In relation to the 'news' surrounding Sacheen Littlefeather, i'm really going to need non natives to kinda sit back on this one. I mean it. It gets exhausting having to repeatedly explain ideas of blood quantum and it's catastrophic effects on indigenous communities to allies that're strangely gun-ho about attacking someone who may or may not be Native.
CONTEXT ; Jacqueline Keeler, for those who are uninitiated, is a notorious 'pretendian hunter' and authored a list of 'confirmed pretendians' that erroneously implicated several people as race fakers when that was flat out not the case. This was most famously the case with Ben Nighthorse Campbell ( who mind you, isn't a good person, but that doesn't matter here ), where she claimed that he had no Cheyenne ancestry despite him being a registered tribal citzen of the Northern Cheyenne nation. At no point did she confer with tribal officials to confirm her belief.
She is the author of the piece that is now implicating Sacheen as a race faker, and that alone should be a red flag to people. The whole piece leans on the idea that Sacheen's sisters, Rosalind and Trudy, always knew that Sacheen was lying and spent years and years and years holding back from speaking out out of the belief that Sacheen's career would fizzle out eventually.
If they always knew, then why did Rosalind flat out say on twitter that she found out recently FROM Jacqueline Keeler herself that they aren't Native?
Jacqueline should not, in my opinion, be trusted to speak on issues of 'real native status'. Anyone who values mindlessly rooting out 'pretendians' over doing community work of real merit isn't worth giving the time of day to. Her evidence for most things is flimsy and should always be taken with a HEFTY grain of salt.
I need everyone to understand that obsessing over 'pretendians' and blood quantum and who has a right to claim nativeness is a fool's errand. Blood quantum as a concept is a tool of colonization, and is something we're still trying to shake off to this day. Smaller Native communities are losing their land rights and tribal sovereignty because of blood quantum stipulations put out by the government. At some point, there may be no one with a large enough quantum to claim tribal affiliation for these small bands, despite thriving communities still existing.
So, imagine our frustration at non natives pointing at people and saying 'lol I bet you're only 0.1% native, shut up' like that's some kind've all powerful gotcha. It displays a profound lack of understanding for our experiences and how we define nativeness. Please try and get that blood quantum is an issue that we as a community debate about all the time and that it's just.. something that's best left to those it effects. You aren't helping any indigenous people by perpetuating this shit.
I don't know what Sacheen's claim to Nativeness really is. I do not trust Jacqueline's word as far as I can throw it, which isn't very far. Her sisters openly hate her and seem to not know how to get their story straight. This all conveniently comes forward after her passing, so she couldn't defend or explain herself if she wanted to, and all of it feels very suspicious to me. I don't know what Sacheen's claim to Nativeness really is, and yanno what, I don't care. At the end of the god damn day, this sorta thing is not my business and it's not your business either.
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