Dispatches From The Frontline

SHAPESHIFTING FOR POWER ~ The Saga of Maylei Blackwell, the UCLA Pretendian

By María Elena Gaitán ~ Chola Con Cello

“First they tried to get rid of us. Then they tried to assimilate us. And when all those things failed, they said, ‘Well, if we can’t get rid of you, we’ll just become you.” ~Riley Yesno, Anishinaabe scholar and writer~

A Pretend Indian is a person who claims to be indigenous but cannot prove it. But Pretendianism is far more harmful than mere pretending. It is an act of colonial violence that has plagued Canada in the recent period, and also exists in the United States.

This stolen identity claim allows the race-shifter, often but not always a white person, to move from cultural appropriation to cultural identity theft, someone who takes advantage, benefits and steals the possibilities and opportunities intended for indigenous people by passing as one.

In the U.S. we have seen this with people like Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who headed the Spokane NAACP and taught in Africana Studies, claiming to be African American but wasn’t. We saw it when Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Cherokee, a powerful white woman who benefitted from her false claim at Harvard Law School, but wasn’t, and we have seen singer/song-writer Buffy Saint-Marie claim to be Cree and Algonquin but isn’t.

Now in academia… meet UCLA Chicana Studies professor and graduate student advisor, Maylei Blackwell, who first claimed to be a Chicana and later emerged as a…