Opinion: The Real Problem With Jacqueline Keeler’s ‘Alleged Pretendian’ List
Posted By Angelina Newsom May 14th, 2021 Last Updated on: May 19th, 2021 shares
You can’t.
Unless a person shares their background and history, appearance isn’t going to give anything away. Sometimes people exploit this by claiming Native ancestry. Sometimes family stories with no truth behind them run amuck. Recently, there’s been a lot of publicity surrounding high-profile cases of individuals falsely claiming Indigenous American ancestry while working in entertainment and other industries.
In an apparent response to these incidents, Navajo and Yankton Dakota writer Jacqueline Keeler recently created an “alleged pretendian” list a spreadsheet of people she thinks are pretending to be Indian.
274 pages
Review by Ryan Winn
Native literature is inherently political, often requiring an understanding of both national and tribally specific opining. This is not to say that all Native writing has a unified, or even a defined political agenda. In fact, as James H. Cox notes in his recent book,
The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History, Native texts resist predictive classification.
Cox considers the assertions and observations made by and about Native texts as the “political arrays” of American Indian literature. Exploring letters, novels, reviews, articles, and paratexts collectively as “literature,” Cox recognizes that Native writing and ideas span the political spectrum, thereby defying umbrella classifications. In so doing, he challenges readers to reconsider any reductive textual comparisons in favor of recognizing the nuances within the complexities of Native authors and their literary output.
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Ames Tribune
Editor s note: This story has been updated to remove an incorrect description of the gender make-up of the Ames City Council in 1994; to reflect the lack of clarity on whether Stubben had the chance to speak before that council; and to clarify that a packet of paperwork on the name change was required by a federal governmental organization.
Nearly three decades ago, 16-year-old Fawn Stubben prepared to stand before the Ames City Council to talk about what she said was the real meaning behind a local creek s name: Female genitalia.
But that conversation never happened.
Stubben, whose mother is from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and father is from the Ponca tribe, wanted to explain why the name of Ames Squaw Creek needed to change.