The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Living Culture Versus the White Possessive

People who think they are white deciding they would rather be Indigenous and then presenting themselves as such is far from a new phenomenon. From the look of it, this was a thing from at minimum the beginning of the creation of settler states, which are what colonies are transmogrified into after the invaders manage to impose control by violence over the land and hem in Indigenous peoples. The earliest pretendians seem to be an all-male group, including both "swarthy" southern europeans and runaway englishmen. It is not coincidental they become especially visible and quick to exploit their masquerade for personal gain in the same era as the brief efflorescence of "wild west shows." Many of those dubious shows not only presented a false narrative of total Indigenous defeat and destruction, but also proliferated a stylized image and character of "the indian." Yes, among those shows and related exhibitions were real Indigenous people seizing opportunities to maintain their regalia and dances by presenting versions of them to outsiders in these fora. Those real Indigenous performers knew they were taking a calculated risk of feeding colonial imagery that could cause headaches in the future for the greater gain of maintaining cultural transmission under the most appalling of conditions. They trusted their descendants to be stronger than any colonizer fakery, and their trust was and is well-placed, as the recent Holding Our Ground: Voices and Strategies Against Self-Indigenization Hybrid Symposium. The focus of the Symposium was on unpacking current rather than historical instances of pretendianism, alongside important discussions of how to counter this form of fraud. There was excellent reason for this: the historical origins of identity fraud are laid out already in the work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in her brilliant essay collection, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015). In what is currently referred to as canada, northwest métis scholars have documented how identity fraud depends upon racialization combined with a communion with the dead with a view to denying the reality and rights of Indigenous peoples.

Headline art from the Holding Our Ground: Voices and Strategies Against Self-Indigenization Hybrid Symposium, held 18-19 march 2026, hosted by the department of American Indian studies at the university of minnesota. (Still working on identifying and properly crediting the artist.)

Considering the vicious stereotypes still deployed against Indigenous peoples to this day, it may be counterintuitive to think there are "settlers" who invested a lifetime of effort into pretending to be "indians" rather than simply be themselves. However, I doubt this is genuinely counterintuitive to anyone who thinks they are white. Moreton-Robinson's 2015 collection "reveal[s] how racialization is the process by which whiteness operates possessively to define and construct itself as the pinnacle of its racial hierarchy." She goes on to explain how to make "possession" real, a person must be able to asset "this is mine." Asserting and then violently enforcing "this is mine" began with the land, and through the coalescence of settler states, extended all the way to an assertion of ownership over Indigenousness itself. Leslie Marmon Silko noted in her 1979 article "An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts," "If you examine the notion that the writer has the 'power' to inhabit any soul, any consciousness, you will find the idea restricted to the white man: the concept of a 'universal consciousness' did not occur until sometime in the 18th century." The twentieth-century version of this mindset is beautifully unpacked by Lisa Nakamura in her book Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, and her analysis applies just as much to its earlier colonial iterations. To summarize, Nakamura shows how somehow, the real experience, the real life, the actions that count, can only be carried out by white males according to this view. Nothing changes, nothing happens, until white people in general and real white male agents arrive to make time move.

This is the complete colonizer's view of Indigenous people and anybody else whom the colonizer opts to racialize. The colonizer knows better whom those people are than the people themselves, knows so much better that they can be more those people than the people. The colonizer will show how it's done, without any need for pesky things like committed longterm relationships to the community. As long as there is one white man who decides to lay down his status as "identity tourist," a person who adopts stereotyped notions of the group he wishes to pass among, deeming "...that their travels have shown them real 'native' life, these identity tourists often took their virtual experiences as other-gendered and other-raced avatars as a lived truth," that group is itself redeemed. It is redeemed from destruction or at least everlasting sameness by the new white hope's capacity to bring history, change, and survival, to the doomed. With the white convert to racialized being, he at least can have real experience on behalf of the racialized others who may never access the status of those considered true persons by whites. Best of all, the white convert has demonstrated total possession. Set out so baldly, it sounds a bit crazy, which reveals how dangerously tempting pretendianism is to the people who take it up. There are not many ways to get so many dopamine hits on a daily basis as identity fraud, considering it enables the fraudster to assert their possessiveness, contribute directly to maintaining and reinforcing a racial hierarchy, and they may benefit not just socially but monetarily and professionally from the sham.

In the united states, the preferred target of pretendians is the Cherokee Nation, while in canada it is the Métis Nation. Both are widely perceived as having many "white passing" members, a conveniently "mixed" culture, and settler states have sought mightily to reduce them wholly to a product of a fictitious "race" or "races," rather than accepting what makes them nations is a shared history, culture, and self-government. Another thing they have in common is a matrilineal kinship system and women serving as leaders in both political and spiritual matters. In north america, pretending to a Cherokee or Métis identity has been a potent means for working class whites to leap up in status, not least because they could take advantage of the weathered and darker skin typical of people who have had to work outdoors. Suddenly that skin is no longer a negative class marker for the savvy and determined, but a "proof" of Indigenous "ancestry." And it is indeed "ancestry," typically of the most distant kind. Métis scholar Aam Gaudry explains how Métis identity appropriation involves communion with the dead to displace living Métis culture, :

Unlike long-standing Métis communities, however, these self-identified Métis do not situate their Métis identity – and the authority to speak about being Métis – in the lived practice of Métis communities that have persisted for generations throughout Western Canada but in written genealogical reports that link them to long-dead Indigenous relatives who may not have even understood themselves to be Métis.

Observing how these faux-Métis actively avoid existing historical Métis communities, Gaudry also points out the parallels with the Cherokee case,

Similar to many New Age “Indians” and selfidentifying “Cherokees” in the United States, these “Métis” identities are described as a personal journey rather than a connection to a historically continuous and still-living Métis community, making them relatively difficult to critique in settler societies that privilege self-identification in identity construction.

Furthermore, these people opt for founding their own organizations instead, typically with names referencing military clashes between Métis and settlers. The majority of such groups are in eastern canada the leading members strive to replace genuine Métis history with what they claim is the even more real, earlier, eastern version. Looking up any of these organizations reveals what sounds more like a fan club of sorts, where everyone pays a fee to get a special club card and is expected to perform certain rituals in public to keep themselves in good standing.

Unfortunately, these organizations are not harmless anymore than identity fraud is a "victimless crime," nor are they based in respect for Indigenous peoples. After several high profile revelations of pretendian status among female academics, another indicator of how "playing indian" is a ready status elevator for otherwise working class or downwardly mobile settlers, the university of saskatchewan commissioned respected Métis lawyer Jean Teillet to study and report on the issue. She is among the first prominent Indigenous intellectuals in canada to firmly label this form of masquerade as a fraud, one in which ineligible people take up scholarships, designated positions, and space in conversations and debates to the exclusion of the Indigenous people they were intended for. The results go beyond unethical research, some of which may or may not be usable with caveats in the manner of older materials collected and stolen by missionaries, anthropologists, and government officials. By intervening in Indigenous matters and reinforcing stereotypes, identity frauds reinforce colonial oppression and spread confusion and mistrust. The results in the united states are all too similar, and include the ongoing farrago of "tribes" recognized by individual states rather than the united states federal government. An especially egregious example are the various pseudo-Abenaki groups in vermont, who have actively misrepresented the historical record and made absurd claims such as that the Abenaki peoples in canada have no connection to their own lands south of the medicine line. Careful and responsible non-Indigenous scholars may find themselves under legal attack for debunking the claims of pseudo-indian groups, such as Darryl Leroux, who is currently pursuing an appeal to a vexatious defamation suit.

The overall result is that Indigenous peoples who live within and are the embodiments of living cultures, together with their few true settler allies must spend time and energy fighting the many-headed hydra of the white possessive. Identity theft has so many pernicious effects, from jeopardizing treaty negotiations to feeding attempts to delegitimize Indigenous studies that challenging it is not an option. A curious outcome of the work may be the unexpected revelation of positive, constructive elements of the original, non-colonial cultures of settler ancestors. The question for settlers, especially those who think they are white or aspire to be white, is whether they are willing to give up the addictive dopamine hits of "whiteness" so they can attend to their own cultures and restore them to a living state, rather than constantly striving to kill living peoples and nations in order to render them into cosplay materials.