The American Indians living today are the descendants of the tiny percentage of American Indians who survived colonization.
We are still fighting for our sovereignty, for basic human rights, and facing many challenges like the intergenerational grief and trauma we inherited from colonization itself; reservations, the boarding schools, forced removals, missing and murdered women and girls, environmental issues such as at Standing Rock, high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and much more.
American Indians are very resilient. It is literally in our genes. We adapt. We thrive.
But we are facing a new form of genocide: the theft of our cultures, and even our ancestors, by people who are benefiting from their theft and who are taking our cultures and turning them into something unrecognizable.
Why? Because they think it’s cool. Because they mistakenly think they have American Indian ancestry. For whatever reason. They are uninformed and do not realize what they are doing. And some do it for money and/or notoriety.
It does not “honor” someone when you steal what is not yours. It is not for non-American Indians to determine what American Indians should be willing to share after so much was stolen.
If something is willingly shared, that is a gift. It should be respected and honored. If it is not willingly shared, it should not be taken. That is theft.
Some are willing to share more openly than others. American Indians are not a monolith. Make no assumptions.
Ideas about tribal identity and sovereignty do vary. Please honor them all and err on the side of caution and respect.
We expose those who knowingly represent themselves falsely for the purpose of financial gain and other damaging causes.
People who falsely represent themselves as Indigenous are slowly erasing us by replacing us.
