DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED

POLICING INDIGENEITY | 02.05.21

This week in Vermont, government officials banned a public access TV host after he raised questions about how the state would determine who gets Covid-19 vaccines set aside for Indigenous Peoples. Specifically, he wondered, how one would qualify as Indigenous. "Do you use the Elizabeth Warren standard with high cheekbones?” Tom Merrill asked.

A journalist live-tweeting from the event wasted little time pining about the incident. "Can I just acknowledge how offensive this line of questioning is?" tweeted Jane Lindholm of Vermont Public Radio. She waxed on about the aspects of white supremacy that has rooted such thinking. "We're getting into things like the one-drop rule and a longstanding racist history in this country of quantifying and qualifying people based on rubrics of race and ethnicity and who gets to 'count.'"

She’s not wrong. But in Merrill’s defense, the issue, or rather the question of ‘Who is Indigenous?’, isn’t cut and dry. In fact, there are so many layers of gray that it makes this one question perhaps the most emotional question to raise in Indian Country.

We’ve been witnessing a case slowly unravel from our neighbors up north. An acclaimed filmmaker, Michelle Latimer, featured in the photo above, was recently outed for lying about her Indigenous heritage and it was Indigenous journalists with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation who revealed it. The CBC produces Trickster, the Indigenous-themed series co-created by Latimer. (The other co-creator is First Nations.)

As I was putting out my newsletter last week, news was slowly surfacing that Trickster, the only network show in North America (and maybe the world) where the majority of cast and crew are all Native, was canceled. I have yet to watch an episode, but I’ve seen the trailer and watched it again today. It’s a tad too supernatural for my taste, but seeing so many Natives on screen, and so authentically — it empties you knowing that the source of such loss comes from an imposter.

Since Latimer resigned and Trickster got the boot, here in the U.S. an “Alleged Pretendians List” has surfaced — a spreadsheet of would-be phonies—and it’s generated much ire on social media. (I have a copy of the list but I’m not posting it.) The whole ordeal hasn’t been pretty. In fact, it’s shined the worst light on Indian Country where even those who mean well don’t look or sound good. That’s because when it comes to policing Indigenous identity, nobody wins.

It’s a never-ending battle because, like Ward Churchill, they all try to make a comeback. And as we know from a long succession of fakes—Chief Lenoard Long Lance, Iron Eyes Cody, Elizabeth Warren — there will always be another like Michelle Latimer lurking around, waiting to pounce. For Latimer, it was Standing Rock. There’s this amazing clip of her accepting an award from the Canadian Academy for her VICE documentary, RISE where she literally says, “It is not an easy time to be Indigenous.”

Wow.

There’s more to say but I’ll just leave you with some related reading materials including one that circles us back to Vermont. Race-shifting author, Darryl Leroux did some deep diving into the “fake Abenaki tribes” in the state and will have a peer-reviewed published piece out soon. In other academic texts, Dr. Desi Rodriguez Lonebear just released her monthslong research report about blood quantum. I haven’t read it yet, but you can rent it here. And then on some lighter opinion reading, First Nation’s writer, Robert Jago, makes the case for Indigenous Peoples to decolonize the identity problem by solving it on Indigenous terms.

All of this is a doorway because I predict there will be more stories about the complexity of Indigeneity to come. I can think of at least two big cases both before the Supreme Court and centering around these questions: “Who is an Indian” and “What is an Indian Tribe?” Not easy stuff.

To a restful weekend, friends ❄️

Jenni

THE INDIGENOUS INTERNET

ENDORSEMENT

This week’s endorsement is quite self-promotional. I couldn’t find anything that more or less jives with the thematic flow of the newsletter than this short film I put together about a decade ago. It’s called An Eagle Eye in Harlem and follows around a Harlem man I met by way of doing some research centered around Black-Indigenous identity. It’s around seven-minutes, character-driven and fun to watch, at least for me, after so much time has passed.

A quick note, the title cards at the end of the piece are a bit outdated; there are 574-federally recognized tribes, today. But one thing remains true: American Indians and Alaska Natives remain the only group of Americans who must prove their ethnicity to the federal government to be seen as citizens of their nations. That history and analysis for another newsletter.

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In the Thick Podcast

I returned to Maria Hinojosa and Julio Ricardo Varela’s fun and fantastic podcast, In the Thick, this week to which they always boost the newsletter. 💥Thanks ITT.

Follow them, guys.

QUOTE

The Indigenously newsletter is produced by Jenni Monet (Laguna Pueblo)

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