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.
5 Likes
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.
14 Likes
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.
14 Likes
I just want to reiterate this point… The internets are full of people posing as caricature of various kind of people or accounts (with varying levels of effectiveness). Here is another case of someone posing as a “feminist” that many conservatives have taken to be the real thing… and once again, this is undercutting real oppression. The INTENT may have been to make people laugh, but it does real damage to the cause of women’s rights (in this case) - people begin to take things like the objectification of women and rape culture, and other such things LESS seriously because of accounts like this:
I really with people would take this seriously and not just assume it’s a “joke” so we should just ignore it… or that we don’t know people’s real intent, so we should just ignore it… This sort of thing is doing REAL MATERIAL damage to our body politic. We in part elected the current president because of people doing just this sort of thing (both home grown and foreign). We have really moving backwards and this point, and just shrugging this shit off does not help to stop the slide…
10 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
