Reply to Sacheen Littlefeather - What a courageous woman!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

I do think that she was likely a fraud, and the part about White Mountain Apache appears to be just false, but the PP is correct that the article writer is uneducated and misleading, at least, about the Mexican/Native part of it.  The "Pima/O'odham (formerly Papago)" part is wrong, or a really weird way to write it.  The O'odham group includes what was formerly known by white people as the Pima, and what was formerly known by white people as the Papago, as well as some other groups.  The writer's suggestion that only the O'odham were the only native groups in the area of what is now the state of Sonora (or even the Sonoran desert, which is somewhat different) is incorrect.  The Yaqui also historically lived in that area, and I believe there were other Native peoples that lived in that area for at least some of the year for some of the time.  As PP pointed out, identifying as Mexican on a legal document 100 or 150 years ago does not indicate that the person was not associated with one of these indigenous peoples that lived across the Sonoran dessert, on both sides of the border.   At any rate, that part of the article was not persuasive to me.[/quote]

Right, to the extent that she specifically claimed to be White Mountain Apache, it appears she was lying and that's why I agree she was likely a fraud. [b]But the second excerpt where it talks about looking at legal records of relatives who wrote "Mexican" and somehow concluding that that means "Mexican BUT NOT native American" is just 100% wrong.[/b] Especially because, in the US, Mexicans of native decent were often specifically told to identify as Mexican RATHER THAN native to avoid the implication that they were American-Native Americans because it mattered for a host of (mostly racist, sometimes nationalist) legal purposes.[/quote]

+1 to this.  The idea that "Mexican" or "Latina" is a racial category separate from "Native American" is not true.  You can be an indigenous Mexican-American (and you might very well experience racism and oppression from Mexican-Americans with more European heritage, as we all saw in LA a couple of weeks ago).

That said, it seems like she totally fabricated her heritage and upbringing - whatever indigenous ancestry she might have had, it was not the specific tribal affiliations she claimed[/quote]

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