Thread by @KimTallBear

i was asked at the harvard history of science talk i gave last week on pretendianism & DNA, "why the cherokee? why do so many white people want to identify as cherokee?" @justicedanielh explains some of that history in this podcast interview with medicine for the resistance.

https://twitter.com/gindaanis/status/1100020549521006592

at 10 mins this podcast links the dawes allotment act to the current treaty process in canada. it notes the "destruction and horrors that accompanied allotment"--the turning of Indigenous communal landholding into private property.

at 13:44 @justicedanielh discusses identity fraud perpetrated during allotment...whites claiming Native ID to get Indian allotments. "stories of having a great-great grandmother who was Cherokee....and there was no evidence of that...but there was free land..with oil on it."

at 16:00 @justicedanielh discusses strong possibility that these lies become embedded in family lore as reality.

. @justicedanielh discusses white creativity, "especially in oklahoma...where there were tens of thousands of grifters coming in laying claim to our lands and resources", falsely claiming Native identity. Links this to #ElizabethWarren's zero evidence for claiming Cherokee.

White pretendianism can be seen in light of this history as both individual and familial absorption of the bigger lies of US moralism and exceptionalism...where actually there was fraud, theft, & greed. It must be hard to face up to that in oneself and throughout one's genealogy.

at 28:10 @justicedanielh "one of the reasons to claim Indian heritage is to not have to deal with the shame of being on land that was taken from Indian people in your grandparents time BY your grandparents."

28:50 "Nobody wants to think that their grandparents stole other people's homes. Nobody wants to think that they're descended from bandits and thieves and CRIMINALS."

Awww....I guess not. @justicedanielh gives me my first LOL of the day.

30:13 False claims "works from an assumption of Indigenous illiteracy...We have people who have always been able to utiize the documentary archive...there is a condescending presumption that our archive doesn't exist or...is less legitimate than their bullshit family story."

a fascinating discussion of the Indigenous archive follows, the colonizer archive, how well-documented Cherokee people are, including touching on Freedmen history and anti-Blackness. The genealogist @pollysgdaughter is also cited for her command of Cherokee archives & history.

37:00 "the reality is Warren's blood claims don't help Freedmen. They're embedded in the same race logic that disenfranchised the Freedmen and have disenfranchised Black Cherokees and other Black Nativee people since settler-colonialism first gained sway."

49:30 @justicedanielh and podcast hosts @gindaanis and Kerry Goring making comparisons between #ElizabethWarren situation & liberal/progressive US thinkers throwing Indigenous people under the bus to Canada and Trudeau government similar behavior.