Did you know that pretendianism (existing in the world as a fake “Indian”) is a multimillion dollar industry of lies, deception and continued genocide of the ACTUAL Native peoples of Southern CA?!?
Local Native Identity Theft in Southern California
Aside from the dramatic lack of education about Los Angeles Basin Native people’s history, I would surmise that when most people are introduced to the term “pretendian” (an amalgamation of “pretend” and “indian”), they probably think of prominent “white” ones, such as the Italian Buffy Saint Marie, or U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. There are countless other cases in Canada (Grey Owl) and the U.S. (Iron Eyes Cody, Sasheen Littlefeather) of identity thieves, some prominent, many not. For example, after the advent of for-profit DNA testing, the self-identified “Native American” population increased in the Culver City district by 17% in one year due to many white people claiming Native identity with a mere single digit amounts of alleged Indigenous DNA.
The problem in the Los Angeles Basin of Southern CA is different. Here, the predominant form of identity theft is being performed by Mexican Americans, AKA Chicanos, with genealogical lineage not connected to Native peoples in Southern CA, but South of the U.S. Mexico border or out of state. Due to the California Judgement Rolls, and then, in the 1990’s, after it became “popular” to be “pro-indigenous,” some people discovered that money could be had from the state public funds if applications were submitted from people claiming to be Native American lineage from Los Angeles. This was the genesis of fake, homogenizing terms such as “Tongva” or “Kizh Gabrieleno.” These are entities that have no credible documentation in any recorded histories prior to the 1990’s. There are no vetting protocols for persons making such claims seeking to tap into public funds in CA.
There is no disputing the fact that many persons from Mexico have lineages that are mixed between Spanish colonizers from the 1500’s and assorted combinations of Indigenous, African and Asian familial lines. Coupled with the fact that many Spaniards have lineage to North African Moors, and you have an explanation for how the modern concocted identity of “Mexicanos mestizo” would include people who have dark hair, brown eyes and skin, as well as a high probability of legitimate basis for claiming Indigenous lineage.
And persons having this lineage would have a perfect right to do so.
The problem in Southern CA, is that many dozens of such Mexican Americans, and self-proclaimed “Chicanos,” in attempting to claim these Native family histories, are doing so in ways that are not grounded in genealogically-researched fact. For example to simply claim lineage to a tradition of “Moctezuma Aztec warriors and the Aztec Empire,” is romantic, idealized, and most likely not accurate at all. There exist hundreds of Native tribes and villages that were not Aztec between the Los Angeles Basin and Tenochtitlan and the center of Moctezuma rule. There were many tribes that aligned with Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards to expand the “New Spain” empire. Some were the first colonizers of what became North Mexico.
The concocted Mexican identity of “mestizo” tends to homogenize and also romanticize Native lineages. It asked for mass commitment to a new national identity to consolidate the rule of the post-Independence nation-state of Mexico, but retained the social, political and economic hierarchy of the previous Spaniard Casta system, and this was, in part, verified by the 1833 Secularization Act, when Mexico blocked return of Mission system lands to Native peoples.
It is part of the popular Chicano culture to claim “indigeneity,” and the notion of “Atzlan” or a “Chicano Nation” remains common to many. Slogans like, “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us,” reflect a national consciousness that was formed over the course of many generations of superexploitation, discrimination and inequality during the third colonization in the region, the Annexation of the Southwest, in 1848. And the desire to connect to an Indigenous past versus only identify with the European colonizer legacy was a positive response to the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny. Unfortunately, for Chicanos, with their history being connected to the Secularization Act of 1833 and a history of land struggles between Mexican rancheros against Anglo-U.S. colonization, the ideas of “stolen land” or “land back” or “indigeneity” are often framed in a way that deny the sovereignty and self-determination impulses of the First Peoples actually indigenous to the region of the LA Basin.
This is the primary thrust of Chicano operatives in the Los Angeles area who falsely claim lineage to local Native peoples. By assuming these identities, it has given them access to resources and positions of influence that were originally intended to mitigate ongoing genocide of local Native peoples, not Indigenous peoples or their descendants from other regions of the hemisphere.
Thus the term, “Chicano Pretendians,” while accurate with respect to identity theft of local Native village lineal descendants, is problematic, both because of common physical appearances with verifiable Native peoples and a public assumption of Mexican mestizo indigenous lineage.
Regardless, the act of this identity theft is harmful and consistent with genocide (still ongoing for lineal descendants of LA Basin Native villages) because it is predicated upon de-centering true Native voices and rendering actual local first peoples invisible.
This identity theft is criminal. State and local funding agencies, academic institutions and museums, non-profits, and media outlets should be held accountable for irresponsible promotion of such activities.
And much more education needs to be done to normalize genealogy as the foundation of identity and revealing of the truth of history in the region.
Chicano identity theft of local Natives’ identities public funding intended for them is real, harmful and a criminal disservice to the public trust.
https://archive.org/details/handbookofindian0000kroe_b1b4
https://archive.org/details/chinigchinichori0000bosc
https://archive.org/details/fromindianstochi0000vigi