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Indigenous identity fraud in Canada and the United States

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Individuals who practice Indigenous identity fraud are often called "pretendians", a pejorative portmanteau of "pretend" and "Indian"; similarly a "pretenduit" is a portmanteau of "pretend" and "Inuit". Philip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) called the practice "playing Indian," and anthropologist Circe Sturm coined the term "race shifting". Indigenous identity fraud is considered an extreme form of cultural misappropriation, especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities from which they do not originate.

Early false claims to Native identity date back at least as far as the Boston Tea Party. According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Dawes Commission was "bombarded with fraudulent applicants from across the US trying to secure an allotment" during the creation of the Dawes Rolls. The Guion Miller Roll, which determined eligibility for financial restitution to Eastern Cherokee people for treaty violations, was also inundated with applications, two-thirds of which were rejected as fraudulent. Fraud in Native American art was so common that the U.S. federal government had to pass the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935, which created a $2,000 fine or six months in prison for selling goods falsely claimed to be American Indian-made. States and tribes later passed their own Indian arts and crafts laws. Indigenous identity fraud increased after the 1960s for several reasons, such as the reestablishment of tribal sovereignty following the era of Indian termination policy, the media coverage of the Occupation of Alcatraz and the Wounded Knee Occupation, and the formation of Native American studies as a distinct form of area studies which led to the establishment of publishing programs and university departments specifically for or about Native American culture. At the same time, hippie and New Age subcultures marketed Native cultures as accessible, spiritual, and as a form of resistance to mainstream culture, leading to the rise of the plastic shaman or "culture vulture". By 1990, many years of pushback by Native Americans against Indigenous identity fraud resulted in the successful passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (IACA) – a truth-in-advertising law which prohibits misrepresentation in marketing of American Indian or Alaska Native arts and crafts products within the United States. Indian arts and crafts laws have also been enacted by some states and tribes.

While Native communities have always self-policed and spread word of frauds, mainstream media and arts communities were often unaware, or did not act upon this information, until more recent decades. Since the 1990s and 2000s, a number of controversies regarding ethnic fraud have come to light and received coverage in mainstream media, leading to a broader awareness of pretendians in the world at large.

History of false claims to Indigenous identity

Early claims

Historian Philip J. Deloria has noted that European Americans "playing Indian" is a phenomenon that stretches back at least as far as the Boston Tea Party.

In his 1998 book Playing Indian, Deloria argues that white settlers have always played with stereotypical imagery of the peoples that were replaced during colonization, using these tropes to form a new national identity that can be seen as distinct from previous European identities. Early examples of white people playing Indian include, according to Deloria, the Improved Order of Red Men, Tammany Hall, and scouting societies like the Order of the Arrow.

Individuals who made careers out of pretending an Indigenous identity include James Beckwourth, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Grey Owl.

The academic Joel W. Martin noted that "an astonishing number of southerners assert they have a grandmother or great-grandmother who was some kind of Cherokee, often a princess", and that such myths serve settler purposes in aligning American frontier romance with southern regionalism and pride.

Post-1960s: Rise of Indigenous identity fraud in academia, arts, and political positions

Several factors influenced the rise of Indigenous identity fraud after the 1960s. The reestablishment and exercise of tribal sovereignty among tribal nations (following the era of Indian termination policy) meant that many individuals raised away from tribal communities sought, and still seek, to reestablish their status as tribal citizens or to recover connections to tribal traditions. Other tribal citizens, who had been raised in American Indian boarding schools under genocidal policies designed to erase their cultural identity, also revived tribal religious and cultural practices.

At the same time, in the years following the Occupation of Alcatraz, the formation of Native American studies as a distinct form of area studies, and the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday, publishing programs and university departments began to be established specifically for or about Native American culture. At the same time, hippie and New Age cultures marketed Native cultures as accessible, spiritual, and as a form of resistance to mainstream culture, leading to the rise of the plastic shaman or "culture vulture". All of this added up to a culture that was not inclined to disbelieve self-identification, and a wider societal impulse to claim Indigeneity.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn wrote of the influence of Indigenous identity frauds in American academia and political positions:

[U]nscrupulous scholars in the discipline who had no stake in Native nationhood but who had achieved status in academia and held on to it through fraudulent claims to Indian Nation heritage and blood directed the discourse. This phenomenon took place following the "Indian Preference" regulations in new hiring practices at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 1970s. Sometimes unprepared for such outright aggression or suffering polarization from the conflicts in the system, Native scholars in the academy often seemed to be silent witnesses to such occurrences. Their silence has not meant complicity. It has meant, more than anything, a feeling of utter powerlessness within the structures of strong mainstream institutions.

By 1990, as noted in The New York Times Magazine, many years of "significant pushback by Native Americans against so-called Pretendians or Pretend Indians" resulted in the successful passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (IACA) – a truth-in-advertising law which prohibits misrepresentation in the marketing of American Indian or Alaska Natives arts and crafts products within the United States. The IACA makes it illegal for non-Natives to offer or display for sale, or sell, any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian, Indian tribe, or Indian arts and crafts organization. For a first-time violation of the act, an individual can face civil or criminal penalties up to a $250,000 fine or a five-year prison term, or both. If a business violates the act, it can face civil penalties or can be prosecuted and fined up to $1,000,000.

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