Sacheen Littlefeather, Elizabeth Warren, Thomas King and others have grabbed recent headlines for what turned out to be unfounded or outright fraudulent claims to Native identity. The widespread issue of “pretendians” remains under-examined even in Native circles. The topic is politically and socially fraught, with hyper-online crusaders taking up the mantle of pretendian hunting in pursuit of social media clout. The problem is real, but these sometimes vicious vigilante efforts have been known to conflate personal vendetta and erroneous or uneven methodology with rational research and concern for Indigenous communities.
Researcher Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville) faces the issue of pretendianism — as well as its inverse counterpart, tribal disenrollment — in her new book, Who Gets to be Indian? The conversation needs to be honest and rational, she says, approached with vulnerability outside of toxic social media spaces. (Disclosure: Gilio-Whitaker is currently a special advisor to the High Country News board of directors and a former board member.)
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
HCN: You noted in your book how controversial the topic is, and that many Natives stay away from it. Why do you think that is? And why did you choose to confront pretendianism with your book?
DGW: I think it’s controversial because of colonialism. Our identities as Native people have been attacked from the beginning. And so many people have been disrupted, our communities have been disrupted, our families have been disrupted, our tribes have been disrupted. It’s not really any surprise that we would find ourselves in this quagmire of confusion about what being Native is, especially, as I write about, if we understand it through the lens of free speech logics and private property. Identity is a personal possession.
I think also Native people, at least historically, tend to be pretty open to people and not that judgmental — and that’s to a fault. Native people tend to be very generous. From the very first moment of European arrival on this continent, that was the case.
HCN: It’s sensitive stuff, isn’t it? Because we’re dealing with people’s personal family histories. Like you said, it’s a quagmire. It’s difficult to know what information is true or verifiable.
DGW: Well, not for everybody, it’s not. I mean a lot of us, and I imagine this is true for you — you’re an enrolled tribal member, right? — you have a clear genealogical line that is well-established, and so do I. And that would be the case for the vast majority of people who have affiliations with federally recognized tribes, and even for some who don’t. The controversy is about those who don’t have that kind of documented lineage. I mean, Native people are the most documented people in this country; I think that’s a fair statement. There are lots of reasons people cannot have documentation but still be legitimately Indigenous or Native. But there are also huge ruptures that have opened up that create space for people to fill in with some wishful thinking.
HCN: Isn’t there a danger, in writing a book like this and tackling these problems publicly, that it’s going to give non-Natives more ammunition against us for their ignorant hatred?
DGW: Mm-hmm, but ignoring the problem has also not served us. Ignoring the problem has precisely gotten us here, I would argue. I felt that there was a big hole. There was a need to address this in a really rational manner in a way that provides a historical trajectory.
We need to understand that there are distinctions here and be really precise with how we understand the nuances of the phenomenon. We have to have a language for it. We have to have a way of talking about it rationally, because it’s so confined to social media right now, and this call-out culture — that’s where we’re at, and it’s really toxic as fuck.
HCN: It’s an invasive process. How do we know when somebody’s family tree should become a matter of public scrutiny?
DGW: If your subject is somebody with a Native claim, the beginning place is to have some kind of process of vetting those claims, and you start with asking them. And this is part of the work. I think we need to develop these kinds of processes.
I don’t want to be in the business of calling people out. That’s another part of why I wrote this book. My goal is to create a conversation, where people come to their claims with the understanding that they need to be accountable to the communities that they are claiming. I want to normalize that conversation. I want to get us beyond this calling-out bullshit. Sometimes it’s probably necessary; it probably is always going to be necessary, because we are completely infiltrated, and it causes harm. So we need to normalize something else, where people understand that if they’re going to make those claims, they have to be willing to explain themselves and not be defensive about it. You have to do that if you are a veteran. You can’t just claim to be a veteran and go and expect to get benefits. You have to be scrutinized. What do they call that? Stolen valor?
HCN: You write that Indians becoming non-Indians (through disenrollment) and non-Indians becoming Indians (through pretendianism) are both results of the twin forces of capitalism and colonization, which have forced Indigenous North Americans out of their traditional land-based ways of life and into a cash-based economic system. What does settler capitalism gain by mixing up Native identity like that?
DGW: Well, they gain our land. And they gain our identities and our resources, everything. Everything that colonialism is about, capitalism is the mechanism for it. They’re inseparable, because land is private property. In the Eurocentric system that implanted itself here, that’s all land is. Land is real estate.
HCN: So because identity is property under this system, the theft of identity is part and parcel with the theft of land?
DGW: It’s definitely part of the logics of it, yeah. It’s like Kim TallBear says, it’s the last thing that settlers can take. Everything’s up for grabs in settler colonialism.
HCN: When I was reading this book, I kept running into this: The more we tunnel into identity, the farther we get from our ancestors’ sense of collectivism. This is a cul-de-sac of colonial thinking. How do we get out of the whole problem of identity?
DGW: That’s a huge question. I think it has to start with returning to our collectivist thinking. Because we’re all colonized, right? There’s nobody who’s not colonized. All of our minds have been co-opted by the colonial systems that we have been inducted into, and we are immersed in it. There’s probably no escaping it, but we can at least be aware of it and start to reverse it.
We have to start internally, like how we understand ourselves, and as Native people coming back to re-normalizing those Indigenous ways of thinking. That’s Indigenous knowledge: Re-adopting, coming back into those knowledge systems that are about collectivist thinking.
When you’re in community and you’re introducing yourself, you introduce yourself by who you’re related to. You say who you are, who your family is, and that’s just protocol. That’s how we do it. Why don’t we do that in our non-Indigenous spaces? If you’re going to identify as an Indigenous person, then show us how you’re Indigenous, based on tribal protocols.
Who Gets to Be Indian?
Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity
By Dina Gilio-Whitaker
280 pages, hardcover: $29.95
Beacon Press, 2025.
HCN: Some of this you trace to urban pan-Indian culture, which you identify as an on-ramp for pretendians. In a way, the book casts a critical light on urban pan-Indian culture. But for people who grew up away from our reservations and homelands, sometimes urban pan-Indian culture is the best that we have access to. Does pan-Indian culture have a place and a function in our world?
DGW: Yeah, I’m not saying to dismantle it, not by any stretch of the imagination. I think that urban pan-Indian spaces provide a facsimile of culture and community belonging. Because all of this is about belonging, and if we’re not in our tribal cultures, Native people try to find people who they can relate to. And I think that it’s necessary and it’s good, but there need to be systems of accountability.
That’s what happened in urban pan-Indianism, going back to my comment about Native people tending to be really trusting and believing. They believe people. I did it. I grew up in that time. That’s why I write with so much passion about it, because I was so freaking snowed for so long. I grew up in that era in the ’60s and ’70s when urban pan-Indianism was really taking off, and it got infiltrated by posers, people who were taking on these identities, these claims of being Native. There were so many people who claimed — I mean, it just — it’s embarrassing to me. It took me a real long time to get comfortable with writing the way that I did, because I was embarrassed of myself.
HCN: Because you’ve been duped?
DGW: Because I got duped so many times. I don’t even want to talk about the people that I got duped by, people in relationships, in marriages, like full on. I just believed people. Like I said, it never occurred to me that people would lie about who they are or stretch the truth, even if it was well-intended. We tend to believe people, because we’re generous like that. Native people are trusting, and it gets taken advantage of.
That’s why I wrote that section on intertribalism. We need to really talk about these terms that we throw around. What is it that we mean when we say intertribalism in the Red Power movement, if we understand the Red Power movement as this time in history that’s defined by urban pan-Indianism? At least to a large extent, the Red Power Movement was about urban pan-Indian activism. And so we’re going to just assume that all those people were actually Native people? That’s the assumption.
HCN: Was blending in your own family history and personal experience with reconnection a way of anticipating potential accusations of pretendianism or race shifting, or was it a way to lead with vulnerability, or what was your motivation in including memoir?
DGW: It was really just about the desire to be vulnerable, to be just super honest about me, because I struggled with my own identity for my entire life, always feeling like I’m not enough. And as I’ve gotten older, I see that my experience is by far not unusual. I think all of us as Native people struggle with our identities in one way or another, even full-blood Native people — I don’t think it’s limited to those of us of mixed-blood or super mixed-identity, non-enrolled people. There are very few Native people that I have met in my life that I felt were super confident in their Nativeness or didn’t have questions at some point in their lives. I can’t quantify that, but that’s my sense of it. I wanted to, by showing my vulnerability, make it OK for others to feel it, too, to be in their vulnerabilities. I want people to feel safe disclosing their own stories, because, like I said, ultimately my goal is to create a conversation.
HCN: What would you say to someone who’s interested in reconnecting with their tribal cultural heritage, but who doesn’t want to be a race shifter and doesn’t want to be dismissed alongside fraudulent pretendians?
DGW: They have to do their homework. We all have to do it. If you don’t have a clear connection to a tribe, then you got to do the hard work of doing your genealogy. Don’t be freaking Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Hoover. If you don’t have a clear line of connection that you were raised with, you don’t really know who your family is but you’re claiming it, you need to do that work. And if you can’t find it, maybe that’s cause it just ain’t there. That has to be part of the process, the willingness to accept that you are not who you say you are, or who you thought you were, or who somebody told you you were.
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