Millions More People Claiming To Be Native American In Past Decade, According to Census Data

Millions More People Claiming To Be Native American In Past Decade, According to Census Data

Elizabeth Warren was not Native American. But she played one when it suited her career advancement.

In the past decade, millions more people have started pretending to be Native American, according to Census data.

Circe Sturm, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin, writes, How the Native American population in the US increased 87% says more about whiteness than about demographics:

The Native American population in the U.S. grew by a staggering 86.5% between 2010 and 2020, according to the latest U.S. Census – a rate demographers say is impossible to achieve without immigration.

Birth rates among Native Americans don’t explain the massive rise in numbers. And there certainly is no evidence of an influx of Native American expatriates returning to the U.S.

Instead, individuals who previously identified as white are now claiming to be Native American.

This growing movement has been captured by terms like “pretendian” and “wannabe.”

Another way to describe this recent adoption of Native American identity is what I call “racial shifting.”

This chart provided by Prof. Sturm show the dramatic increase:

Prof. Sturm packages the phenomenon as fleeing whiteness and found that of the 45 people she interviewed for her book, only as small number were “fraudulent” claims, most were simply claims without proof:

These people are fleeing not from political and social persecution, but from whiteness.

I spent 14 years researching the topic and interviewing dozens of race-shifters for my book “Becoming Indian.” I learned that while some of these people have strong evidence of Native American ancestry, others do not.

Yet nearly all of the 45 people who were interviewed or surveyed for the book believe they have Indigenous ancestry and that it means something powerful about who they are and how they should live their lives. Only a tiny – but troubling – number makes blatantly fraudulent claims to advance their own interests.

But claiming to be Native American without proof is not innocent, it’s a way to obtain potential career and other preferences to which the person is not entitled:

These people are fleeing not from political and social persecution, but from whiteness.

I spent 14 years researching the topic and interviewing dozens of race-shifters for my book “Becoming Indian.” I learned that while some of these people have strong evidence of Native American ancestry, others do not.

Yet nearly all of the 45 people who were interviewed or surveyed for the book believe they have Indigenous ancestry and that it means something powerful about who they are and how they should live their lives. Only a tiny – but troubling – number makes blatantly fraudulent claims to advance their own interests.

That was Elizabeth Warren’s problem. She had no proof, and her claims to a good faith belief were not credible considering she waited until she was in her mid-30s and climbing the law professor ladder to assert she was Native American, Even then she did it mostly quietly in a way designed to juice her hiring prospects without being so public about it that people would question the claim.

Warren was also typical of “race shifters” in that she stole Cherokee status, which Prof. Sturm found was common:

Racial shifters also undermine tribal sovereignty when they create alternative tribes for themselves outside the federal acknowledgment process. Most of these groups, such as the Echota Cherokee Tribe or the Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy, have emerged since the late 1970s.

The number of these new self-identified tribes is startling. Over the course of my research, I discovered 253 groups scattered across the U.S. that identify as some sort of Cherokee tribe.

This is a huge number considering that there are only 573 federally recognized tribes, three of which are Cherokee.

Maybe consider the incentives to “race shift” – that may explain the dynamic.

(h/t Nathan Taylor on Twitter)

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