Reply to Sacheen Littlefeather - What a courageous woman!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It seems likely that she's a fraud, but "Mexican" does not mean "not Native American" as this article seems to suggest. My uncle is Mexican and about half of his ancestry is Native American and all of his paperwork just says Mexican, apparently because he was Mexican-Native American rather than American-Native American. This whole issue is definitely not as cut-and-dry as that article makes it sound.[/quote]

From the article:

“Could their family have some distant drop of Indigenous blood from hundreds of years ago? It’s possible; many people of Mexican descent do. But Indigenous identity is more complicated than that. A U.S. citizen of distant French descent does not get to claim French citizenship. And it would be absurd for that person to wear a beret on stage at the Oscars and speak on behalf of the nation of France. The White Mountain Apache is a very specific tribe with very specific rules of membership. Falsely claiming its heritage, using it to become a spokesperson and relying on dangerous tropes about an abusive Indian father to bolster that fable did real damage.”

And

“My review of her father’s side of the family tree, where she claimed her Native heritage, found no documented ties between his extended family and any extant Native American nations in the United States... Marriage and baptismal records do not place the Cruz or Ybarra families near White Mountain Apache territory in Arizona — and they weren’t near Yaqui communities in Mexico, either. Instead, the Cruz line goes to a village that is now part of Mexico City. Mexican Catholic baptismal records and U.S. military registration cards from World War I and World War II of the Ybarra men (their grandmother’s brothers) place distant family in Pima/O’odham (formerly Papago) tribal territory in Sonora, Mexico. However, Brian Haley, a scholar of California and Sonoran tribes, told me that these are communities where tribal members would have been a distinct minority…All of the family’s cousins, great-aunts, uncles and grandparents going back to about 1880 (when their direct ancestors crossed the border from Mexico) identified as white, Caucasian and Mexican on key legal documents in the United States. None of their relatives married anyone who identified as Native American or American Indian. ”[/quote]

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