So itâs no surprise that Iâve been havingâŚissues, to say the least with how certain people have been conducting themselves. This post has been a long time coming given my concerns. I hate to do this without actually being productive on Barry, but I hate letting somebody get away with this type of shit in this day and age even more. So here we go. Iâm only going to be addressing one of these issues right now, but here goes.
Hey there @jjedied / @amlovedâ / @medquien. You barely know me, but I surely know you, and youâve been no stranger to scandal in the time that Iâve known about you. I am not directly messaging this as Iâve seen that you requested because I want to make sure that my concerns are properly addressed and not dismissed again. I also want to make sure that this message gets to the people who may have been enabling your behavior here as well.
See, I knew it was suspicious when I noticed your post mentioning that you were a white passing person with native descent â Cherokee, to be specific. You know. THISÂ one? Iâve highlighted the relevant section of the ask for the casual observer reading through this post. Suspicious because, in the entire time myself and several other people have known you, you being a white passing person of color has, shocker, never come up. Itâs not even listed on an introductory post that you made before as well, found HERE.Â
This strikes me as odd given some of your later posts on the issue. I can only assume someone before me has confronted you about this because you later made THISÂ post with some claims and wording that struck me as odd. Letâs start with this one:
my great grandmother was a cherokee chief, and my great great grandmother before her.
This is impossible. Youâve been approached about this by an anon before, ask to be linked and mentioned later in this post, but there has only ever been one female chief in Cherokee history. Her name is Wilma P. Mankiller, and I sincerely doubt sheâs your great grandmother or great great grandmother. She is certainly not the latter given her age and yours as mentioned in your introductory post. Already, this along with everything else is enough to cast doubt in my mind about your claims, but then we get to the real kicker here.
You keep using white and whitepassing interchangeably, and the former more frequently than the latter. Now, to me, an outsider, this fully reads as you claiming heritage because itâs convenient and earns you points while distancing yourself from it when you receive backlash because itâs never been brought up before. You claim your grandmother is full Cherokee. This would make you Âź Cherokee. That is not basically white. 25% is a significant amount of native ancestry to have and is on the higher end of what some tribes require to live on the reservation. If you truly have this ancestry, why not claim it proudly? Why keep insisting that you are white and yet in the same breath make (false) claims about having such prolific ancestry? White and whitepassing are not interchangeable labels to use, and the fact that you only seem to use whitepassing when itâs convenient for you is extremely suspect.
Not to mention that saying âmy mother still qualifies for native american benefits. we do not take them because we do not need them and they belong to our people insteadâ comes off as incredibly disrespectful and patronizing as well, but thatâs not the biggest issue here. Itâs an issue, but a smaller one.
You seem very pissy in your post tags about having to âroll out your credentialsâ on this but reallyâŚcan you blame people? You have literally never mentioned having any native ancestry or being whitepassing before answering that initial ask. Youâve told several people before that you are white. Why does the backlash surprise you?
Of course, then you received THIS ask, and your answer only serves to muddy the waters even more with lies. Thereâs so much to address here that I may miss some of it, but Iâm going to try breaking it down bit by bit to make sure I get most if not all.
i very much remember both my mother and my grandmother telling me stories abt my great grandmother being an indian chieftess and that i do have direct cherokee lineage
So, given the context implied in this very first sentence, I can only assume that this is something you have known since early childhood. You also later confirm this assumption. This gives you no leniency for people to say âwell maybe she only just learned and is ignorant!â because. You didnât. You arenât. Personally, I think you know full well that everything youâve said so far in regards to this is a lie, and that youâre trying to hide it by getting overly specific to make it more believable. Let me tell you, considering that youâre still contradicting yourself several posts later and ignoring when people point out to you that what youâre claiming is impossible, that belief holds a lot of credence.
i do very much claim my native american heritage as something that is very important to me
All I ask isâŚwhere? Because from what I can tell this is only a very recent development to your background that seems to have arisen out of convenience. If you really claim it, if it really is as important to you as you say, why have you never brought it up before? Why do you continue to insist that youâre white despite being Âź Cherokee according to previous posts? If that is true, you are not white. You are whitepassing.Â
Of course, hereâs where the backtracking starts to come. This is the biggest sign to me of lying. Admit what you canât deny. Deny what still canât be proven (in your mind, at least).
i know that it was at least my great great grandmother who was an indian chief. my great grandmother may have instead been a leader
Again, as Iâve established before, this is impossible. Your great great grandmother could not have been a Cherokee chief because the only one in Cherokee history is Wilma P. Mankiller, who is not old enough to be your great great grandmother. So. Smart thinking admitting that your great grandmother may have just been a leader you donât know, but youâre still digging yourself into a hole by lying about the former.
my mother is still white passing, and i probably fall among moreso being just white than anything, but we do still qualify for benefits that we have never taken advantage of because of the simple truth that we donât look definitely native as our blood would say, and as such, leave it for our people who exercise a much more valid claim to it by dint of necessity
This Iâll have to address in a couple of parts. First off, based on your earlier claims, your grandmother is full Cherokee. This makes you mother ½ Cherokee. This would make you Âź Cherokee. You do not fall among moreso being just white than anything. One quarter is a significant amount of ancestry to have. And yet again you contradict yourself by using white and whitepassing interchangeably. Earlier, your parents (including your mom), were âwhite as cheeseâ. Now your mom is âstill whitepassingâ? I understand being defensive about your heritage, but at this point everything that you put out is just such blatant lies that itâs both exhausting and entertaining to read.
Second of all, yet again, youâre back at it with the disrespectful and patronizing language again. You could express the same sentiment in just âwe donât accept the benefits because we have no need for themâ, but instead you had to be extremely condescending with your word choice again. But, like Iâve said before, thatâs really not the biggest issue here. Itâs just one of the smaller ones.
Anyways, Iâm assuming you later got another ask about the âchiefâ issue because you later made THIS post as well as THIS one.
You know, people wouldnât be questioning you about this if it werenât so painfully obvious that youâre lying? Like you might as well be saying your great great grandmother is a Cherokee princess because thatâs how believable the claims youâve been making are. I mean.
my great great grandmother WAS a chieftess. it has been reaffirmed to me since i was a kid
NO. SHE. WAS. NOT. Honestly, the fact that you even made these posts makes me think that the anon went to you with the same information I was able to find with a simple Google search, and thereâs really no excuse at this point. When someone tells you that you have the wrong info, plain and simple, maybe uhâŚlisten?
But then again, what can I or anyone else expect from you when in the same breath you immediately contradict yourself with an okay well maybe it was exaggerated a lil like that somehow erases the fact that you have continually been lying out of your ass about this since it has come up. I donât buy your excuses. I just donât. Once is a mistake. Twice is suspicious. Anything more is just blatantly a lie.
Plus thereâs THIS ask from a completely different anon. Again, more of the same backtracking. The more people challenge you on this the more you keep changing your story so itâs just enough to fit the facts at hand. Itâs transparent, just like your request to take things privately so that any more wiffle-waffling on your position wonât show on the dash and further expose yourself. Unfortunately for you, you did that plenty on your own.
HERE is the last post Iâve seen you make on the matter. This is what adds insult to injury, honestly, to read.
all im really starting to get from this is that people only seem to care abt native american people when it comes across as convenient for them and itâs just kind of starting to irk me in general if i have to front all the proof of a heritage that i have no reason to lie about and certainly not one that, oh i dunno, has been something im proud of and have clung to since learning it, wanting to eventually pursue trying to learn the cherokee language to preserve my peopleâs history, increasingly love respect and appreciate modern media attempts to even moderately portray native people with the respect and nobility they deserve.
This is justâŚno. NO. Please quit hiding behind this facade that you actually care about this and that you have no reason to lie about this. Plenty of white people have lied about being whitepassing on this site before. They do it for the âPOC pointsâ. They do it for attention. There are so many reasons for people to lie about this, and so many white people either lie or are mistaken about having Cherokee heritage that itâs now treated as the brunt of a joke. I myself have had to put up with Generokee comments. Continuing to lie and make yourself the victim in this is so far beyond disrespectful that at this point all I can say is just S T O P. You cannot keep distancing yourself from this by constantly referring to yourself as white and then in the same breath act like this is something that youâve been proclaiming from the getgo. Itâs not. You keep acting like this is something that you care about, but if it were then you wouldnât have lied so many times across so many posts.Â
Please. Learn from this, admit what youâve been doing, and STOP.Â
So for those of you who have been checking up on my blog in the time since I initially posted this, you may have noticed that this post had disappeared. I put it on private in an attempt to hopefully resolve my issues with the person this post was about and gain closure on an issue that has been bothering me from the minute it came up. Unfortunately, no such resolution could be reached at the time, and though I chose to refrain from deleting this post for several reasons, I also chose to keep it on private for several reasons as well.
I do not take it off private lightly. I do not make this update lightly either, just as I did not make this post in the first place lightly. I take this allegation very seriously and hope that my update will offer some more clarity to those who may still be skeptical or wary. I will also be addressing it more to the general public rather than the mun themselves as I feel it will best suit the intended tone of this post.
Iâll start with the immediate aftermath of my post. Caps of these posts can be found HEREÂ and HEREÂ (in chronological order of being posted) and I will be quoting the relevant sections as I did before. Some parts will be highlighted in the cap because they are key parts in reference to my conversation with this person.
Letâs start with the first post. I will be quoting one of the tags on the post.
#I did my research into the claims Abt female cherokee chieftans after wording things as harshly as I did
Iâll be honest, it is fully unclear what is meant by âafter wording things as harshly as I didâ as far as the timeline is concerned, but the most appropriate time to have done so would have been after that first anon ask letting them know that their claims were improbably nigh on impossible. If they had truly done their research then, they would not have made the mistake of continuing to insist on it. Which is what they did. Several times, in fact, before eventually waffling and saying the equivalent of okay so maybe my family may have exaggerated. And said waffling was done immediately after insisting that this was something they knew for a fact.Â
Itâs little stuff like this added together that prompted my first post, and it doesnât stop here.
Moving onto the next post, we have this.
I donât tend to claim white passingÂ
Hereâs the thing. They did. Now, I will admit, tend is a very operative word here because ever since theyâve only used white rather than whitepassing. And sure, maybe this does explain why they have the tendency to just use white over whitepassing despite claiming to have a large amount of native ancestry. The issue I take with this comes further (and is not highlighted on the image but does follow immediately after).
bc it wonât be credited because it never is with native Americans
I just. This is something that grinds my gears here because? Several people with native ancestry as quantifiable as what theyâre claiming do in fact claim whitepassing when they are, in fact, whitepassing because Native American isâŚnot white. Like it is very pointedly nonwhite and the people who donât claim whitepassing generally donât have native ancestry until they get to a great-great-great-etc. grandmother which means 3% or less of native ancestry among a slew of white European blood. Thatâs when it doesnât get credited as whitepassing. Having a grandmother of full Cherokee decent kind ofâŚnegates that whole point quite a bit.
Point blank, if itâs something that they were really as proud of as they claim, it would have come up before. It would have. Even giving the benefit of the doubt claiming white over whitepassing (because everyone has their own level of comfort when it comes to what to refer to themselves as, even if I wholeheartedly disagree with using the two like theyâre interchangeable), there should still be some kind of point made that they had native ancestry. Itâs something theyâre proud of. Itâs something theyâve cherished since childhood (re: image). That generally warrant a mention of that ancestry, even if they do consider themselves white overall because thatâs what they look like.
And Iâll give them this. They made attempts to apologize for how they reacted in these posts. I received these asks (ONE, TWO, THREE). THIS post was made. Itâs a great sentiment, being sorry for reacting defensively and being harsh against perfectly valid concerns but. It means nothing to me when it doesnât address the real issue here, which is the lying. And some of you are probably at this point thinking okay, this is definitely bad if they are lying, but what if youâre wrong and they DO have this heritage? what then? and I get that. I fully get that. For all I know, they maybe do have Cherokee or Sioux or whatever ancestry going very far back to the point where itâs 3% or 2% or 1%. I donât know that for sure. I have no way of knowing that short of demanding a DNA sample.
What I do know is that these claims of having a grandmother who is full Cherokee? Of knowing about it since a young age and being proud of it and acknowledging it? Theyâre false. Theyâve been contradicted time and time again, not just on Tumblr, but in my own conversation with them.
This brings me to my next point. My conversation. I did not speak directly to them but rather, relayed messages between a third party who will remain nameless in this edit because they are not the issue here. My conversation went as follows.
Without my own messages I understand that this may lack some context, and I apologize, but without extensively doctoring larger screencaps to protect the identity of the third party and to remove parts of the conversation not inherently relevant to what they were saying, it would be very difficult to provide the appropriate context. I will try to explain.
The first message was the beginning of the conversation. The opening of dialogue. Paraphrasing my own response, I made the point that the biggest issue I had wasnât just the timing, but everything about how they approached the situation. How often the story would change. How, when it changed, it was never a full correction or admission but rather manipulating the details to fit the new facts. It was always contradiction after contradiction and story change after story change. Even the very beginning of their message contradicts their own words in several of the receipts Iâd gathered for the initial post.
That brought us to the second message. Not a direct quote this time, of course, but a paraphrase. I trust the third party enough to know that the general content of this message was not distorted. The general jist, to make my own response easier to parse.
it IS something sheâs only recently come to care about and wanted to explore more in depth
My response to this? Skepticism. Here we have yet another direct contradiction to several of their own posts on the matter, one of which I brought to their attention with a specific quote. Iâll be linking to these posts as well for your own reference so you can make of it what you will. HERE. HERE. HERE. In the first two, I actually have highlighted the relevant sections that are so blatantly being contradicted by this message, and theyâve also been linked up above in regards to separate issues in this update.
Which brought us to the final message. Thereâs a lot that, reading back, still makes little to no sense to me. Itâs not coherent, particularly in the beginning as to what exactly is meant. The only general gist that I can get is an admission that, yes, I am right that they are contradicting themselves and that it is a lie. Followed by what they themselves admit is a pity cry rather than the justification theyâre trying to pass it off as. I never pointed it out in my initial post, but I always found it suspicious how they would fall back on the excuse of i donât have a good relationship with my grandparents for x and y reasons when they were confronted about how what they were saying was patently impossible. Not because I doubt that she doesnât have a good relationship with them but because it always came off as justification and pity searching when sheâd bring it up in context. It was always itâs not my fault iâm wrong about this cause i donât wanna ask them to confirm and not justâŚadmitting that, best case scenario (i.e. not lying), they were misinformed about the issue and apologizing for any skepticism it brought.Â
So yeah, here we are, days later, and though I appreciate the attempts made to resolve this privately, I believe this is all information that people deserve to know. You can make of this what you will. Some of you may look at this and be as skeptical as I am. As unconvinced as I am. That is fair. Some of you may be reading this and thinking that Iâm going after them too hard, that Iâm being too tough for whatâs probably just misspeaking. You may have a close relationship with this RPer that makes reading this uncomfortable or maybe even unpleasant. I understand that too. I welcome being approached in private about this so I can explain even further why I believe I know for a fact that this is something theyâre lying about. Whatever course of action you take after reading this, just know that I respect your decision and wish you nothing but the best.