” in the work of Sturm and Leroux applies only to white people. So while their work is very helpful, it doesn’t address non-white false claimants to Indigenous affiliation and/or ancestry. And they are clear about that.

I, on the other hand, do not restrict my analyses to white people’s false or exaggerated claims, so I tend to use the term “race shifting” less than do Sturm and Leroux. Not all false or exaggerated “Native American,” “Métis,” “Cherokee” and other Indigenous claims are made by white people. I’ve been asked by reporters to comment on some high-profile claims by Black and “Hispanic” or “Latino” people or groups to Indigenous “American” identities. When Black, “Hispanic” or “Latino” people attempt to shift into a Native identity, one must ask if it is possible or necessary for them to “race shift”? For example, can a Black person simply leave their racialization as Black behind because they start to identify also or instead as Native? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Might a brown-skinned Latino person (who is almost always an actual biological descendant of long-ago Indigenous people) already fit well into a stereotypical “Native American” phenotype, especially by adding some beads or feathers? What about a Chinese American who wants to claim Indigenous North American identity? I’ve seen a case like that in my own personal life. Not all false or exaggerated claims to Indigeneity involve “race shifting.” Some people’s racializations remain present and salient to others in society despite any North American Native claims. They can’t really shift. For others, their racialization is malleable and does not require such a significant “shift.” They don’t need to shift much at all.

The fact that Indigeneity or better yet Dakota-ness, Cree-ness, or Cherokee-ness are not races, they are Peoplehoods that intersect with race, complicates the “race shifting” idea. We also have actual Native people who look all kinds of ways: my cousin before he cut his hair and especially when he danced at the pow-wow looked like a stereotype of a plains Native. There’s a picture of him on a postcard (featured in this essay) with his black braids and regalia. We also have actual Native people in our families who look racially white or Black. Not that they can’t also produce some beautiful regalia and cut some good fancy dance moves in the pow-wow arena. My white looking uncle was a champion dancer in his day. My niece who is Black and raised by multi-racial kin, also dances beautifully and is a typically chauvinistic TallBear. I have no trouble personally labeling such people as a white Dakota or Black Dakota, for example. Both their racializations and their Peoplehoods are important aspects of who they are and how they are able to move (or not) through the world. Of course, I pay attention to how people label themselves so as not to get into fights, but I think seeing Peoplehood as just that (as not a race), but as intersecting with race is the truest way to see things and I try to emphasize that in my language.

Finally, it must be said that the history of how “red” is racialized, contributes to the robustness of “race shifting” among white people. One can read Sturm and Leroux for an in-depth study of how Euro-American race concepts have worked historically to enable whiteness to absorb red, thus allowing whites to claim both and also allowing some “red” people to claim both. On the other hand, whiteness refuses Blackness and this means that race shifting between Black and white has been made more difficult than shifts between white and red. In fact, while marriage was heavily policed and outlawed between whites and Black people, it was often encouraged by the white supremacist state between white and red people. Although Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug sure tested the solidity of the Black/white racial line recently, it is interesting to note that they were very quickly called out publicly and widely condemned for their white race shifting to Black. However, high-profile cases of white people who race shift to “Native American” (Ward Churchill and Andrea Smith come to mind) tend to get defended for YEARS by both non-Natives and even many Natives ourselves in the face of compelling evidence of their false claims. My theory is that this has everything to do with the fact that redness is viewed as absorbable by whiteness while again, Black and white are defined as a binary condition. Some of the same institutions or individuals that were quick to condemn Dolezal or Krug were also either silent on or defending Andrea Smith all over social media. Churchill’s race shifter outing happened before the social media age. I could give you specific examples of those across the racial spectrum, including Native people, who demonstrated double standards related to these cases, but I’m not interested in being dogpiled on Twitter. You’ll have to be curious forever.

Why So Many False Indigenous Claims?

In closing, I don't think most of the people who make unsubstantiated or exaggerated claims to being Cherokee, Métis, “Native American,” or another Indigenous category are being deliberately deceitful. I think their claims to be us stem from at least two fundamental colonial problematic ideas:

1)    First, false claimants to Indigenous identity are not always or even usually simply lying. I often think of them as suffering more from a national delusion rather than consciously lying, although I’m sure a minority of would-be race shifters are that cynical. But I have the impression that most of them base their claims to Indigeneity on a pervasive settler-state myth that many families in the US and Canada have taken up: the story of having a long-ago “Indian in the family tree.” This mythological narrative then gets combined with a misguided definition (because they have no actual lived Indigenous relations) of what it is to be Cherokee or Métis, “Native” or Indigenous. Their definition favours ancestry (actual or alleged) in contradistinction to Indigenous peoples’ much more complex definitions of ourselves. Tribes or Indigenous nations are two things: extended kinship networks or sets of relations both in contemporary and historical times, and we are self-governing entities. Most US Americans and Canadians have little understanding of this complexity. That leads to the common conflation of an ancestral claim no matter how distant, vague, or unsubstantiated with an Indigenous identity claim. I write about these differences in definitions at length in my 2013 Social Studies of Science article, “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity.” I also address internal controversies in Indigenous nation citizenship in my 2011 Aboriginal Policy Studies article cited above, “The Political Economy of Tribal Citizenship in the US: Lessons for Canadian First Nations?”

2)    Second, by observing the race shifting or pretendian phenomenon closely for years, and studying it in relation to DNA testing, it is clear to me that many false claimants of Indigenous identity suffer from a second nationalist colonial delusion. That is, they mostly believe as settler-state citizens that they have unquestionable moral and legal rights to occupy Indigenous representations and identities just as their nation states claim moral and legal right to occupy stolen Indigenous land. Again, I am not saying their feelings or thoughts are conscious. How many US and Canadian citizens actually question their nation-states’ legal rights to occupy these stolen lands? Their lack of questioning isn’t solely due to their lack of treaty history, although that might help. It’s also due to their indoctrination into US and Canadian settler state exceptionalism. Challenging nation state citizens’ claims to be us, to occupy our identities is as daunting as challenging their states’ claims that they have the right to occupy stolen land.

Most non-Native people, be they in universities, the corporate workplace, government, or the military are simply unqualified to determine who is and is not “Native American,” “Indigenous,” or Cherokee. In addition, we Indigenous people do not always spot a race shifter either. Off the top of my head, I can think of several people in my life—a friend, a fellow student, and a colleague who fooled me. I might have assumed they were a bit disconnected, but I used to be loath to assume someone was actually fabricating their Indigenous claims. It’s just so unbelievable, right? I’ve been burned, watch many others get burned, and I’ve learned to be more careful.

Most of us need to get more educated about how widespread this problem is and the damage it causes. False “identity” claims enable further claiming and appropriation of land and resource rights, cultural access, “minority” business set-asides, scholarships, university admissions, and jobs. In addition, there is what I have referred to in another essay as “structural trickle-down” when “non-Indigenous people with non-Indigenous community standpoints ris[e] through the ranks to represent us and theorize Indigenous peoplehood, sovereignty, and (anti-)colonialism. These people become ‘thought leaders,’ institutional decision-makers, and policy advisors to governmental leaders with regulatory and economic power over our peoples. They then shape academic and public discourse about who we allegedly are, what our lives allegedly look like, and what they think should be done about and to us.” The material damage done to Indigenous Peoples from race shifting is very real.

New Introduction for Readers and Listeners

My Critical Polyamorist blog that I began writing in 2013 is largely dormant now. I could no longer keep my nonmonogamy analyses separate from everything else I am thinking and writing about. Thus, I will occasionally migrate content from the Critical Polyamorist to here with the added benefit of Substack’s audio/podcast option.

All of the work that I do, be it interrogating certain genomic and other scientific activities, interrogating compulsory monogamy and marriage, or interrogating assumptions about "nature," is really about interrogating the violently imposed worldviews and structures of the Eurocentric settler-colonial state. This is why I decided to gather and link different topics together under the broader umbrella of this Unsettle newsletter. Unsettle is dedicated to unsettling the narratives and assumptions of settler-colonial thinkers and structures through an examination of Indigenous affairs, cultural politics, and decolonial thought and initiatives across different but ultimately related topics and fields.

At the end of this post, I will note any factual updates since this piece was first written and posted in July 2014 when I lived in Austin, Texas. I now live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Of course, my thinking on this topic has evolved a bit since this post was originally written, but I have not revised it to reflect more updated nuance or terminology. My thinking today largely adheres to these words as I first wrote them.

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Several evenings ago, I attended a class and conversation on open relationships at a feminist sex shop in an increasingly trendy area of my mid-Continent city. The class was for the open relationship curious, or beginners. Although I’ve been at this for about nineteen months, I’m still a beginner. My fabulous fellow WOC (woman of color) sex educator friend, Divina, led the course. She also does community activism on a range of other social issues that entangle and go beyond topics of sexuality. In this largely white, middle-class poly community, where I shy away from poly group events because I feel like a cultural outsider, I willingly submit to Divina’s skilled, effusive, and politically sophisticated leadership. Like me, she thinks about the role of compulsory monogamy in propping up a heteronormative, patriarchal, and colonial society. I can jump right in with her—into the politically deepest part of a conversation on this stuff and she’s right there with me. Plus she’s got years more on-the-ground experience in open relationships than I do. This particular class was aimed at a more general audience, however, tackling issues that many Poly 101 classes do—namely handling jealousy and the kind of never-ending communication that is a hallmark of healthy polyamory.

While the heightened racial and cultural diversity at this meeting was encouraging (yay, feminist sex shop!), another cultural bias nonetheless loomed large at this event. That is the couple-centric culture that pervades our city’s polyamory scene, and our broader society. Coupledom is often the foundational assumption that anchors many polyamory discussions. Topics for conversation at this class included WHY (open the “primary” relationship)? And then ground rules (for the couple) to consider: WHO (can and cannot be a candidate for an additional relationship—mutual friends? Exes)? WHAT (kinds of sex with others does the couple agree is okay)? You get the drift. As a “single poly” person I sat there feeling feisty and thinking “What, are we single polys just out here populating the world to sexually and emotionally serve individuals in couples?!” We get the “honor” of being on lists of appropriate partners, eligible “secondaries”? Or not? Our bodies and hearts and desires get to be the objects of couples’ rules about what’s allowed. Or not? It’s easy to feel ancillary in this type of poly scene, a sort of “snap on” component to a more permanent—a more legitimate—entity.No doubt, many polyamorous people in primary relationships struggle against hierarchy between that primary relationship and outside relationships. After all, the structure of the couple allows only so much. The language of primary and secondary only allows so much! Even in a polyamorous worldview that seeks to undo so many of the repressions and exclusions of monogamy, the normativity of the couple itself goes unquestioned by far too many polyamorous people. Yet its primacy in our society is engendered of the same institutions and unquestioned values that produce the monogamy we resist. Like monogamy, the couple entity as central to the nuclear family is bound up with the sex negativity that polyamorous people battle as we argue for and live lives in which sex and love are not viewed in such finite terms (although time certainly is) and thus not “saved” for only one other person. Like monogamy, the couple (especially when legally married), is legitimated and rewarded at every turn—U.S. health insurance eligibility, clearer child custody arrangements, tax filing benefits, and general public recognition and validation. In our society this type of arrangement is assumed as the logical end point, what we are all looking for or should be looking for. One of my favorite bloggers, SoloPoly, has an excellent post on this “relationship escalator” (the expected progression—first meeting, courtship, sex, presenting as a couple in public, intimate exclusivity, establishing a routine together, commitment defined by these steps, culminating in legal marriage that is supposed to last until one person dies). SoloPoly also has a second related post on “couple privilege” and a guest post on couple-centric polyamory, which links to the Secondary’s Bill of Rights. I’m posting that one on my refrigerator!

The fight for recognition of same-sex marriage also testifies to the pervasive couple-centricity of our culture. The dyad, for so long, opposite sex and now increasingly also same sex, is portrayed as the fundamental unit of love and family. It is a key structure used to try and gain what should be fundamental human and civil rights for all of our citizens. I am reminded of biology textbooks that describe the gene as “the fundamental unit of life,” an instance of gene fetishism in which molecules come to stand simplistically for much more complex social-biological relations, for nature and nurture that actually shape one another in all kinds of interesting and unpredictable ways.

In addition to genetic essentialism, we have in our culture couple essentialism. We fetishize the couple making it stand at the heart of love and family, which are actually the product of much more complex social-biological relations. The (monogamous) couple and narrower notions of family have a hard time containing and often sustaining the great complexity of relations that we humans feel and forge as we attempt to connect with one another throughout life.

As with genes, I am not saying the couple produces only myths and master narratives. Like molecular sequences, there is sometimes beauty and profoundness in what the couple produces. But just as genes do not alone embody the enormity of “life” (despite the assertions of too many scientists and pop culture more generally) neither should the “couple” and its offshoot “nuclear family” embody in its most essential form the enormity of human love, physical desire, and family. A final note on same sex marriage: gays don’t always do marriage like straights expect them to—to give but one example of many, their greater acceptance of ethical non-monogamy. I see this as another upside of marriage equality in addition to it being the right thing to do for same sex couples. From this non-monogamist’s point of view it may help us revise marriage into a less repressive institution.Of course, it was not always so that the (monogamous) couple ideal reigned. In Public Vows: A History of Marriage and Nation, Nancy Cott argues with respect to the U.S that the Christian model of lifelong monogamous marriage was not a dominant worldview until the late nineteenth century, that it took work to make monogamous marriage seem like a foregone conclusion, and that people had to choose to make marriage the foundation for the new nation.” In The Importance of Being Monogamous, historian Sarah Carter also shows how “marriage was part of the national agenda in Canada—the marriage ‘fortress’ was established to guard the [Canadian] way of life.” At the same time that monogamous marriage was solidified as ideal and central to both U.S. and Canadian nation building, Indigenous peoples in these two countries were being viciously restrained both conceptually and physically inside colonial borders and institutions that included reservations/reserves, residential schools, and churches and missions all designed to “save the man and kill the Indian.” Part of saving the Indians from their savagery meant pursuing the righteous monogamous, couple-centric, nuclear-family institution. Land tenure rights were attached to marriage in ways that tied women’s economic well-being to that institution.Indeed, the nuclear family is the most commonly idealized alternative to the tribal/extended family context in which I was raised. As for many Indigenous peoples, prior to colonization the fundamental Indigenous social unit of my people was the extended kin group, including plural marriage. With hindsight I can see that my road to ethical non-monogamy began early in my observations in tribal communities of mostly failed monogamy, extreme serial monogamy, and disruptions to nuclear family. Throughout my growing up, I was subjected by both whites and Natives ourselves to narratives of shortcoming and failure—descriptions of Native American “broken families,” “teenage pregnancies,” “unmarried mothers,” and other “failed” attempts to paint a white, nationalist, middle class veneer over our lives. I used to think it was the failures to live up to that ideal that turned me off, and that’s why I ran for coastal cities and higher education—why I asserted from a very early age that I would never get married. Now I see that I was suffocating under the weight of the concept and practice of a normative middle-class nuclear family, including heteronormative coupledom period.I was pretty happy as a kid in those moments when I sat at my grandmother’s dining room table with four generations and toward the end of my great-grandmother’s life FIVE generations. We would gather in her small dining room with it’s burnt orange linoleum and ruffled curtains, at the table beside the antique china cabinet, people overflowing into the equally small living room—all the generations eating, laughing, playing cards, drinking coffee, talking tribal politics, and eating again. The children would run in and out. I would sit quietly next to my grandmothers hoping no one would notice me. I could then avoid playing children’s games and listen instead to the adults' funny stories and wild tribal politics. Couples and marriages and nuclear families got little play there. The collectives—both our extended family and the tribe—cast a much wider, more meaningful, and complexly woven net. The matriarch of our family, my great-grandmother, was always laughing. She would cheat at cards and tell funny, poignant stories about my great-grandfather who died two decades before. Aunts and uncles would contribute their childhood memories to build on those stories. My mother would often bring the conversation back to tribal or national politics. A great-grandchild might have been recognized for some new creative, academic, or athletic accomplishment. The newest baby would be doted on as a newly arrived human who chose this family. The Mom might be 18 or 20 and unmarried and would have help, and she would be told to go back to school, or find a career track to better her life for her baby.Too many in my family faced life choices more restricted than mine are now. Others were simply unwilling to sacrifice a life lived daily among extended family and tribe, as I have done. From where I stand it looks like my most of my extended family members have more security in that small town family and tribal community, or in the coherent, densely-populated “urban Indian” community in which I spent part of my childhood, than they do in Euro-centric traditions of nuclear family and marriage. On the other hand, my security and primary partnership is the educational and professional escalator that I ride and climb to ever more opportunities in high-up cities. Paradoxically, in seeking security outside of one colonial imposition—marriage and nuclear family (although I also tried that for a good while and wasn’t so skilled at it)—I chose a highly individualistic path that enmeshes me in different sets of colonial institutions: all of those corporate, nonprofit, government, and academic institutions in which I have worked. I also have a global Indigenous and professional network that brings tremendous meaning to my life. But individuals among them are rarely here at night when I need someone to share words, laughter, food and touch with. I need to build some sort of extended kin group here in this city where I live. I doubt that coupledom (mine or others) combined with “outside” relationships will ever suffice in this context. Building something more collective is my desire and my challenge. Despite my focus on couple-centricity in Polyamorous World, some polyamorous people refer to their intimate networks—their extended made families as “tribes.” But even those individuals are an ill fit for me for cultural reasons I’ve written about in earlier posts, ISO Feminist (NDN) Cowboys and Poly, Not Pagan, and Proud. I learn especially open communication lessons from Polyamorous World, but I’ve made few real friends there. I look more to Indigenous peoples for partial models, and I continue to seek non-Indigenous people in this city who don’t fit the existing polyamorous cultural mode, but who are committed to open relationships. Alas, it is exhausting being a minority within a minority. But I can never resist a challenge.One final insight: Indigenous colleagues that I admire, speak and write of “decolonizing love,” for example the Nitâcimowin blog of University of Victoria graduate student Kirsten Lindquist (Cree-Métis). I obviously love her focus of decolonial analysis on relationships. It is a generative framework for pushing us to articulate a better world. But my slightly cynical aging self doesn’t quite believe that we can decolonize, meaning to withdraw from or dismantle colonialism. We live inside a colossal colonial structure that took most of the world’s resources to build. Does not every maneuver against colonialism occur in intimate relationship to its structures? There is no outside. Deep inside the shadows and shifting (cracking?) walls of that edifice I don’t anymore see my family’s and tribe’s failures at lasting monogamy and nuclear family as failure. I see us experimenting, working incrementally with tools and technologies that we did not craft combined with indigenous cultural templates in any open space we can find to build lives that make any sense to us at all.As ever,The Critical Polyamorist

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August 2021 update: Kirsten Lindquist is now a PhD student in the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta where I teach. She is also my co-producer and a co-founder of the Edmonton-based storytelling show, Tipi Confessions. You can read more about her here.

Note: This post is a write-up of initial observations as both a “CMC Mom” and an Indigenous anthropologist of all things settler during a few days in Leadville, Colorado.

I like this little town, to my surprise. I am here because my daughter just enrolled in Colorado Mountain College (CMC). I liked it even more when I checked out of the historic Old West hotel after my first night here. That hotel was recently bought by new owners and, by the sounds of it, is in the process of being bougied up. Disclaimer: the quirky local guy working the front desk was super helpful in terms of local recommendations and even went outside and checked that my car was not illegally parked. I couldn’t face going down to check the parking signs again after having climbed three flights of steep, too-narrow stairs with those old-timey bannisters that only come up to mid thigh, which seems weird for all those miners and tycoons who were probably stumbling around here drunk in the 1880s. Maybe they were all really short? I am recovering from a knee injury from believing I could do a trampoline workout, and those stairs were killers. Also, every other guest seemed to like slamming doors and talking loudly in the hallways of the reportedly haunted hotel that has no soundproofing (p.s. I am working on another Unsettle post about haunted places where I have lived.) I am happy to report that I did not make the acquaintance of any Old West white spirits there. Although maybe it was spirits slamming doors starting at 5:45 am that morning?

On my second day in Leadville, I moved to a roadside hotel at the end of town where the bricks and mortar historic buildings and old wooden houses with porches and turrets—some dilapidated, some gentrified—have turned to trailer houses, reminiscent of places I lived as a child in Aberdeen, South Dakota or in Sioux City, Iowa for a brief stint. I saw a dark-haired young woman outside on her trailer patio with kids’ bikes on it, on her phone, and smoking a cigarette with her hair up. She was wearing a wrinkled, but cute peasant top and skirt. She was barefoot or wearing flip-flops. Despite my long and circuitous road since the 1970s from those trailer houses, I feel more comfortable on this end of town. My current hotel has seen better days. It has potholes and cracks in the parking lot and looks a little run-down from the outside. But this room from which I write is very clean, the bed comfortable, and I’ve had three quiet night’s sleep here. It even has mint green and pink bathroom linoleum like one of my aunts would’ve had in the 1980s. I especially like the friendly, not bougie people working the front desk who are also local residents, I assume, and who directed me to the nice little laundromat in town with good machines and interesting characters: dusty looking backpacker types and equally dusty, quiet mountain guys with rez-looking dogs.

I have spent the last few high-altitude, out-of-breath days shopping and unloading my little hatchback of several loads of my daughter’s personal items, dorm room extras, food, and extra cleaning supplies to last the whole year (hint, hint, Babygirl—my nickname for her). She’s attending Colorado Mountain College because they have outdoor recreation leadership programs, other trades and certifications, and a two-year environmental studies academic track meant to transfer to four-year universities. When her dad and I sent our mountain girl to a three-week Outward Bound trip in the Sierra Nevadas a couple years ago, she screamed with anticipation as she read the online trip descriptions and again when she was packing her camping gear before her flight west. I ordered this t-shirt because I am surprisingly that Mom, and I am so excited for how excited she is to be here.

One lesson I’ve learned is, be careful where you raise your kids. Formative lands, waters, and experiences matter. I am a prairie flatlander. But my daughter’s father and I raised her in or near mountains in Arizona, California, and Virginia. She won’t tolerate the prairies for long. My daughter and I both agree that Leadville reminds us of Ukiah, California, the Mendocino County seat where we lived on-and-off when she was between five and ten years old. Her dad worked for the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, which is headquartered in Ukiah. Leadville is simultaneously a little more downscale (that seems to be changing) and a little more touristy, and it has mining history more front and centre, not only on the internet, but in its main street businesses. Leadville also does not have Ukiah’s wine country vibe, with the exception of a similar wealth disparity between tourists and local workers. But the combination of mountain country people, the particular type of racial diversity in Leadville (minus small Native communities), and more hipstery outdoorsy types recall Mendocino County.

When we were in California, I was on faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. So we also lived in Berkeley for a few years during which I grew increasingly agitated. I knew that part of my problem was landscape, but another significant contribution to my displeasure was the culture of the Bay Area with its pervasive (by my prairie standards) Indigenous erasure. Despite its mountainous topography, I felt calmer and less disoriented when we lived in Mendocino County. I knew back then that Ukiah was more comfortable for me in part because there was a visible Indigenous presence. While they were not my particular People, and were in many ways culturally different, there was still a common social language related to our colonial resistances and survivals. Small reservations dot Mendocino and nearby Lake County and all of northern California.

I have learned over many years of living in and traveling to many places both in North America and globally that I crave prairie skies. I cannot go years without them. But I also need as much or more to be where Native people are not only present as distinct nations/Peoples, but where we are also visibly present as individuals or as extended families with everyday lives. I cannot abide anymore living in places where Indigenous people(s) are predominantly vanished, mythological ghosts in the minds of the local population. It’s not that I need to engage in “traditional Native” activities all of the time, but rather I need to see us as alive and present. That is my formative experience growing up between the urban Indian communities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and Dakota reservations in eastern South Dakota. Sure, I grew up going to ceremonies or to pow-wows (wacipi as we call them now with Dakota language reclamation), but more often, we Natives ran into each other in the Pizza Ranch, at the post office, at the tribe’s mini-mart, or in a high school classroom.

To return to Leadville, I have yet to learn how Indigenous people are seen and viewed in and around this little mountain town, which is coincidentally in another Lake County. Where as Ukiah is in Pomo territory with Native communities within and surrounding the town, Leadville is in Ute traditional territory. But the Ute tribes are today all four to five hour drives away from Leadville. I haven’t done real research on Native history in this area, but I am sure I’ll learn more while our daughter is here in school. Late last week, I got obsessed for a few hours with Wikipedia sites on Leadville history and the biographies of some of its colourful (white) historic characters. The internet dive helped me figure out who is in some of the old photographs I’ve seen on saloon and restaurant walls in Leadville. The little bits of history were interesting, and unsurprisingly erased Indigenous presence from this landscape.

Why then am I liking this little town in a way that feels like my affinity for Ukiah? Despite its high mountain terrain and the lack of visible Indigenous presence, I already hinted at a reason that has taken me longer to understand. I have an acute distaste for the particular kind of settler society pretentiousness with which I have had much contact, being highly formally educated. That is, the implicitly anti-Indigenous and anti-class-analysis form of “multiculturalist” politics that conditions “liberal” settler cities and their prestige institutions. Leadville, like Ukiah, is not that. Admittedly, I am just fine with Dakota community prestige politics. We can be culturally pretentious. But our cultural elitism isn’t really comparable to the liberal settler-colonial politics I’ve experienced at the prestige institutions I’ve attended, taught, and been invited to speak at. I’ll touch on Dakota ethnocentrism, I am sure, in future posts.

To return to Berkeley and the Bay Area and to other prestige institutions in so-called liberal cities, I don’t, of course, mean to uniformly critique everyone affiliated with such places. I have had colleagues and students at UC Berkeley and in other such places who are not insufferable elitists. But overall, and to use Berkeley as one example, I got weary of all the implicit or explicit Bay Area and UC Berkeley worship—as if it’s some uniquely enlightened geography and “excellent” institution. Really? By whose standards? Enlightened for whom and at whose expense? Indigenous genocide is daily erased there and yet it is a foundational energy upon which that campus and those cities are built, as with all of these colonial cities.

In all of my geographic relocations, I have figured out something that is ultimately simple: I prefer to live where those who want to forget or justify genocide and land theft must be explicit in their Indigenous dismissal because we are still a visible threat. It doubly angers me to endure dismissal from those in places where Indigenous peoples are more curiosity than presence and where people are smugly self-satisfied that they are not party to the elimination. Whether in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve studied, or in Berkeley, too many people comfort themselves that they are actually enlightened and excellent, and certainly less a part of the Indigenous elimination problem than are all of the non-enlightened troglodytes in the backward and less prestigious places. The relatively few Natives at UC Berkeley while I was there were ignorable both in everyday and in official opportunities for acknowledgement and remembrance. A couple of years before I left, an administrator in charge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion issued an 80-page report on the state of diversity among faculty, students, and staff at Berkeley, but after the first mention of the U.S. census racial categories, Native peoples were never mentioned again. I can laugh diabolically now. Back then I was just enraged.

To return to Leadville and my concerns with Indigenous erasure, I briefly Googled for a Colorado Mountain College Indigenous land or territorial acknowledgement. I didn’t find one. I hope they are working on it. Land acknowledgements are most provocative and educational where they are most surprising, where they have not yet become de rigueur. CMC knows whose land they sit on as indicated by the fact that tribal members from one of the Ute tribes pay CMC’s lowest in-district tuition rate. I’ll make it an on-going small project to dig into local Indigenous history and relations over the next couple of years while our daughter is in school there. I’m headed back to Dakota homelands for a couple of weeks, but I’ll be back in Leadville after that for a quick visit on my way back to Canada. I am sure I’ll do additional future CMC Indigenous Anthro Mom Observations as I continue to analyze the various geographies of Indigenous elimination in this land currently occupied by the USA.

Thanks for reading or listening.

Note: Tonight’s post is an effort to write something not involving research and peer review, a goal I had when starting Unsettle. I wanted to use this platform to get ideas down on the e-page more quickly.

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Much has shifted since March of 2020 in my polyamorist practice. Back then I was in one relaxed, long-distance relationship, two on-again, off-again relationships with partners in Edmonton and Calgary, and my one steady and deeply attached relationship with my main partner in Edmonton. He and I celebrated our three-year anniversary in April of this year. Our relationship just seems to get better as time goes on. I’ve never had such an easily vulnerable and affectionate romantic relationship. The only persons I’ve doted on as much have been the children in my life. And no, he does not act like a child. He’s intellectually and physically competent, self-reliant, and impressively mature.

All four of my pre-Covid relationships are or were with people in open marriages. At my age, it’s my experience that many of the good prospects are married. I am too, legally, although we live a couple thousand miles apart. He and I communicate almost everyday, see each other 2-3 times a year, and remain amicable kin and closely consultative co-parents to our sweet and impressive eighteen-year-old daughter. My long-distance relationship lives in Texas. Due to the pandemic, I haven’t seen him since January 2020. We communicate regularly. We have an affectionate and easy relationship, albeit sporadic. I first met him in the Fall of 2014, about nine months before I moved from Austin to Edmonton. He’s a total sweetheart who used to send me a song a day until I couldn’t keep up with the volume of music he sent me and his eclectic taste. He just got over Covid despite being double vaxxed! Thankfully, he seems to have recovered well in his house out on the Texas plains.

Edmonton is a different and, in my experience, more difficult polyamory scene than was Austin. Polyamory is so common there that I hear it is a thing for dating profiles there to specify “no polyamorists!” Edmonton is much more conservative with polyamory still being unusual. At least, I think that’s still the case. I dropped out of the scene in the months before Covid-19 hit. It was unrewarding. The polyamorists in my age range were few and far between, or deep into kink, and I am vanilla. One partner who I was quite sweet on broke up with me after a year because his wife decided she couldn’t handle the open marriage. She offered divorce or close the marriage. That sucked. They weren’t out to their children or community, a not uncommon situation in Edmonton. So i wasn’t totally surprised. This is a chief difference from Austin where my polyamorist partners were open with their children if they had them. But the Indigenous presence in Austin is light and the gun presence heavy, so I moved 2300 miles north to a place that felt more comfortable to me.

What has shifted since pre-pandemic? I dropped the two on-again, off-again local relationships and am not pressed to travel to Texas. Something emotionally and physically has shifted and I am not sure if it is the pandemic, on-coming menopause, and/or an intellectual shift toward building community beyond polyamorous, romantic relating. In one sense, it doesn’t matter what the reasons are. What matters is that I pay attention and do what feels right and what I can manage emotionally and physically.

Has my risk tolerance changed? Perhaps. Trained in environmental planning and having worked with environmental risk assessment professionals, and also safer sex educators, I am attentive to risk reduction. I acknowledge that there are no zero risk scenarios in everyday life. I contracted Covid-19 in December 2020 and recovered well as far as I can tell. I am double vaxxed. I hated crowds pre-Covid and continue to prefer solitude or very small social gatherings. That, combined with my Covid and vaccination status, make me not too worried about Covid. Yet, the two relationships I gave up were with men in very public jobs—a pilot and a musician—who downplayed Covid-19 risk because they had to for their financial well-being and/or because they were already politically inclined that way. It was hard for me to discern if I was being risk-sensible or if their less risk-averse politics were getting to me. It doesn’t matter. I felt comfortable moving on from those relationships.

Second, it also crossed my mind that maybe my sex drive is declining, a noted menopausal symptom. But the physical part of my ongoing relationship has not waned, but evolved and deepened over its three years and three months duration. I’ll ignore the menopausal possibility for now. Perhaps it’s my emotional bandwidth that is declining, either due to Covid-19 or to the fact that I am aging and thinking more than ever about making kin and community that will sustain me and which I can sustain. I am focusing more on non-romantic relationships with made family. One polyamory mantra is “Love may be infinite, but time is limited.” So true. I had more limited emotional energy during the pandemic, and that continues.

The fourth possibility is that GOD FORBID I am feeling more monogamous. My daughter teases me that I am de-facto monogamous now. I take comfort in the fact that I am still open to the occasional, mutually-consensual conference fling with the age-appropriate, power-balanced, trusted, and chill conference acquaintance. That is, if I feel Covid-safe enough for such a gathering, which I do not. I am all talk and no action these days. I admit that de-facto monogamy has been a relief. There has been no regular STI testing, which I can manage emotionally, but I’m busy and it’s one more thing I don’t have to schedule. It’s also nice not to have to deal with the monogamist and heteronormative doctors and nurses at my clinic. Their assumptions and thinly-veiled surprise at my sexual frankness are annoying. Medical professionals need to GET WITH IT. They are knowingly or unwittingly reinforcing an oppressive compulsory monogamy system.

The next task is to read beyond settler polyamory literature as I craft this new orientation and a language to describe it. I am on sabbatical this coming academic year. I have a stack of about 30 books and as many articles from cultures and relational practices globally that I will dive into in the coming twelve months as I finish my next book that is tentatively called “Disrupting Sex and Nature: an Indigenous Relational Logic.” I hope to figure out where my relational ethic and practice is moving. “Polyamory” doesn’t quite capture it. But I knew that from the beginning of this journey. Stay tuned, and thank you for reading and for listening. Good luck to all of you on your relational journeys.

White Bullies Story #1

In the past six months, I’ve been thinking of an incident that probably happened in the summer of 1979. I was about 10 years old. I am pretty sure it was my summer before sixth-grade. I simultaneously laugh out loud and am filled with embarrassment when I think of that day.

My mom dropped us four kids off at Lake Phalen in St. Paul, Minnesota where we lived—and where I am this month, visiting family. She probably went to work or ran errands. If I was ten, then my sisters were nine and seven, and our brother was six. That was normal in the 1970s and 80s. No helicopter moms for us. I remember a few white kids had moms like that. They tended to wear color-coordinated Dr. Scholl’s wooden bottom sandals with their plain and tidy outfits. They had their hair cut in bobs sometimes with a slight feathering like Princess Diana. They seemed bland, overly-attentive, and mildly oppressive to me. There was a “beach” at Lake Phalen. You know, those half-pebbles and dirt, half-sand beaches at little lakes that dot the north and middle of the so-called USA by the thousands. They usually have lots of weeds that scratch your feet and legs if you swim in them, and the fish that come out of them taste like lake down to their many tiny bones.

We definitely would have swum and my youngest brother and sister probably played in the sand. I don’t remember the details of the day until the embarrassing incident. Our mom was due to pick us up later in the day. Judging by the angles and color of daylight in my memory, the incident happened between 5 and 6 pm. Our mom would have been picking us up just before supper as we called it then.

I don’t remember how the white boy of about 12 years old approached us. I do remember that he looked like Danny Partridge from the TV show about the singing mom and siblings, The Partridge Family. For the next 45 minutes “Danny Partridge” proceeded to gaslight us. I would have said “brainwash” back then.

I recall red-headed Danny ordering all four of us like little ducklings (although I wasn’t much smaller than him) to keep walking in a line around the lake. He said his older brothers were off in the trees watching. Of course, we couldn’t see them. He told us if we didn’t keep walking where he told us to go, his brothers would come running out of the tree grove and beat us up. Lake Phalen is over three miles around and our mother was due any minute to pick us up in the parking lot.

I often laugh when I think of that day. But in that moment, we four siblings were scared. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that when we weren’t living in the country on our Dakota reservation, we lived in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in sometimes rougher neighborhoods. In the eyes of whites, my mom was a “single mother,” but we had a lot of support from my grandmothers. When we lived off reservation in the Cities, we lived in places like the Little Earth housing project in South Minneapolis. Or we lived in a walk-up on Van Buren Avenue in Frogtown (then a working class, poor white and POC neighborhood) in St. Paul.

We lived above the Native American GED program office that my mother directed. In my childhood, children ran feral through urban neighborhoods along with the dogs, and were regularly subject to the whims of neighborhood bullies. Sometimes that involved physical beatings. I remember frequently crossing a dangerous urban street to get to third grade in order to avoid the cement walking bridge that had dark corners and mean big kids hiding, waiting to chase and beat the younger kids that came by. I was not a fast runner.

To us, this bigger white kid at Lake Phalen with the imaginary brothers was a conceivable threat. I remember feeling so sure that his bravado was an indication of actual danger. I went where he told me to go, and my younger siblings followed. In those days, I didn’t quite understand the male and sometimes white supremacist move of making oneself big and loud and assuming the rightful authority to just order people around. Do they do this in order to compensate for who knows what? A lack of real power? Maybe he was a lonely kid who got beaten on himself. Maybe he was just a mean little jerk. I mostly remember being hot, tired, hungry, and worried that our mother would have the cops out there looking for us. After walking about a mile, it was suddenly time to make a break. We were away from the trees, and we figured if his brothers were there, we might make the parking lot where my mother should be waiting (fingers crossed) before they caught us.

We ran. He didn’t come after us. No one did.

We got to the parking lot out of breath and relieved, and my mother was pissed. “Where the hell have you been!?” We told her the whole story with drama and urgency.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? There are FOUR of you. You could have taken him.” She was not sympathetic, but incredulous that we let some white kid force us to walk one-third of the way around the lake.    

White Bullies Story #2

Midway through sixth grade, after Christmas of 1979, I decided I’d had enough of gritty urban life and I asked to once again move back to Granny’s house. My great-grandmother lived on our reservation in southeastern South Dakota in a small two-bedroom house with very few doors, and many books. There were no neighborhood bullies, just the neighborhood dogs who never knew a leash and who would chase extra hard when I rode my bike on small-town streets, my legs on the handlebars to avoid getting bit.

I lived with Granny for the next several years. As luck would have it, I found my white bullies on the junior high playground of the reservation border town. They were three middle-class white girls and all three were cheerleaders. That part cracks me up. It sounds like a 1980s teenager film. Jeanie, Jackie, and Shelby (names changed to protect the not-so-innocent) harassed me daily on the playground after lunch. One spring afternoon when there were still patches of dirty snow on the ground and the prairie wind was blowing as it often does, I was standing off alone for some reason. I did have a core group of friends, but I was apart from them. The three cheerleaders decided to pounce, not physically, but emotionally. They saw me alone and recruited a go-between to give me their message of hate, as if I didn’t already know it. They sent Tina, a girl in their grade, which was one above mine. I don’t remember the details of their message. But I saw red, as they say. Not because of whatever they said, but because they sent Tina. She was a short rocker-looking girl who also looked white, but she hung out with Natives mostly. She could sprint like a rabbit. I never knew if she was Native or white. But I had considered her, if not a friend, then a friendly. I liked her contradictions. And I knew she only came bearing the cheerleaders’ scornful words because she was intimidated by them. That was the final straw for me.

My usual tactic with their mocking was to stoically ignore them. I would summon all of my courage to walk silently past them, refuse to look at them as they huddled in a little group and laughed at me in the hallways or in the lunchroom. Man, my days were stressful. In retrospect, I understand that their derision of me might have been in part due to their confusion and perhaps even jealousy. Or maybe they were just mean girls. I was in many ways a small-town, timid Native kid who often kept quiet so as not to attract negative attention. I lived with my great-grandmother and great-aunt in a humble little house. We didn’t have a car. Granny never learned to drive. But because I occasionally lived in the more urbane Twin Cities and because my great-grandmother who didn’t have a lot of money would still spoil me and order some of my clothes from a higher-end catalog - I was the first person in my school to have the original Gloria Vanderbilt signature jeans. I don’t know if people who weren’t adolescents in 1980 can fully grasp what a fashion coup that was. The small-town kids in Wranglers and Lee jeans thought I dressed weird, or so I heard. I think mostly it was hard to assign me to some junior high social category box in our red/white racially divided town.

Let’s return to Tina. Mean girls coming after me was one thing, but them intimidating an otherwise kind girl into doing their dirty work seemed even more unethical. I just looked at Tina, then I turned toward the cheerleaders. I walked up to Jeanie, Jackie, and Shelby and let them have it verbally. My mouth, it turns out, is faster than my legs and tougher than my fists. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I do remember swearing at them and using the F-word for probably the first time in my life. I told them what I thought of them. Then I turned away and put one foot in front of the other with forced calm. I walked straight up the front steps into the old brick school building. I can still feel the prickles in my back when I think of it. My backside was waiting for the attack of the cheerleaders, for their collective weight on me. I walked and I waited for them to maul me, pull my hair and drag me to the ground. But I didn’t care. I’d had enough. I walked up the steps. I opened the heavy school doors, still no attack. I arrived in the school foyer and turned around to look back outside through the windows in the great doors. The cheerleaders were standing where I left them, their mouths hanging open. “Are you kidding me?” I thought. “That’s all I had to do?” I was so pissed at myself for being silent through a year of their relentless mocking. I had done it again, acted like that day at Lake Phalen.

Unlike with Danny Partridge, I didn’t fully believe what the cheerleaders told me. Yet I still struggled to wholly reject their words and judgement. I was in an internal battle when they daily assaulted my self-esteem. On one hand, I did not believe that we as Dakota people were culturally beneath whites as they would explicitly or implicitly tell us we were. I knew too much history. My family and our tribe made sure of that. I’d also been taught indirectly that I was an individual self within a broader Dakota people, and that was a worthy position to be in. I linked in my mind what I individually experienced as a seventh-grade Native girl in rural South Dakota to what happened to Dakota, Lakota, and other Native people in what became the states of South Dakota and Minnesota in 1862, 1887, 1890, and 1948. I knew my injuries were comparatively small next to those of my ancestors, yet my experience was in part shaped by that history. I also grew up in an era of American Indian Movement (AIM) activism in a part of the country that was at its epicenter. I got young a sense of the workings of structural and anti-Indigenous racism that enabled not only the theft of land, but ongoing settler cultural attempts to attack us as Peoples and as individuals. I was trying in my inexperienced child’s way to embody what my elders, who I trusted intellectually, told me to be true.

Back in 1980 at the age of 12, I did not, of course, have these complicated words to describe a structural versus individual analysis. But I remember clearly how I felt; I can describe it now. I trusted our People’s interpretation of our own history, yet I also felt unsure of myself individually. I still listened too much to the cacophony of white voices. It was hard to not believe at some level the words of white children who were born of the dominant power structure in my hometown and who had already learned themselves, and continued settler-colonial brainwashing.

But after that spring day in seventh grade, everything changed for me. I had publicly and assertively challenged the bullying. Simultaneously, I challenged the idea that challenging their power was too risky, that they were too formidable. After that, I was still afraid, but less so. I got even mouthier the next year in eighth grade. I was in the principal’s office almost daily for pushing back against the mocking with my own disparaging critique. Our soft-spoken and nerdy principal, it turns out, was my ally while the bullies among my classmates and some of my teachers were not. I would like to think I spoke “truth to power” as they say these days. In junior high, it seemed like those middle-class white kids and the teachers who permitted their bullying had a lot of power.

Every day over the past seven months, I’ve recalled Danny Partridge and the cheerleaders after years of not thinking about them. I thank them for hard lessons. It turns out, they prepared me for the current onslaught of gaslighters, and the institutional decision-makers who permit them.

White Bullies Story #3

My readers will know about the so-called Pretendians—those who falsely claim or exaggerate Native “identity” via false or often tenuous claims to Indigenous ancestry and affiliation. I’ve written, tweeted @KimTallBear, and podcasted extensively on this problem during the last seven months. Several major stories have broken about well-known people—a film director, a high-profile academic, and an artist—who for years claimed Indigenous identity, thus garnering lucrative employment and funding opportunities as well as social capital they might not otherwise have had. All three are now known to have fabricated their ancestry or wildly exaggerated their Indigenous affiliations.

Another recent breaking story involves an anonymous report challenging the Indigenous identities of six people affiliated with Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “Investigation into false claims to Indigenous identity at Queen’s University,” was published as a Google doc on June 7, 2021. The author(s) write in the introduction that “The report includes an analysis of six people currently associated with Queen’s University who, after extensive research, appear to be falsely claiming Indigenous identities (primarily “Algonquin”). It also raises significant doubts about the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation’s (AAFN) claims to represent an Indigenous membership.”

Queen’s University issued a statement a few days later that rejected the charges, and with it the widespread severity of this problem. But the heated debate about the Queen’s situation continued. On June 27, University World News published an article, “High stakes in Queen’s faculty Indigenous Status row,” that is among the most comprehensive takes I’ve seen in a non-Indigenous publication of the material implications of this widespread form of Indigenous appropriation. In another article published June 28 in Queen’s Gazette, soon-to-be Queen’s University Chancellor and high-profile Indigenous figure in Canada, Senator Murray Sinclair, was quoted: “It is clear that self-identification of Indigeneity no longer works…We must go beyond an honour system and include voices from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island.” We don’t know how hard Queen’s will ultimately tackle this problem, but they were clearly forced to do more than double-down on their initial denial that fraudulent claims to Indigenous affiliation are a problem.

Figuring out how to institute guidelines for Indigenous affiliation claims in faculty, staff, and student hiring and admissions that go beyond Indigenous self-identification is not easy. Especially when universities across Canada and the US are mostly run by white people who are unqualified to determine who is Indigenous in the course of hiring, student admissions, and funding. To date, universities have largely shown themselves to be unwilling and/or incapable of tackling this problem. In fact, many are culpable in growing the problem in the last forty years by uncritically forwarding “multiculturalism” discourse at the expense of more aggressive and materially-focused “affirmative action” policies. I wrote more about that problem in my June 14 Unsettle essay linked to in the notes below. I and others have explained that individuals and groups appropriating Indigenous “identity” (not a term I prefer, but one commonly used) is a final act of colonial appropriation.

I tweeted on June 22 a thread that I will recap here. I noted that “I don’t feel like most people who play Indian are being deliberately disingenuous.” But that does not mean that I give them a pass for their fabricated histories and lies. I have come to believe, by observing this phenomenon closely for years, and studying it in relation to DNA testing, that many false claimants of Indigenous identity suffer from a nationalist colonial delusion that they have as settler-state citizens unquestionable moral and sometimes legal rights to occupy Indigenous representations and identities just as their nation states claim moral and legal right to occupy stolen Indigenous land. How many US and Canadian citizens actually question their nation-states’ legal rights to occupy these stolen lands? Challenging their claims to BE us, to occupy our identities is similarly daunting.

Like with adolescent bullies on a white-dominated playground, it has seemed too risky to publicly confront race shifters and their accompanying resource appropriation. This is true despite decades-long whisper networks across Indigenous territories about such cases. Like the bullies of my childhood, I am sure the corruption on the societal play(ing Indian)ground is committed by people who truly believe they are morally justified when they harangue and patronize us into accepting the authority of their distant, individualistic (rather than collective and relational) ancestral descent narratives of “identity.” In such accounts, especially in the last several years of heightened (social)media attention to such cases, I’ve observed three narrative patterns that white-dominated cultural and governance institutions also help script and stage (also see TallBear 2013 and TallBear 2021).

1)    It’s all too complex and fluid: Paradoxically, while the playground bullies fetishize a long-ago or fabricated ancestor (i.e. a “one-drop rule”), they accuse us of “oversimplifying identity.” Indigeneity and within that tribal- or people-specific “identities” are supposedly just too “complex” for us to say anything definitive about them. Everything is “fluid.”

2)    Distant ancestry claims are the same as our stolen relatives’ claims: We are told when we question their generations-ago claims that we are simultaneously rejecting the repatriation of our close kin (i.e. the scooped and stolen generations), as if these two sets of distinct situations are the same. Indigenous people who push back are shouted down as nothing more than blood quantum savages who are too colonized to ascertain who we should claim. The scooped and stolen face formidable challenges, but they have the capacity to connect or reconnect when they have living kin and nation to remember and claim them. Non-Indigenous people underestimate Indigenous community collective memory and literal, physical archives.

3)    Indigenous communities are the perps while those who’ve lived as (usually) white are our victims: They encourage the idea that they are victims as much or more than those of us who don’t have to research an ancestor generations ago, but who actually come from living Indigenous families and communities. We are treated as if we Indigenous people and nations who have never not lived as Indigenous and who have lost almost all of the land and governing authority actually hold the power; instead those who for generations “hid” in whiteness are our supposed victims.

They relentlessly attack our focus on lived relations and substitute the dead ancestor figure (sometimes named, sometimes not) as the grounds for their Indigenous claims. They undermine our confidence. They cause us to question our own judgements, definitions, and understandings of our social realities. Some of them gain considerable material and social benefit while putting Indigenous people individually and structurally at financial, social, and emotional risk. They are, in effect, “gaslighting” us (Tobias and Joseph 2020).

Like my challenges to the cheerleaders and to Danny Partridge, this race shifter phenomenon has seemed for decades too formidable, too risky to openly and loudly challenge. But as I learned at the age of twelve, everything can change in one day, or perhaps in one year. We see case after case now breaking with Indigenous identity appropriators being researched and named by academics, report writers, investigative journalists and in well-researched social media in the US, Canada, and Australia.

Privileging Indigenous collectivity (both kinship and “nation”) and thus reclaiming close kin kidnapped and alienated from us by settler institutions that include residential schools, foster care, and Indian Act rules is quite different than allowing unfettered access to our collectives by people who come from generations who have lived as not Indigenous, most often with white privilege. If we adhere to social constructionist ideas more than biologically essentialist ideas, it seems safe to say that those who claim a long-ago Indigenous ancestor among tens, hundreds, or thousands of ancestors are actually constituted as other than Indigenous to these lands. Their narratives of “inclusion” are actually assertions of entitlement to Indigenous resources, which is yet more colonization.

But the time of reckoning with this final act of Indigenous appropriation might just have arrived. I keep hearing my mother’s voice in my head: “What the hell’s wrong with you? You can take them.”

Additional Background Reading and Listening (in addition to links in text)

Media Indigena podcast. “Contemplating the Consequences of Colonial Cosplay” (Pt. 1), Episode 245, February 24, 2021.

Media Indigena podcast. “Creating Culpability for Colonial Cosplay" (Pt.2), Episode 246, February 27, 2021.

Kim TallBear. “We are not your dead ancestors: Playing Indian and white possession.” Unsettle. June 14, 2021. Both text and audio here.

Kim TallBear. “Playing Indian Constitutes a Structural Form of Colonial Theft, and it Must be Tackled.” Unsettle. May 10, 2021. Audio here.

Heston Tobias and Ameil Joseph. “Sustaining Systemic Racism Through Psychological Gaslighting: Denials of Racial Profiling and Justifications of Carding by Police Utilizing Local News Media.” Race and Justice 10(4) (2020): 424-455.

This essay was given in an earlier iteration as a keynote at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) on June 9, 2021. Slight changes were made for word count and clarity.

Some of you will know my anthropology of science work represented in my book Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science that challenged twenty-first-century racial science and disputed genetic definitions of “Native American” identity. More recently, I bring my critiques of genetics, race, and whiteness to bear on a related problem. To put it bluntly, we are in the middle not only of a viral pandemic, but also a Pretendian Pandemic. “Pretendian” is of relatively recent coinage; it refers to individuals who make false or tenuous claims to Native “identity,” often via distant Indigenous ancestry. I put the term identity in scare quotes because as I frequently write and say of late, “identity is a poor substitute for relations.” It leans toward the individual and choice more than the collective, and it implies a property interest in said identity rather than necessarily requiring relations to exist.

Two social scientists, American, Circe Sturm, and Canadian, Darryl Leroux, have each written important book-length examinations about groups of white people who “race shift” in their terminology into self-defined Indigenous identities. In 2010, in Becoming Indian, Sturm wrote about whites across the US south who shift into an identification as Cherokee based on recent discovery or even undocumented suspicions of having a Cherokee ancestor. There are only three recognized Cherokee tribes, but race shifters have organized over 200 self-identified, so-called Cherokee organizations. The race shifters Sturm wrote about understood their whiteness as “guilt, loneliness, isolation, and a gnawing sense of racial, spiritual, and cultural emptiness.” In their search for fulfillment, they focused on their actual or perceived and very often “thin” Cherokee ancestral lines as informing their total identities. They sought “transcendence” and conversion from their whiteness (83 and 87). In 2019, in Distorted Descent, Leroux wrote about tens of thousands of French-descendant people, many in the eastern provinces of Canada and also in Vermont, who shift into an Indigenous identity based on discovering an Indigenous ancestor in their genealogies 300 to 375 years ago. Some have no documented Indigenous ancestry at all. Such individuals have also self-organized so-called Indigenous organizations or “nations” that have challenged actual Indigenous peoples’ resource rights and who have sued as Indigenous people themselves for hunting, fishing, and logging rights.

There are more high profile, documented cases, names, and dubious claims to Indigeneity that I could cite and share here in addition to those I have named—stories of reverse passing broken by major news outlets in the US and Canada in the last several years. They include individuals who have had lucrative and prestigious careers as writers, film directors, and academics, either with no documentable Indigenous ancestry or with an Indigenous ancestor or two who lived three to four centuries ago. In the centuries in between, they are descended from many generations of ancestors who lived as white. As I write this, an Investigation into false claims to Indigenous identity at Queen’s University was released earlier this week on June 7. It provides detailed publicly accessible genealogical documents for six academics and other people publicly claiming and benefiting professionally from Indigenous identification at the prestigious Ontario university.

Eighteenth-Century Revolutionary Indians as Prop and Hindrance to American Identity

The so-called pretendian phenomenon might be a more recent flowering, but it has three-hundred-year-old roots in evolving American law, politics, and self-understandings. Historian and member of a famous Dakota family, Philip J. Deloria, in his 1998 monograph, Playing Indian, traces the origins of dressing up and performing Indianness in the United States. His historical account begins in the eighteenth century and winds through the late twentieth century as he recounts incidents of playing Indian from the Boston Tea Party, in scouting and fraternal order rituals and romanticized literature that eventually informed anthropology, and finally in New Age appropriation of Indigenous spirituality. Deloria’s historical investigation sets up an analysis of what eventually became a more literal form of playing Indian: making false or tenuous claims to “identity,” often via distant Indigenous ancestry. In twenty-first-century acts of Playing Indian, the players probably do not recognize their role in this dog-eared yet evolving script. Neither do the viewers necessarily understand the centuries-long national play they are watching.

In Playing Indian,Phil Deloria quotes early twentieth-century British writer D.H. Lawrence’s description of an “essentially ‘unfinished’ and incomplete” U.S. American consciousness that produced “an unparalleled national identity crisis.” Lawrence saw the Indian as “at the heart of American ambivalence…Savage Indians served Americans as oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self. Coded as freedom, however, wild Indianness proved equally attractive, setting up a…dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion” (3). Deloria summarizes:

“The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants…half-articulated Indianness continually lurk[s] behind various efforts at American self-imagination” (5).

Surprisingly, Deloria barely touched on false claims to Native ancestry and identity in his 1998 book, when it was already a commonly recognized problem. Yet he built sturdy historical scaffolding for understanding the emergence of false or very distant ancestry claims that proliferate in the early 21st century. Let me guide you up and through Deloria’s architecture so you too can understand how we got here. After a brief history lesson, I’ll move onto critical race theory literature, and discuss the roots of “pretendianism” in settler-colonial law.

Deloria begins in the revolutionary war era by showing how “Americans” dressed up and played Indian in various anti-British colonial actions such as the Boston Tea Party. Deloria writes that “the Tea Party is a catalytic moment, the first drumbeat in the long cadence of rebellion through which Americans redefined themselves as something other than British colonists” (2).

Deloria shows that “New Englanders used Indianness to create an identity psychologically attuned to resistance and, eventually, rebellion” (26). This new American identity “was both aboriginal and European and yet was also neither” (36). It occupied an in-between space, between the “oppositional savage” that Americans needed, on one hand to exterminate, and the noble “Indianness that lay at the heart of American uniqueness.” Deloria explains that “there was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Indians. At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained” (37). As the US moved beyond revolution to nation building, Deloria writes, the Indian rebel and savage became threatening once again (40).

The Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Search for the Vanishing Indian, Authenticity, and Hope

By the 1830s, Indians were firmly imagined as part of the past. This coincided with the removal of Natives from the eastern territories to west of the Mississippi, which simultaneously generated nostalgic images of Indians (at least in the east) and the classic “vanishing Indian” trope (63-4 and 140). Fraternal orders shifted from mainly urban men’s societies into organizations in which men would gather around campfires in the woods and proffer “nostalgic, metaphor-drenched poetry and prose as prototypes of a national literature,” although they did not actually publish much of it (73 and 79). Lawyer-turned-anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s New Confederacy of the Iroquois did not want the Indians to disappear in total; documenting the vanishing Indian past and practices became vital. Literary production turned to historical and anthropological research, including a more formal practice of participant-observation of the Indian Other (93).

Deloria writes that “After establishing the nation, fraternities and agrarian protestors wrestled with the Indian many times, shifting the figure back and forth across social borders in a series of redefinitions always compromised by the contradictory presence of real Indian people.” The Boy Scouts organization gave boys “Indian teachings” in the outdoors to build masculinity in a post-frontier era of increasing urbanization. Their sister organization, the Camp Fire Girls, taught supposed Indian crafts, costume making, and water sports, and were indoctrinated into domestic labor versus paid labor outside the home (96 and 111-13).

Similarly, the early twentieth century saw white people “go Native” and insist on perfectly authentic Indian garb such as the classic 1900 photo, “Frank Hamilton Cushing in Zuni Garb” (119).

Such Americans were attempting to cross the line between modernity and the primitive Indian Other in order to extract authentic knowledge and representations from the inevitably vanishing Indian. For Deloria, by this time, the “pure authentic Indian … meant hope for modern society” (120).

Then in the mid twentieth-century, the hobbyist movement begins. Whites and other non-Natives dressed up and danced in their own pow wows that sometimes coincided with actual Native dances and celebrations. This is the part of Deloria’s history that touched the beginning of my own life. I was born in a Public Health Service hospital in Pipestone, Minnesota in 1968, just miles from an important Dakota site, the ancient Pipestone quarries, where the red stone is harvested by Dakota and other Native quarriers and carved into ceremonial pipes. I was born to a young Dakota mother who not only shawl danced in pow wows—now we call them wacipi with language revitalization—but also wore her dance outfit to guide visitors to the Pipestone quarries. After reading Deloria’s history, I can imagine a photograph of my own mother in her mid 1960s era pow wow dress, moccasins, and beadwork, still with black hair in two braids walking in stereotypical “young Indian maiden” style. I can see her leading white visitors through the wooded monument site with its trees shaking in the summer breeze, sunlight dancing between shadows of leaves on the path below, over the small bridge that crosses the babbling brook, and back around to the quarries where Dakota and other tribal people (usually, but not always men) do the backbreaking work of harvesting stone for pipe.

On the surface, the Pipestone quarries with their “Indian maiden” guide were a serene setting. But that was hardly the whole truth of the 1950s and 60s in rural Minnesota and South Dakota, or anywhere in the US. Deloria writes, “detachment, alienation, and anomie had become popular culture buzzwords.” Such cultural developments did not pair well with a country obsessed with individualism. Personal identity became of paramount concern to especially “the newly expanding white middle class” (130-31) Enter white desires to become other. Whites explored multiple kinds of racial otherness at that time, including again playing Indian. But in this era, something was changing on the racial landscape: the rise of multiculturalism.

Deloria explains the contours of the hobbyist movement. “Object hobbyists” were interested in replicating the historical artifacts and dress of Indians; “people hobbyists” were also dedicated to the “intercultural contact and boundary crossing” they could find at Native people’s own powwows (135). The vanishing Indian once again created anxiety, as the authenticity of living Indians, made manifest in their Indian-made artifacts, their bodies and their ancestral knowledges, was sought after to shore up meaning and individual identity for white Americans. But with the advent of multiculturalism, Native people existed “simply as members of one among many equivalent cultures [and] living Indians could be considered as authentic as dead ones” (140). Deloria also notes examples of whites who appropriated Black and Latino culture and representations in this era, especially through literature and performance. Since culture can be learned, might not non-Natives be able to learn Indian ways and thus “grasp hold of the authentic”? Might they not “consolidate a unique personal identity” through their hobbyist activities? (141)

On the other hand, the very fluidity of multiculturalism threatened the authentic Indian needed to anchor a unique American identity. The claim-making was too easy. Fortunately for hobbyists, biological race concepts never seem to die, and the concept of Indian blood sustained sought-after authentic essence. Federal relocation programs of Indians from reservation to city after World War II helped ensure that “the highest possible degree of authenticity inhered in the traditional, reservation-based full-blood” (143). People hobbyists gravitated toward such individuals; proximity to them conferred a stronger sense of individual accomplishment as hobbyists moved deftly between modernity and the Indian’s tradition. Deloria wrote that “few hobbyists actually went Native. That was not the point.” The point of their weekend play was to establish their difference and specialness in their otherwise mundane American lives (147). And many Indians took advantage of economic opportunities to be cultural experts and performers afforded them by hobbyists.

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of anti-war movement, Black and Red Power movements, and the era of “Indian Self-Determination,” the cultural and political landscape changed radically. Deloria writes that Native people “began installing cultural boundary lines of their own” (153). Ethnic power-based social movements were not multicultural. Natives, like other groups, were asserting their difference, and their sovereign rights to what American society had taken—land, children, ancestors’ remains, and cultural and governance authority. I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s in an era of increasing Native pushback to white appropriation. For example, I saw the passage in 1978 of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in response to the tragic numbers of Native children removed from their families and communities. ICWA aims for Native children to be placed with Native relatives and families. I saw the passage of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) that aims to return ancestors’ remains, funerary and sacred objects to tribes, often taken by outright theft and desecration of grave sites. In terms of local tribal governance, and likely to the chagrin of hobbyists, I witnessed, the rise of rules forbidding non-consensual photography of individual dancers, and quiet derision of whites who came to pow wows or wacipi in regalia and danced. Even as many tribal communities look multi-racial, the hobbyists stuck out.

Erecting boundaries to dissuade incursions by appropriative cultural outsiders coincided with the rise in the 1980s of the New Age movement that included new forms of playing Indian. I distinctly remember in my teenage years that spanned most of the 1980s, the contempt and making fun of anything remotely New Age in both my reservation and urban Native communities. Not all New Agers necessarily engaged real Indians. Some of them, like the object hobbyists and Revolutionary Indians of old, were content to dress up and appropriate Indianness. For the New Ager, Deloria writes, “Indianness—coded as a spiritual essential—was the common property of all Americans” (171)[1] Thus New Agers like those who played Indian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and like growing numbers of “Pretendians” could divorce their experiences from actual Natives who might be the original carriers of the essences they fetishize, be those ethical, spiritual, or biological. New Age spiritualism was historically consistent. Deloria wrote that violence against actual Indians always parallels US fetishization of Indians. The rise of the New Age coincided with the weakening of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) in the 1980s in which federal decisions allowed settler land-uses that impeded Indigenous religious or spiritual practices and protection of sacred sites (171).

Neither Hobbyists nor New Agers have totally disappeared from the North American landscape, but they are not the predominant groups who now play Indian.

Playing Indian in the Twenty-first Century

I have given you more of Phil Deloria’s thinking on Playing Indian than my own thus far. But I am thinking hard on his historical accounts. They make clear the temporal and cultural depth, and the intractability, of our present-day predicament. I feel intellectually fascinated in this cultural moment. But given Deloria’s historical analysis, my twenty years of writing against the de facto genetic definition of “Native Americans” in human population genetics research and DNA testing, and recent experiences on social media in response to my work on this topic, I also feel newly hopeless that we will push back the latest crushing wave of Indian play. That wave formed probably in the late 1960s when, as Deloria writes, “cultural boundaries opened up” and “Non-Indians began taking up permanent native identities in order to lay claim to the cultural power of Indianness in the white imagination,” in ways that hobbyists and New Agers had not (168).

Deloria certainly did not mean to pre-sage the era of genetic ancestry testing that began just a few years after Playing Indian was published in 1998, but I am struck by his accidental prediction. In writing about New Age spirituality seekers, he wrote that actual “Indian people were basically irrelevant. Indianness—even when imagined as something essential—could be captured and marketed as a text [my emphasis], largely divorced from Indian oversight and questions of authorship” (170). Substitute test for text, and you have precisely the kinds of claims that are made by “Native American DNA” test takers, for example, US Senator Elizabeth Warren, to essential Indianness in their ancestry. Such claims to belonging based on a 23&Me genetic ancestry test that points to probable distant, un-named, and non-tribally affiliated ancestors are indeed claims and definitions of Nativeness “divorced from Indian oversight and questions of authorship,”—that is, tribal bureaucratic regulations and social and familial precepts that govern such matters. Warren’s claims had been refuted by the Cherokee Nation and its genealogists since 2012. She had also been warned since 2012 not to take a genetic ancestry test that tribes do not accept as evidence of the relationships they care about. Despite tribal pushback on her claims and explicit warnings about the inapplicability of the DNA test, she took a genetic ancestry test in 2018 and used it to continue claiming Indigenous identity - in the absence of ties to community.

While Deloria barely touched on false or exaggerated Native ancestry and identity claims, his analysis of New Agers offers yet more historical gems for understanding how their deployment of a multicultural identity-on-demand was an important step between the age of the Hobbyists and now, where we are in the middle of a Pretendian Pandemic in both the US and Canada.

Deloria described New Age thinking as tending “to focus on ultimate individual liberation and engagement with a higher power [and as] having little interest in the social world that lies between self and spirit” (170). In addition, “self-creative cultural free play was the prerogative of individuals, and it had little to do with the relations between social groups or the power inequities among them” (172). Too many ancestry claimers show little interest in adhering to the social and legal restrictions that Indigenous communities and governments place around citizenship and belonging. Often, those who falsely or exaggeratedly claim Native ancestry and consequent “identity” appear to view it as a form of common property, the right to which they can purchase for $99 on-line in the form a DNA test or an ancestry.com subscription. Native ancestry, alleged or distant, becomes a form of property that aids them in their search for self-actualization, their higher power. And it does not require the agreement of the actual Indigenous peoples they claim, for example, the Cherokee, Métis, or Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg (171).

Like some of the New Agers who called on “essential Americanisms—freedom of religion and equal opportunity” and loftily denied that “skin color” should stand in their way “to acquire and practice sacred traditions,” would-be Natives claim similar individual freedoms and equal opportunity. They often also call attention to their skin color and accuse Natives of colorism when tribes or First Nations are instead asserting political and cultural authority over citizenship and kinship parameters. It’s not that “skin color” or phenotype never come into play as they tend to correlate with blood quantum rules in tribal citizenship or in federal Indian status, a complicated historical and bureaucratic topic for another time.[2] But the point of tribal or First Nation political authority is key, and colorism can often be an argument used to deflect from the fact that ancestry claimants deeply object to the assertion of Indigenous cultural and political power when it challenges their claims to Indigenous resources, including our biological and cultural patrimony, as Americans’ or Canadians’ common property.

Cosmopolitan Multiculturalism and Pretendianism

Taking up permanent Native identities, a move begun in the 1960s, was aided by the rise of multiculturalism as a supposed antidote to hard racial divisions. Deloria writes that “the breaking down of inequities and social restrictions enlarged the numbers of people who fit multiple categories at the same time: one might be Swedish, Dakota, and Latino all at once.” Add to that “a cosmopolitan focus on culture-crossings and simultaneities” and suddenly ethnic identity becomes in part a matter of choice. Cosmopolitan multiculturalism becomes “license for anyone to choose an ethnic identity—Indian, for example—regardless of family, history, or tribal recognition.” The New Agers and Pretendians are cultural contemporaries although on the surface they often seem quite different. Deloria writes that when “non-Indian New Age followers appropriated and altered a cosmopolitan understanding of Indianness, they laid bare a slow rebalancing away from the collective concerns with social justice that had emerged in the 1960s and toward the renewed focus on individual freedom that has characterized America since the 1980s.” Consuming other cultures was a path toward “healing a wounded Self” (173).

Where the Revolutionary Indians sought to heal and form a new national self, the Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls sought to redeem that national self as ethical. The hobbyists carried on the redemptive national and ethical project while also individualizing redemption. For the New Agers, they were not consciously building or redeeming a national American self although they were certainly formed of its deeply-held notions of individual liberty. They were in part resisting what they saw as a violent and immoral nation while they hyper-individualized their resistance. And the Pretendians, who come in diverse political, class, and racial stripes—although I focus on the mostly white and public facing individuals who benefit most—are also trying to heal a wounded self. That is clear in their rhetoric and in their defenses of their claims, which are increasingly under the spotlight in both the US and Canada. My deep dive into Deloria’s Playing Indian makes clear that such claimants are actors reading from a script that has been performed upon the American national stage for three hundred-years and counting.

“Diversity” and “Reverse Passing”

I cannot spend as long on the critical race scholarship that I draw on in my analysis of this moment of widespread false and exaggerated Indigenous ancestry and identity claims in the US and Canada. But I want to call attention to key scholarship that picks up where Phil Deloria left off, in the 1980s.

While the concept of Black people and other people of color “passing” as white in order to avoid discrimination is a commonly recognized cultural artifact of our white supremacist society, the concept of “reverse passing” was until very recently a far less recognized phenomenon. In her important 1993 Harvard Law Review article, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris argued that whiteness and the right to and control of property became so strongly linked that the racial category of whiteness became a form of treasured property, a valuable thing in and of itself. Those who were seen to possess it were accorded rights and privileges that the US legal system then defends. One of the rights and privileges of whiteness is the right to define and control the legal meaning of group identity. White-controlled institutions such as the courts define who counts as Black and who counts as Native. I’ve written in Native American DNA and elsewhere on white definitions of Indigenous identity, including genetic definitions.

“Reverse passing” emerges later, according to Khaled Beydoun and Erika K. Wilson, in their 2017 UCLA Law Review article by the same name. While racial passing as Native is technically a multi-racial affair, it is whites as a group who materially benefit most. Beydoun and Wilson explain how the concept of “racial diversity” aids reverse passing. It was “conceptualized to mean increasing the number of nonwhite persons in a particular space, particularly with respect to coveted university seats and employment opportunities” (289). Supreme Court affirmative action jurisprudence, they argue, produced a “situational value in nonwhiteness” in which there have arisen “incentives that previously did not exist for whites to reverse-pass” (282).

The era of diversity, narrated by Phil Deloria, coincides with white backlash to affirmative action protections and consequent lawsuits by white plaintiffs. Beydoun and Wilson write that in 1978 the Court held in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that “rather than remedying the generalized lingering effects of past societal discrimination, diversity is the compelling state interest that justifies the consideration of race in college admission programs” (289). They explain that “the Court extolled the virtues of racially heterogenous groups while diminishing the relevance and propriety of using affirmative action programs as remedial measure for historic discrimination against minority groups” [my emphasis] (289-90). Remember Phil Deloria’s explanation of how 1980s New Agers revealed a national movement away from collectivist social justice concerns that emerged in the 1960s, the same era in which affirmative action policies emerged? The New Agers and the nation returned in the 1980s to focus on individual freedoms and self-actualization. Court cases in that decade also struck blows to 1960s and 70s group gains toward collectivist remediation from previous centuries’ exclusions and the consequent employment, educational, and economic harms.

Beydoun and Wilson explain:

“By supplanting discrimination remediation with diversity as the sole compelling state interest, the Supreme Court removed the import of actual ‘lived experiences,’ particularly lived experiences of marginalization and discrimination experienced by people of color. The Court instead reduced nonwhite racial identity into phenotype and culture… Such a reduction of nonwhiteness makes it an identity that some whites can easily perform and present for purposes of capitalizing on racial identities coveted by diversity-driven programming…These performative contributions [to classrooms, campuses, and society] are divorced from the broader lived and existential dimensions that remedial affirmative action programs previously took into consideration when considering nonwhite applicants for university admission” (291-92).

After Beydoun and Wilson’s extensive legal argument, most of which I’ve not done justice to here, it seems straightforward to make a restorative justice case for the most marginalized against reverse-passing or race shifting. But there is also a wider institutional case to be made against reverse-passing. As I wrote last month in a post to this Substack newsletter, there is great risk to Indigenous well-being with the “structural trickle-down” that occurs when “non-Indigenous people with non-Indigenous community standpoints who pose as Indigenous and who are invested in sustaining that deception ris[e] through the ranks to represent us and theorize Indigenous peoplehood, sovereignty, and (anti-)colonialism. These people become ‘thought leaders,’ institutional decision-makers, and policy advisors to governmental leaders with regulatory and economic power over our peoples. They then shape academic and public discourse about who we allegedly are, what our lives allegedly look like, and what they think should be done about and to us.” Playing Indian has consequences for our well-being and for our very survival.

Conclusion: “I Will Die with You”

I and others have encountered pushback in the last several months due to our direct challenges to the structural problem of false or overblown Indigenous ancestry claims. It has become clear to me that confronting this form of theft is as formidable a challenge as confronting the core theft of settler colonialism: false and illegal claims by the US and Canada to Indigenous lands and waters. The nation state’s debt for genocide committed against Indigenous peoples, and the almost total appropriation of Indigenous land and resources will never be repaid. Genocide cannot be undone. Even #LandBack, an at once inspiring and pragmatic move, cannot restore our ancestors who were stolen, starved, who died of broken hearts, massacres and sickness. Even #LandBack is still unfathomable to most non-Indigenous citizens. It is unfathomable to some Indigenous people too. Imagine how many Canadian and US citizens would balk at the idea that Canada and the US illegally occupy much of their territories, that they lack moral authority? That is essentially the same conceptual mountain we face in saying that well-paid and well-known people like politician Elizabeth Warren and academic Andrea Smith in the US, novelist Joseph Boyden and film director Michelle Latimer in Canada have no moral or legal rights to occupy the identities they claim and the attendant resource and psychic benefits of reverse passing.

I said earlier that I feel hopeless for the first time that we will push back this latest wave of Indian play. My life’s work, whether earlier as a planner for tribes and tribal organizations, or now as a Native Studies scholar, has been about defending Indigenous knowledges and interests for a future in which I believed our distinct Peoplehoods might survive for the good of this world. But in the last several months I’ve witnessed refusal after refusal to believe or address the massive fraud involved in this Pretendianism Pandemic, including by our own people. I’ve seen Indigenous people—sometimes those who have always been connected to community, but more often those who say they want to (re)connect—cling to individualized “identity” and a worldview that emphasizes individual choice and long-ago ancestral essence over the rights of living Indigenous collectivism, however impure and struggling with/in colonialism those collectives might be. I should not be surprised. I am more of a social constructionist than a biological essentialist. But the threat is existential when our biological relations with less lived experience in Indigenous community find common cause with pretendians formed by settler individualism.

I now expect that Indigenous futures, at least in the US and Canada, will be ever flatter shadows of our ancestors’ ontological fullness. I expressed my newly found despondency to a respected Indigenous Studies colleague. I told him I had suddenly lost the purpose of my life’s work. I am working my way toward understanding my own ontological grief as part of a global ecological grief that I had already understood to be present. He said he’s never felt the hope that had been my guiding light. I was incredulous: “What then are we doing in Native Studies?” I implored. “Harm reduction,” he responded. Okay. Lessening suffering is good work.

I want to tell you a short story before I end this piece. I’ve told this story in multiple places, and I quote myself here:[3]

“In August 1862, a group of young Dakota men were hunting unsuccessfully. Their hunting grounds diminished by white encroachment and suffering long-term hunger, they stopped at a settler’s house to ask for water and food. The settler threatened them with his gun. The young men argued—who among them was brave enough to stand up to the white man? They shot the settler and several others at the home. This was the beginning of war...

After killing the settlers, the young men returned to the camp of my four-greats grandfather, Chief Little Crow or Taoyateduta. Legend has it that he made a great speech…:

You are like dogs in the Hot Moon when they run mad and snap at their own shadows. We are only little herds of buffaloes left scattered; the great herds that once covered the prairies are no more. The white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one -- two -- ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.

Do you hear the thunder of their big guns? No; it would take you two moons to run down to where they are fighting, and all the way your path would be among white soldiers.

You are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the hard Moon (January). Taoyateduta is not a coward. He will die with you.”

I am nowhere near the person that my ancestor Taoyateduta was. Nonetheless, and despite the incomprehensibility of the white supremacist state making restitution for what it has stolen and continues to take, I will die with Indigenous collectives in this struggle. I will not cease, along with growing numbers of scholars, journalists, and other Indigenous community members, resisting the big guns that are fetishization of one or two long ago real or imagined ancestors, genetic ancestry testing, and reverse-passing. This struggle doesn’t only manifest in the form of individuals like Warren, Smith, Boyden, and Latimer. It is a continuation of struggle that we and our ancestors have collectively lived for centuries as we have resisted the theft of land and children, the extinguishment of Indigenous governance structures, and the theft of ancestors’ bones, and our literal blood and DNA. Indigenous Peoples as collectives, as relations, as humans, are not the property of the white supremacist settler state, nor do we belong to its “multicultural” citizenry like the land stolen and occupied. We are not your dead ancestors. We are living Peoples. We belong to ourselves.

Notes

6/18/21 Update: In the NAISA 2021 session, “The (Recent) Settler Turn to Indigeneity: Indigenous Self-Determination and the Challenge of “Race Shifting” and Circe Sturm notes between 6-7 mins that by 1980 is where we really see the race shifting to Cherokee beginning in earnest. There were major shifts in Native self-identification between 1970 and 1980 US census.

[1] Also see Deloria 1998, page 175 for more on Native “cultures as ethnic gifts for a pluralistic American whole.”

[2] See Kim TallBear, “The Political Economy of Tribal Citizenship in the US: Lessons for Canadian First Nations?”

[3] See, for example, Kim TallBear, “The US-Dakota War and Failed Settler Kinship,”Anthropology News, Vol 57, issue 9 (September 2016). I re-published the essay with an updated introduction in April 2021 in my Substack newsletter, Unsettle.

This talk text was originally posted on The Critical Polyamorist, my largely dormant blog. This platform is mostly for new writing, but I will occasionally migrate previously published work to this site. I’ve edited this post for Substack length restrictions. Portions of this 2018 talk were later published in “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family” (TallBear in Clarke and Haraway 2018) and in “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming” (TallBear 2019).

Keynote lecture given at the Second Annual International Solo Polyamory Conference (SoloPolyCon18), Seattle, WA, USA, April 14, 2018

During the weekend of April 7-8, 2018, I attended Converge Con in Vancouver, a conference “that originated with a desire to build sex positive communities, and start a dialogue around sexuality, relationships and activism.”[1] I had the honor of being on the closing panel, #MeToo in the Age of Consent, with Erin Tillman, author of The Consent Guidebook, and sex educator, Jimanekia Eborn—both from L.A. The final question posed to our panel was: 

If there was one thing you wanted people to take away this weekend about autonomy, agency, power, and creating a culture of consent, what would that be?

I responded, “Remember your structural analysis.” Settler sexuality—this hetero- and increasingly homonormative compulsory monogamy society tied to settler-colonial ownership of property and Indigenous dispossession—is a structure.

Converge Con was refreshing with so many people comfortably talking unabashedly about sex. There was a separate social space for between-session gabbing; in 2017 there were complaints from “normies” at the hotel about all the sex talk happening in the lobby. At Converge Con, sessions included “Group Sex Demystified,” “Sex Positive Parenting,” “Masturbation for Healing and Creation,” “How Society’s Representation of Beauty…Impacts Sexual Self Expression,” and how to manage sex and relationships when coping with depression. There were many sessions that teach us as individuals, couples, triads, polycules, families, and communities about techniques for liberating ourselves from sex negative and shaming thoughts and behaviors.

I found less emphasis on averting our gazes from our own bodies, individual, family, or community histories to look hard at the settler state and its structures. Those structures not only indoctrinate us with settler ideals, but they have legally and economically enforced certain forms of sex and relationships throughout the existence of these nation states. It is necessary to throw off shame, love one’s self and one’s body, rejuvenate, and practice self-care. Yet a focus on sex positive bodies and relationships vs. a focus on sex negative bodies and relationships is not in and of itself a structural analysis. Focusing on sex and body positivity helps us cultivate the energy to fight systemically. Personal transformation cannot fully occur without societal transformation. The two are co-constitutive—meaning individual and societal change help produce one another. The heteropatriarchal state would prefer we focus our eagle eye on our own shortcomings exclusively, and not its extractive and oppressive structures. 

A Note on Terminology: Settler and Settler Sexuality

Queens University queer theorist, Scott Morgensen, has popularized in academic circles—and this bleeds into Indigenous sexual health circles—the term “settler sexuality.” He defines this succinctly as:

The heteropatriarchal and sexual modernity exemplary of white settler civilization.[2]

If that is too succinct, he has also explained settler sexuality as:

A white national heteronormativity [and increasingly also homonormativity] that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects.[3]

Morgensen’s work and the work of other anthropologists and historians of Euro-American settlement, marriage and monogamy in the US and Canada, show how it was not only Indigenous people that were forced into monogamy and state sanctioned marriage.[4] Those relationship forms were intimately tied to the appropriation of Indigenous collectively held land and its division into individual allotments to be held privately. Men as heads of households qualified for a certain acreage. They obtained more if they had a wife and children. Women were tied to men economically. Accordingly, compulsory monogamy and marriage have been forced on other non-monogamous and sometimes non-Christian communities as well. Thus, settler sexuality can be translated more straightforwardly as both heteronormative and homonormative forms of “love,” “sex,” and marriage that are produced along with private property holding in the US and Canada.

Therefore, when I use the term “settler,” I am not interested in nitpicking who is and is not a “settler” on an individual level. Americans often find the term odd, too polite. On the other hand, Canadians are a bit more accustomed to “settler” and don’t often find it so polite. Some of them seem to have the same reaction to “settler” as they do to being called “white.” But I also know many academics, both white and “visible minorities” who self-identify as settlers. When they do, it is with explicit recognition that their lives in Canada are made possible by settler-colonialism.

There are vibrant conversations in Canada and in the US (although more so among academics in the US) that debate the applicability of the term “settler” and suggest different terms for non-racially privileged, non-Indigenous groups, e.g. African-Americans or non-white or non-Christian immigrants who enter the US or Canada due to conditions of war and violence often due to settler state imperialism abroad. There are no untroubled definitions of “settler” so I focus on settler state power, including its cultural power, which all of its citizens are capable of shoring up. I see non-Indigenous racially disadvantaged citizens as potentially complicit in settler-colonial appropriations of Indigenous (re)sources. And many of us across racial and religious lines have been made complicit in helping uphold settler forms of sex.

Kyle Powys Whyte, a Potawatomi environmental philosopher and activist who teaches at Michigan State explains pithily how the citizenry broadly is involved in ongoing settler-colonialism. In a 2018 article in Yes! Magazine, he wrote:

Whether one participates in settler colonialism is not entirely a matter of when or how one’s ancestors came to the U.S. Having settler privilege means that some combination of one’s economic security, U.S. citizenship, sense of relationship to the land, mental and physical health, cultural integrity, family values, career aspirations, and spiritual lives are not possible—literally!—without the territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples.[5]

Are Non-normative Sexualities also “Settler Sexuality”?

So-called non-normative sexualities and relationship practices, such as polyamory— especially solo polyamory within that—do challenge important settler state cultural restrictions, but they also tend to assume the inevitability of settler-colonial cultural norms and governance structures. They do not sufficiently interrogate Indigenous dispossession for the rise of a private property state. They often simply want to redeem the settler state into a more multicultural and inclusive entity, without asking how even alternative practices of intimate relation uphold settler colonialism.

Margot Weiss, an anthropologist who wrote a book Techniques of Pleasure that examines kink communities in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, shows how they consume expensive sex toys and “play” experiences on their way to personal self-actualization. Weiss highlights gender and race dynamics and power relations in kink communities that are sometimes not so different from mainstream settler sexuality. These patterns of individual identity-making via capitalist consumption, and fairly normative race and gender dynamics rose in concert with settler-colonial nation-building. Weiss also delves a bit into the very interesting history of old guard leather communities in San Francisco that have had more oppositional politics historically, but the focus is on newer more economically privileged kink communities, including tech sector workers.

Scott Morgensen, in his anthropological work in a community of radical faeries and their predominantly white back-to-the-land communities, also shows how even queer sex, including non-monogamy and kink are also often enacted as forms of settler sexuality. Morgensen’s work shows how radical faeries in a rural Oregon community remain conditioned by race hierarchy, and their back-to-the-land ideology is predicated on Indigenous dispossession historically and erasure of Indigenous presence today.

Morgensen discusses how queer claims too are conditioned by settler colonialism. He also pays close attention to Indigenous two-spirit activism and theorizing and their focus on People or tribal-specific knowledges about sexualities, relations, and relationships. The term “two-Spirit" gestures toward precolonial gender systems not based on the European sex/gender binary that concerned colonizers and which now concerns queer thinkers. If you don’t know the history of the term two-spirit, which is in wide use today, it came into common use in 1990 in Winnipeg at the International Gathering of American Indian and First Nations Gays and Lesbians.[6] As opposed to “coming out,” an important aspect of two-spirit thought is the idea of “coming in” to community to take up special roles designated for gender diverse individuals within the extended kinship webs of Indigenous communities historically. Or at least that is the ideal. Two-spirit people have struggled in Indigenous communities too with homophobia produced of colonial violence.  

In my Critical Polyamorist blog, I’ve written about the disproportionate influence that heteronormative couple privilege and associated hierarchies have in polynormative communities. My frustration with that mode of polyamory is explained in my critiques of how it remains very much a form of settler sexuality. More rule-bound and couple-centric forms of polyamory privilege the married, cohabiting, child-sharing couple as “primary,” with additional relationships being “secondary.” This replicates key conditions of monogamy that I find politically and ethically difficult. In short, it is not only vanilla monogamists who uphold settler-colonialism with their intimate practices linked to property, consumption, couple and marriage privilege.

Within open nonmonogamy, I push for analyses that help us envision ways of relating beyond such normative arrangements and also beyond Western notions of romantic “love” conditioned—whether we know it or not—by capitalism’s coercive power. I don’t want Hallmark and Nestlé telling me when and how I need to show my love while also giving those companies my money to evangelize normative relations and unsustainably extract resources.

SoloPolyamory and Being in “Good Relation”

I am here with all of you at SoloPolyCon because I see more potential in solo polyamory for challenging the assumptions of settler states. I’ve considered too the potential for my focus on being in good relation—my particular Indigenous standpoint—to be in conflict with the ethic of autonomy and non-hierarchy that is a mark of solo polyamory. But then I remembered a photo that one of you posted on Facebook during last year’s conference. (I was sick and had to Skype in from Edmonton.) The photo showed a half dozen SoloPolyCon attendees hanging out at the beach. They were each standing apart, scattered along the beach like differently contoured and colored stones. And I remember the photo was captioned “Alone together.” The image looked so appealing, just the kind of community that would understand me and that might be able to be articulated with the idea of being in good relation that is taken up with renewed commitment by Indigenous peoples across North America these days. I cannot emphasize how much Indigenous thinkers inside and outside the academy are focusing on “Indigenous relationality,” an umbrella term used to help us think beyond race, the nation state, biology, and other settler conceptual impositions.

Taking the “solo polyamory” explanation from our Facebook page:

People who practice solo polyamory have lots of kinds of honest, mutually consensual nonexclusive relationships (from casual and brief to long-lasting and deeply committed). But generally, what makes us solo is the way we value and prioritize our autonomy. We do not have (and many of us don't want or aren't actively seeking) a conventional primary/nesting-style relationship: sharing a household & finances, identifying strongly as a couple/triad, etc.[7]

How do I see that as being articulated with the idea of Indigenous relationality? Autonomy from compulsory monogamy or even the nonmonogamous hierarchical couple need not be defined as “single.” Solo polyamory for me is a de-escalation from the couple. For me and others it is a refusal to get on the escalator (again). But it can simultaneously also lend itself to living in extended relation and disrupting commonly accepted relationship categories. Many of us work to build networks of made kin as essential support systems, and with more fluid boundaries. And many of us do this under settler structural duress. It’s just that most solopoly people probably don’t name the challenges they face as settler-colonialism.

I’ve written and talked elsewhere about my Dakota ancestors’ practices of relating and their “sexualities” as we call it today (TallBear 2018). Before settler-imposed monogamy, marriage helped to forge important Dakota kinship alliances, but divorce for both men and women was possible. Women also owned household property. They were not tied to men economically in the harsh way of settler marriage. More than two genders were recognized, and there was an element of flexibility in gender identification. People we might call “genderqueer” today also entered into “traditional” Dakota marriages with partners who might be what we today consider “cisgendered.” In a world before settler colonialism—outside of the particular biosocial assemblages that now structure settler notions of “gender,” “sex,” and “sexuality,” persons and the intimacies between them were no doubt worked quite differently. In thinking about “sex,” how did my ancestors share touch as a form of care, relating, and connection before the imposition of settler structures of sexuality and family? There is much that has been lost due to forced conversions to Christianity and the sexual shaming that came with that. And so much of settler sexuality has been imposed onto Indigenous peoples in place of our ancestors’ practices, both heteronormative and now also “queer” settler sexuality. But in a world before settler colonialism and its notions of “gender,” “sex,” and “sexuality,” persons and the intimacies between them were no doubt worked quite differently.

Yet we Dakota continue to live in a way that embodies in our 21st-century loves, long-held kinship structures. Many of us continue to live in extended family where the legally married couple is not central, where children are raised in community, and where households often spill over beyond nuclear family and across generations. Can we not then also imagine sexual intimacies outside of settler family structures? I know we already have them. Can we name and measure them without using settler sex and family forms as reference points?

It is also important in unsettling settler sex and family to mine historical and language archives in order to know more about what kinds of relations were possible before settler-colonial impositions, including nonmonogamous relationships that were common in Dakota and other Indigenous cultures. This suggestion will be met with resistance by some Indigenous people. Our sexual shaming and victimization has been extreme at the hands of missionaries, in residential schools, and by government agents who all wielded violent control over Indigenous lives. There are still many of us unrecovered from the shaming of Christian sexual mores, and supposedly secular state institutions that continue to monitor, measure, and pathologize our bodies and our peoples.

That said, I am beginning to hear from younger Indigenous people either via comments on my blog or when I give lectures at universities, that they would like to embrace open and honest nonmonogamy. But in addition to a shortage of willing Indigenous partners, they worry about the judgement of their elders who are still immersed in values that younger people see as a holdover of residential schools and the church. One Indigenous undergraduate asked me what my elders think of my nonmonogamy. I remember exactly how I responded:

I don’t know what they think. They don’t say anything to me, and I’m pretty open on Facebook, and on my Critical Polyamorist blog. But I’m almost 50, and at 55 I'll get a senior discount at businesses on my reservation. I’m almost an elder myself! I also earn my own money and I’m an academic. With that comes more freedom than most people have. So I’m not really worried about what people think. But I know you do have to worry. I try to make space for others so someday they will have the choices that I have.

Writing and speaking this talk is to make just a little more space.

Yet in our lives as Indigenous people, we already unsettle settler relations in courageous ways. Think about work that Indigenous people do to defend the earth in order to have a chance at (re)constituting good relations with our other-than-human relatives. I think of the resistance to resource extraction that particularly Indigenous women and two-spirit people have organized via #IdleNoMore and #NoDAPL, sometimes at great personal risk. These are both movements that link the defense of Indigenous treaty rights to defense of the planet, which is a way of also caring for our human descendants to come. In terms of that idea of being in good relation, I consistently compare “environmental” caretaking to caretaking human relations. Accordingly, decolonizing sex is one way of re-constituting good relations with some of our human relatives. Of course I use “relative” broadly since “we are all related.” 

I will be paying close attention the rest of the weekend at this conference to notice potential articulations between solo polyamory and forms of Indigenous thought and practice related to sex and relationships.

Disaggregating “Sex,” Reaggregating Relations: The Example of Moreakamem

I want to dig just a bit deeper into the theory behind being in good relation by providing one more example of “non-normative sexuality” (by settler standards) among an Indigenous people in Sonora, Mexico. My friend, David Shorter, an Indigenous Studies scholar at UCLA, wrote an essay entitled simply, “Sexuality.”[8] That essay resulted from time Shorter spent with moreakamem—healers or seers among the Yoeme. Being also a religious studies scholar, he had originally set out to understand the “spiritual” aspects of moreakamem as healers. But his analysis came to entangle “sexuality” with “spirituality.”

Among the southern Yoeme in Sonora, an elder told Shorter that individuals who engage in nonmonogamous and/or non-heterosexual relationships are often also moreakamem. In fact, in northern Yoeme communities in Arizona, moreakame has come to be conflated with terms such as “gay,” “lesbian,” or “two-spirit,” and other less positive terms. The healer aspect of the word has been lost for US-based Yoeme who have much ethnic overlap with “Catholic Mexican American” communities. 

Among southern Yoeme, Shorter found that he could not understand the powerful “spiritual” roles in community of moreakamem without also understanding their so-called sexuality. He explains that in many Indigenous contexts, there is an “interconnectedness in all aspects of life.” Following the connections between sex and spirit among the Yoeme was akin to “following a strand of a spider’s web.” Shorter sees both sexuality and spirituality as sets of relations through which power is acquired and exchanged between persons or entities. So when he writes about moreakamem, he emphasizes their focus on relating and their relational sharing of power with those who seek healing, with deities and spirits, etc. The moreakamem have reciprocity with and receive power in their encounters with spirits, ancestors, dreams, animals. And also in the human realm when they use their power to see for and heal other humans suffering from love or money problems, addictions, and other afflictions of mind and body.

But moreakamem refuse to accentuate their personal characteristics and capacities. They do not focus on their own so-called sexuality or even their power to heal. Rather, they focus on their work in community. Shorter explains that these healers “work tirelessly and selflessly to maintain right relations.”[9] And he too refuses to classify Moreakamem as gay or nonmonogamous.

Shorter also encourages his readers to de-objectify. That is, we should try not to think of sexuality, spirituality (and nature too) as things at all. This is difficult: In a settler framework—whether in bed or in ceremony—relations get appropriated if you will and made into “things.” They get named or objectified as “sex” or “spirituality.” David Shorter asks us to see that what settler culture turns into objects are actually sets of relations in which power (and sustenance?) circulate.

I would add that our relations then become resources for the settler state to measure, monitor, and exploit to in complex ways build settler knowledge and national identity. This is why I think we can decolonize and restore better relations if we de-objectify them. A practical outcome of this shift in thought is that if we resist hardening relations between persons (human, nonhuman, or spirit) into objects, we might be better attuned to relating justly in practice, and we might reclaim our relational “resources.” We might attend to being in good relation and what that requires; we might resist having our relating both stifled and remade by less flexible “natures” and hierarchies. Therefore, It is not only for moreakamem, but for all of us that “sexuality” can be understood as a form of reciprocity and power exchange”—a way of being that “mediates social relations across the family, clan, pueblo, tribe,” etc. We exist not simply in nature, but we exist in relation to one another. With this understanding of sexuality, it begins to look as Shorter writes, “more like a type of power, particularly one capable of healing” and transforming.”[10]

Think of that co-constitution and re-constitution of our sexualities if we are polyamorous—the multiple, diverse sets of relations, power exchange, and subjectivities that result from multiple relating. I leave you with a powerful quote by David Shorter (2015, 487):

Sexuality is not “like” power…sexuality is a form of power: and, of the forms of power, sexuality in particular might prove uniquely efficacious in both individual and collective healing. Further, I will suggest that sexuality’s power might be forceful enough to soothe the pains of colonization and the scars of internal colonization.

Radical Hope

Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz expresses two powerful ideas that have been helpful to me. In a September 14, 2017 interview with Krista Tippett of the On Being podcast, Díaz explained that in this moment of crisis—and always—it is imperative that critical thinkers be “misaligned with the emotional baseline” of mainstream society. He also explained his notion of “radical hope,” his trust that “from the bottom [meaning those not in power] will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible.”

I see that emotional baseline as dreaming of a progressive settler state. Tippet, the interviewer, recounted Díaz ’s idea that “all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also have…radical hope. Talk about what that is…” she said. Díaz responded:

I do trust in the collective genius of all the people who have survived these wicked systems. I trust in that. I think from the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart.

I have radical hope that settler relations based on violent hierarchies and concepts of property do not have to be all there is. This crisis or transition time in the US and globally, offers an opportunity to cease cultivating a misplaced love for the state that insists on dreams of progress toward a never-arriving future of tolerance and good that paradoxically requires ongoing genocidal violence. The path toward the supposed democratic promised land of settler mythology is in everyday life a nightmare for many around the globe. We require another narrative path to guide us. Indigenous people are proposing a relational web framework that is more about here and now, not about when. We have an opportunity, if we choose to see it that way, to be misaligned with the emotional, intellectual, and (un)ethical baseline and narrative of those who hold power. We can have radical hope in a narrative that entails not redeeming the state, but caring for one another as relations. How do we live well here together? The state has and will continue to fail to help us do that.

I leave you with an inspirational quote from an Indigenous thinker who is misaligned with the emotional baseline of settler sexuality. At Converge Con, I interviewed Janet Rogers for the Media Indigena podcast I do every other week. Rogers is a poet and performance artist who is Mohawk and wrote the book Red Erotic (2010). I mentioned to her at Converge Con that I felt like non-Indigenous people there were more respectful and less invasive with their questions and assumptions about my Indigenous perspective than is usually the case when I am in largely non-Indigenous space. I thought their focus on consent culture might have a lot to do with their respectful behavior.

Here is what she had to say:

I’m … coming to the realization that the sensitivity, the consideration, the education, the awareness, the “awokeness”—if you will—within the sex positive community overflows into that awareness, sensitivity…into how those communities are relating to Indigenous people….Your practice and understanding of your own sexuality overflows into the rest of your life. That’s where it begins!...If you’ve got that resolved in the bedroom…all of that empowerment, all of that positivity is going to overflow in other areas of your life.

I take her advice to heart. I am trying to get it right in the bedroom so I can get it right in the rest of my life. I think you are too.----------------Acknowledgement: Thanks to all of the people at Converge Con 2018 in Vancouver who I had the pleasure of thinking with over the weekend of April 7-8, 2018. Their sex positivity work fertilized this keynote that I gave the following weekend in Seattle.

Notes[1]http://www.convergecon.ca/about/.[2] Scott L. Morgensen . The Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011: 23.[3] Scott Lauria Morgensen. “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16(1-2) (2010), 106[4] Katherine Franke. Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Inequality (New York: NYU Press, 2015). Also see Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press 2008).[5] http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/decolonize/white-allies-lets-be-honest-about-decolonization-20180403.[6] Morgensen 2011, 81.[7] For more on solo polyamory, check out these two-oft read articles. Aggiesez. “What is Solo Polyamory? My Take.” SOLOPOLY: Life, Relationships, and Dating as a Free Agent. December 5, 2014. Available at: https://solopoly.net/2014/12/05/what-is-solo-polyamory-my-take/. And Elisabeth A. Sheff. “Solo Polyamory, Singleish, Single & Poly.” Pyschology Today. October 14, 2013. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-polyamorists-next-door/201310/solo-polyamory-singleish-single-poly[8] David Delgado Shorter (2015). Sexuality. In The World of Indigenous North America. Robert Warrior (ed.). New York and London: Routledge: 487-505.[9] Shorter 2015, 490 and 497.[10] Shorter 2015, 497-8.

Additional Sources

Kim TallBear. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou, Vol. 6(1), 2019: 24-41.

Kim TallBear. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” In Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, eds. Making Kin, Not Population. Toward Feminist STS Pro-Kin and Non-Natalist Politics of Population and Environment. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.

This is the audio version of the Unsettle post by the same title. Thanks for listening.

Relevant websites

https://muckrack.com/jacqueline-keeler

Media Indigena. “Contemplating the Consequences of Colonial Cosplay,” Part 1, episode 245. February 24, 2021.

Media Indigena. “Creating Culpability for Consequences Colonial Cosplay,” Part 2, episode 246. February 27, 2021. .

Sources

Tara Bahrampour. “Elizabeth Warren’s Refusal to Take a DNA Test to Prove Native American Ancestry was Probably a Smart Move.” The Washington Post. March 14, 2018.

Joanne Barker et. al. “Open Letter from Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith,” Indian Country Today, July 7, 2015 (September 12, 2018).

BBC. “US Senator Elizabeth Warren Faces Backlash After Indigenous DNA Claim.” October 16, 2018.

Canadaland. The Convenient ‘Pretendian,’ Ep. 359. February 15, 2021, .

CBC. The Current. With Anna Maria Tremonti. “Indigenous Identity and the Case of Joseph Boyden.” January 5, 2017. .

Angela Chen.“No matter what Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test shows, there’s no genetic test to prove you’re Native American.” The Verge. October 15, 2018.

Ka’nhehsí:io Deer and Jorge Barrera. “Award-winning filmmaker Michelle Latimer’s Indigenous identity under scrutiny,” CBC Indigenous. December 17, 2020.

Philip J. Deloria. Playing Indian. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

Delilah Friedler. “Natives are Split Over Rep. Deb Haaland’s Endorsement of Elizabeth Warren.” Mother Jones. August 1, 2019.

Rhiannon Johnson. “Canada Research Chair Critical of U.S. Senator’s DNA Claim to Indigenous Identity.” CBC Indigenous. October 15, 2018. .

Glenn Kessler. “Just About Everything You’ve Read On the Warren DNA Test is Wrong.” Washington Post. October 18, 2018.

KUOW. “Senator Warren Takes the DNA Test.” By Bill Radke. Interview with Kim TallBear and Rick Smith. October 15, 2018.

Matt Miller. “A DNA test won't explain Elizabeth Warren's Ancestry.” Slate.com., June 29, 2016.

The National Archives Experience. American Conversation: Henry Louis Gates Jr.February 5, 2009.

Jennifer Raff. “What Do Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test Results Actually Mean?” Forbes. October 15, 2018.

Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear. “Your DNA is Our History”: Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property.” Current Anthropology 53 (S5) (2012): S233-S245.

Vincent Schilling. “Strike Against Sovereignty? Senator Warren Asserts Native American Ancestry Via DNA.” Indian Country Today. October 15, 2018.

Jamil Smith. “Why Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Fiasco Matters.” Rolling Stone. December 7, 2018.

TallBear v. Moniz, No. 1:2017cv00025 – Document 15 (D.D.C. 2018).

Kim TallBear. “Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating: Genetic Ancestry, Critical Polyamory, Property, and Relations.” In Brendan Hokowhitu, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin. Critical Indigenous Studies Handbook. Routledge, 2021: 467-478.

Mari Uyehara. “What Elizabeth Warren Keeps Getting Wrong About DNA Tests and Native American Heritage.” GQ. December 11, 2018.

WYNC Studios, On the Media with Brooke Gladstone. “By Blood, and Beyond” Interview with Kim TallBear. October 19, 2018.

This is a test. I’m going to experiment with also orating some of the Unsettle posts. Both to diversify formats in the interest of diverse readers/listeners, and also because I write to be spoken and I speak a piece as I write. It makes sense to offer both formats.

Notes

[1] K. TallBear. “Ghosts on the Road.” South Dakota Review, Spring 2000 (Vol. 38): 9-10.

[2] K. TallBear. “A Nomad’s Sleep.” In Florene Belmore and Eric Ostrowidzki, eds. Gatherings: The En’owkin Journal of First North American Peoples. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, Fall 2001 (Vol. XII): 175.

[3] Dakota Conflict. PBS, aired January 27, 1993. 56 minutes, 24 seconds. https://www.pbs.org/video/tpt-documentaries-dakota-conflict/.

[4] The Past Is Alive Within Us: the US-Dakota Conflict. PBS, aired December 26, 2013. 1 hour 56 minutes, 54 seconds. https://www.pbs.org/video/tpt-documentaries-past-alive-within-us-us-dakota-conflict/.

[5] K. TallBear. “Between Nations.” In Florene Belmore and Eric Ostrowidzki, eds. Gatherings: The En’owkin Journal of First North American Peoples. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, Fall 2001 (Volume XII): 179. I changed a word in this poem from its original published version. It is a word that could have been read as ableist.  

[6] #NativeReads episode 10: Memory Songs w/ Lydia Whirlwind Soldier of the Red Nation Podcast.

[7] L. Whirlwind Soldier, “Wakpa.” Survival Songs. Martin, SD: CAIRNS Press, 2020: 31. Purchase the book here: https://www.nativecairns.org/resources/print/books/index.html