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Pretendian

Pretendian (portmanteau of pretend and Indian[1][2][3]) is a pejorative colloquialism describing a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by professing to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native American or Indigenous Canadian ancestors.[4][5][6][7] As a practice, being a pretendian is considered an extreme form of cultural appropriation,[8] especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities from which they do not originate.[3][8][9][10] It is sometimes also referred to as a form of fraud,[1] ethnic fraud or race shifting.[11][12]

Early false claims to Indigenous identity, often called "playing Indian", go back at least as far as the Boston Tea Party. There was a rise in pretendians after the 1960s for a number of reasons, such as the reestablishment of tribal sovereignty following the era of Indian termination policy, the media coverage of the Occupation of Alcatraz and the Wounded Knee Occupation, and the formation of Native American studies as a distinct form of area studies which led to the establishment of publishing programs and university departments specifically for or about Native American culture. At the same time, hippie and New Age subcultures marketed Native cultures as accessible, spiritual, and as a form of resistance to mainstream culture, leading to the rise of the plastic shaman or "culture vulture." By 1990, many years of pushback by Native Americans against pretendians resulted in the successful passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (IACA) – a truth-in-advertising law which prohibits misrepresentation in marketing of American Indian or Alaska Native arts and crafts products within the United States.

While Indigenous communities have always self-policed and spread word of frauds, mainstream media and arts communities were often unaware, or did not act upon this information, until more recent decades. Since the 1990s and 2000s, a number of controversies regarding ethnic fraud have come to light and received coverage in mainstream media, leading to a broader awareness of pretendians in the world at large.

  1. ^ a b Isai, Vjosa (October 15, 2022). "Doubts Over Indigenous Identity in Academia Spark 'Pretendian' Claims - Some Canadian universities now require additional proof to back up Indigenous heritage, replacing self-declaration policies". The New York Times. Retrieved October 28, 2022. "pretendians" (short for "pretend Indians")... Ms. TallBear said, there is no excuse for outright lies. "If they're lying and they've gotten job benefits or scholarship benefits, they should be required to figure out how to make restitution," she said, likening fake identity claims to falsifying academic credentials. "It's fraud."
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference NYTdef was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ a b Robinson, Rowland (2020). "4. Interlude: Community, Pretendians, & Heartbreak". Settler Colonialism + Native Ghosts: An Autoethnographic Account of the Imaginarium of Late Capitalist/Colonialist Storytelling (Ph.D.). [Waterloo, Ontario]: University of Waterloo. p. 235. OCLC 1263615440. Archived from the original on December 28, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2021. [The] phenomenon of what I and many other Indigenous people have for some time called Pretendians, as well as the related, and very often overlapping, phenomenon of Fétis*. This not-new phenomenon, to put it perhaps overly simply, is the practice of settler individuals (and sometimes others, but primarily settlers) putting forth a false Indigenous identity, and placing themselves out in front of the world as Indigenous people, and sometimes even attempting to assert themselves in some way as a kind of voice of their supposed peoples. *Portmanteaus of "Pretend" and "Indian" and "Fake" and "Métis", respectively. Pretendian, as a descriptive term, has been around most of my life, to the extent that I am not sure that placing its origin on the timeline is readily possible.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference AlgPretendiansCBC was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference TStarMcCusker was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Polleta, Maria (November 30, 2017). "'Pretendians': Elizabeth Warren not alone in making questionable claim to Native American heritage". The Arizona Republic. Archived from the original on March 22, 2022. Retrieved November 11, 2021 – via AZCentral.,
  7. ^ Irwin, Nigel (January 12, 2017). "Joseph Boyden's Apology and the Strange History of 'Pretendians' – Boyden is hardly the first person to be alleged to have faked Indigenous roots for material or spiritual gain". Vice Media. Archived from the original on June 8, 2021. Retrieved July 8, 2021.
  8. ^ a b Ridgen, Melissa (January 28, 2021). "Pretendians and what to do with people who falsely say they're Indigenous". APTN News. Archived from the original on July 13, 2021. Retrieved July 13, 2021. Pretendians – noun – A person who falsely claims to have Indigenous ancestry – meaning it's people who fake an Indigenous identity or dig up an old ancestor from hundreds of years ago to proclaim themselves as Indigenous today. They take up a lot of space and income from First Nation, Inuit and Metis Peoples.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference BringsPlenty was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference BoydenMisrepresent was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Leroux, Darryl. "Raceshifting". Raceshifting. Archived from the original on July 9, 2021. Retrieved July 8, 2021.
  12. ^ Leroux, Darryl R. J.; Gaudry, Adam (October 25, 2017). "Becoming Indigenous: The rise of Eastern Métis in Canada". The Conversation. Retrieved November 5, 2022. In 2011 there were over 250 self-identified Cherokee "tribes" in the U.S., according to anthropologist Circe Sturm. Like efforts by self-identified Métis, Sturm suggests that "race shifting" among white Americans to Cherokee identity is an attempt to "reclaim or create something they feel they have lost, and … to opt out of mainstream white society." The end result, however, has been the proliferation of self-identified Cherokee "tribes" in the U.S. and "Métis communities" in Eastern Canada with minimal connections to Indigenous peoples who they claim as long-ago ancestors.

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