How on earth did I miss these?

As we go into the brave new world of 2023, it’s reassuring to know that some things just won’t change.

Once again, a white person has been outed as fabricating an indigenous identity for personal gain. The person in question is one Kay “Nibiiwakamigkwe” LeClaire, a leader of a queer indigenous collective in Madison, Wisconsin. LeClaire, who identifies as “two-spirit*” and uses they/them pronouns, has publicly referred to themselves as being of “Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage” since around 2017. They have been extremely vocal in indigenous and LGBT activism in the Madison area for roughly the same period of time, repeatedly referring to themselves as “indigenous” and related terms.

Except, it turns out that they’re more indigenous to Europe than to the Americas. “advancedsmite” on the New Age Fraud forums, which specialises in what I like to call “Pretendian Studies” found evidence through genealogical records that “Nibiiwakamigkwe” is of mostly French-Canadian, German and Swedish descent. The Madison365 article opens with some of the pictorial evidence advancedsmite found of Kay LeClaire’s previous existence. Take a butchers:

It’s Rachel flipping Dolezal all over again. The spraytan, the plaited dark hair. It’s a front, a backwards ass front. Literal redface (well, more orangeface, let’s be honest). How did this person believe they could pass as a Native American, even a mixed one?

And now, they’re grovelling to Madison365 saying that they have stopped using their Ojibwe-language name (which was given to them, presumably, by a genuine Ojibwe person), have resigned their positions while playing dumb with regards to the revelations the forum user found, claiming it to be new information. Excuse me, if this genealogical debunking was new information, why weren’t you claiming various American Indian ethnicities at the time of your blonde-and-blue high school photoshoot?

Another case I’ve just stumbled across, this time a few months old, is that of Canadian judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. She claimed that her father was a Cree man and that she grew up on a Cree reservation. When it came out that her father’s parents were listed on a baptismal record as being of British descent (with his mother being born in Essex), she scrambled to do damage control. Now her father was still Cree, but he had been adopted by British parents. An undocumented adoption, by the way.

Alarm bells. Her paternal grandfather, as a medical doctor, would have known better than to adopt a random baby from under the table. Just because he worked on the reservation she claims to have grown up on doesn’t make her father Cree. Is an elephant born in a pig sty a pig? No! While her father did look slightly Amerindian, phenotype does not equal genotype. I have people in my own family with similar appearance, and their Amerindian-type admix is distant, if even nonexistent. He also takes a lot after his own father (right), negating the slim chance that he was a non-paternity event, the result of his mother mucking about with one of her husband’s patients.

And this being Canada, where the issue of indigenous identity is VERY hot-button, she is getting dragged across the coals and then some. She wasn’t even born on the northern Manitoba reservation she claimed, instead being born well over 700 miles as the crow flies from there, on the US-Canada border! Not only that, she has spoken at length about her father being an alcoholic wifebeater- none of which is true! She is taking the very real issues of alcoholism and domestic abuse on Indian reservations and playing the woe-is-me card with them like she’s a contestant on X Factor! As the recent Jean Telliet report commissioned by the University of Sasketchwan says: “Indigenous identity fraudsters often play heavily on stereotypes of alienation from their culture and heritage, intergenerational trauma, family violence, addictions, racism, and poverty.”

Imagine if, instead of claiming a Native American identity, these people claimed a black one. In order to compensate for their pale skin, they say their mother is white. She was a crack addict. Her black boyfriend walked out not long after their baby had been born. See how racist that sounds? This is exactly what these hucksters are doing when they claim to be something they’re not. Again, as I’ve reiterated so many times, this is not the same as honestly believing one’s great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess. This is taking a family story- or even fabricating one’s heritage completely- in order for personal gain. I know all too well that genealogy can throw up so many false links, and that’s why I’m thankful for DNA. But DNA doesn’t always prove Amerindian ancestry, as I’m sure Liz Warren knows all too well. The small amounts of Amerindian I score on some calculators are more likely than not misplaced Sami, Siberian, Turkic or Hunnic.

And I probably score more Amerindian than these wannabes.

*A term used by some American Indian LGBT activists to describe indigenously-rooted expressions of sexuality and gender, sometimes used as an umbrella term for all LGBT Native American people.