Holding Our Ground: Voices and Strategies Against Self-Indigenization
This two-day, hybrid symposium will convene leading experts, community members, and “first responders” to the global issue of self-Indigenization, particularly in the form of “Indigenous ethnic fraud,” or “pretendianism,” as it is referred to in North America.
The symposium will be held in Minneapolis, on the traditional homelands of the Dakota people, who were imprisoned and eventually exiled in 1863 to aid settler appropriation of “Minnesota,” a word also taken from the Dakota. On top of seizing land, US citizens have for centuries “played Indian” via sports mascots and appropriating Native nation names and iconography in scouting and in industries including the military. In the twenty-first century, we see ballooning numbers of US citizens make mythological claims to belong to Native lineages and nations. Some capitalize on those claims to appropriate Indigenous resources and opportunities, and to seize governance of institutions. We see an obviously violent example of self-Indigenization in the Department of “Homeland Security” whose agents seize governance of these lands, terrorize, imprison, and threaten to exile. As multiple forms of self-Indigenization converge, not all are grasped as violent, yet they combine to further colonial extraction.
Extractive self-Indigenization, including Indigenous ethnic fraud, not only targets American Indians, but also First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada; and global Indigenous communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and elsewhere. This symposium will bring participants together to engage in critical discussions, learn from one another, and discuss actionable strategies to disrupt this global problem.
@Velvetcello
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Please please please reach out to me or tell me who I can reach out to who can do something. I have a lead for someone who NEEDS to be investigated.
@jerrywilson933
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Have you reviewed the freedman case in the muscogee nation courts
@jerrywilson933
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Interesting
@AT_BASE
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
It’s interesting how much this parallels the erasure of actual marx!sts in the states
@kaceybunting3512
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Thank you for your podcast. It's been enlightening for me as a non-indigenous person who is trying to educate myself on the history and cultural studies excluded from mass education.
@phucksusan-n5n
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
problematic on all fronts. such is whiteness.
@JasmineSeason-j4i
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
🌺🍀🦋
@LelandLittleDog-ou4hf
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Very interesting yelo. Multifaceted. Immigrant squawman descendents are ineligible for treaty and allotment benefits under customary and federal guidelines. Zoom forward. Same descendants children marry fullblood girls for blood degree. Original 5 year leases become long term leases put under indigenized immigrant childrens names for the privatization of tribal collective asset through IRA subsidized subleasing. Millionares. Other side. We are a mixed DNA society now bc the world is smaller. The language is what makes one fully indigenous. Teach all lineal children their respective languages regardless of DNA. New mixture of DNA equals new mixture of ideas! Deport immigrant subsidized subleasers and welcome back our lineal grandchildren.
@edmundozaragoza1453
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Put them to work on the land with little to no equipment and see if they can grow something. Lol. Its straineous labor. All these pretendians (PhD) including real Natives want to be cultural representatives and speak about it but not work it. Like honestly the people in this video, how much growing have yall done? Yall have better started since February to prepare for winter. When was the last time your hands touched the earth to nurture and harvest? Let me see your soft hands. 😂😂😂I bet you its been a while, because your principle work is cultural/academic reporter/ representative/critic.
@ASLandry
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
How does the community reconnect to their roots or tribes?
If force assimilation (boarding schools, adoptions) is found in their family tree?
@99911445
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
the gill sisters are from Ontario but they were impersonating Inuit. we call then Inu-isnts lol.
@ero4515
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Thank you! Great conversation and very informative.
@leftloversML
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
I can prove my ancestry through hundreds of years but I'm still disconnected from the cutlure and the tribe because of time and colonialism. I can visibly see the people in my family tree migrating to where I live today, just for people to deny me being native. I got sent this video by a white person subtly hinting they are worried I'm a pretendian. I am hurt.
@ObliviouslyGifted
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
34:10 ELIZABETH WARREN (Pocahontas)
@ObliviouslyGifted
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
ALL I SEE IS…. $5 🪶
@Des-Anudando-el-karma1519
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
When blac pretendians don't get equally exposed or denounced by so-called activists, teachers, elders or self-appointed leaders who only focus on Wyte supremacism, they are are holding a double-standard.
Denouncing one form of pretendianism and anti-native racism by one group but choosing to ignore or to stay silent about blac anti-mexican/anti-indigenous racism is to passively allow it and encourage it. It is equivalent to acting as accomplices of blac supremacism.
Activists, teachers, elders, and so-called leaders who do this are betraying the rights and true interests of our people to blac supremacists.
At this point in time it is hypocritical, cowardly and it is an outdated narrative to denounce colonialism without denouncing the multifaceted forms of anti-indigenous racism of which it is conformed because colonialism has never been an exclusively Wyte supremacist enterprise since the euro-african invasion of this continent!
@andreascornelis
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
As an American with various European ancestry who has been living in Europe, I wonder what would happen if worldwide European settlers came back to Europe. It would be crowded for sure. They already think it's too crowded. Maybe some healing would happen.
@cantwaittosea
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Kim Tallbear AND Nick Estes! On the same faculty!!! In the same place! I wish I could be 20 again and go to school at UM!
@karamacella30
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Thanx for your time & discussions for first time I start to understand the structure of American social fucked upness. 1000 time more thanx & all good for u & us communities.
@kateribird9717
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
🎉🎉 yay your home 😢❤ so happy!!
@lobochicano
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Isn't ICE just gathering (mostly) Indigenous people who have been "detribalized" and continuously traumatized for hundreds of years? How does all this work for the people whose cultures were fractured 500 yrs ago, but still speak Nahuatl languages, Purepecha, Mayan languages, etc.? I just met a young man named Cuahtemoc (Moctezuma's son – means "downward diving Eagle"), but didn't know about Tenochtitlan despite being from Mexico. Didn't even know that was a Moctezuhma's son, the last tlatoani (speaker for the people) of Tenochtitlan. In California Yurok is a word modified from the Karuk language meaning "down river people", but Yurok are a "one language people" of the Klamath river with Place names describing family locations- Pue-lik-lo' (downriver people), Pey-cheek-lo' (up river people), & Ner-'er-ner' (coastal people) – all speaking the same language and then by village name. Many Chinese, German, Mexican, and others have married Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Wiyot, Tolowa Diné, Shasta, Klamath (in Oregon), and more. It's all so confusing. The Wiyot have two different Rancherias from only a small number of survivors of the Tuluwat Island massacre in 1860 (which lasted 5 days). ICE just picked up a Yurok person, have picked up Navajo Diné people, and they can't tell the difference because of phenotype being passed down – it's so mixed up. If it isn't connection through family and Place, tied together by culture they aren't Native? A Hupa elder, one of the last 5 fluent speakers who grew up with Hupa as his first language, used to tell me it's hard to be Hupa without being raised speaking Hupa as your first language because it's hard to understand things like k'winya 'nya:n-ma 'awhiniw ("the human
way"). What is "the human way" to Hupa people who can't speak Hupa? Or those who live in Las Vegas and haven't been raised on the Rez but are loved by their families on the Rez? Read Ka'm T'am, edited by Dr. Kishan Lara-Cooper and her father, Walter Lara, Sr. – his story in particular is challenging (and horrifying) – as it includes the "ICE" of the early days, driving around in flatbed trucks, rounding people up to take them away to boarding schools, to other places, or to their deaths. Walt's brother was taken to a residential school, but not him. Huge issue – so complicated. Read the book. Just reminds me that some form of "ICE" has existed for 500 yrs. Also read El Requirimiento, written in 1513. It'd be really interesting to see an episode about detribalization, epigenetic trauma, how language holds cultural comprehension, how people are (re)learning, the (re)generation of culture, language, etc. And then another about the constant "herding" and "moving" of people groups by the "governments" – which seems to be as ongoing as all the forms of colonization. And have you heard of "digital colonization" Ugh. I'm exhausted. Ye izquich.
@readingwritingspeakingmaki2584
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Thank you so much for offering your analysis on how academia participates in the making of pretend Indians. I am a graduate student and I have had to put my foot down in a number of ways, against peers and faculty, who unethically engage with Native thought and scholarship. It is so incredibly angering to see how all are encouraged to just take and take and take without centering justice or reciprocity. Thank you so much for your work.
@henryheglas8060
July 13, 2026 at 5:59 am
Kim Tallbear, most excellent of an example of a well studied genius!! Agreed, prove your connection to the land.
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