The last few days/months/years have brought a lot of new folks to me, my work, and this ever-aging blog. I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself to anyone who may be new here, and re-introduce myself to anyone who may have jumped in at any point along the last 14(!) years of Native Appropriations and my journey. I decided to write this as a snarky Q&A where I am both the asker and the answerer because why not?
Who are you?!
Hi! My name is Adrienne Keene. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and also Settler/White (specifically Armenian/German/Irish/English/Welsh). I’m a scholar, researcher, educator, writer, podcaster, and more recently a visual artist. Up until January I was a professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, where my research focuses on Native students navigating the college process and the role of higher ed in Native communities, as well as cultural appropriation and Native representations.
What is Native Appropriations? How did it start?
This space where we find ourselves is my blog, Native Appropriations. I started the blog when I was 23, as a first year doctoral student. I had just moved to the East Coast from California, where I had been lucky to spend the previous seven years surrounded by a large, diverse Native community on my undergraduate campus, where I then worked after graduation. I arrived at grad school, and suddenly I was faced with overwhelming ignorance on Native peoples like nothing I had ever experienced before. My classmates told me to my face they thought Indians didn’t exist anymore or that they had never met a Native person in their lives. They didn’t have any knowledge or understanding of the issues or communities I cared about, and didn’t care to learn.
One day in Urban Outfitters, surrounded by the worst culturally appropriative BS I’d ever seen, something clicked. I realized that the reason my classmates and faculty didn’t know contemporary Native peoples existed, or care about our modern struggles and triumphs was partially because the only images they ever saw were things like this crud in Urban Outfitters, or any of the other awful stereotypes we see on a daily basis. To them, Native peoples were these decontextualized stereotypes without any relation to actual living humans, and that, I decided, was a problem. So I put up a Facebook note, back when people did that, and asked my friends to start sending me things for a “project.” I honestly never thought anyone was going to read the blog. I thought it would be a place for me to catalog, mostly. A repository of images and products and things that I found hurtful, and place for me to find the words to say why. But obviously I was wrong, in the best ways, and it’s grown into something I never could have dreamed.
But why a blog?
In the 2010s everyone had a blog! It was actually pretty glorious. There was a blog for every niche interest or community imaginable. You could always find someone’s elaborate thoughts on truly anything within a few clicks. Folks posted their elaborate daily outfits in front of garage doors. We all coded HTML by hand. I knew way too much about random strangers’ lives to the point that I actually miss them and wonder how they are all these years later. So starting a blog wasn’t a rare or weird thing back then. Having one in 2024 might be though?
Where did the name “Native Appropriations” come from?
The name came from me smushing together “Native”/”Native American” and “cultural appropriation.” I didn’t really think a lot about it, nor did I think it would become my “brand.” I had been an anthropology major as an undergrad and cultural appropriation was a thing that we had talked about in some of my classes. I also was entering an existing internet conversation, there was a growing cultural appropriation discourse happening. My (not-yet, but now) friend Jessica Metcalfe was covering Native fashion and plenty of appropriation on her blog, Beyond Buckskin, an anonymous person named “K” (who recently revealed themselves to me all these years later–made me so happy!) was running a tumblr called “My culture is not a trend,” as well as a few other folks.
If you’re interested in more of the origin story and/or want a more in-depth discussion about what Native appropriation/cultural appropriation is, why it matters, and more, we have a whole All My Relations (the podcast I co-created–more on that in a minute) episode about it: Season 1, Episode 7: Native Appropriations.
If you were only writing about cultural appropriation, how come if I scroll back there are only long posts about you and your life, instead of posts about misrepresentations/Native Appropriation?
For the first five or so years of the blog I was primarily responding to instances of cultural appropriation in popular culture–writing about the phenomenon of “hipster headdresses” over and over and over, writing about Indian mascots, cowboy and Indian parties, brands using fake Native imagery in advertising and logos, bad movies like The Lone Ranger, analyzing TV shows, on and on.
Then at some point I started including more personal essays as well. Essays about responding to racism in my grad school classrooms, cringey missives about dating, and later even more personal pieces about really tough things like PMDD, cervical cancer, and predatory “famous” men in our communities. Through it all I went from a grad student, to a postdoc, to a faculty member, and now…whatever I’m going to be, and since I had been so open about who I was, I felt it important to share all parts of what it meant to be a Native person. The blog went from being very active in the early years, to nearly dormant for the last five or so. Mostly because on the tenure-track hustle I was (sadly) trying to prioritize writing that would “count” for my tenure process. So for the last couple of years I used the blog as a space for when I needed to post something publicly, and those tended to be more personal updates.
Your academic research is largely on Native students in college, So why did you decide to keep writing about Native representations as you moved through academia?
I’ve always operated the blog under an ethos of “Consenting to learn in public”–the idea that I don’t know everything, but am learning publicly along with all of you. It means that I’ve always tried to be open to criticism when I misstep, offer corrections, apologies, resources I’ve found helpful, and hope that others will join me on that learning journey as well. Learning is a messy, complicated, nonlinear process, and I hope to model how we are able to extend each other grace and understanding as folks embark on their own learning journeys. So while many academics might blog about their particular area of research expertise, I have always considered this blog a side hustle that I was actively learning along with my readers. Interestingly, it then morphed into my research, and I’ve been publishing lately on a big survey of Native people on Native appropriation, which has been really fascinating and rewarding.
If I’ve never actually read your blog before, where should I start? What should I know as I read the posts?
The biggest disclaimer I want to offer as you delve into the archives is that these posts are old. The conversation and language around these topics has (thank goodness!) evolved in the last decade, so some of these posts might seem a little outdated, naive, or my voice might sound young–because I was. I believe very strongly that we should never be afraid to be seen trying, so I want the blog to live as an archive, and think that some of the pieces are still very relevant. I don’t expect you to agree with all of these, I don’t even agree with old me a lot of the time. Oh also don’t be alarmed if the formatting is wonky or pictures are missing or links are broken, sometimes that happens on relics of the ancient internet.
and then more recently (2018, ha) a post about Sephora’s “Starter Witch Kit” and the appropriation of white sage in particular.
Those are just off top of my head, feel free to jump around and explore. Folks who’ve been reading a long time, if there are others you still resonate with, feel free to share in the comments!
What about the other things you do? Your podcast? Your book? Your art?
I’m so glad you asked! I also am proud of the work I’ve done on the All My Relations Podcast over three seasons, where I co-hosted with Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur. I published a book in 2021 called Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present—a book beautifully illustrated by CHamoru artist Ciara Sana featuring short profiles of 50 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian folks from history and today, covering a wide swath of identities and life paths. These two projects were an outgrowth of the realization that we couldn’t just tear down misrepresentations all the time, we needed to give folks some nuanced, complex, beautiful representations to replace the bad. Right now I’m hard at work on two, maybe three(?) additional book projects that hopefully will become real in the next few years. I recently have also turned toward visual art as an additional medium, which has been very healing and fun.
You’ve said you grew up away from your community? And are White? Who are you to speak on anything Native?
(I’m sad I have to include this tbh)
Through it all, I’ve tried to be very open about who I am. I am an enrolled tribal citizen, but anyone reading old posts will notice I talk about my whiteness often, and from the beginning of the blog was clear about my own positionality. Part of having white privilege is needing to work incessantly to dismantle it, and that’s part of what I hope I’m doing with this project and calling out white supremacy in action. I also talk about growing up surrounded by non-Natives, the ways settler colonial policies have impacted my own family through removal, boarding schools, land flooding, and more, and I talk about my own journey of reconnection, now over 23 years in the making. I write about it because I think it’s important to understand that these ideas and opinions I share are mine, and I represent only one Native perspective informed by my own life experiences. I also don’t want others who have similar stories to feel the shame that comes with having no control over the way you were raised or not knowing/feeling “enough.” My story is a shared one for many Native folks, so I don’t want anyone to feel alone or like it’s too late to build a connection to their nation. I also talk about the whole journey on an All My Relations episode as well, if you want the long version.
I think the conversations online lately about what “reconnecting” means and entails have shifted the meaning of the phrase in ways I’m not comfortable with, so want to offer a caveat here. Reconnecting often now is taken to mean someone who “discovered” an ancient ancestor many generations back, maybe they know the tribal nation, maybe they don’t, and immediately tried to monetize it or speak with full authority on all Native topics without seeing reconnecting as the action verb it is. That’s not me. I grew up knowing I was Cherokee, having a Cherokee Grandma who grew up on allotment land and went to Indian boarding school, and visiting my Cherokee relatives in Oklahoma. But through generations of colonization, our family lost a lot. A lot of land, a lot of knowledge, a lot of language, a lot of connection–nearly everything. I’ve made it my life’s mission to reclaim that connection, and am immensely proud of the community I’ve built over the last two decades and what I’ve been able to learn, while also looking forward to the future and knowing there are lifetimes of work still ahead.
I am very careful about where I speak with authority. I write primarily about representations because that’s my lane, and that’s an experience that impacts me deeply as a Native person living off her homelands. I am surrounded by these images and see how they shape non-Native perceptions of Native people, daily. I write about Native students in college because I was a Native student in college, and then have been on university campuses firsthand for the last 18 years. I don’t write about Cherokee spirituality, ceremony, or cultural knowledge, because that is knowledge I don’t have authority to speak on, nor would I want to (because not everything belongs on the internet or in an academic journal). Throughout my writing and other work like the podcast I try to lift up others and center other Native voices, and try to always give credit where credit is due. I’m sure I’ve unintentionally overstepped at some points, but know that I try to be very conscious of the space I occupy and the limits of my knowledge.
Part of what stereotypes do is they collapse the immense diversity of Indian Country down into one flattened version of what an “Indian” is. So one aspect of resisting these stereotypes is showing that there is no one “Native” anything, and that our communities contain multitudes of opinions, perspectives, experiences, cultures, languages, on and on. I’m just one of millions.
So what’s next with Native Appropriations? What does the future hold?
This is largely the whole point of this long post! Congrats on making it this far! After many years of laying dormant, I’m seeing a need to revisit a lot of these conversations from the last 15 years for a new generation and new audience. We’ve made such huge advances in the last few years that I think it’s important to reflect on how far we’ve come, but also to recognize a lot of the BS we were dealing with in the 2010s hasn’t gone away. Part of the purpose of the blog was for me to create resources I wished I had as a young person, so hopefully the posts can still be useful for folks today. I miss the community we had in the early days of the blog, and I miss writing in this medium regularly and using that part of my analytic brain. I also want to uplift all of the cool stuff happening in Native TV, fashion, art, film, and more.
Sooo all that is to say, stay tuned, the blog is coming back in a new form, very soon!! Eeee! 👀
As of Monday, January 15, I am no longer a faculty member at Brown University. I made the very difficult decision to resign from my position as an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies in November, after nine years on campus.
I’ve held in the back of my mind that I needed to write this post and to make some kind of formal announcement, because I’m still looking for what comes next, and I know our beautiful community and network might hold the key. But I’ve struggled, and am struggling, to figure out what I need or want to say.
During the height of the pandemic, when I lived alone, and would go weeks without speaking to another human in real life, I started thinking about apocalypse. Not the apocalypse, but apocalypse as a world ending that can happen again and again. Native studies scholars talk about the fact that Native people have already survived apocalypse. Our worlds ended with the arrival of settlers and the onset of the structure of settler colonialism. I teach this concept to my students, to help them understand what survival really means. We survived the end of the world. We are remaking the new world daily.
During those years alone in my apartment I would wonder how long it had been since I had seen another Native person. Another Cherokee person would be even longer. I thought about what my ancestors would think. This, to them, would be an apocalypse. A lack of community so deep and so absolute that I resorted to having long conversations with my 16 pound dog. That apocalyptic loneliness extended to my research, to my teaching, and to all of my work on campus. There was never someone I could turn to who truly and fully understood.
Ultimately I knew I had to resign because I was exhausted and lonely, and my mental and physical health had begun to be impacted in ways I could not ignore. For years I’ve felt adrift, unrooted, and have been left longing to do the work that I know I am capable of, that serves my spirit, and brings me back to the relationships, people, and lands I care so deeply about. I’m leaving not to turn away from academia, but to turn toward the creative endeavors that have sustained me for the last decade. I want to continue to weave art and words to build future worlds—hopefully in more community and alongside others who share the same dreams. I am ready to do the work of building something new.
I, as far as I know, was most likely the first tenure track Native faculty member in the history of Brown, which opened in 1764. There are perhaps some caveats to that—first tribally enrolled American Indian faculty member with ties to the Indigenous community on campus, or something equally convoluted. I add these caveats because I don’t want to erase any faculty member’s identity who I don’t or didn’t know. Regardless of how we parse it, in 259 years, the number of Native tenure track faculty members is hovering around one.
I take no pride in being the first. Until two years ago, I thought I was the second, and that unraveling continues to haunt me. I am a Cherokee person, who due to colonial policies of removal, boarding schools, land flooding, and intergenerational traumas, ended up being raised in very white suburbia in southern California. I had access to the best public schools, the privileges of whiteness, and elite college and graduate education. I had all of the tools of western success, and I still was unable to navigate life as the one of the only Native faculty members on campus. I’m still working through some level of shame at that statement. I’ve watched my friends and colleagues at other institutions find their paths as the only one, why couldn’t I? I kept thinking if I could just get to the next milestone–through the postdoc, getting hired, reappointment, the book, tenure–it would all fall into place. But with each step it just kept getting harder for me, and I felt farther and farther behind.
I’m still reflecting and processing my time on College Hill, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say later when I have more distance. But I know I am leaving grateful for my time at Brown, especially for the fellow faculty members who believed in me and my work, fought tirelessly for my hiring, and supported me along the way. I am so so proud of the hundreds of students I had the privilege of working with and learning from, you are brilliant and beautiful and give me so much hope for our collective futures. I am also proud of the work we did to build Native and Indigenous Studies in the past decade, building on decades of work before, and I hope that NAISI continues to build and grow. I’m grateful for the work of those on campus who hold all of those moving Native studies pieces together for all of us.
I wrote a letter to the Native students directly, but I’ll quote a portion of it here in hopes it is useful to Native students on other campuses:
I know Brown is often a hard place to be a Native student, but I want to remind you that you come from legacies of strength and love, and the problem is always the university and never you. For those of you who have taken my classes you know I’m fond of reminding you to refuse the university, to be in but not of, and to reassemble the colonizing parts into decolonizing contraptions (shout out to A Third University is Possible and Sandy Grande). Creating our classroom spaces where we could read and engage Indigenous scholarship, laugh, cry, and be our full Indigenous selves was the highlight of my time as a professor and what sustained me, and I hope you’ll be able to create and find more of those spaces, because you deserve them.
So, for now, I’m going to rest. I’m going to take time to remember who I am and re-find my voice as a writer. I’m going to give myself space to create without expectations. I’m going to look for joy and laughter and rebuild the friendships and relationships I let crumble and that I’ve deeply missed. I’m going to travel and visit the pandemic babies turned toddlers turned preschoolers I haven’t met yet. I’m going to continue to learn Cherokee language and seek out Cherokee community. I’m going to look for otherwise and possibility. I’m going to nourish my body and spirit.
While I’m still figuring out next steps, and have a few exciting projects and endeavors that are going to hold me over for the next few months, I am looking for any opportunities and new directions. I’m also not opposed to another faculty position in the future if it’s the right fit.
I would love to get back into public writing—we’re in an incredible Native representation in media and fashion moment and I would love to write about it for any outlet, or whatever other musings anyone might be interested in. If you’re looking for pitches or have an idea for me, please reach out. My clips are here.
I have experience in podcasting/audio storytelling; qualitative research and Indigenous research methods/research consulting; issues in Native higher ed/college access; some curatorial experience with hopes for more; experience teaching Ethnic Studies, CRT, Native studies, and education courses at the undergrad and graduate level (I truly love teaching and will miss it); experience in Native youth programming; and an emerging visual art practice.
Finally, I love coming to speak to campuses or organizations–virtually or in person–about issues of Native representation, Native students in higher ed/Native students in college admissions processes, limitations of land acknowledgements, Indigenous studies or methods 101, or anything else that might be helpful for creating environments where Native people can thrive. I also am happy to come talk about my book Notable Native People (bonus points if you let me bring one of the people featured in the book!). If you’re interested in having me come speak, please reach out to my amazing speakers’ bureau Speak Out.
My personal website is adriennekeene.com, my current academic CV can be found there as well on the “Teaching and Research” page. There is a contact form that I’ll be checking regularly.
Wado to everyone who has followed and supported me through all the stages of my academic journey, some of you have been here for over ten years, and I’m so appreciative and maybe a little confused that you still care what I’m up to and what I have to say.
Yesterday, on May 1, 2023, Elizabeth Hoover put up a “Letter of Accountability and Apology” on her personal webpage in which she states, “I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life.” I have had the following post sitting in my drafts for a few months, and feel ready to share it because I feel there is a need for information to be in the public record, and a need to understand the level of labor actual Indigenous people had to put in to get her to the point of writing that statement. I am one of many, many Native people who have been caught up in her decades of lies and one of many Native people who has worked tirelessly to hold her accountable, and this continues to take up enormous amounts of time and emotional energy.
For the past year I have been dealing with the reality that Elizabeth Hoover (“Liz”), once one of my close friends and colleague, has falsified her Mohawk and Mi’kmaq identity. Nearly a year ago I researched her claims and communicated the findings to her. I did not do this to hurt her or destroy anything, I did this to find the truth for her and to help to exonerate her. What I found was the opposite.
In February of 2021 Elizabeth Hoover’s name appeared on the controversial “Alleged Pretendian List.” Since she had long asserted that she was of Mohawk/Mi’kmaq descent and the list contained the names of people who have actual, undisputed Native ties or are even enrolled in their nations, I offered to help her to write a statement about her identity to clear things up. She declined, but said she would talk with others to decide what to do. I realized then that I had never heard the full story of her family, though I had always been very open about mine–-but I pushed the questions away. However, one year later, in February 2022 there was a public statement put out by an Indigenous group in Chicago questioning not only the behavior of her then-partner, Adam Sings-in-the-Timber, but her claims to heritage. We then had a conversation where I asked her directly for family names and ties, and was left confused and unsatisfied by the answers. Failing a clear story from her I embarked on my own research into her claims. After extensive research utilizing Canadian and US census records, death certificates, obituaries, marriage certificates, baptismal records, and census data from Kahnawake I found no Indigenous ties on the lines that she had claimed, tracing back to her great-great-great grandparents.
I will say that this work was not particularly difficult nor did it require a lot of specialized knowledge–her story fell apart very quickly, within a few clicks, but the subsequent months were spent trying every avenue to find something that would explain her claims, triangulating and triple checking, looking in new databases, finding more and new documents, or going back another generation.
In April 2022, Acee Agoyo of Indianz.com published a very disturbing research-driven account of her claims, looking up her dissertation, her on-line bios, while also investigating the allegations of sexual assault against her then partner. This public conversation created urgency around my need for answers from Liz directly. I sent her the letter that follows in June 2022. Four months later, in October 2022, she released a statement on her personal website [scroll below recent statement]. She has continued, publicly and in small groups, to reference “somebody” or “a colleague” who did the research into her family, and in some cases implied that it was research done out of spite or vindictive in nature. That “somebody” was me, and this research came from the exact opposite of spite or hate–I just wanted to know the truth, and I truly thought the answer would be different than what I found.
I have been very hesitant to share this letter. I wrote it for Liz. I didn’t write it for a broad audience, and I am the first to admit that I am not Mohawk or Mi’kmaq, nor am I a genealogist or a historian. I worried that maybe I had gotten something wrong. That I had not identified the correct ancestors. That I missed something. However, I am a PhD trained researcher (as is Liz), and this has since been examined by several others who found the same ancestors in their research. In the months since I sent the letter, she hasn’t offered any corrections or additions to the genealogy.
I also feel strangely and illogically protective over these random white ancestors, who I now feel connected to over months of reading their lives through online documents and tracing the trails and trials they endured. There is tragedy and sadness here. Though they are not Indigenous and they are not my family relations, they didn’t ask to be pulled into this. However, in making these claims about herself in print and in public, in accepting opportunities designated for Indigenous peoples, Liz pulled them into this.
I continue to be referenced online as her supporter, called a “defendian,” and have had my own Cherokee identity repeatedly questioned (I am an enrolled tribal citizen), which has been extremely painful. At the time I sent this, I told her that I had no plans to make this work public, and I didn’t–but I feel that the work contained here and my approach may be helpful to others navigating the pervasive trespasses of ethnic frauds.
I am sharing the letter as I sent it, with the exception of one reference to a graduate student that I have redacted for privacy.
In her direct response to me, Liz didn’t question any of my findings. She refuted ever lying about her identity and insists that her shifting claims about her identity in written documents was not about obfuscation or attempts to back away from her claims. She also refutes others who recall her claiming to be from other Mohawk communities as untrue. There are other minor points that she disputes, but again, she had no objections to the core of the research.
If you have any additional information about Elizabeth Hoover or have stories of how her claims impacted you or your community that you would like to share, I and a small group of other Native women have created a gmail account where you can contact us. Know that we will take the utmost care with your stories and you will have the final say over whether or how we use your information.
I request that you please only email the above account and do not respond to me directly through my personal or work emails as the time and energy this has required has already exerted an exhausting toll. Thank you for your understanding.
***
[Sent June 20, 2022]
Dear Liz,
I want to be clear that I did all of this work hoping to vindicate you. As someone whose identity is constantly questioned, I absolutely hate this kind of thing. I wanted the rumors and the tweets and the pretendian list to be wrong. Though you wouldn’t take me up on my offers to help you write a statement about your family, I wanted to help you tell your family story in a way that protected what you had described as a hurtful, embarrassing, and messy story and allowed you to move forward and put all this behind you. I didn’t go into this looking to prove you wrong or wanting to prove you weren’t Native. I did this work from a place of love, which makes what I found even harder for me to understand. I wanted your story to be true. I wanted to give you the tools you needed to prove everyone wrong. But I also got to a point where I needed to know for myself. Things were starting to not add up. If I was going to defend you I needed to know the truth, and I wasn’t getting it from you.
This represents hours and hours of work poring over ancestry.com, cross referencing to other archives, finding online gravesites and obituaries, learning about pitfalls of Native genealogy, learning about Kahnawake and Canadian records, and even translating things from French into English.
I am a researcher, as are you, and I used every skill of my Indigenous studies researcher arsenal to try and corroborate your story or find any shred of truth. I entered into this with the most generous reading of connection as possible. Knowing how settler colonialism and Indigenous erasure function, I gave the benefit of the doubt at every turn. I still hold out some tiny flame of hope that maybe I’m wrong on one of these ancestors. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I didn’t go back far enough. So I’m turning it over to you. All of this information is readily available online, and I will share all of these documents with you if you need them. I, and your friends, colleagues, collaborators, students, communities, and organizations need answers. If what I’ve found is untrue, incorrect, or incomplete, I need to know. If it is correct, I need to hear it from you directly.
From your dissertation:
“Because I am of Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent (my mother has ancestors from Kahnawake, a Mohawk community to the East of Akwesasne, and my father has Mi’kmaq ancestors from Quebec), I was invited to attend Longhouse events.”
From your book:
“As a person of Indigenous ancestry who is not from Akwesasne…” (Introduction, page 12)
“I have mixed Indigenous ancestry (Mohawk and Mi’kmaq) but am not enrolled in a community, so I am grateful to the Bear Clan, and especially Bear Clan mother Wakerakatsiteh, for giving me a place to sit with them in the longhouse; to Jean and Henry Laffin, who took me in as their daughter; to Ionawaiienhawi, who became my niece and her parents my dearest friends; and to the dozens of others who took me in, made me their friend and family, and put me to work.” (Footnote in introduction, page 286 of Notes)
[These are the only mentions of your ancestry I could find in your whole book, which is hard to understand in hindsight.]
From what you have told me, only recently:
Your great grandmother, Adeline Rivers, was from Kahnawake, but left when she married her husband (who I now know is Morris Ovitt), a Frenchman. He was abusive and harmful, and she took her own life by drowning herself in the St. Lawrence River. Her son, your Grandfather, who I now know is Leroy Ovitt, was then raised by another woman or family and disconnected from his heritage. Your mother, Anita Ovitt/Hoover raised you with this story, and you grew up going to local powwows and some kind of ceremonies in upstate NY and surrounding areas. You also mentioned the Mi’kmaq came from your paternal grandmother, who I believe is Maxine Earl.
Below is what I’ve been able to compile through my research. To be upfront: None of what you have stated and/or been told appears to have any truth.
Your maternal line, tracing the claimed Mohawk descent:
Elizabeth Hoover (you)
B. 1978
Anita Ovitt-Hoover (mother)
B. 1947
Leroy Ovitt (grandfather)
B. 1918, Luzerene, NY
D. 1997, Saratoga, NY
Obituary:
Adeline Rivers (Great Grandmother, where you have stated the ancestry comes from)
B. 1888, Luzerne, NY
D. 1928, Luzerne, NY
Obituary:
Based on this information alone, the story you told me is patently untrue. Adeline was born in Luzerne, NY, and is listed as white on all census records (see below). Her obituary states she drowned in the Schroon River, not the St. Lawrence.
This is the 1900 Census. It shows Adeline (Addie), at age 12, living with her family in Luzerne, NY, where she was born. There are no census records or other records from her life that list her as anything other than White.
In 1902 she married Morris Ovitt in Corinth, NY, not Canada:
In 1925, she is listed as white, and the census shows that your grandfather, Leroy, was 7:
She then sadly died at age 41, three years later.
Her father, Charles Rivers, your great-great grandfather, was listed as born in “France, Canada”. Her mother, Luretta, was born in NY. To give you the benefit of the doubt, I looked into Charles’ origins, as maybe the story was one more generation back.
Charles Rivers, your great-great grandfather, who is also listed as white on all census documents, arrived in the US before or at age 4, and on the 1850 census is listed as living with his parents in Vermont:
His parents, Joseph and Ester Rivers, your great-great-great grandparents, are also listed as white, and listed as laborers born in Canada.
I found Ester Rivers Jr.’s death record from 1914, your great-great Aunt, where she is also listed as white:
It shows her mother’s maiden name as Coutour.
Joseph Rivers and Ester Coutour emigrated to the US sometime around or before the 1850 census, meaning if either of them were Mohawk from Kahnawake, they would have presumably been on the Kahnawake census records before then. The community took full community censuses throughout the 1800s, all of which were transcribed and recorded in these documents (I have the PDF if you would like to see). There are no records of the name Rivers on any of the censuses, which include other nearby Mohawk communities as well, nor Riviere (the french spelling), or even Two Rivers, Cross River, or some of the other Mohawk names that show up in the 1900s, long after your family emigrated. There are also no Countour’s or any other similar spelling.
I found the marriage record for Joseph and Ester, which show them getting married in 1831 in Bertheirville, Quebec, which is a French-candadian village located about 60 miles north of Kahnawake. It appears Joseph changed the family name from the Francophone spelling of Riviere to Rivers when he and the family emigrated to Vermont.
I am happy to share any of these documents with you if you would like to see them. I was very careful with my research, cross checking and verifying and making sure I was tracking the correct people.
I also found plenty of Mohawk people from Kahnawake during the same time period who were very well documented. Not only on the Mohawk censuses from their communities, but also through baptism/marriage records, and records of crossings between the US and Canada. On all of these documents they are clearly marked as “Indian” and their origin/home/birthplace as “Caughnawaga” (the early spelling of Kahnawake).
In summary, for your maternal line:
Liz Hoover
B. 1978, New York
Anita Ovitt/Hoover (mother)
B. 1947
Leroy Ovitt (grandfather)
B. 1918, Luzerene, NY
D. 1997, Saratoga, NY
Adeline Rivers (Ovitt) (great-grandmother)
B. 1888, Luzerne, NY
D. 1928, Luzerne, NY
Charles Rivers (great-great grandfather)
B. 1846, Quebec, Canada
D. unknown
Joseph Rivers (great-great-great grandfather)
B. ~1802
All of these ancestors are not listed as Indian on any document.
Through looking at all of these folks in your maternal family, there are no discernable ties to Kahnawake, or any Mohawk community for at least five generations and over 200 years. The story about your great-grandmother you told me is untrue, and there appear to be no Indigenous ancestors through your maternal grandfather, as you’ve claimed.
Your paternal line, tracing the claimed Mi’kmaq descent:
This claim is even more baffling to me, as there are no ancestors that I could find through your paternal grandmother who were born in Canada, or even near Canada. The Vermont ties are from southern Vermont, not near the northern border. I have similar documentation as above for your paternal line, but because the locations didn’t line up with Mi’kmaq communities I didn’t provide it here. I’m happy to share if you want to see them.
Liz Hoover
B. 1978, New York
Robert Hoover (Father)
B. 1950
Maxine Earl (Grandmother)
B. 1915, Chicago, Illinois
D. 1998, Altamont, NY
Harry Bennet Earl (great-grandfather)
B. 1884, Balston Spa, NY
D. 1923, Saratoga Springs, NY
Agnes Leyden (great-grandma)*
B. 1895, Iowa
D. 1938, Saratoga Springs, NY
Rollin J. Earl (great-great grandfather)
B. 1847, Mt. Holly, VT
D. 1922, Saratoga Springs, NY
Emily Bennett (great-great grandmother)
B. 1849, Boston, MA
D. 1922, Balston Spa, NY
Sally Spring-Earl (great-great-great grandmother)
B. 1806, Massachusetts
D. 1879, Vermont
Roswell Earl (great-great-great grandfather)
B. ~1806, Mt. Holly, VT
D. unknown
All of these ancestors are listed as white on census, marriage, and death certificates. I also found documents of your great-great Uncle, Rufus Earl, who was listed as white on his death certificate as well. There appear to be no ties at all to any Mi’kmaq community, or even Canada, through your paternal grandmother for at least 5 generations and over 200 years.
*Agnes’ parents were born in Ireland, so I didn’t trace this any further, as they clearly could not be Mi’kmaq:
Philip Leyden (great-great grandfather, Agnes’s father)
B. 1845, Ireland
D. 1906, Iowa
Mary Manton (great-great grandma, Agnes’s mother)
B. 1849, Ireland
D. 1915, Iowa
Questions/Concerns you probably have:
Couldn’t my ancestors have been miscategorized on documents?
We know the US census is not a reliable marker for race, especially for Natives. Folks could not self categorize until 1960, and American Indian was not included as a category until 1860. However, in 1860, *only* Natives who were considered to be “assimilated” were counted on the census, meaning the folks living off reservations and in white communities, which would have included your ancestors if they were Indian. In addition, in 1900, folks were recorded with blood quantum, and in 1930 Indigenous folks who were mixed with white were recorded as solely Indian. The US government wanted to keep track of Indians.
From Pew research:
“Although American Indians were not included in early U.S. censuses, an “Indian” category was added in 1860, but enumerators counted only those American Indians who were considered assimilated (for example, those who settled in or near white communities). The census did not attempt to count the entire American Indian population until 1890.
In some censuses, enumerators were told to categorize American Indians according to the amount of Indian or other blood they had, considered a marker of assimilation. In 1900, for example, census takers were told to record the proportion of white blood for each American Indian they enumerated. The 1930 census instructions for enumerators said that people who were white-Indian were to be counted as Indian “except where the percentage of Indian blood is very small, or where he is regarded as a white person by those in the community where he lives.”” (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/06/11/chapter-1-race-and-multiracial-americans-in-the-u-s-census/#fn-20724-23 )
On all of these censuses, your ancestors are listed as white. On documents where they could presumably have self-identified, such as marriage licenses, they chose to identify as white. The obituaries I found don’t mention Native ancestry or connections, even in passing or as something they were proud of.
Additionally, our ancestors don’t exist in a vacuum. They each have a massive web of relatives that chain off of them–siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins–and each of those relatives have relatives and so on, making thousands and thousands of relatives throughout 200+ years. I clicked and searched for as many of these relations as possible in my research, and none of them are identified as Indian that I could find.
As an example of miscategorization, I offer my own family. I found a census for my Cherokee family in the 1920s, when they were living on Cherokee allotment land in Oklahoma. For some reason, the entire family is listed on the census document as white. However, on the same census card, right next to my family, is my great-grandmother’s brother and his family, who were living on the allotment next door, and they are all listed as full blood Cherokee–meaning obviously my great-grandmother was as well. Then, on all subsequent censuses, my great-grandmother is listed as Indian. My grandmother, who went to Indian boarding school and grew up on that allotment land, didn’t have a birth certificate because she was born at home in the rural country. When she was an adult, she went to get a birth certificate made so she could apply for a passport, and either she or the official listed her as white. But on other documents, she is listed as Indian.
So even in cases of miscategorization, there are usually other documents or relatives to demonstrate connection to a tribal nation.
For your family, there appear to be no such corroborating documents that I can find.
Couldn’t my family have been “hiding in plain sight” for five generations? Maybe you didn’t go back far enough.
I mean, maybe? Your great-great-great grandparents would have already had to have been white passing enough to assimilate into the white communities in which they lived to be recorded as white on all the documents. I obviously don’t ascribe to racist colonial blood quantum at all, but for a reference point, one Indigenous ancestor at the great-great-great grandparent level equals 1/64 of your ancestry, and one generation beyond that is 1/128 of your ancestry. If they were already mixed at that point, it would be even less.
But it also then boils down to what you think about identity. That blood quantum BS shouldn’t matter at all if your ancestors were shown to be in community with a living tribal nation for all those generations, but they weren’t. So being completely generous in a way that is unsupported by facts in this case, yes, maybe some beliefs, stories, lifeways, or other connections wound their way through five or six generations to be a part of your family’s life today. At what point, though, do those bits and pieces warrant a primary identity? One that is so strong I’ve never actually heard you say that you’re Native and white, or even mixed, or even talk about your whiteness at all? When does “reclaiming” become appropriation? But again, even so, I can’t find evidence that your family has anything to reclaim.
But I have never claimed to be enrolled in a community, only descent?
To be a descendant of a tribal nation you must actually descend from that nation. As a professor of Native American studies, you know more than anyone that Indigenous identity is about nationhood. You have, as far as I can tell, no documented ties to any tribal nation. You only ever claimed a generic “Mohawk” and a generic “Mi’kmaq” which I now recognize as something I should have picked up on years ago. Those are not tribal nations. They are groups of tribal nations. That would be like me claiming “Cherokee” but not being able to state which of the three Cherokee nations I come from–a huge red flag.
Again, to be a descendant, you must actually descend from a tribal nation. Which Mohawk? Which Mi’kmaq? To reconnect, there has to be a point of disconnection to heal. I can’t find any point of disconnection, because there doesn’t appear to be a connection in the first place.
I have close friends who have to list themselves as descendants because their tribal nations have restrictive enrollment policies. These are folks whose parents are enrolled, whose grandparents are enrolled, some who have even grown up in their communities. They can get official letters from their tribes affirming their descendant status, allowing them to be working artists or apply for scholarships etc. They are descendants, because they have continued ties and connections. An unverified family story is not enough to claim descent. An unverified family story is not enough to build an entire personal identity and career off of.
This is what I was always told, this is how I was raised, I never thought to question it?
You are a professor of Native studies. You make your entire living and career off of being Native. You have a responsibility to know your own family story. Every Native community I have entered into folks immediately ask who my family is and where I’m from by way of greeting. If it’s true you never questioned your parents, I wonder how you’ve been asked who your family is and where you’re from throughout your whole life and never stopped to wonder who your family actually is. Where they are actually from.
There are also signs that show you did know the story wasn’t true. You’ve slowly erased your tribal affiliation from your bios online through the years, the parenthetical after your name stating Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk/Mi’kmaq) has disappeared, you didn’t offer any kind of deep positionality in your book which isn’t a best practice in Indigenous studies, and Devon Mihesuah shared that you changed your bio for your book together in 2018 right before it went to press to remove any mention of your ancestry. That’s four years ago. I have a hard time believing or understanding that you would have done all this if you didn’t know at some level and were trying to cover your tracks.
To be Indigenous is to be from the land. You know this. If it was true you never questioned your parent’s stories, how did you never want to know what lands you were from? How did you not want to find those lands and go visit with them? Stand on them? Be in relationship with them? As a food sovereignty advocate, know the plants and animals and medicines that come from the place you supposedly came from? For me, when I began reconnecting when I was a teenager, one of the first things I needed to know was what lands I came from. I needed to visit with them, and feel the place my ancestors came from, because that is what makes me Ani Yunwiya. I don’t understand how you didn’t have that same desire and therefore do the work yourself to find out.
But I do good work, I’ve made family in Akwesasne, “canceling” me isn’t going to help anyone?
You did all of your “good work” based on what appears to be a lie. You told communities and organizations you were Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. You gained entry into spaces because of that lie. You gained entry into sacred ceremonial spaces where no non-Natives are allowed based on that lie. You created family based on that lie. You earned grants and jobs and fellowships based on that lie. You gained trust for your research based on that lie. The “good work” does not exist in the world on its own. You used previous relationships and others vouching for you as a “Native woman” to gain entry into additional spaces. You built trust and relationships based on the fact that you were Mohawk and Mi’kmaq, which is untrue. You strategically performed identity in visible and marked ways so folks would make assumptions and not ask questions.
The thing that is hard for me is you could have done all of this good work as a white woman. You could have stood in solidarity with Native people, been a true accomplice, a co-conspirator, without having to claim identity. The work needs to be done, and communities need people to do it with them. You could have had the same career and do the same work as a white woman, and folks would have welcomed it. But now you’ve broken all of the trust and called into question all of the work, because you started it with a lie.
There has to be some kind of accountability. I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t advocate for “canceling” anyone, but you have some major work to do to repair any level of trust, and you have to realize there are and should be consequences for falsifying your identity for your entire career. You’ve caused immense harm. All of your friends, your collaborators, your co-authors, your students are all having their judgment questioned. Folks are calling to not assign your work any longer, meaning any of your co-authors and the communities whose stories you are telling also suffer. I and others can no longer ask you for letters of recommendation. I’ve had to field dozens and dozens of texts, phone calls, emails, and zoom meetings from your devastated and angry former students and colleagues. I have to be gaslit by everyone who doesn’t want to believe it’s true or who questions my own judgment for being so close to you for so long.
This has been devastating for me. You were my best friend in Providence. You are the reason I am at Brown. You were my mentor and my guide for what it meant to be a Native woman in academia. And now I’ve had to call into question everything about our relationship and what I’ve learned from you. I have to reflect back and reexamine my ways of relating and being in community and the academy, knowing that I learned how to be a Native scholar from a white woman lying about her ancestry. The amount of stress and sleepless nights and crying phone calls has derailed all of my work for months and wreaked havoc on my body. I’ve been so angry, so upset, and questioning all of my reality and our friendship. How much of our relationship was because you loved me and wanted me as your friend, and how much was because you wanted more actual Native people close to you to be able to vouch for you? How will I ever be able to know?
I don’t need to address this. I stand by my work and those who support me and don’t need to give in to this witch hunt.
The pretendian hunts of the current moment are a mess. They are harmful to those of us, like me, who are actual Indigenous people who code as white and have grown up disconnected because of settler colonialism. They are harmful to folks with complicated family stories and adoptions and estranged family and force many of us to share things about our families that we shouldn’t have to. But if you have actual ties to community, it’s simple and straightforward to stop the questioning. You share your family names. You tell, even an abbreviated version, of how your family was disconnected. Indian country understands the complications, when they’re real. Prior to doing this digging, I never understood your resistance to writing a statement or sharing your family names and story. To me it seems like such an easy fix–you just tell the truth, even if it’s messy, and people understand. You’ve also hinted that some of your changing of how you identify is because Mohawk’s are “intense” about identity, or Kahnawake is a hard place to reconnect to because of their own identity politics–but to me, anytime I’ve been questioned, it makes me more obstinate in claiming my identity. It’s a disservice to my ancestors to back down. There is no reason to back down if you have truth behind you. But now I see that there wasn’t a way for you to fix it, because there aren’t family names to share. There isn’t a story to tell.
You’ve used stories that weren’t your own. You implied your family was harmed by settler colonial policies, such the misogyny of the Indian Act, you implied your great grandmother was a victim of racist abuse, you allowed for everyone to fill in gaps and blanks with stories we all know from our own families and communities. But these stories weren’t the stories of your family. Your story has also shifted and changed, and even adjusted as new information emerged. Other friends relayed that they thought you had claimed Kanesatake, or even Six Nations at various times. No one ever heard which Mi’kmaq nation you claimed.
I can’t believe I’m quoting a TV show here, but it’s recent and relevant. In the new season of Rutherford Falls, Reagan inadvertently hires a pretendian as curator for her tribal museum. There’s a very powerful moment where Michael Greyeyes’s character confronts him and says, “There are real Native people out here with deeply complex identity stories. But that’s not you. You take advantage of centuries of violent displacement. You hide in the cracks of our trauma, feasting on opportunities. How long have you been pretending? What started this game? You got waitlisted at Amherst, so you thought you could sneak in the back door. To compensate for your hopeless mediocrity by presenting as…whatever this is. Now you’re here, until you scurry back to a more prominent museum where no one in those white spaces has the depth to sniff out your fakery. Do you fathom the harm you cause us? Can you? As you pick and choose all the positives of who we are without ever once experiencing any of the hardships. I want you to look at me and tell me who you really are.” (Rutherford Falls, Season 2, Episode 2)
So this is what I have, this is what I’ve found. I need to be able to address this, learn the truth, and move on. Now I need you to look at me and tell me who you really are. The full truth. Please.
Siyo Friends! I know it’s been ages since I’ve written here, and a lot has changed in the last year or so. We’ve all been through, and continue to go through, times that would have been unfathomable a few years ago. I hope all of you are finding space for healing and reflection as we move into this next stage of the pandemic.
Even though this space has been quiet, I’ve still been working and writing behind the scenes, and I’m thrilled to announce that my first book will be in stores tomorrow, October 19th! “NOTABLE NATIVE PEOPLE: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present” is an series of fifty profiles of Indigenous people from American Indian, Alaska Native, and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) communities, with spreads on things like “Settler Colonialism 101,” “Who Belongs?,” “Representation Matters,” “Whose Land are You On?” and more. It’s illustrated by incredible CHamoru artist Ciara Sana, who some of you may know as the creator for all of our art for the All My Relations Podcast!
When I started this blog over a decade ago, I had no idea how far it would take me, and how much things in the world of representations would progress, shift, and change in that time. When I first started writing Native Appropriations, I struggled to find the words to talk about why these misrepresentations were harmful, and then spent years responding to incident after incident in the media, writing impassioned pleas for the non-Native public to recognize our humanity. Hipster headdresses abounded, I got death threats for telling people to not dress as an Indian for Halloween, we got mainstream movies like The Lone Ranger, and Dan Snyder told us he would NEVER change the name of the Washington Racial Slurs (and told us to use all caps). Land Acknowledgements didn’t exist. #LandBack wasn’t a conversation happening outside of Native spaces. It was rare to see Indigenous Peoples noticed or mentioned in any context.
Ten years later, “cultural appropriation” is no longer an obscure academic term (for better or worse!), we have Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, The Washington Football Team changed their name(!), Spirit Halloween no longer sells “Indian” costumes, on and on. There are meaningful conversations happening around Land Back and Indigenous communities in ways that I never could have imagined. Yet, of course, we still have so much work to do.
I realized at some point in all this that tearing down misrepresentations was incredibly important, but that I also needed to be pointing folks to representations to replace those horrible images with–because Indigenous people are so invisible, without a counter-representation or counter-narrative, there could be no forward movement. I also continue to work with Native young folks, and wanted them to have representations that reflected their lived realities and the endless possibilities for their lives and futures.
So, in that space, NOTABLE NATIVE PEOPLE was born. As you can imagine, curating a list of 50 individuals out of millions of Indigenous people was a challenge, and one I took on with care and reflection. I tried my hardest to balance thousands of tribal and Indigenous communities in what is currently known as the US—including Alaska and Hawaii—being mindful of tribes, regions, age, gender, LGBTQ2S+ identities, western education level, historic vs. present, inclusion of Black Native/Afro-Indigenous perspectives, type of life’s work, well known vs. less known, and more. There were color-coded spreadsheets and index cards with shorthand codes taped on my walls as I wrote, trying to make each person count. I sent the list to lots of Native friends and colleagues asking for feedback and thoughts, and the final list is a result of that collaboration.
Writing a book is hard, writing a book in deep pandemic was even harder. As the release approaches, In many ways I still can’t believe it all came together and is actually happening. As I was writing, I was living alone after a rough mid-pandemic break up, going through a really challenging mental health time, teaching multiple courses online, serving as the director of undergraduate studies for my department, was the co-chair of Native studies, and was trying to support all of the Indigenous students on campus as one of the only Native faculty–all while processing the immense loss throughout our communities to COVID. I needed lots of extensions, lots of patience, and struggled to get words on the page. Somehow, through that haze of dark months, this beautiful book emerged.
In a non-pandemic context I know would have approached the book writing differently. I knew everyone was stretched to their limit and struggling, and I didn’t want to burden any of the amazing people in the book with more labor or take their precious time–so I wrote their profiles based on lots of research through publicly available information. I (and my fabulous research assistant Issy!) watched hours and hours of youtube videos of lectures and panels, listened to interviews on podcasts, read articles and books, pulled up tribal newspapers and historic archives, and more. I figured if folks had already put in all the work to do these various interviews and talks, I didn’t want them to have to do it again for me.
But that’s a very non-Indigenous way of doing things. If I had it to do over, I would have approached everyone from the very beginning and worked collaboratively rather than surprising them with a nearly complete profile and asking for approval on a short timeline. I’m deeply grateful to a couple of the elders in the book, particularly Vi Waghiyi, who reminded me of how things should be done, and helped me remember that relationships should always be centered in this type of work. I learned so much, and can’t wait to bring these teachings into my next projects.
This book is meant to be a celebration and a love letter of Indigenous joy. Each of the profiles represents a legacy of ancestors, family, land, community, and ongoing resistance to settler colonialism. I hope that Notable Native People can be a resource, a source of pride and inspiration for Indigenous folks, and a place to learn for non-Natives. I know it’s nowhere near perfect, and there’s no way that only 50 profiles can represent the vast diversity and vibrancy of our communities. So I hope it can be a starting point, a place to begin, and we can continue to celebrate every single Indigenous person past, present, and future as notable, beautiful, and important.
My deepest gratitude to all of the blog readers who have been here from the beginning or joined along the way, my patient and brilliant editor Kaitlin Ketchum who believed in me and this project from the start, Ciara Sana, my agent Alia Hanna Habib, the team at Ten Speed Press: Kimmy Tejasindhu, Want Chyi, Lizzie Allen, Serena Sigona, Felix Cruz, and Monica Stanton, and of course all of my family and friends who held me up throughout this process.
NOTABLE NATIVE PEOPLE is on sale tomorrow, October 19 where ever you get your books, and can be ordered online from many online retailers and independent bookstores using this link!
Wado to all the Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers past, present, and future–I am forever grateful and know our Indigenous future is bright.
Welcome to “Indigenous Stories of Uncertain Times,” an ongoing open call series to share perspectives and reflections on the pandemic from Indigenous people and communities. For each post I’m donating to a cause supporting COVID relief in Indian Country, as well as broader racial justice and #BlackLivesMatter causes. For more information on the series, submission instructions, or if you would like to contribute to author honorariums and donations, please see this post.
by Aimee Inglis
Aimee (Osage/Wazhazhe) is a queer femme organizer rooted in California and concerned with the development of our human potential, defending the sovereignty of every being on this planet, and learning from the past and our elders to co-create a visionary future. She is on Instagram at @aimelissabalm
Life is sacred. This conviction is nothing short of revolutionary when those in power are calculating how many Black, Indigenous, and Brown lives society at large will quietly accept in order to go “back to business” and reopen the economy. I write this as hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. are refusing to accept the loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and other Black lives stolen because of the terror of white supremacy. I have hope that the compassion muscle we have been strengthening to support our communities and our broader human family in this time could mean that back to business is not business as usual. Business as usual is not freedom for all of us.
Breath is a gift, but it’s not true that you don’t have to learn how to breathe. In truth it can be a struggle to be able to breathe well and with purpose. We are born with the breath of survival. It is our birthright to learn the breath of thriving. In the time of this pandemic that uniquely attacks the lungs I have been learning about my own.
I started jogging two months ago and before I could even get out of breath my feet would creak in pain trying to carry my body across the pavement. Two weeks later my feet were stronger, but then my side would scream out before I could tire. Through trial and error I realized it was because I wasn’t breathing frequently and deeply enough. Once I noticed my breath I realized I was practically holding it. I was starving my muscles of oxygen as if air were in short supply.
I hadn’t run since I was a child on a soccer field. I would run hard easily for 15 minutes at a time–my face red and hot, but my body resilient. For a few months I did have what I’ve come to understand as stress-induced asthma, probably from the loss of my father as a parent due to his tranquilizer habit. I would learn later how my body could express heartache even when no other part of me could when last September after my father’s passing the skin around my eyes inexplicably was constantly cracked and dried. I thought perhaps I was crying in my sleep but I never determined the root cause and it cleared up by the end of the year. My “grief skin” took some time before it was shed.
This recent experience jogging and getting tuned into my body brought back to memory years ago trying to hike in Yosemite. This was the last time I tried to do strenuous physical activity and my body seemed to refuse. My ears would fill with the blood of my own heartbeat before I could get very far up a hill. I had only moved to San Francisco in the past year. Walking up hills isn’t a regular occurrence growing up in Anaheim. I thought maybe I didn’t have enough practice or it was the altitude. I was relatively fit, but had just finished up a course of Accutane in my desperation caught between teen and adult acne. I worried pumping this poison through my body had weakened me. Walking uphill this past month in Redwood Regional Park, I applied my new knowledge of my need to consciously breathe and found my heart did not have to work so hard when I called on my lungs in support.
I’ve also been playing music again now for about a month. Off and on in my life I’ll pick up my guitar and sing. I’ll play covers of the music of my teens and twenties, sometimes more recent music, but mostly the old rotation: Neutral Milk Hotel, the Decemberists, Elliot Smith, Gillian Welch, etc. My finger calluses have nearly returned to effectively hold down the strings and my hands feel strong. My voice is finding its way back but I can hear whenever I waiver since I’m not singing along in a car, the place I used to get practice, the time when traveling used to be possible.
I loved to sing all my life. There were recordings of me as a toddler singing as my dad played the country songs he wrote. The only good part of Wednesday chapel at my Lutheran elementary school was singing together. I joined choir in high school and I would get chills that would bring me nearly to tears when our voices resonated. A few years back I took a singing class and after the exercise where the instructor determined my range, I was told that though my range was wide, I needed to put more power behind my voice. I already know intellectually that this means taking in breath in preparation and effectively pushing out breath to support the sound of my voice, but this takes practice.
We know breath as spirit, and that the act of breathing creates a sacred connection between our world inside our bodies and our world outside. This connection is our birthright, to every moment feel what we give to the world and what we receive. To know that we are worthy of both takes practice for those of us who have received consistent messages in our life that we should not exist, or that some part of us is inconvenient to others or should remain hidden. What it is to be sure of the next note you are about to sing, to draw power behind your voice?
In my work as a community organizer and activist, many meetings begin by grounding in the breath. Participants and facilitators are invited to breathe into the full length, width, and depth of their bodies, to take up space in the present moment and to see the dignity in themselves and others. This particular practice is rooted in generative somatics, but many cultures have a practice of grounding in the breath to slow down and be present.
We are born with so many tools that come to us free with the gift of life that many of us don’t know how to use. Stimulating the vagus nerve is recently being recognized in popular culture as key to our mental and physical health. Breathing deeply is an accessible way to stimulate the nerve and it really does work. What a wonderful thing for me to have known as a child. To know that I had the ability to calm myself when the world felt chaotic. We are taught so little about our own bodies. Imagine being an octopus that doesn’t know how to change color or a squirrel that doesn’t know how to hide acorns.
We are born into a world and a dominant culture of white supremacy and patriarchy that does not recognize the sovereignty of human life, that does not allow each of us to exist in our full length, width, and depth, that does not honor our boundaries, our NO in the face of racial terror, environmental degradation, mass homelessness, and gendered violence. Overworked and underpaid, expected to show up and serve white supremacists who don’t wear face masks in a pandemic: Black, Indigenous, people of color, womxn and essential workers are putting their bodies, their lungs, their spirit on the line because they are forced to do so.
This reality requires us to meet it, not to look away, not to distract ourselves, but to meet it with compassion and conviction. We can take a deep breath in to meet the world and all its pain in the present moment. It can feel like too much but we can do it and find that we survive. We can let our breath out to extend ourselves into this world, to bring what we can offer to ease suffering. We can breathe in to fill our lungs with the capacity to shout, to sing, to yell at those who have profited off this suffering, those who would rather send more people to their deaths than extend unemployment benefits or cancel rents. We must demand more from those who hold power, who have taken power from us. We must practice to be sure of our own voice and our right to exist.
The donation for Aimee’s post is going to United We Dream’s National UndocuFund, which “will provide need-based financial help to immigrant families hard hit by the COVID-19 emergency,” as well as an additional donation to ActBlue’s split fund, which splits donations between 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers.
“The Gods of the Taino People,” Perkins Street (behind former Hi-Lo Foods), Jamaica Plain. By Rafael Rivera Garcia with Jose Ramos, Jose Alicea, John Montero.
Welcome to “Indigenous Stories of Uncertain Times,” an ongoing open call series to share perspectives and reflections on the pandemic from Indigenous people and communities. For each post I’m donating to a cause supporting COVID relief in Indian Country. For more information on the series, submission instructions, or if you would like to contribute to author honorariums and donations, please see this post.
I live in a neighborhood of Boston that has been transformed over the last 40 years from Jamaica Spain, the city’s barrio, to Jamaica Plain (JP), a haven for white young urban professionals. They have taken over this neighborhood for the same reasons that I wanted to live here: it has good public transit access, the Jamaica Pond and the Arnold Arboretum. It is also Boston’s most walkable neighborhood, with small stores along Centre Street, very active neighborhood listservs and Facebook groups that emphasize caring for each other and social justice, and is very family friendly.
Although I have lived in the Boston area since 2006, I have always avoided living in Jamaica Plain. As a fellow Native/Indigenous woman raised Latinx, the gentrification and the entitlement that goes along with the white people who have slowly but surely taken over here has always enraged me, and I didn’t even grow up here. (Don’t know what I mean by saying I am Native Raised Latinx? Read my post about it here.) When I separated from my soon to be ex-husband, I lived in a friend’s guest room, then rented a room in a former trap house with 22 year olds who didn’t clean and stole from me. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and asked if anyone knew of housing in Boston on Facebook. The first listing I got was of a beautiful 2 bedroom that was below market rate because the landlord was a white JP progressive who wanted socially justice minded people in the house and could afford to do so. After a year of not feeling at home anywhere, I eagerly clicked on the photos and was delighted with what I saw. Plants everywhere, beautiful light, and artfully arranged furniture. I could tell right away that the white queer artist and social worker who lived there cared about not just having a place to live, but making it a real home. So despite my reservations about the Whole Foods and all the white yuppies in the neighborhood, including my new roommate, I moved in. I was tired and needed to feel like a whole person with a real home again.
Now that COVID 19 has hit, I wouldn’t say that I regret my decision, but the underlying tensions in my neighborhood are rising to the surface in big ways, just like they are in the rest of this country. Stopping the spread of the Coronavirus isn’t just about washing our hands or staying home. It is also about consistently and quickly out thinking the virus. We now need to prioritize the health of the whole by stopping our instincts to be physically close to our fellow human beings and starting again when we make unconscious mistakes like touching our faces or a door knob. Every. Singe. Time. The delivery guy who stood right in my doorstep to collect a package from my landlord upstairs a month ago wasn’t intentionally trying to invade my space. He was just standing where he normally stood, with a natural inclination to want to be close to another human being. He didn’t remember in that moment that times have changed and that he should ring the bell and then step back. In the absence of national leadership and agreed upon rules of engagement, people are left to figure out what social distancing means on their own, and it is pretty clear that we all have different definitions of what that means.
When I go outside to walk my dog in Jamaica Plain, it is like playing the old video game Frogger. I am constantly crossing the street, slowing my pace to maintain a 6 foot distance from someone and checking my surroundings so that people stay away from me. The white people who I see on the street still think that they are entitled to all the space, even during a global health pandemic. I no longer walk around Jamaica Pond because people seem to think that this is a vacation and on a nice day are walking on the path or sitting on the benches much less than 6 feet from each other. The runners sometimes do and sometimes don’t wear face masks. They definitely do not slow down or move around others to maintain their distance because apparently keeping their pace is more important than making sure their sweat or their spit doesn’t get someone sick. (Yes I still see runners spitting in the street even while Massachusetts is in lock down and has not hit its peak yet.) This is what it is like when I go outside, where there is plenty of space. I can’t even imagine what these people are like in the tiny Whole Foods that sits where the Hi-Lo supermarket used to be. I don’t even go in.
As we are seeing on the national stage, there is a way that white people think that their lives, convenience, and wealth are more important than anyone else’s. This is why there are protests to end quarantine in some states, why the Navajo Nation has more COVID 19 cases than 8 states, and quite frankly, why the virus has spread so quickly and so far in this country in the first place. I have been watching this play out from the safety of my own home where it’s been just me and my dog Penelope since the restaurant where I used to work as a server shut down right before Saint Patrick’s day. But now this entitlement has come home to roost. My roommate went to quarantine with her girlfriend at the beginning of the pandemic, and the heaviness of it all is starting to get to her. She wants to come home.
Growing up in an alcoholic home, I was taught to focus all of my attention out on another person and severely punished when I tried to think about myself. The way this manifests in my adult life is by me taking care of everyone else in my life at my own expense. It is really hard for me to figure out what I actually want when faced with a request for something from someone else. My first thought is to figure out how to give them what they want, even if it doesn’t make sense for my life or would even be bad for me. It also makes me hesitate to tell my story as a Native Raised Latinx person for fear of how it will be read and received by others. It is no accident that during a Trump presidency, the Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy dies in the darkness.” I agree with this principle, so despite my fear and not wanting to upset my roommate, here we are. Just as I would never silence another Native/Indigenous person or person of color, I cannot silence myself. Sometimes the best cure for white entitlement is the truth in broad daylight.
When my roommate first called me saying she wanted to come home, my first thought was to say yes. An interesting conversation ensued where she told me all about the ways that she had and had not been social distancing. How she went to her Mom’s house and waved at her from the sidewalk. How she needed to pee when she was there but it was too dangerous to go inside, so her mom threw her a roll of toilet paper and she went in the backyard. How she had done better in the house with just her and her girlfriend, and that it was tense when the roommate was home, especially with her boyfriend. She talked about how all four of them were still working and that it was hard to find a place to take zoom calls when they were all there. But luckily, since quarantine had started, it had only been all four of them in the apartment twice, for a week at a time, with a couple of weeks in between because the boyfriend lives alone. How she thinks that we will all end up in pods, but that our landlord probably won’t want to be in a pod with her.
A couple of things strike me now as I replay the conversation in my mind. I never told her how hard it has been on me to be living here alone. I chose to live with a roommate for a reason. I have struggled with anxiety, depression and disordered eating my whole life. Having the energy of other people in my own home helps me cope and do simple things that I struggle with: getting out of bed, eating, and going outside. Because she isn’t here I’ve had to dig deep and come up with other supports. I am spending lots of time on video chat with friends and family. I started this blog. I am turning to God, the universe, a higher power (I am still searching for a word that resonates most with me) and inviting them into an active relationship with me in my home. I am making friends with the plants in the apartment. I am cherishing my relationship with my dog more than I ever have. When the quarantine was first imposed and I was faced with an unknown amount of time alone, I couldn’t stand the silence of the apartment. It was very triggering. But now I notice the bird song outside my window as I write and I can tell I am not alone. Noticing all of these connections and being grateful for all of these relationships is huge progress for me.
As I reflected on this situation, I started to think about what I wanted and needed. With some help I realized that my top priority couldn’t be what my roommate wanted, but rather about my own needs. That I have a right to be safe and healthy both physically and mentally. And that during a global health pandemic, we both had a communal responsibility to each other to maintain our safety and health as well. Hers AND mine. In the ensuing conversation and email exchange, I told her that I wasn’t comfortable with her coming home. That the virus now considered us to be separate households. In my mind, this was pretty straight forward. No one likes the pandemic. We all want to escape from it. But the chess pieces fell where they did when this started and now we have to take responsibility for them. Make the best out of what we have. She had just told me how she hadn’t entered the homes of any of her friends or family, and neither had I. For most of the pandemic she has actually been having a pretty good time living with her girlfriend. They are getting along really well and making the most of it. They are baking bread, going on walks, and playing board games after dinner. They are both still employed. We were all in quarantine. All in this together, or so I thought.
Her reaction to the idea that she had to stay away for longer and do her part in the responsibility we all have to bear during the pandemic was to turn me into the evil roommate who was depriving her of her home and her ‘right’ to it. I was shocked at how quickly she shifted the responsibility of the pandemic completely onto me and refused to accept her part in it in any way. She had just told me she was obeying the rules of quarantine and not going to any one’s home. She had just told me that she was struggling like everyone but that she basically had a 2 bedroom apartment for herself and her girlfriend and they were having a great time. Where did this urgent ‘need’ to be in our house come from? She just ran through all these people in her life who she was social distancing from to keep them safe. I assumed that she would put me in that category too. I forgot to account for the fact that all those other people are white.
There is a long history in the Americas of white people treating Native/Indigenous people as less than human in order to get their way. When the colonizers came here and fought to dominate this land, the way that they fought each other and the way that they fought us is very telling. When European colonizers fought each other, there were rules. Face to face combat, everybody has a gun in their hand, an agreement on time and place. When the colonizers wanted something from the Native peoples of this land, they just took it. By giving out smallpox blankets for example. No rules. No warnings. Just murder and then land theft.
The City of Boston posted an infographic that I saw on the mayor’s Facebook page urging Boston residents to Be Polite, and wear face masks out in public. The mayor’s personal blurb used stronger language saying that it is unacceptable to be outside and not have a mask on. What I know is that this isn’t an issue of being polite. It is an issue of the entitlement that is built into the white people who live here. They don’t need to be more polite, they need to stop thinking that their lives are worth more and act accordingly.
As I develop this relationship with something greater than myself, navigate this pandemic as best I can, and struggle in my relationship with my white roommate, I am learning a lot about judgement and forgiveness. I am very angry about all the entitlement that I see, how many people have died, and all the ugliness that has always been there but is now more visible because of the virus. But I know that if I engage with that anger and let it harden into judgement, the only person that I am really hurting is myself. Bitterness does not lead to a peaceful and loving heart. It does not change the actions or hearts and minds of other people. It only leads me away from a spiritual center. I am not entitled to judge my roommate, or any other person on this earth. Whether they are wearing a mask or not, social distancing according to my version of the ‘right’ way, or handing out smallpox blankets. The Creator is the only one who can judge. It is also not my place to forgive my roommate or anyone else for their actions because again, that means that I felt entitled to judge them in the first place. The only place for forgiveness in my life is for myself. I get to forgive myself when I slip into the temptation to judge another person so that I give myself the opportunity to refrain next time. Given my story and the story of my peoples, this is a difficult road to walk. But if I expect others to give up their entitlement, I must give up mine too. In order to keep my own spirituality, my heart, and my sanity, I have to surrender it and give it away. God doesn’t want me to have an angry life and a bitter heart. Their purpose for me is much larger. I just have to keep listening, learning, and living for it to be revealed, one day at a time.
Donation for Rosa’s post will go to The NDN Collective’s COVID-19 Response Project, “designed to provide immediate relief to some of the most underserved communities in the country. NDN’s intent is to quickly distribute resources to frontline organizations, Tribes and individuals to provide gap services during this health crisis, and to artists and entrepreneurs who have suffered the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic,” as well as an additional donation to ActBlue’s split fund, which splits donations between 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers.
Welcome to “Indigenous Stories of Uncertain Times,” an ongoing open call series to share perspectives and reflections on the pandemic from Indigenous people and communities. For each post I’m donating to a cause supporting COVID relief in Indian Country. For more information on the series, submission instructions, or if you would like to contribute to author honorariums and donations, please see this post.
By Vincent Barnargas, Jr.
Vincent Barnargas Jr, an Akimel O’odham from the Gila River Indian Community, is an unpublished novel and short story writer living in Chandler, Arizona. You can find him on Twitter @Windjammah.
They say there’s comfort in familiarity, but there’s horror there too. I find myself considering this as I watch my people suffer across the country, each and every story about tribes hit hard by the Pandemic bringing me closer to tears with every word no matter how many times they flow.
It’s an old story and a song I’m so sick of hearing. How many times does it bear repeating and how long until it’s played for no one at all?
I remember reading Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse and finding so much pleasure in her version of the post-apocalypse where the Diné people survived because they, “had already suffered their apocalypse over a century before.” Pragmatism is a tool of the marginalized and down-trodden, a necessity to bear the burden of survival as a question, as a goal rather than a given. But if pragmatism could save a tribe of people like mine, then at least they wouldn’t have to suffer again.
And though I won’t call this an apocalypse, instead of avoiding suffering I’m seeing tragedies written into our history once again.
I’ve been struggling to get through each day. My tribe has managed to get by with few losses compared to the state, but it’s hard to find comfort in that when one of those was my grandmother. I choose to believe she passed unrelated, having been in the hospital for a month prior to all of this happening. But it’s little comfort when nothing is the same, when on top of abbreviated funerary rites and an inability to touch one another I’ve lost someone dear to me and I will not be getting her back when all of this is over. For her, the stories have stopped.
I have been doing my best to lift my chin and push forward. This marks the most words I’ve written since all of this began, despite writing being my biggest outlet, my tool for pushing back against the darker times and celebrating the brighter ones. But I will keep trying because I think we need stories in times like these. We need to remember that we can win and not everything will be a tragedy. That, despite history and the present being familiar melodies, we can create new songs and sing them together. And I think that’s the biggest thing keeping me going: trying to do some good.
One day this will all be over. One day I’ll stop seeing the death counts rise. My hope is that one day the news will play a smaller part in my daily anxiety, but until that day comes and forever after it, my heart is with my people. It’s with everyone who has lost loved ones like I have and who also fears every day that they will lose more. But more than anything I wish for this to be the last time that I have to brace myself every time I read “native” and “tribe” in a headline. I fear that learning my history has narrowed that hope for me, but I will hope all the same.
Waynetta Lawrie (left), of Tulsa, Okla., stands with others at the state Capitol in Oklahoma City in 2007, during a demonstration by several Cherokee Freedmen and their supporters.
In the past week in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we’ve watched as cities, towns, and villages have risen up, marched against police brutality, and demanded that Black Lives Matter. If the Instagram stories and twitter threads are any indication, many are waking up to issues of racism and inequality for the first time, and it’s simultaneously frustrating and beautiful to watch. While many white folks have a lot of learning and un-learning ahead, we in Indian country do as well, especially in my own tribe.
We in the Cherokee Nation have work to do.
With our history of slaveholding and ongoing disenfranchisement of Cherokee Freedmen and Black Cherokee citizens, our nation has upheld anti-Blackness for generations. I and many white-coding Cherokees are complicit with our silence, it’s much easier to point the finger outward toward the structures of white supremacy that pervade American society, rather than inward toward the ways our own tribal structures and narratives perpetuate anti-Blackness. I know I have personal learning to do, so I commit to try and do better, and hope others will as well.
What follows is an ongoing and incomplete list of resources and readings to start the conversation. This is not a stand in for action, and definitely not the end of the road, it is not even the beginning. Self-education is an important step, but is meaningless without real action. I encourage fellow CN citizens to read and learn, but also start the difficult conversations within our own families, with tribal officials, and one another, and to start to build a nation that is inclusive of Black liberation as well as Indigenous sovereignty.
I made this primarily thinking about other CN citizens as the audience, so if you are unfamiliar with any of the “backstory” of our nation, you may need to read some other materials first.
This is not a history limited to Cherokee, other members of the Five Tribes have this history as well, and within all of our nations in Indian Country we have a history and ongoing struggle with anti-Blackness. I encourage folks to create their own reading lists or resources for their community.
If you have readings, resources, articles, or anything to add to this growing list, please comment on this post or send me an email, nativeappropriations@gmail.com.
When available, I have linked to the full PDF. If any of the links don’t link to the full PDF, let me know–I may have linked the wrong version. If any scholars listed here would prefer I not link to your work in full, just contact me. For books, I’ve tried to link to the publishers or independent bookstores, but most of these are available on Amazon as well.
As a disclaimer, I have not read every reading on this list. I can’t vouch for them other than many of these come from scholars and writers I trust, and many were recommended to me by others. As I said, I have a lot to learn as well. This list is heavily weighted to ‘academic’ scholarship (cause that’s me and what I do) and to the history of enslavement and the Freedmen cases, but there are additional resources on broader conversations of race, belonging, anti-blackness, and intersections between Black and Native communities, and I’ll continue to add and update.
Race, Anti-blackness, and the Cherokee Nation Reading List
Racial Formations, Broader Native/Black History:
Field, K. T. (2018). Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. Yale University Press. Buy Here.
Forbes, J. D. (1993). Africans and Native Americans: The language of race and the evolution of red-black peoples. University of Illinois Press. Buy Here.
Katz, W. L. (2012). Black Indians: A hidden heritage (Rev. ed.). Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Buy Here. – NPR interview with Katz: “Black Indians Explore Challenges Of ‘Hidden’ Heritage”
Wilderson III, F. B. (2010). Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press. Buy here. Link to PDF.
History and Contexts of Native/Cherokee Slaveholding:
Krauthamer, B. (2013). Black slaves, Indian masters: slavery, emancipation, and citizenship in the Native American South. UNC Press Books. Buy Here.
Miles, T. (2015). Ties that bind: The story of an Afro-Cherokee family in slavery and freedom (Vol. 14). Univ of California Press. Buy Here.
Miles, T. (2015). The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens & Ghosts. John F. Blair, Publisher. Buy Here.
Miles, T. (2010). The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Univ of North Carolina Press. Buy Here.
Minges, P. N. (Ed.). (2004). Black Indian slave narratives. John F. Blair, Publisher. Buy Here.
Naylor, C. E. (2009). African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens. Univ of North Carolina Press. Buy Here.
Cherokee Identity and Broader Native Identity and Belonging:
Garroutte, Eva Marie. 2003. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buy Here.
Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Univ of California Press. Buy Here.
Sturm, Circe. 2011. Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Buy Here.
Ratteree, K., & Hill, N. S. (Eds.). (2017). The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations. Fulcrum Publishing. Buy Here.
Wilkins, D. E., & Wilkins, S. H. (2017). Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights. University of Washington Press. Buy Here.
Cherokee Freedmen:
Cherokee Nation and Cherokee Freedmen, A Historical Timeline (Cherokee Phoenix, September 27, 2017)
Barbery, M. (2013, May 16). “From one fire”. This Land Press. https://thislandpress.com/2013/05/16/cherokee-freedman/ (AK note: great in-depth, non-academic overview of the Freedman issue, some cringy language from author, but important info overall)
Chin, J., Bustamante, N., Solyom, J. A., & Brayboy, B. M. J. (2016). Terminus amnesia: Cherokee Freedmen, citizenship, and education. Theory Into Practice, 55(1), 28-38. (Link to PDF)
Chin, J. (2013). Red Law, White Supremacy: Cherokee Freedmen, Tribal Sovereignty, and the Colonial Feedback Loop. J. Marshall L. Rev., 47, 1227. (Link to PDF)
Broader Convos of Anti-Blackness/Settler Colonialism and Intersections between Black and Native Studies:
Iyko Day. (2015). Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique. Critical Ethnic Studies,1(2), 102-121. doi:10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.2.0102 (Link to PDF)
Byrd, J. A. (2019). Weather with You: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and the Grounded Relationalities of Resistance. Critical Ethnic Studies, 5(1-2), 207-214. (Can’t find full PDF)
Harris, C. (2019). Of Blackness and Indigeneity: Comments on Jodi A. Byrd’s “Weather with You: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and the Grounded Relationalities of Resistance”. Critical Ethnic Studies,5(1-2), 215-228. doi:10.5749/jcritethnstud.5.1-2.0215 (Can’t find full PDF)
King, T. L. (2019). The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press. Buy Here.
King, T. L., Navarro, J., & Smith, A. (Eds.). (2020). Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Duke University Press. Buy Here.
Podcasts:
The Henceforward is a podcast that considers relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples on Turtle Island.
There are also many more resources on Cherokee history and identity on the Elizabeth Warren Syllabus
If you need a more thorough introduction to race and racism in what is currently known as the United States, my graduate seminar “Intro to Critical Race Theory” course is online, and free.
Welcome to “Indigenous Stories of Uncertain Times,” an ongoing open call series to share perspectives and reflections on the pandemic from Indigenous people and communities. For each post I’m donating to a cause supporting COVID relief in Indian Country. For more information on the series, submission instructions, or if you would like to contribute to author honorariums and donations, please see this post.
By Mr Little Cat
Mr Little Cat (Diné and Havasupai) is a genderqueer, artist and activist who resides in Omaha NE. Their purpose is to uplift the Indigenous and LGBTQIA2S+ communities. You can follow their work on instagram at @DisarmingAllure.
I’m come from the land of red dirt and red canyons
Some people, call us The Red People
I’m born after Valentine’s Day; red hearts
Red fire flames burning at ceremonies
A red velvet blouse my grandmas wears
Dad wasn’t in the picture, my anger is red
I felt shame when I got my first period; red stains
I noticed my Mom drinking a lot of red tinted drinks
I’m too familiar with skin becoming reddish from anger
My school work had a lot more red markings than blue markings
My art teacher recommend me to take up pottery, some from of therapy with red clay
But I found sick relief seeing red come out of my skin
I wish for my life to be of red carpets and red roses
All I got was red stretch marks and cystic acne
I grew up to have Red Pride if it only came to sports
Too many red states, rapidly decline of my people
I’m a red target for racism, hatred, violence
I live my life in red ominous shadows
But I wear my red heart shaped sunglasses
It seems my life has too many red stop signs
I find myself beautiful with red lipstick on
I sometimes cry so hard that my eyes get bloodshot red
I’m exhausted, I wish too often for a red line
To me, a red dress is not only pretty
It now represents trauma, suffering, silence, violence
Red blood from the murdered
Red bodies being buried in the red dirt
Bold red font of the missing
Those red hearts aching from grief
I could easily be a MMIW, I wear red for awareness
I wear red to honor the murdered and missing
This color impacts my life and livelihood
The color red
The donation for Mr Little Cat’s post will go to the Radical Indigenous Mutual Aid Fund, which supports radical (non-charity anti-capitalist anti-colonial) Indigenous Mutual Aid organizing efforts by individuals, collectives, and other organizations (excluding non-profits).
Welcome to “Indigenous Stories of Uncertain Times,” an ongoing open call series to share perspectives and reflections on the pandemic from Indigenous people and communities. For each post I’m donating to a cause supporting COVID relief in Indian Country. For more information on the series, submission instructions, or if you would like to contribute to author honorariums and donations, please see this post.
By P. Don’Té Cuauhtémoc, M.F.A.
Cuauhtémoc (Mescalero Apache, Mexika-Chichimeca/Cano, Cihuaiyolo Butch Queen) is a Critical Dance Studies Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Their research and writing focuses on how queer, trans* and two-spirit black, and blackened indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere have deployed the dance form of vogue (voguing/Performance) as a praxis of decolonization, resisting capitalism, transformational resilience, and radical indigenous knowledge reclamation. You can follow their work on Instagram @donte_omelauren and Facebook.
1) When dancing becomes easy, I get bored and unmotivated, but ‘ease in grace’ is a necessary aspect of dance performance.
2) I enjoy the rigor of dance class, training and practice, because of the growth I experience and see in myself, but always pushing limits can become unsustainable.
3) I was taught to dance in service of the people around me, and to the spirits and the Creator of this world. All of my dancing has become sacred because of this.
4) I want my dancing to be delicious. I want to be delicious. And that takes a lot of work. Every day, one moment at a time. I had wished there was some sort of end, or achievement, so that I could relish in all that I am and have created– but that’s only possible through privilege, which is an exploitation of labor through generational insidious means.
5) So long as we stand on stolen land that is “America,” our dancing is imperfect, and like everything we make, it is made with theft. I had once wanted to be a strong and balanced dancer, but the Queens taught me that’s an illusion made and sold, entrapping us to the reservations of our mind. They taught me to focus on acceptance, refusal, resistance, survival, and reciprocity. They taught me to enjoy the adventure, because my birth was prayed for, and I am a gift from the ancestors to do the warriors’ work.
6) I was born into a body that colonization had tried to destroy through genocide. The biopolitical warfare continues today on my black and brown, and blackened families. Because of this, the joy of dance, and my freedom to express anything I feel, is a blessing, a gift, that was fought for, through deadly wars and battles. My grandfather’s dream was for us to have our sacred freedom to dance.
7) What makes an incredible dancer, is not their technique, or their passion, but the fortification of their Spirit. Anyone can be beautiful when they are young, but to be beautiful and delicious in old age, is earned, and deserved.
8) Dancers lie. Hips lie. Eyes lie. Hearts lie… Like everything else, imperfection of truth, is the only real lived experience we will ever have. So, I’m not too interested in the illusion of moral consistency, or greatness in integrity… I am much more interested in how we recover when we fall: …how our completion of a dip always includes recovery…
9) Failure is our greatest teacher. She’s a hard-ass, but she knows how to get you to where you need to go.
10) I have seen, felt, heard, tasted, experienced my full truth only once in my life. But, I know the formula now, and I know how to recreate it. But recitationality is never enough, innovations through inclusivity is required for sustainability.
11) Elitism, ownership, and exclusivity are colonial terms, illusions for commodifications of materials, services, and experiences into commodities. With this, because of the meta logics of colonialism, those with power always benefit. Statements of truth, such as “dance is for everyone,” are strange and terrifying, because with simplicity, it disrupts colonial order.
12) We all want to predict the future, avoid mistakes, and say “aha!” Or “I told you so!” — but how we dance in the present moment is honestly much more important.
13) Why we dance comes before what we dance, always.
The donation for Cuauhtémoc’s post will go to the First Peoples Fund Resilience Fund, which “provides emergency relief to grassroots artists and culture bearers within our network so that they can cover urgent personal needs: food, housing, caretaking, and/or healthcare expenses.”
