Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #pretendianism
Most recents (4)
@DinaGWhit @washingtonpost Did a terrible covering the actual reporting (mine in the @sfchronicle that spurred the article. AND the issue of Pretendianism and the political nature of Native identity. 
@DinaGWhit @washingtonpost @sfchronicle They even got the way the Alleged Pretendians list works wrong. We verify stated claims, so there is no need to remove folks from the list if we do.
@DinaGWhit @washingtonpost @sfchronicle And the whole point of addressing Pretendianism is to make it clear who a Native American person is and who we are not. This @washingtonpost article fails to do that, giving space for fraud.
Seriously? As critical race theorist Cheryl Harris showed way back in '93 , the white power structure seizes the RIGHT TO DEFINE ALL RACIAL CATEGORIES. This is what #pretendians are doing, defining the Native w/o regard for Indigenous definitions.
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& non-whites shore up white supremacy when they insist on definitions of Indigeneity forged in white supremacy. After stealing land & resources, white people & their institutions stole Indigenous children, bones, & blood. "Identity" theft is part of long line of appropriation.
if you defend her right to ID individually as Cherokee & Native (in part via DNA), you defend white supremacist rights to partition us all into (hierarchical) races, which guards access to the privileges of whiteness, Indigenous land & life that the (white) nation state claims.
Non-Natives often think that b/c i go after #ElizabethWarren's #pretendianism (I wrote the book "NATIVE AMERICAN DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science") that i must be FOR one of the other US prez candidates. No. i'm against settler-colonial occupation.
and yes, it should not need to be said that it's a settler-colonial occupying government, no matter who is at the helm. they all buy into the settler state as their horizon of freedom. including as far as i can tell, Indigenous politicians.
FYI i also don't debate who is a "settler" and who is not. it's kind of like attempting to definitively categorize races. we have 400 years of that misguided scientific project. we're all capable of shoring up the settler-colonial project. i focus on the system.
#pretendianism is also a form of genocide denial.
So is human population genetics (its grounding assumptions & methods) in the so-called Americas often a form of genocide denial.
No wonder these two efforts are sometimes linked. As in making identity (and resource) claims based on "Native American DNA."
