Indigenous Frauds in Academia | Jacqueline Keeler on "Pretendians"
Conversations with Peter Boghossian
There is an epidemic of primarily white people—and white women in particular—who are pretending to be Native Americans for professional gain. Dubbed “Pretendians,” these individuals are predominantly active in academia and hold tenured faculty positions or even department chairs.
To be sure, this is a cultural oddity. It is not, however, particularly surprising given the career advantages the academy confers on Native Americans. What is bizarre is that once a university finds out that one of its faculty is pretending to be Native American, they do nothing about it. Nothing.
I invite you to ponder this: The same institutions that start meetings with land acknowledgments, champion Native American history, obsess over equity-based racial solutions to contemporary ills, and perseverate on historical tragedies, completely ignore known instances of fraud by white people who are pretending to be indigenous and who receive direct financial reward as a result. I cannot believe that the Pretendian scam is not a bigger story. It is a clear example of staggering hypocrisy on multiple levels.
To help make sense of this institutionally supported fraud, I spoke with an actual Native American. Jacqueline Keeler is an author and journalist who’s an expert on the phenomena of Pretendians. She names names and pulls no punches in our conversation. In light of my experience at Portland State University (PSU), I was only mildly surprised to hear Keeler’s report that three of its leading Indigenous Nations faculty are Pretendians: Ted Van Alst, Grace Dillon, and Judy Bluehorse Skelton.
Van Alst, the chair of PSU’s Indigenous Nations department, is a particularly interesting case. He previously had no tribe listed next his name on PSU’s website. Within the last week, a tribal affiliation has been added, claiming member status with Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians. He has previously described himself as Anishinaabe & Lakota (or both).
In this conversation, Keeler explains the research process she and others use to identify false claims of native status. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
As always, thank you for your support.
Peter
Thank you for this important pushback on identity based falsehoods. I recently had to listen to supposed native Americans telling schoolchildren that the Bering Strait hypothesis of American settlement was definitively wrong and that their ancestors had been here for over 40,000 years. This is directly contradicted by science and the state education standards, but God forbid you correct anyone of color in Wokelandia. So infuriating.
1. No one should be allowed to get away with pretending to be Native American.
2. No one should have to be Native American in order to study or publish papers on Native American history.