04/25/2026
“Pretendians”: excerpt
hmm?
At the same time, in the years following the Occupation of Alcatraz, the formation of Native American studies as a distinct form of area studies, and the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Kiowaauthor N. Scott Momaday, publishing programs and university departments began to be established specifically for or about Native American culture. At the same time, hippie and New Agecultures 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". All of this added up to a culture that was not inclined to disbelieve self-identification, and a wider societal impulse to claim Indigeneity.[20]
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn wrote of the influence of pretendians in American academia and political positions:
[U]nscrupulous scholars in the discipline who had no stake in Native nationhood but who had achieved status in academia and held on to it through fraudulent claims to Indian Nation heritage and blood directed the discourse. This phenomenon took place following the "Indian Preference" regulations in new hiring practices at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 1970s. Sometimes unprepared for such outright aggression or suffering polarization from the conflicts in the system, Native scholars in the academy often seemed to be silent witnesses to such occurrences. Their silence has not meant complicity. It has meant, more than anything, a feeling of utter powerlessness within the structures of strong mainstream institutions.[20]
