Thread by @KirosAuld

Happy Birthday, Grandma.

A correction: She was enrolled at Pamunkey in her lifetime, not just a “descendant.”

https://twitter.com/WomenInTheArts/status/1505152132152020993

#StopDisenrollment and Anti-Black Racism in Indian Country are hard for people to wrap their heads around, but it takes understanding both to begin having an honest conversation about Grandma.

Pan-Indianism doesn’t understand or translate for that.

https://twitter.com/KirosAuld/status/1385308833141121029

Looking at the “Due Process” the @nooksack306 are getting has been REALLY FAMILIAR.

Bad Laws enforced and the absence of law are terribles, yes.

So are unenforced Laws pertaining to Due Process rights to Tribal Citizens.

Disnerollment and divestment involve both.

All of it is corruption and it violates basic Human Rights.

One might be aware that Human Rights are more important than “Sovereignty,” they qualify it as a matter of basic norms.

I’d suggest anyone wanting to understand the artist, who didn’t make money off her Indigeneity or Pamunkey enrollment, also take a read from Dr. Arica Coleman’s book about our part of Indian Country:

“That the Blood Stay Pure”

https://twitter.com/KirosAuld/status/1501399918484901889

“Descendant” is nebulous.

Grandma was enrolled and that matters. Within living memory she kept alive the reciprocated kinship connections of her father and his father, aunts and cousins besides.

My bio says “Pamunkey Descendant” for deliberate reasons:

• Aptness under Federal Law
• Not conflating Tribal Citizenship
• Nonaggression
• Leaving doors open

“DISENROLLE” is a word that could be used and my declination to do so is a pointed, measured choice.

Aside from Jim Crow, because Grandma was raised in Fairfax County, Pamunkey Women only recently regained personhood and full status under law.

That change was NOT retroactive.

https://twitter.com/KirosAuld/status/1394342062636552195

And this is despite our last Treaty of 1677 being signed by Pamunkey Woman Leadership:

https://twitter.com/KirosAuld/status/1375502125615214605

It’s really easy to get a bold misread by looking at public records alone, because annihilation of Indigeneity was the point of them.

Karendians relying on smear and Ancestry .com when it comes to this part of Indian Country are just following Jeffersonian Tradition:

https://twitter.com/KirosAuld/status/1480904156672106496

Reading this article from 2011, I don’t see the sheer VIOLENCE of Grandma’s life conveyed.

That violence being at the levels of Tribal, Federal, State, Community, Interpersonal.

She survived A LOT.

And she did it without leveraging her Indigeneity, which simply was.

Grandma acknowledged *everything* that she was.

“Family is family.”

If you don’t understand the sheer controversy of that position, in her time and ours, in *this* part of Indian Country, you have no right to speak about it or us.

You will come away with a superficial understanding of here, us, her, and her work.

We were really close and her life story ended with me, her son (my uncle), and the funeral home carrying her body from her home Christmas Eve 2016.

Compared to that? Fuck identity.

Identity is important, but essentialism around it—the Toxic Authenticity of it as promoted by really loud people—has shown glaring limitations and myopia during the COVID Pandemic.

As to Indian Country, some of just live here, despite our existence itself being controversial.

There is no substitute for *actually knowing* people individually and within community.

The record and whatever else remains of us after death does not capture the full essence of kinship and personhood.

Pan-Indian Reductionism and Invasion is specifically dehumanizing.

Grandma was born at Freedmen’s Hospital, now Howard University Hospital.

Living in Fairfax during Jim Crow under the Racial Integrity Act, she crossed bridges to attend Dunbar High School and later @HowardU.

Different rights on different sides of the Potomac.

She attended Pamunkey Homecoming as a child and was remembered among a certain generation.

Asking why she didn’t “choose” to live on the Rez is a deeply ignorant question.

“Choosing to live on-Rez” implies choice and where choice exists it is not equal or even necessarily just.

Understand, this was the period where “well-meaning White Saviors of the Indians” collaborated to certify that “Pamunkey Indians have no Negroid admixture.”

That was not a bloodless, victimless proposition. Its fissures and that is its precursors remain to this day.

Perversely, BIA-OFA and the US generally validate and encourage that, to this day.

It produces weaker, fundamentally unjust and dishonest outcomes.

There’s a lot of work left to do.