Odin of Ossetia Wed Feb 28, 2024 11:03 pm
A U.S. University Professor Falsely Claimed "to be Native American" for at Least 10 Years.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/a-professor-claimed-to-be-native-american-did-she-know-she-wasnt?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
"(...).
Such fraud seems particularly rife in academia. In just the past few years, several scholars have been accused of being Pretendians, including Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a former judge and law professor in Canada who has said that her father was Cree, and Qwo-Li Driskill, a professor of gender and queer studies at Oregon State University who claims to have Cherokee, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage heritage. (Turpel-Lafond denied the accusation, in 2022; Driskill’s attorney characterized the accusation against his client as intrusive and false.) Ward Churchill, one of the country’s best-known Native-studies scholars, has been accused, throughout his career, of telling false stories about his Cherokee ancestry; when asked for proof of it, he claimed that such inquiries were the tools of colonialism. In January, 2023, Andrea Smith, a major figure in the field of ethnic studies, agreed to resign from the University of California, Riverside, effective this August, following questions about the veracity of her Cherokee heritage. (Both Churchill and Smith deny lying about their identities.)
There are likely many other cases. Kim TallBear, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, guesses that a quarter of those who have checked the box for Native American in the academy are what she calls “self-Indigenizers,” people who either invent a Native heritage wholesale or play up a tenuous connection. “Most of the cases haven’t been made very public yet,” TallBear said.
(...)."
This is the case not only with the academics, many "rednecks" - in both Canada and U.S.A. - claim "some Native ancestry" and in the case of the U.S.A. "Cherokee on the maternal side" appears to be especially extensively claimed, but I suspect a significant portion of these claims are false.
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