Ethnic Fraud amd "Red Face" Impersonators
April 6, 2014
By Woawachin Suta Win
The escalating debacle regarding whether or not the Rosebud Sioux
Tribe’s Attorney General is an American Indian takes me back to my days
as an undergraduate at a top university in the United states almost two
decades ago.
There were roughly 200 students who “checked the box” as Americans
Indians/Alaska Natives but who did not respond to outreach efforts by
the student peer counseling program, never came by the American Indian
Studies Center, and who otherwise blended into the mainstream of the
public university we attended with a population upwards of 25,000
students.......
....... It seems to me that non-Indians often appropriate Native identity in the
United States not only to take advantage of perceived benefits in
higher education and employment as a racial minority, but also to
oppress Natives by infiltrating our communities at the highest levels.
Or, just as ominously, by placing themselves in positions of authority
as Native Americans within the mainstream a la Ward Churchill. While in
his case, Mr Churchill (whose writings were fascinating and inspiring to
me regardless of his status as a white man) was more radical than most
Native radicals, in the local situation we appear to have the more
common phenomenon of the fake Indian or wannabe being an apologist for
the traditionally white institutions that figure prominently in the
social problems we face and overcome every single day as individuals and
as a people.
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