PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker knows that talking about Native American identity is messy. She’s in a gray area with her own tribe as a legal descendant who doesn’t qualify for enrollment. She was still processing this ambiguous identity when she encountered a troubling phenomenon: people coming forward with FALSE claims to Nativeness.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
It never occurred to me that people would lie. Or that people would make up some story because they had some romanticized. Vision of what it being native was.
Anita Rao
Today, a deep-dive into Native ethnic fraud. Dina shares what she’s witnessed personally and her research into how the phenomenon started. Plus, how these fake claims to Native identity cause real harm.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Native Americanness. we have been conditioned to believe it is a racial category, but in fact it's this, this, uh, political relationship.
Anita Rao
That conversation... Just ahead on Embodied.
Ask Dina Julia Whitaker to describe her Native American identity and here's what she'll say.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
So I'm really in that gray zone.
Anita Rao
Dina is a legal descendant of the Colville Confederated Tribes. She has family ties to the Colville reservation in Northeastern Washington state, but she doesn't qualify for tribal enrollment. She has access to some benefits from the federal government, but not others. Dina has been making sense of this liminal space her entire life, and at the same time, she's witnessed massive shifts in the cultural conversation around Native American identity. And there is one particular phenomenon that has caught her attention. People coming forward with false claims to nativeness.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
What I observed was people coming out of the woodwork to claim that they are native without necessarily even knowing a tribe or having a relationship to a tribe. They were everywhere.
Anita Rao
Dina watched this phenomenon grow over decades, and then after becoming a journalist and academic witnessed the fallout up close. This experience led her to some big questions. Why does native ethnic fraud happen and what are the stakes? This is Embodied our show about sex, relationships, and health. I'm Anita Rao.
News stories about people pretending to be Indian have become more frequent in the past decade with allegations coming out about folks in academia publishing in Hollywood. As Dina watched this wave of pretending accusations build, she was at work on a book about the complexity of Native American identity. She hoped to shift the conversation about ethnic fraud away from call out culture, and she wanted to help people understand the history of this phenomenon, its impact on native people and what can possibly be done. The now published book is who Gets To Be Indian, and it starts with some context about her own identity and family story story.
Dina was born at the end of the baby boomer generation and raised in Los Angeles. Her dad was the child of Sicilian immigrants and her mom was of native and white ancestry.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
It was complicated. Um, my mother grew up in Washington and was connected to her tribe. Much of her life was spent on the reservation as a child, um, but she leaves that area in the 1950s, moves down to Southern California and meets my father. It coincides with this era. Where the federal government is actively trying to push native people off their reservations in what's called the relocation program. So yeah, I was raised mostly around this large Sicilian American family who were loving good people, uh, but they were also people who really didn't know. About American Indian people. There was no lack of affection, but there was a lot of stereotypes. There was a lot of misunderstandings of my mother, for example, and her drinking problem, my mother, um, to set. The context for that. My mother had grown up in a family that was shaped by trauma, the historical processes of being colonized and having everything taken from them. This is what shaped who my mom was. Uh, nobody in my Sicilian family really understood it, so my mom became scapegoated.
Anita Rao
Well, I wanna take you back to the lessons that you were learning from your parents. You were, you were, uh, raised away from the space where your mom grew up, but you did feel really connected to your native heritage, even though you didn't really have a lot of exposure to it. Uh, you were 12 and your family took a road trip to the Colville Reservation in Washington State. Tell me about what it was like to visit the reservation and what your. Relationship was with your native identity as you were coming of age, entering your, your early 11, 12, 13 years?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
I had grown up very clear about who I was. I mean, you know, my knowing that my mother was a native person, she was an Indian. And it's also a time when, you know, things are starting to shift around our own national narratives about it, you know, with the ethnic pride movement. And, um, so by the time we get. To that trip that you're referencing in 1970, we get to the reservation and I just felt some deep connection to the land. I was only 12 years old. Hmm. But there's something unnameable about what it means to be a native person and to be in your homeland, to be in a place where. Your DNA is connected to a landscape and to a people, um, that are, is really hard to put words to.
Anita Rao
So you have this experience of kind of coming of age. During the Red Power Movement, there was activism led by native youth. There was messaging about pride in, in being Native American, and then as a young adult you move to the Bay Area. This is in the early eighties and we're amidst a burgeoning new age movement and a really interesting time when this. Kind of rise of urban native communities and this melting pot of people of a variety of different tribal backgrounds was coming together. Tell me about that and your exposure to this interesting kind of melting pot, how that shaped your emerging understanding of what it meant to be native. I.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
As you say, moving to the Bay Area is in 1987. So, um, I'm in the North Bay area and this is a time where the counterculture is morphing into this whole new age movement and the counterculture turned its attention to Indian country and to Native Americans where there's. A valuing of native culture and the back to the land movement gets infused with all of that native wisdom, the medicine people, tribal uh, knowledge, all this kind of stuff. And that's a good thing. Like it's the first time in American history that there is this, you know, actual respect for native people and their cultures, but it does become fetishized and it becomes commodified. And so this is what I. Find myself in the midst of, and, um, what I observed was this urban Indian population that's people from a lot of different tribes and these people with these very ambiguous claims. And, uh, you know, of course there's no, there's no system of checks and balances in urban situations like that. People aren't asking for your tribal ID if you're. You know, coming and saying you are, uh, from whatever tribe, nobody's gonna ask you to show your, your identification. And so there's a lot of trust. There was a lot of just, uh, open acceptance of people.
Anita Rao
Is there a story that comes to mind for you of like a firsthand interaction you had with this wannabe in this era?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Oh my God. Well, I knew a lot of people that had such a story and. It never occurred to me that people would lie or that people would make up some story because they had some romanticized vision of what it being native was. I had a lived experience and the lived experience was really harsh. Um, so. You know, now I, you know, I question like, why, why would somebody wanna make up something like that when our actual experiences were so difficult? It just, and it plus it, it's rude. Like, you know, if somebody's gonna come up to you and say, I'm blah, blah, blah, tribe, it would've been seemed rude to me to, to ask them to prove it or to ask. Too much. But of course now I think that it's incumbent upon us to, to press people for their claims.
Anita Rao
I wanna ask about the kind of transition from that time period for you, because you were living kind of in this melting pot environment. You were engaging in a lot of kind of native cultural practices, but you were also becoming more politically. Activated and really reckoning with questions about your own family's story. And then in 1991, when you were in your thirties, you did go back to your family's reservation. Is there a question that you needed an answer to or something that you were searching for that you needed to go back to find?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Very much so. I was at a real turning point, you know, early thirties, that that's a turning point for a lot of people. And for me, uh, it was at the end of a marriage I was, uh, questioning everything about my life and who I'd become. Um, I had been. Two failed marriages where I had been subject to domestic violence. I had been abused, and I'm trying to find out why is that So I'm asking these deeper questions and I knew that it was gonna come. I was doing family systems work. I knew that I was gonna have to figure out my relationship with my mother and what is it about our family system and my mother. That can help explain that. I was starting to learn about what it meant to be the adult child of an alcoholic. And so I knew that in order to get the answers to those questions, I was gonna have to go back to the reservation and look for those answers myself. And you know, I had uncles there, I had relatives there. And so, um, it was with that. Intent to, uh, uncover this family history so that I can understand myself better.
Anita Rao
How did the answers that you found shape your relationship with your native identity on both a personal and a professional level?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
So what it was for me was, this is the first time I hear the story of the boarding schools and my Uncle Verne, um, tells me about Chemawa. Um, so Chemawa is one of the notorious boarding schools, uh, in the northwest, in the state of Oregon. And so my grandmother, uncle Vern and Uncle John had all three been sent there. They were her brothers. And he tells me this story about. The abuses that they all suffered and how they all tried to run away, uh, you know, many times and they never made it. The, the stories about, you know, being kids and being drilled with rifles, being dressed in military uniforms, being subjected to corporal punishment, all of that stuff was really shocking to me and. I felt enraged by it and I felt like I had been lied to my whole life. This feeling of like, why did I not know this? Why doesn't everybody know this? If this is our history and I became committed to, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life reeducating myself. So that I could tell what I am learning to everybody I know around me and commit to reeducating as many people as possible. And so, um, that's what I did and that's what I do Now,
Anita Rao
Just ahead, Dina comes across a major case of ethnic fraud and tells us the whole story. You're listening to Embodied from North Carolina Public Radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking with Dina Gilio-Whitaker about Native American identity and protectionism, the phenomenon of people falsely claiming Native heritage. Dina is a descendant of the Colville Confederated tribes and a lecturer at California State University San Marcos. She's also the author of the book Who Gets to Be Indian. Dina first encountered protectionism in the 1970s and eighties. In that era of the New Age movement, there was frequent appropriation of native identity and culture. But the phenomenon didn't rock her personal world until about three decades later when she became acquainted with the actress Sacheen Littlefeather. Little Feather is best known for taking the stage during the 1973 Academy Awards to refuse an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando.
Sacheen Littlefeather Archival Audio
He very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award, and the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry. Excuse me. [BOOING]
Anita Rao
Littlefeather claims Apache and Yaqui Heritage, and became an icon and activist for native causes. In 2016, Dina was tapped to Ghost Write S Sheen, little Feather's memoir. But early into their work together, Dina started having suspicions about little feather's claims to native identity.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
She had been contacted by a literary agent in New York. They were soliciting a manuscript from her. And so, uh, she needed somebody to help her write it. And I had just published my first book. So we started working on that project together. And through that process, um, you know, I conducted hours and hours of interviews with her on a preliminary basis as we were. Developing, uh, a proposal, a book proposal, and. In that process, she handed over a journal. Uh, she had been keeping a handwritten journal. There were 200 pages of this journal, and so she ha she gave me 200 pages of photocopies of that original journal. So I had all this information in there and, um, she mysteriously pulled the plug on the project, but I still had this journal and she didn't ask for it back. And so I just sat on it and, you know, a few years went by. I start to get communications from other people as I talked to people about my experience with her, which was very bewildering for me.
Anita Rao
What were the red flags like? What was bewildering?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Well, the red flags was how she completely just disregarded me. And so I started to think, well, maybe it was because she found somebody better that's a better writer, or that she would rather work with, or, you know, I mean, I had no nothing to go on and so, so I started just talking to people about. About my experience and I started to hear rumblings of people who said they thought that she was a fraud. And there had always been these whispers, and I, I was unaware of that. And here I had this journal. And so the journal is actually a treasure trove of evidence, uh, for her. I actually came to believe that, you know, if in order to write a book about her life. Especially with me, it was gonna require, you know, brutal honesty, a lot of family details, and I, I believed that she was not gonna be willing to go down that road and answer some really tough questions. And so, uh, turns out. Not long after that, a couple years after that, there was a documentary that had come out about her, uh, 25 minute documentary called, um, breaking the Silence. And it's terrible. It's a terrible documentary. It's doesn't have any new information. It's her repeating her same tired narrative of her story and definitely no hard questions about her, her own, you know, supposed. Native background, so, so I just became, you know, all of these things added up over time that I became convinced that she was not who she said she was.
Anita Rao
So in addition to this, this personal experience with her and this conviction that you had, that she wasn't who she said she was simultaneously, you decided to kind of. Weighed into academic and scholarly research about this phenomenon of ethnic fraud, and you did it knowing that it was prickly territory inside academic circles, inside native circles. Why did you want to lean into the conversation?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Well, it's something I had been writing about in my previous book, uh, as long as Grass Grows, which is a book about environmental justice. In Indian country for native people. I wrote about it there when I wrote about the, the history of the environmental movement and how it became infiltrated with the counterculture and uh, and with fraud in there. Although I didn't go directly into the fraud, I was definitely concerned about, um, the fetishizing of native people in that movement and. So with the, the, the experience with Sing Little Feather, I became. As I became convinced that she was not who she said she was, and I had this journal of hers, you know this, this where there was evidence. I just felt like it was, I knew I had something and years went by. I knew I was gonna have to do something with it. I didn't know what, but it just sat there on my bookshelf for all these years and then. When she passed away in 2022, uh, two weeks after she passed away is when this bombshell article came out written by Jackie Keeler exposing her as a fraud based on, um, the testimony of her two sisters. That's when I knew the opening was there. This was a bombshell. I mean, it was really, it rocked Indian country and people were not happy about it. People do not wanna hear their heroes. Are liars, especially in Indian country because we have so few heroes to begin with. But, but it's something that we have to confront. And I just felt like I was in a hot seat. Like, what do I do now? I felt like I was put into a position. I could have ignored it, I suppose. I could have just, uh, not engaged, but I felt like I was handed this thing and I felt like I had a certain sense of responsibility to, uh, expose what. I knew because this problem is so big. I mean, the, the fraud in her case was so blatant that, you know, it, it can't stand, we can't allow it to stand. And that's the stand that I, I took on it. This is an opportunity. To really have a serious conversation, to move the conversation from what I call, call out culture, because that's really where we're at with it. Uh, the, you know, in social media, in our social spaces, we, we get. Righteous indignation about people that we believe are frauds or pretends. And not that that's wrong or incorrect, but that we need to get beyond that. We need to have a serious analysis, uh, a serious conversation about the phenomenon, about how we get here and how we move through it in a way that's productive. I'm not the only one to. You feel this way, and they're, they're the work of other scholars who have, you know, tried to advance this. But we need, my goal was to lay a foundation that's historically informed and can offer some, you know, hopefully constructive. Advice moving forward or suggestions.
Anita Rao
So I wanna talk briefly about that history of how protectionism began. And you argue that to understand that we must look to early Hollywood, what was happening during the early film industry that led people to start claiming that they were native?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
The early film industry is a time, so if we're talking about the late 19th century, early 20th century, 'cause this is the era of silent films, uh, the film industry comes directly out of, in, in. One regard comes out of the Wild West shows and the Wild West shows were, you know, like a Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West. And there were numerous other of these shows. They were, uh, quite an American phenomenon. They were these spectacles that demonstrated the, the American stories of the winning of the West. And so they were populated by veterans of the Indian Wars. So these who people who had become prisoners of war. Basically, uh, get drafted into these Wild West shows and they travel around the country and around the world, especially Europe, performing this, these wild west, uh, spectacles. And so this is during a time when native people are confined to reservations, often not allowed to leave. Native religions have been banned. You're not allowed to practice your religion. Your lands have been allotted. They have been. Privatized and native people have been thrown into bitter, horrible conditions of poverty and sickness, and it's a really dark time for native people. But what they can do is they can join the Wild West shows. And travel the world and get paid really well. Hmm. So it's not a bad opportunity for those who with the skills, you know, coming out of these Indian wars and, and it's in this era that, so Nativeness, I argue this is the point at which native identity becomes commodified. Um, because now the fir it's the first time where you can be paid to perform Indianness. And why would. Wouldn't you in this time? If you could. It's a way out of a very difficult situation, and so the film industry comes out of that. Some of the earliest films are within these Wild West shows and it morphs into the film industry, and so. The, some of the earliest film topics were about, um, native people and this, you know, the vanishing Indian trope. It was, um, many of those themes were about we have to, you know, honor the native people. Their cultures are vanishing. It's the vanishing race. And so this trope was being played out over and over again, and some of the earliest actors in those films were people, veterans of the Wild West shows. And so na Now Nativeness is fully commodified. You can, you can make money by performing nativeness and by the time it hits the film industry, it's native people mostly doing those roles. But, but the, the process of being made up to look like an. Everybody had to go through it. It was a very, uh, artificial process. You can be red-faced as, uh, it's been called. So you didn't need to be native, an actual Native American person to be red-faced. Now it's opened to anybody. Uh, so that's, that's the moment that I pinpoint as being the origin point of pretending is as we know it today.
Anita Rao
So historically folks in the entertainment industry had a financial incentive to pretend they were native to get certain roles as we move through time. What else did you uncover about why pretend unionism occurs? Why are people pretending to be native when they're not?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
It comes down to a number of reasons. Lots of these people who are out there publicly claiming themselves to be Native Americans, especially. Those that don't have any kind of connection to a tribal community whatsoever, uh, they take resources away from actual native people. And it's especially. Acute in academia, in the entertainment world, in the publishing world, and in government contracting. So, um, the, we're talking about massive amounts of, uh, financial resources that get diverted away from the people that they're actually designed to benefit. So the financial incentivization is there, but by the time we get to the mid 20th century. We start to see the shifting of values. Our social values are changing. We, we see the civil rights movement, and that's the beginning of this ethnic pride movement that starts to sweep across the country. People are no longer a. As ashamed to be people of color. You know, the Black Panther movement, the American Indian movement is taking shape. The Brown Berets. This is a moment where people are starting to turn away from whiteness and claiming their ethnicities. My argument is that there are psychological benefits and that there always have been from, um, from the beginning of really American society where we. Begin to see the the origins of, um. Cultural appropriation to use an older term. So, so there's a, a lot of reasons why this happens, but it's rampant, it's systematic and it's done nothing but grow.
Anita Rao
So I wanna ask about that self-identification, the implications of it, because I know, you know, I. That has really become the norm, starting with how the census was done. That's how people apply to jobs now, and I'm a mixed race person, and as I was reading your book and thinking about this, I was like, oh, for me, overall self-identification has been a good thing. It's allowed me to express myself more fully. It's allowed me to kind of express myself, even if people don't see my heritage when they look at me, but. It is much more complicated when it comes to native identity in particular. Tell me more about how you personally became to understand that distinction and why self-identification is much more complicated when it comes to talking about who's native and who's not.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Self-identification is what gave us Sing Little Feather and what gave us Ironized Cody Buffalo Child Long Lands. These are early frauds in the Hollywood business and uh, I can go on and on and on to name you. The frauds that we've had to deal with in academia, in entertainment, in publishing, in government contracting, self-identification does not allow for any processes of accountability and transparency. Being Native American is, I argue it's a political distinction, native Americanness, um, we have been conditioned to believe it is a racial. Category, a racial distinction that's, I would call it a false distinction that's been thrust upon us. You know, being native is something that is a, a relationship on an individual basis. It's a relationship to a tribe and a tribal relationship to the United States. That's a political status and distinction and, um, that's. The way that native people started to relate early on to Europeans and then the American government, but it became racialized, a racialized category over time. But in fact, it's this political relationship. The, the racializing of native people is what, uh, has led to so much misunderstanding, but it's also led to. The attacking of native people and a systematic attempt to dismantle tribal sovereignty. That's a whole other conversation, but that's what I deconstruct in the second chapter of the book.
Anita Rao
Can you give me an example of, of what's at stake if we continue to talk about native identity as a racial identity and not a political one, just to help us kind of have something to latch onto.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Yeah, this is the, the sort of the crux of the problem. There has been a sustained effort to. Dismantled tribal sovereignty forever. Forever. anti-Indian has never left us. The processes of colonization has always been about eliminating native populations and taking their lands. That's just the history of this country. We are left with less than 5% of our lands, but we have this legal structure in place, and that's what's unique about the United States is that hundreds and hundreds of treaties that the United States made with Native Nations have left us this legal. Structure where the federal government has agreed that it has a, uh, fiduciary responsibility to tribes to protect their resources, to protect their lands, and to guard. Its this relationship of responsibility. It's called the trust responsibility. And so this is the roughly the scaffolding that we call tribal sovereignty to protect native rights and native lands well. One of the ways that this has been done in the legal system is through protecting against the taking of native children, the boarding school history, 20th century history of children being taken away from parents, which happened in my family. That's a whole other piece of this story about how, uh, my mom had a child taken from her before I was born, and that was part of my. Discovery of my mom's history. Anyway, the IT leads to the Indian Child Welfare Act. It gets passed in 1978. This ends the systematic taking of native children and placing them in white adoptions. Well, that law has been considered the gold standard in adoption law. It's also been. Called this, one of the strongest laws that we have to protect native rights. And, um, that law has been under attack for well over a decade now by conservative interests led by a group called the Goldwater Institute, backed by a. Big law law firm called Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, the goal is to undermine, if not completely overturn that act. Why? Because, because it protects tribal sovereignty as long as you have this framework of tribal sovereignty in place that protects what remains of native lands and resources. And so, um, the systematic attack on that law, legal. mines have said, you know, if that is undermined or undone, it becomes the thread that can unravel the entire, uh, foundation that protects what rights native people have left, and ability to protect their lands.
Anita Rao
Just ahead, we'll hear Dina's proposed solutions for combating ethnic fraud in native communities, and how doing all of this research has affected how she thinks about her own native identity. Stay with us after the break.
This is Embodied. I am Anita Rao. Today we're talking about ethnic fraud in Native American communities with Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Dina is a descendant of the Coleville Confederated tribes and the author of the book Who Gets to Be Indian. Dina argues that pretending to be Native American is more than just an issue of cultural appropriation. Pretends can take jobs and financial resources away from the native people they were intended for, and broader confusion around native identity chips, away at tribal sovereignty and cultural preservation. So what can be done? One solution Dina proposes is moving away from policies of self-identification where people just declaring that they're native on forms or in interviews is enough. But that also gets tricky because some folks who do have legitimate claims to native ancestry don't have all the legal proof. This is how Dina makes sense of that tension between being in a legal gray zone and wanting to limit self-identification and ethnic fraud.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
So my personal relationship to it is difficult because until my tribe, the Colville Confederated Tribes changes its rules for, for, uh, enrollment, which is based on blood quantum. You know, based on the documents that we have, I can't prove that I have a quarter. Indian blood to be an enrolled member and a lot of tribes are moving away from this blood quantum standard and adopting liter, what we call lineal descent. Lineal descent acknowledges kinship and family connection to a tribe. And that's a much closer to an indigenous way of understanding what indigeneity actually is. And so I, you know, until, and unless my tribe adopts that. That standard. I will never be an enrolled person. I will be in this space of liminality, and so, but I still care about it even though. Like I, this is a tribal sovereignty matter. I believe that tribes, this is an exercise of sovereignty. Even if I can't be an enrolled member of my tribe, I support my tribe's right, to establish whatever rules it wants, even if it means that I'm sacrificed in this process and I want to, I want to read from the book in the, the end of chapter. Two, I make this argument, uh, there must be a baseline by which we determine name and inhabit the paradoxical relationships. We now, now find ourselves in, in the United States. In the language we inherited from our English colonizers. We call it tribal nationhood and sovereignty. Framed as they are by legal structures, not our own. Whether we have clearly documented tribal lineages and enrollment within a federally recognized tribe, to which our native identities are legally tied or not. We should care about these processes and relationships because without them, there are no Indians that the state is bound to recognize at all. There would be no tribal land basis or treaty rights that the state is legally bound to protect without those legal realities. Colonial, though they may be American Indian people are just part of the multicultural mass that the US prides itself on. Without legally defined Indians, the state evades accountability to the original people of this land.
Anita Rao
So you have this interesting tension in your own personal experience, and, and there are a, a number of different realms we're kind of talking about in this conversation. We're talking about the public spaces in which people self-identify and have access to various scholarships or jobs or opportunities. We're talking about tribal enrollment and the relationship with a particular tribe, but when it comes to. Pretending as in particular, and this kind of first sphere of people. Pretending to be Indian and, and the implications that has. What are some alternative models for validating claims? Like, how can we not fall into, call out culture, but actually have a productive conversation and, and look at this in a productive way.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Well, we need to have honest conversations, frank conversations about it. We have to not be afraid to question people's identity. We need accountability and transparency, and we need systems in place in our institutions.
Anita Rao
Well, I wonder, I wonder about what processes can exist that won't cause more harm? Like do you have. Ideas or, or specific examples of processes you think would, would work to kind of further the ability for folks with real heritage to get these opportunities but not cause undue harm?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Well, I would say that there's already a lot of harm being caused uhhuh and the harm being caused is because of self identification. People claiming, you know, because they have the right to self identity claiming the the heritage. Of something that they don't have a right to claim, they don't have, uh, you know, and that's not true for everybody. I mean, so we have to talk about the, the very. Real, uh, existence of this big gray area that a a lot of people, for countless reasons, can actually be legitimately native people, but not be able to prove it, right? Mm-hmm. Through adoption and through all kinds of other processes. So we have to be able to. To, to acknowledge that, but at the same time, like there's, there's a conversation there. And so we have to be willing to have those conversations. You know, in academia there is no reason why we shouldn't ask people coming into, say, for example, an American Indian studies department applying for a tenured track job, uh, that has an a claim to native identity. Why shouldn't that person be asked? To be accountable for those claims, it would be very similar to. Asking somebody who is coming in from out of the country to show their immigration status, right? Like it's showing what is your nationhood, what is the evidence for that? There's of ways,
Anita Rao
What are some examples of of proof that allow for the accounting for folks who have that history of forest adoption, who have that. Removal who maybe cannot get that tribal enrollment card, like could you give me some examples of questions that could be asked or things that could be considered in the process of validation that would account for some of those disruptions?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Yeah, I mean, I have siblings that would be in that position. I have three siblings that were born before I was, they had all been placed in adoption. So now these folks. Have a, a legitimate tribal heritage, but they have no documentation. They'll never be able to get documentation that connects them to our tribe, whereas I do, but they have a story that they can tell they if they ever want, and this would never happen, but if they wanted to apply for a job or, or some other kinds. You know, be in some other kind of position where they would assert that nativeness. Um, they have a story to tell. And so when, if I, when I talk about processes of accountability. In a place like academia, that's a story. Like this is something that somebody can, can tell, like we are open to everybody's stories. We like to hear these stories. If you don't have the documentation, you, your family was impacted by adoption or some other kind of process, but you know that you came from a native family, and tell us what is that story. And then if you've got some other, some way of validating that story, great. But this, when I'm asking for processes of accountability, you know, this is just, just one. It's not like, you know, you don't have to necessarily prove your heritage through a document. 'cause there's so many ways that that's not possible. But, but account for your story. Tell us who you are. Tell us why we should believe you
Anita Rao
And what's the role of. Kinship in this and the ability to kind of, I mean, I guess, I guess what I'm, what I'm hearing when you say that is I'm, I'm thinking about those examples of stories where people say, you know, oh, I have a great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather who was Cherokee. Like, that is not exactly a story that you would consider to be a valid one, I'm guessing.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
That raises questions about, you know, what does it mean to be an indigenous person to be native? So, okay, what if you can trace back 400 years? And there are lots of examples of that, of this out there. Uh, people who have stories about, or, and even like, can. In their genealogy shows a native person three or 400 years ago. But what's happened in that interim is that there's been lots of inner marriage. There has been no maintenance of relationship to a tribal culture or to a tribe. And so now here you are 400 years later, going back to, to claiming this native ancestor, but, but you have no kinship, you have no relationship to that tribe. Like what does that, what does that claim mean? Is it valid? Well, you have entire groups of people that are doing that now that have done this deep genealogical work, you know, in Canada. Uh, and here I'm talking about the, the scholarship of Darryl Laro, that's his specialty look, interrogating those Canadian, uh, genealogy tribes, and we have lots of them here in the US too. And, and so the questions are like, well, what does it, what does it mean to. Claim nativeness, even if you can show that you have, uh, an ancestor from a long time ago. And so the way that I argue it in the book is that the way we describe that matters, like words matter. You know, just because you have an Indian ancestor that you know about from hundreds of years in the past is that license to say, I am Native American. It's one thing to say I am Native American. When you have a connection to a tribe and a family, these kinship connections, um, it's one thing to assert that, and it's another thing to say, I have an ancestor from 400 years ago that was native.
Anita Rao
Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
And so, so words matter.
Anita Rao
So you're, after all of this. Research you're, you've kind of come down to this idea of kinship and community as really important things to define your connection to native identity. How have other folks you're in community with, especially those with more ambiguous identities or complicated family histories, responded to this idea?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
So, uh, there's, there's mixed responses. I think most native people would agree. And, you know, let's be clear. I mean, my scholarship builds on the scholarship of other people who have said this. You know, being native is about this kinship connection. I'm not saying anything new here. Mm-hmm. But. There are people who don't have the kinship connections that are still very married to their ideas about their family lore, you know, their family histories, where there is not necessarily any evidence, so they're not gonna give up those stories easily. That's where I see the resistance comes from for the most part, you know, needing to hold onto this. Whatever that is. You know, the, the romanticized family stories about Indian ancestry that are unvalidated or unverifiable, I think those are the people that are gonna have the hardest time with, with these arguments.
Anita Rao
How has researching the pretending discourse affected how you think about your own native identity and, and where you are in your relationship to it at this point in your life?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
It's just strengthened it because I know that even though I don't have that little enrollment card, I do know the value of my Descendancy status as a legal designation. I don't have as much anxiety or. Yeah, doubt about that as I used to. I maintain my connections on the reservation. I go home. I am involved in the culture, but I know who I am. I know my kin, I know my history. I know who my mother was. I, you know, there is absolutely no. Doubt about where I come from. And so I've learned to decenter this idea of blood quantum and having a, you know, a certain amount of, you know, quote unquote blood to define who I am as a native person. I know it's, it's a false narrative, and so I'm much more confident about that now. I, because I do believe that it's the kinship that's the important piece and the maintenance of community with the tribe.
Anita Rao
So you're putting this book about ethnic fraud out into the world, and in that you were really vulnerable in revealing aspects of your own family story along the way. I'm curious about what you feel like is at stake for you personally and how this conversation about Native identity evolves and, and what your hopes are for how the conversation continues.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
My hope is that the, this book. Will be a foundation for people to be able to talk about this issue with a lot more honesty and frankness, and that was the goal of writing the book to just. Create a conversation. You know, that's why in the subtitle, I use that term difficult conversations. These are very difficult conversations, but I'm not one to shy away from a difficult conversation. And I think that we can have these conversations in ways that are logical, they are measured, and if not non-emotional, at least just balanced. So that's the stakes for me. I don't wanna be the one to call somebody out. But I do want people to talk about it. Like, if you're gonna come into my space, you know, and in like in my American Indian Studies program at school and talk about being native, well, I wanna hear you talk about it. Like, what, what is that story for you? I want you to feel safe to talk about it and, and also to feel accountable about what it is that you're saying.
Anita Rao
Are there things that have helped you be able to tell your own personal story? And I guess what are, what are the biggest factors and the things that have helped you be able to do that at this juncture?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
I, I think it has a lot to do with the scholarship that people have done before me. There's a literature on this. People have done some, some really difficult work. Not all of it has been received well, but it's been done for the right reasons. Um, so I, you know, for people to be the, the scholars before me who have done a. The hard work that, you know, I just get to build on. That really helps me and the people that I know in my life who are also in, in liminal positions. There are so many people like me who have this liminal identity that are, are native. They grew up native, but they don't have the, the benefit of tribal enrollment. We are. A dime a dozen in Indian country. And so having the conversations with those people helps me to be able to deal with my own difficult feelings about it. So I'm much less insecure about it than I used to be. And I think, you know, being able to talk about it in these terms will also help other people work through their own insecurities.
Anita Rao
Dina, thank you so much for the conversation and for sharing so much of your story and your work. I really appreciate it.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Well, thank you. I appreciate your time.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Dina and her book, "Who Gets to Be Indian? Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity" at our website, embodiedwunc.org. You can find all episodes of Embodied the Radio Show there and subscribe to our weekly podcast.
Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Wilson Sayre provided editorial guidance. Nina Scott is our intern, and Jenni Lawson, our technical director. Quilla, wrote our theme music.
This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.