Many (most?) American native people from many different tribes don’t want people taking about their “great great grandmother was a Cherokee princess” or checking “Native American” on their college forms because they did a 23andMe tests that shows they have native “genes” when they don’t have any legal or cultural relationship to a tribe. It’s a thing that Americans whose ancestors got here a long time ago like to do.
It’s a little complicated because there are people who do have cultural and family ties to tribal nations but aren’t allowed to enroll as citizens (the rules are different for every tribe) and there a a bunch of tribal nations that the Federal government doesn’t recognize. But those people are going to know the culture and rules and not go swanning about claiming their grandma was a princess.
I’m not sure how it works in Australia but in the US (and I’m pretty sure Canada) is that each tribe that’s been recognized by the federal government though treaties is its own sovereign nation. As a nation it’s allowed to determine its own citizenship requirements.
In practice there’s a lot of stuff the federal government doesn’t let them have sovereignty over, but citizenship is up to each individual nation.
Everything darlingpants said is my understanding too.
I’m by no means an expert on any of it, I’ve learned mostly through native friends, but it’s something that I’m seeing mentioned in social media a lot more lately and it’s come up more in casual discussions around race.
I want to re-plug the All My Relations podcast episodes on Blood Quantum and “Can a DNA test make me Native American?” which are where I’ve learned the most about this topic!
I think this is really complicated, and I’ve mostly been listening to people grapple with it. There was a great panel at Worldcon (science fiction convention hosted by NZ this year) of Maori writers, some who were coming to that understanding of their heritage and that identity as adults, because they had grown up in a suburb or city in a primarily english-speaking Paheka context. But that is also an important modern Maori experience.
In another context, I found Lisa See’s book about her Chinese immigrant family fascinating, because it also has similar questions around connection to culture, assimilation, and which branches still ‘count’ to themselves or the outside world.
I’m white. I have nonwhite blood, but I’m culturally and visibly white. I enjoy all the benefits of whiteness and suffer none of the disadvantages of nonwhiteness, so it would be inappropriate and weird and gross for me to claim any other identity.
My dad is not white. He is visibly and unmistakably not white. He refuses to acknowledge it, though, and gets offended if anyone implies that he is anything but the whitest white to ever white a white. He is also the most openly racist person I know. I think he thinks if he’s so vocally racist people won’t notice that he is not white.
My dad’s situation and response to it is part of why antiracism is so important to me. I have to do better than that hot mess.
Here registered is a government thing. So [massive oversimplification]I have people I know who are registered and raised city white and not registered and strong family connection to culture.
It turns out that being registered is expensive for our government, and so they don’t let everyone have their rights if they can avoid it. And I think specific groups either were fully denied status historically or went underground to not get killed or kidnapped
I agree that how people identify with their own heritage is multi-faceted.
I think the issue of white people who are culturally white claiming fractionated native heritage is different.
Exploring one’s heritage and family cultures is not inherently racist. The latter, however, has been shown repeatedly to directly contribute to erasure of native culture in North America, and as was pointed out earlier, was started for that very purpose.
I think all of it is important for people to talk about though, because there are so many subtleties and complexities and human feelings and varying viewpoints to all these issues.
I am registered with the two groups. To register you need to show connection with the community as well as a family line, which for me was very easy but can be harder for people who had been removed from their families. So many Indigenous Australians aren’t registered and are still very much considered Indigenous and accepted.
@darlingpants we dont have any treaties with Indigenous people in Australia (yet but hopefully we will one day) so its not a citizenship thing here which is maybe why @LadyDuck hadn’t heard of it . Registering allowed me to vote on Native Title decisions as well as on board members for the councils.
But similar to the USA, I would never describe myself as “half Aboriginal” even though my dad is white.
That makes a lot of sense. I tried looking on the internet for details before posting here that I didn’t know of any, but I figured there must be some way people were at least partly organised amongst themselves.
I was wondering - in the U.S. there’s different nations (e.g. Cherokee, Sioux, etc.). Are all Aboriginals part of one larger tribe or is Aboriginal like Native American where there’s multiple distinct nations?
That said, there is more to anti-racism than just not doing racist things. In an interview to mark the publication of her new book Whites, author and journalist Otegha Uwagba points out: “Genuine allyship is probably not going to feel good for white people. It means giving up power, money, wealth, opportunities, things that will change the quality of your life and make it feel relatively worse. No one is talking about those very unsexy actions. It requires loss.”
I was trying to explain to my friend yesterday the importance of intersectional feminism. Which she understood that not all women had the same experience and that we should acknowledge that. But she felt its not up to white women to make space for women of colour and use their platform to help share stories/articles and its unfair to call them out when they don’t.
She was getting pretty defensive about it. Does anyone have any suggestions for articles i could share?
Sorry this took a while, but I just finished reading “Hood Feminism” by Mikki Kendall from the library, and it while it was very US-centric, it had a good balance of both explaining how feminism is intersectional and what people with privilege (e.g. white women) can do, where they should use power and where they should follow the lead of others more carefully. I will post if I find any articles by her that do explain some of this in the shorter way.
But also, yep, would highly recommend that book as general reading. I’m hoping to find some more Australian oriented books on the topic but this still have me enough to work on since the principles of how to support marginalised groups are somewhat able to be applied across cultures.
Next books on my reading list is “Honour among Nations?” by Marcia Langton and several others.
