Popular queer Native American Twitter account turns out to be unpopular straight white woman

I’m at ASU and was pretty upset to hear one of my colleagues died. It took a few hours to realize there is actually an ASU faculty member who is Hopi, about in the field that the fake account claimed to be and very much alive. As much as I wonder how she feels about this BS I hope nobody is wasting their time with it.

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That only happens if she gets caught. I’m assuming she didn’t plan on getting caught.

No. Because I’m guessing that she pulled out some BS that conservatives imagine that actually oppressed people say, and then Fox news or whoever, and point to that as proof of how the whole “grievance culture” thing is really just anti-white, anti-man, anti-capitalist, etc, and we should root that out of American culture and put the deserving white man back on top where he belongs.

It works to undermine the cause of actually bringing to light systemic issues against a number of groups, no matter how you slice it…

Either people with privilege are doing the work of listening and amplifying the voice of people who suffer oppression, or they are part of the problem that keeps it in place. This woman is clearly not the former, because masquerading as an oppressed person isn’t amplifying anyone’s voice or listening, it’s merely being a lying asshole who doesn’t care about the very real struggles of your fellow man.

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Attention. The ability to live out her fantasies.

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I can’t speak for this person, but where I grew up in rural america, everyone claimed to be 1/4, or 1/8, or 1/128 Cherokee, and acted as if it made them part of the tribe. I think it is something some people really desperately want to associate themselves with.

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I used to encounter this a lot in Kansas, and the best case scenario I could figure out (for white appropriation) was to game the system for perks like free hunting and fishing licenses.

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I would have thought that it’s fairly obvious why she’s made the stupid decision to masquerade as this invented character. She was active in a social group where having a claim to a marginalised identity will increase your credibility and gain you a sympathetic hearing, regardless of the actual content of what you have to say. So there’s an obvious incentive to grift- take advantage of people’s generosity and biases in order to gain social validation, support and power within that social group.

It’s an instructive reminder that there’s always someone willing to take advantage for the smallest of reasons, and that people on the internet might not be who they say they are.

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While on the topic. Does BBS have a way of rooting out sock puppets?
I’ve got my suspicions about certain clusters of accounts being just a bit too supportive of each other’s posts.

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Not true. Her actions drowned out actual Native American voices, as well as LGBTQ voices, with what a white woman imagined they might be saying. Whatever her motivation (and I am not prepared to say it was evil, but certainly self-centered, privileged and tone deaf, at best) it served to falsely put forward a voice claiming to be something it was not. I, as a SWM of all the privileges, value viewpoints different than my own. If I found that one of those viewpoints was not what it claimed, I would be pissed. She should be ashamed.

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Agreed. It definitely causes harm whether or not caught, and I didn’t actually address that. It’s something that she should have seen, and I should have as well.

But the question I thought Mindysan33 was answering was intent, rather than result.

What I am saying is that such harm was likely neither intended nor even salient in her decision making. People wanting to oppress other people usually seek stronger forms than just dilution and eventual drowning out of their voices (though of course any opportunities will be grabbed).

She was undoubtedly selfish in her motivations, but trying to satisfy some other goals (attention, shielding from criticism, donations, etc) still seem far more likely as motivations to me.

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Somewhat on topic; technically this query would be ‘meta.’

Basically you need to contact the mods with links to your suspicions.

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Unless you can read her mind, you can’t know her intent. We can more effectively speculate on the result, though.

It doesn’t matter.

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To employ an analogy stretched to the breaking point, a drunk driver pretty much never intends to kill someone, but that does not help the victims.

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clutches pearls but what about their HEART… :heart:

But seriously, this is why we have such a hard time rooting this kind of destructive shit out, because we don’t want to either see it as systemic, which we fear might indict us, and we worry to much about holding people accountable for their actions, fearing we’re dehumanizing them by doing so… but no, it’s not dehumanizing to hold people to account, it’s entirely human to do so. Whatever her INTENT here, her actions were not only hurtful, but dangerous to the other very REAL human beings whose struggles are being co-opted and delegitimized by what she’s done here. :woman_shrugging:

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What’s really dehumanizing is when people of privilege care more about the offending parties in question than they do about the victims of those parties. Or when they care about dogs than they do other actual people. Or when they care more about property… Or…

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Yep. I remember when my sister-in-law’s family members found out they and their kids were within the tribal generational limits and wanted to register so their kids could receive preferential college acceptance. They are VERY white presenting and they’ve all been raised in white, upper middle class privilege. Just disgusting.

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We do, but if you are smart and obfuscate the info we have about you (IP, email, etc) it is much more difficult. The community is actually really good at calling out these situations when they happen, and I encourage you to flag posts with “something else” and your suspicions (or PM a moderator directly) if you are suspicious.

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One thing, false claims (whether deliberate or not) seem to be to well known People (maybe because of population). I assume because that’s all they know. Nobody claims to be Syilx, besides the fact that most people who know about them would only know them as “Okanagan”, nobody made a western about them either. So they are fairly invisible.

" Cherokee" seems to cause flags going off, but here in Canada if someone with a vague “relation” to a certain people, it’s probably not true. The claim is just too common, and the mythology has been debunked.

But in the case of the Cherokee", I’ve read recently that a “long time ago” white people landed on the rolls because they did want land, etc. So in that particular case, the family history may be correct, there was someone up the tree who was “Cherokee” but it was bogus way back then, they had no connection to the Cherokee.

A lot of people seem to have some vague family lore about an ancestor. It’s hard to tell where it comes from. But they proclaim it as a right to speak, or some perceived “benefit”. But generally it’s a garble. Justin Beiber once proclaimed his grandmother was Inuit, he could “get free gas”.

If it’s real, they should have traced out their family tree, know exactly who and what the ancestor was. It doesn’t make them native, but they should claim that ancestor, since if she really existed, their erasure is part of the problem. If the ancestry really exists, having verified it it places an obligation on you to pay attention. Not just to know something about the people, but actually read the news to know what’s happening today. And no tribal tattoos or headdresses because you have an ancestor.

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Down where I live, it’s because southern whites did not want to admit to an interracial relationship with a Black person in the family history… because those were very common, and generally the result of sexual violence of one kind or another… better to say you have a Cherokee princess way on back in the family line.

That being said, there was intermarriage in the areas of the Cherokee/Creek lands back in the 18th and early 19th century, and there is some people who stayed and integrated after the trail of tears who were white passing. The are most certainly people with that background down here, but they are not Cherokee because they are not enrolled in the Nation nor are they raised with any cultural heritage of the Cherokee.

But mostly, it’s about covering up rape of Black women.

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I concur; up North where I grew up, “we have Indian in our family” was well known ‘code’ for the biracial family members they had but didn’t want to admit.

Not that there aren’t folks with real traces of Native American lineage, but they tend not to be the ones demanding acknowledgment in my experience.

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