FUCK! Damn! You Crusher-of-Dreams! I am DEVASTATED to learn about Buffy Sainte Marie, even more than I was hearing about SleazeKing F.Carter just after reading his fake-ass memoir. Last I saw Buffy, she headlined the Stillaguamish Festival of the River and it felt so real, so organic, so meaningful. I felt like a non-intrusive outsider, welcomed witness to a truly healthy, fun Indian celebration. I WANTED/WANT TO BELIEVE! BlechCH!!!! Thanks for including your 1996 poem. Like all your work, it's loaded with "humor" I suppose, but in this case it's the kind that makes me want to punch. So here I go punching a bunch of fuck words into the keyboard, wishing it were that guy who tried to get us to think his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
But now I have to ask, do you have reason to fully trust tribal recognition of who is in the tribe? Part of me can imagine a particularly nasty hell knowing I should be included in a group that would not include me. Somewhat like Junior High.
I remember Michael Moore having Buffy St. Marie on his RUMBLE podcast to discuss the Pope's apology for the Doctrine of Discovery but not rescinding it
As I've written, white leftists love pretendians because they're almost always leftist activisits. White leftists think they're buddies with a combo of Bernie Sanders and Geronimo.
I was adopted at age 4 by my mom's husband. My birth certificate shows him as my dad and his age on my birth certificate is his age when I was born. I'm hoping Buffy gets a DNA test.
If we don't hear about the results of a DNA test then we can be sure that she doesn't have Indian DNA. We'll only hear about the results if there is Indian blood. Also, she keeps making herself a part of the "Indian scoop" in Canada—when First Nations children were removed from their families by the Canadian government and adopted out. But the Scoop happened in the 1960s, more than twenty years after Buffy was born.
I still love this poem, it resonatedwith me before I knew what pretendn was. You hear about Buffy and people will say “but what about all the good she's done for the Indigenous community.” I have also heard the interview from Buffy herself, talking about the places she has gone that no one elso would go to, advocating for the issues no one else even heard about… she's stands on a higher Hill looking down at us “poor Indians”. What about the stealing of our voices, our stories, our experiences. No wonder we are up to our eyeballs in generational trauma and social issues, even our voice is erased and too often replaced by a narrative that has been interpreted by and through the pretendns to be more easily recognizable or easier to digest. Words shoved down our throats, images of who we are washed out like those old before and after pictures from the bording school era. This is why I love your writing, you lived the experience, you are the experience just like so many other Native writers and artists. Our beauty is in the survival, the humor and the beauty of existence. I'm so done with the Buffys of the world. Rant over, sorry about the rant too I could have stopped at I love this poem. Anyway Happy Turkey Day 🫶🏽
Hi Sherman. A discussion about Buffy Sainte Marie has popped up in one of my fave followings. She removed the link to the TV special, and apologize for posting some thing that created such discord in the comments. Hey, it’s Facebook! That’s a given anyway, I would love to share your pretend Indians equal pretend ends post, but it’s in the subscriber part of your Substack. Is there any way that I can get a link that you would not mind me posting on that site I just feel that conversations that are shut down are more damaging then discussions with opposing views.
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 11, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie
From University DEI website earlier this month: The Anthropology Club will be co-sponsoring an event with Dr. John Smelcer [a well-known pretendian]. John is the last native speaker of the Ahna tribe in Alaska and he will be visiting the Planetarium to share his favorite tribal myths.
[Then in larger bold font] Don't miss out on this amazing opportunity to hear from one of the last native speakers of the Ahna tribe in Alaska!
In all charity, I should add that Smelcer is ill (cancer iirc) and locals are well aware he is a fabulist.
Well… I think it’s more a small town wish to go along to get along and simply roll one’s eyes rather than calling out lies. The fabulism is not limited to his pretend heritage, eg submitting blurbs by men and women of note who were not alive when book was written let alone published.
As for the Anthropology presentation, his wife chairs the department.
It's a weird thing... taking the perceived 'positive' side without having experienced the 'negative' either directly or indirectly (through family experience).
Looking back at this brief essay & the poem (among my favs) reminds me of My Life as an Indian, which happened in Boy Scouts (most notably in Order of the Arrow). I did manage to outgrow that fantasy & did not try to trade on it. I'm also reminded of dinner once at a table full of lawyers, and for whatever reason one said he was Cherokee. I think I snarked off to the effect that "everyone claims to be Cherokee" (very common in the South, where I grew up). Hope I didn't say something like "Funny, you don't LOOK Cherokee!" Ouch. The guy had his tribal card--he was/is a registered member. White man eats crow. I did. Not tasty.
Funny! Yeah, well, the Cherokee have VERY lenient tribal enrollment requirements. I think you just need one confirmed ancestor on the Dawes Rolls. And you lived and worked in Idaho/Eastern Washington where the Indians are waaaaaaay Indian! Ha! Thanks for the kind words.
I think one of the more famous pretendians , was Archibald Bellaney , Who became famous under the name Grey Owl , and I believe was the inspiration for Buffy to abandon her Italian family and try to attach yourself to three different indigenous tribes before finally finding acceptance with the Cree .
Both essay and poem excellent and thought provoking. Why pretend? I've always thought it was an appropriation of the perceived mana and spirituality attributed to Indians....and a desire for physical attractiveness and adornment.
We don't have many pretend Māori. It's too hard in a small population. There are admirers who walk along side us and learn our traditional technology and language. Aotearoa has about 5 million people and your genealogy identifies you, no blood quantum. One ancestor and you can identify as Māori if that's where your heart is. Some do, others have no connection. We have many lost souls who don't know their fathers, tribe, marae, mountain or river. Many children got adopted out , or taken by the state and put in borstal for stealing food. Dreadful abuse. What you said about a quiet quest is true. Feeling their way into belonging through learning the language, joining one of the pan-tribal urban marae. Learning how to welcome and feed people. Or joining a motorcycle club and gaining a tribe that way.
Our tattoos get stolen. Photos of European men wearing a chin tattoo, kauae moko, the exclusive preserve of Māori women.
Or the tattooing of a white woman with such a tattoo.
Because of our lower life expectancy, there are places reserved in the medical schools for Māori and Pasifika. A quota. Some of the white kids think the brown ones are given the answers to the tests because we are ' entitled ' and dumb.
If someone steals an indigenous identity, they don't acquire the authenticity of the pain.
Pretendian I don't think so. What the hell else could she be but Native? I mean, look at her! There are no other people on Earth but North American Indigenous who look like that woman.
There's a short film by Māori multi media artist Lisa Reihana called 'Wog Features,' it's images of her, wearing different ethnic hats and clothes. She is making the point that as a person of colour, she could fit in to any number of cultures in a visual sense.
Yes, indeed. Pablo Escobar even. I think, apart from playing Māori characters in films made in Aotearoa, it took decades to be cast as Māori in the USA. Fear The Walking Dead?
Search for 'Pleasures and Dangers'. It's a 1991 made for TV doco about 6 NZ women artists. Lisa Reihana is 5th and there's excerpts from Wog Features and her speaking on race and identity, born from an experience from multicultural Melbourne where she was misidentified.
I will look for the film. If it shows me that I might be wrong, I will apologize. During my years with my Navajo (or Dine, if you prefer) husband, I never tried to pretend I was anything but what I am. Also did not try to write a book about Indians (that was one of the first things people asked me when I started to be introduced to Navajos). And I wholeheartedly agree that the one thing that white wannabees can't appropriate is the history of pain.
Hope you can access the link above. The whole 8 min film is unavailable. If you are interested, Lisa has done 'In Search Of Venus https://www.inpursuitofvenus.com/about .An astonishing piece of work which examines colonisation in Aotearoa and the Pacific from an indigenous perspective.
You've made a racist assertion that all Natives look alike. And you've backed that up by insisting that you know how Natives should feel about Sainte-Marie. I just got my first Substack troll!
Jesus Sherman, you make a couple of big leaps to make the connection between me pointing out what her Piapot family thinks, and "... insisting that you know how Natives should feel about Sainte-Marie." I would never presume to do that on any question. And as for being racist, I've understood white privilege since I was 19. Never a day passes that I don't notice the ways in which I get treated better than a person of color would, and notice my own assumptions as well. Unthinking racist notions for me will always be a deliberate intellectual process. I have a racist gut reaction to something, immediately followed by an inner call to not be such a racist shithead. For what it's worth, my Navajo in-laws said I was "not like other white people."
p.s. I'm not very social media savvy, so I apologize, but what is a substack and am I the troll you are referring to? If so, I apologize, didn't mean to act the spoiler.
Yup, you pinned this one down. Thanks for sharing the piece from the LA Weekly. Somehow missed that. As someone who bought Buffy St. Marie's first album as a 15-year-old white girl in Wisconsin, I recognize I pretended she was Indian as much as she did. Looking to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, and other music icons of my day, she fit my (and millions of other white people's) image of what an Indian girl folk singer should be. Says a lot about all us white folks with no critical self-awareness of our Manifest Destiny mentality.
The thing to remember is that real Indians across a spectrum of political identities. Don'y assume an Indian is an Indian just because they have an expected set of politics.
FUCK! Damn! You Crusher-of-Dreams! I am DEVASTATED to learn about Buffy Sainte Marie, even more than I was hearing about SleazeKing F.Carter just after reading his fake-ass memoir. Last I saw Buffy, she headlined the Stillaguamish Festival of the River and it felt so real, so organic, so meaningful. I felt like a non-intrusive outsider, welcomed witness to a truly healthy, fun Indian celebration. I WANTED/WANT TO BELIEVE! BlechCH!!!! Thanks for including your 1996 poem. Like all your work, it's loaded with "humor" I suppose, but in this case it's the kind that makes me want to punch. So here I go punching a bunch of fuck words into the keyboard, wishing it were that guy who tried to get us to think his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
But now I have to ask, do you have reason to fully trust tribal recognition of who is in the tribe? Part of me can imagine a particularly nasty hell knowing I should be included in a group that would not include me. Somewhat like Junior High.
Great post. A prominent Canadian politician also used his "pretendian" status for political gain but has never apologized for it.
https://www.rejeanvenne.ca/p/canadas-biggest-pretendian
I remember Michael Moore having Buffy St. Marie on his RUMBLE podcast to discuss the Pope's apology for the Doctrine of Discovery but not rescinding it
As I've written, white leftists love pretendians because they're almost always leftist activisits. White leftists think they're buddies with a combo of Bernie Sanders and Geronimo.
I was adopted at age 4 by my mom's husband. My birth certificate shows him as my dad and his age on my birth certificate is his age when I was born. I'm hoping Buffy gets a DNA test.
I was googling Sacheen LittleFeather (because I'm so old I remember watching the Oscars when it happened) and saw "pretendian" on Wikipedia.
If we don't hear about the results of a DNA test then we can be sure that she doesn't have Indian DNA. We'll only hear about the results if there is Indian blood. Also, she keeps making herself a part of the "Indian scoop" in Canada—when First Nations children were removed from their families by the Canadian government and adopted out. But the Scoop happened in the 1960s, more than twenty years after Buffy was born.
I still love this poem, it resonatedwith me before I knew what pretendn was. You hear about Buffy and people will say “but what about all the good she's done for the Indigenous community.” I have also heard the interview from Buffy herself, talking about the places she has gone that no one elso would go to, advocating for the issues no one else even heard about… she's stands on a higher Hill looking down at us “poor Indians”. What about the stealing of our voices, our stories, our experiences. No wonder we are up to our eyeballs in generational trauma and social issues, even our voice is erased and too often replaced by a narrative that has been interpreted by and through the pretendns to be more easily recognizable or easier to digest. Words shoved down our throats, images of who we are washed out like those old before and after pictures from the bording school era. This is why I love your writing, you lived the experience, you are the experience just like so many other Native writers and artists. Our beauty is in the survival, the humor and the beauty of existence. I'm so done with the Buffys of the world. Rant over, sorry about the rant too I could have stopped at I love this poem. Anyway Happy Turkey Day 🫶🏽
Wow. Wow. WOW!!
Thank you.
Hi Sherman. A discussion about Buffy Sainte Marie has popped up in one of my fave followings. She removed the link to the TV special, and apologize for posting some thing that created such discord in the comments. Hey, it’s Facebook! That’s a given anyway, I would love to share your pretend Indians equal pretend ends post, but it’s in the subscriber part of your Substack. Is there any way that I can get a link that you would not mind me posting on that site I just feel that conversations that are shut down are more damaging then discussions with opposing views.
From University DEI website earlier this month: The Anthropology Club will be co-sponsoring an event with Dr. John Smelcer [a well-known pretendian]. John is the last native speaker of the Ahna tribe in Alaska and he will be visiting the Planetarium to share his favorite tribal myths.
[Then in larger bold font] Don't miss out on this amazing opportunity to hear from one of the last native speakers of the Ahna tribe in Alaska!
In all charity, I should add that Smelcer is ill (cancer iirc) and locals are well aware he is a fabulist.
This is it works. Codependent white folks needing the illusion of a spiritual Indian...
Well… I think it’s more a small town wish to go along to get along and simply roll one’s eyes rather than calling out lies. The fabulism is not limited to his pretend heritage, eg submitting blurbs by men and women of note who were not alive when book was written let alone published.
As for the Anthropology presentation, his wife chairs the department.
It's a weird thing... taking the perceived 'positive' side without having experienced the 'negative' either directly or indirectly (through family experience).
They steal trauma.
Oh man. This is IT. White people steal trauma. I’ve been looking for these words for years. Thank you.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Looking back at this brief essay & the poem (among my favs) reminds me of My Life as an Indian, which happened in Boy Scouts (most notably in Order of the Arrow). I did manage to outgrow that fantasy & did not try to trade on it. I'm also reminded of dinner once at a table full of lawyers, and for whatever reason one said he was Cherokee. I think I snarked off to the effect that "everyone claims to be Cherokee" (very common in the South, where I grew up). Hope I didn't say something like "Funny, you don't LOOK Cherokee!" Ouch. The guy had his tribal card--he was/is a registered member. White man eats crow. I did. Not tasty.
Funny! Yeah, well, the Cherokee have VERY lenient tribal enrollment requirements. I think you just need one confirmed ancestor on the Dawes Rolls. And you lived and worked in Idaho/Eastern Washington where the Indians are waaaaaaay Indian! Ha! Thanks for the kind words.
I think one of the more famous pretendians , was Archibald Bellaney , Who became famous under the name Grey Owl , and I believe was the inspiration for Buffy to abandon her Italian family and try to attach yourself to three different indigenous tribes before finally finding acceptance with the Cree .
The pretendians often switch their claimed identity. It’s much harder to get away with that in the Internet era.
Both essay and poem excellent and thought provoking. Why pretend? I've always thought it was an appropriation of the perceived mana and spirituality attributed to Indians....and a desire for physical attractiveness and adornment.
We don't have many pretend Māori. It's too hard in a small population. There are admirers who walk along side us and learn our traditional technology and language. Aotearoa has about 5 million people and your genealogy identifies you, no blood quantum. One ancestor and you can identify as Māori if that's where your heart is. Some do, others have no connection. We have many lost souls who don't know their fathers, tribe, marae, mountain or river. Many children got adopted out , or taken by the state and put in borstal for stealing food. Dreadful abuse. What you said about a quiet quest is true. Feeling their way into belonging through learning the language, joining one of the pan-tribal urban marae. Learning how to welcome and feed people. Or joining a motorcycle club and gaining a tribe that way.
Our tattoos get stolen. Photos of European men wearing a chin tattoo, kauae moko, the exclusive preserve of Māori women.
Or the tattooing of a white woman with such a tattoo.
Because of our lower life expectancy, there are places reserved in the medical schools for Māori and Pasifika. A quota. Some of the white kids think the brown ones are given the answers to the tests because we are ' entitled ' and dumb.
If someone steals an indigenous identity, they don't acquire the authenticity of the pain.
Pretendian I don't think so. What the hell else could she be but Native? I mean, look at her! There are no other people on Earth but North American Indigenous who look like that woman.
P.S. Cool poem.
Plastic surgery? Look at the youthful photos
If you look at pictures of her when she was young and was less good at faking it won't be nearly so obvious to you.
I hope you're kidding.
Nope, and I'd think the bite-back from her adoptive Piapot family would cause some critics to think twice.
There's a short film by Māori multi media artist Lisa Reihana called 'Wog Features,' it's images of her, wearing different ethnic hats and clothes. She is making the point that as a person of colour, she could fit in to any number of cultures in a visual sense.
Cliff Curtis has been cast as a multitude of ethnicities in movies and TV.
Yes, indeed. Pablo Escobar even. I think, apart from playing Māori characters in films made in Aotearoa, it took decades to be cast as Māori in the USA. Fear The Walking Dead?
https//www/nzonscreen.com
Search for 'Pleasures and Dangers'. It's a 1991 made for TV doco about 6 NZ women artists. Lisa Reihana is 5th and there's excerpts from Wog Features and her speaking on race and identity, born from an experience from multicultural Melbourne where she was misidentified.
The same thing has happened to me in Europe.
I will look for the film. If it shows me that I might be wrong, I will apologize. During my years with my Navajo (or Dine, if you prefer) husband, I never tried to pretend I was anything but what I am. Also did not try to write a book about Indians (that was one of the first things people asked me when I started to be introduced to Navajos). And I wholeheartedly agree that the one thing that white wannabees can't appropriate is the history of pain.
p.s. If you have a link to Wog Features please send it. I'm not finding it from a Google search.
Hope you can access the link above. The whole 8 min film is unavailable. If you are interested, Lisa has done 'In Search Of Venus https://www.inpursuitofvenus.com/about .An astonishing piece of work which examines colonisation in Aotearoa and the Pacific from an indigenous perspective.
You've made a racist assertion that all Natives look alike. And you've backed that up by insisting that you know how Natives should feel about Sainte-Marie. I just got my first Substack troll!
Jesus Sherman, you make a couple of big leaps to make the connection between me pointing out what her Piapot family thinks, and "... insisting that you know how Natives should feel about Sainte-Marie." I would never presume to do that on any question. And as for being racist, I've understood white privilege since I was 19. Never a day passes that I don't notice the ways in which I get treated better than a person of color would, and notice my own assumptions as well. Unthinking racist notions for me will always be a deliberate intellectual process. I have a racist gut reaction to something, immediately followed by an inner call to not be such a racist shithead. For what it's worth, my Navajo in-laws said I was "not like other white people."
p.s. I'm not very social media savvy, so I apologize, but what is a substack and am I the troll you are referring to? If so, I apologize, didn't mean to act the spoiler.
Aww man not Buffy Saint Marie - my last record purchase was a Buffy Album I found in a shop in Palm Springs :(
Yup. I know it hurts.
Yup, you pinned this one down. Thanks for sharing the piece from the LA Weekly. Somehow missed that. As someone who bought Buffy St. Marie's first album as a 15-year-old white girl in Wisconsin, I recognize I pretended she was Indian as much as she did. Looking to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, and other music icons of my day, she fit my (and millions of other white people's) image of what an Indian girl folk singer should be. Says a lot about all us white folks with no critical self-awareness of our Manifest Destiny mentality.
The thing to remember is that real Indians across a spectrum of political identities. Don'y assume an Indian is an Indian just because they have an expected set of politics.
.. things aren’t always what they seem ..
have lived it.. still do.. Cui Bono ..
& why ? 🦎🏴☠️