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Concept
Pretendian
Summary
A pretendian (portmanteau of pretend and Indian) is a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by claiming to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native ancestors. The term is a pejorative colloquialism. As a practice, being a pretendian is considered an extreme form of cultural appropriation, especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities they do not belong to. It is sometimes also referred to as a form of fraud, ethnic fraud or race shifting.
Early false claims to Indigenous identity, often called "playing Indian", go back at least as far as the Boston Tea Party. There was a rise in pretendians after the 1960s for a number of reasons, such as the reestablishment of tribal sovereignty following the era of Indian termination policy, the media coverage of the Occupation of Alcatraz and the Wounded Knee Occupation, and the formation of Native American studies as a distinct form of area studies which led to the establishment of publishing programs and university departments specifically for or about Native American culture. At the same time, hippie and New Age subcultures marketed Native cultures as accessible, spiritual, and as a form of resistance to mainstream culture, leading to the rise of the plastic shaman or "culture vulture." By 1990, many years of pushback by Native Americans against pretendians resulted in the successful passage of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (IACA) - a truth-in-advertising law which prohibits misrepresentation in marketing of American Indian or Alaska Native arts and crafts products within the United States.
While Indigenous communities have always self-policed and spread word of frauds, mainstream media and arts communities were often unaware, or did not act upon this information, until more recent decades. Since the 1990s and 2000s, a number of controversies regarding ethnic fraud have come to light and received coverage in mainstream media, leading to a broader awareness of pretendians in the world at large.
Official source
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