Native American identity for white people (by a white person)

From Emergency!, Season 2, Episode 5, "Peace Pipe"

Chet: I don't know what you're getting so uptight about. I've got some Indian
blood in me too, you know.

Johnny: Oh, wait a minute. Now, don't tell me. On your grandmother's side.

Chet: Yeah. That's right.

Johnny: And she was an Indian princess, a Cherokee most likely.

Chet: Hey, that's right. How'd you know that?

Johnny: We call it white man royalty syndrome.

This is one of my favorite episodes of Emergency!. I wish I knew more about the inspiration. I mean, I assume that the bit on anthropologists was inspired by Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died For Your Sins, but it was a real enough issue that it may not have needed him as a reference. 

(I do wish they had not had Roy defend the jokes, but it was the '70s; maybe they felt pressure.)

If you recall, in Friday's post I was writing about selecting songs and musicians for Native American Heritage Month, and starting with some big names, but I ran into a snag.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/12/native-american-heritage-month-2022.html 

Going even further back, in June I had a post that in writing about the "slap" at the 2022 Oscars also referenced Sacheen Littlefeather's Oscar refusal on behalf of Marlon Brando at the 1973 Oscars, and later insistence that she was not really Indian.

Littlefeather died in October of this year. Shortly afterword, Jacqueline Keeler, a Navajo author, came out saying that she had interviewed Littlefeather's sisters and they said that they said they were not native.

There were some problems with it. This included waiting until after Littlefeather's death to say it. She was being honored by the Academy in September, so that would have been a reasonable time to say something. More glaring are tweets from one of the sisters saying that it was Keeler who told them that they were not native, which is not how Keeler represented the conversation. Also, Keeler seems to focus on international boundaries at the expense of tribal boundaries, for example feeling that Indigenous Canadians steal jobs from U.S. Native Americans, when you often have members of the same tribes on both sides of the border. So, saying that Littlefeather's roots are Mexican does not automatically cancel out the possibility of connection to Apache or Yaqui ancestry.

If you are more interested in Keeler herself, you can do some reading here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_lCuYR2FcZLzFcIu1nuyQqm1JG71vrdl/view

Apparently her next target is going to be Buffy Sainte-Marie. As you can imagine I have some feelings about that, but I also believe I am not the only one. I expect there to be push back. Counting on it, really. 

Without getting into that more at this time, I want to explore "white man royalty syndrome", and tell my own embarrassing story about it.

I was told that we were descended from Pocahontas, and repeated it when there was a family history project in 8th or 9th grade. Then I started looking at the records. I did not find any links to it, so I asked my father about that. 

The assumption came from a great-great grandfather having a child named Pocahontas, and assuming that was an obvious sign of descent, as opposed to fashionable trends and maybe trying to be different and certainly having a lot of children where running out of names would be a potential problem.

It is not uncommon for people to do this. I have found at least one author who mentions her mother having a similar delusion, and in late 19th century/early 20th century Oklahoma it was very common. That was partly due to a pride in the local history, and also a hope of being able to get in on claims as land was allotted. In fact, land speculators would search out people with names and birth places probable enough to possibly get land and tell them they were related.

(I think this happening so much in Oklahoma is why it is usually a Cherokee princess instead of some other tribe, but not us! We were Powhatan!)

What all of this did, though, is push actual Native Americans into the past, maybe as part of a cool, almost-mythical history, maybe as ancestors, but not as living people with present legal and moral claims.

I believe this will be followed by a much angrier post in a week, but getting back to the starting point, when everyone was talking about Keeler and "pretendians", some of the artists I had been planning on using (Cher) or did use (Rita Coolidge) were called "pretendians". I suddenly felt unsure about what I was doing.

However, it did give me an idea for what to do for the December daily songs. Friday's post will be about that.