Who Gets to Be Indian?
Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“This incendiary j’accuse isn’t afraid to name names.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Indigeneity is caught between truth tellers and tricksters.…Dina Gilio-Whitaker boldly espouses our truths while confronting the tricksters among us. Indigenous America needs more truth tellers like her and books like this.”—Gabe Galanda, Indigenous rights attorney
An investigation into how Native American identity became a commodity, from cultural appropriation to ethnic fraud to disenrollment
Settler capitalism has been so effective that the very identities of Indigenous people have been usurped, misconstrued, and weaponized. In Who Gets to Be Indian?, scholar and writer Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) explores how ethnic fraud and the commodification of Indianness has resulted in mass confusion about what it means to be Indigenous in the United States.
As an entry point to the seemingly intractable problem of ethnic fraud, Gilio-Whitaker critically looks to the film industry, including a case study of Sacheen Littlefeather, who is most known as the Native American woman that rejected an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973—though later revealed, she was not who she said she was. Gilio-Whitaker argues that this pretendian phenomenon originated in Southern California when the United States was forcing assimilation of Indians into white America culturally, but also into its capitalist economic system. With Indianness becoming a marketized commodity in the Hollywood film business, the field became open to anyone who could convincingly adopt an Indian persona.
Deeply researched using socio-historical analysis, Gilio-Whitaker offers insights from her own experiences grappling with identity to provide clarity and help readers understand how the commodification of Indianness have ultimately left many people of legitimate American Indian heritage to be disconnected from their tribes. Personal and compelling, Gilio-Whitaker takes settler capitalism to task and helps us better understand how we got here in order to counteract the abuses of pretendianism and disenrollment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Gilio-Whitaker (As Long as Grass Grows) exposes how Indian identity is commodified in this provocative takedown of America's tribal politics. Spurred by frustration over her own "blood quantum"-determined status as a "descendant" but not, as her mother is, an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, Gilio-Whitaker examines the history of "pretendianism," or white entertainers passing as Native. She tracks the phenomenon from 19th-century theatrical performances like Buffalo Bill's Wild West through the 20th century, when "the growing ethnic renewal movement" and new census rules that allowed for self-identification led to a surge of pretendianism. This history sets the scene for Gilio-Whitaker's ruthless, stringently cited allegation of pretendianism against Sacheen Littlefeather, who famously declined the Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973. (Littlefeather contacted the author to ghostwrite her memoir in 2016, but later backed out; Gilio-Whitaker speculates it was because Littlefeather wanted to avoid questions about her heritage.) Gilio-Whitaker calls out Native Hollywood insiders who continue to prop up Littlefeather—naming multiple industry gatekeepers—and, in a stunning tie-it-all-together twist, demonstrates how these bigwigs are "incestuously" entangled with the "casino capitalism" that has created the "tribal disenrollment crisis," an ongoing process by which tribes oust members in order to raise per capita payouts. This incendiary j'accuse isn't afraid to names names. Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly described the author's mother as a "full-blooded" member of the Colville Confederated Tribes and mischaracterized when the plan to ghostwrite Sacheen Littlefeather's memoir came to an end.
