Transcript | The ‘Pretendian’ Long Con

[00:00:00] CRISTEN: It's, it's not just a kooky scammer story. 

[00:00:04] MICHELLE CYCA: No, it's very, it's very serious. It's very scary. and I am kind of alarmed for what the future holds. If, you know, we get to a point where real Indigenous people are outnumbered by people who are living out this, like Pocahontas fantasy role play.

The numbers are alarming.

[UNLADYLIKE THEME SONG]

[00:00:23] CRISTEN: This is Unladylike. I'm Cristen. And here's a little pop quiz for ya. 

What do the following people have in common? You ready? 

Andrea Smith, Michelle Latimer, Amy Wolf, Liz Hoover, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Sacheen Littlefeather, Carrie Barasa, Kayla Claire, Cheyenne Turians. Gina Adams.

Stumped?

Canadian unladies, you might have already figured this one out.

What those 10 people have in common is that they are all from different realms of academia and the arts who have been outed in recent years for Indigenous identity fraud, known as pretend unionism.

These are folks who built their influence, funding and careers off of what turned out to be fabricated Indigenous identities, and today's guest found herself in an uncanny position last year in the case of Gina Adams, that last name on the list.

[00:01:39] MICHELLE CYCA: My name is Michelle Cyca and I'm a freelance journalist living in Vancouver, Canada.

I'm a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, which is in 3d six territory in Saskatchewan. and until February 2022, I was an employee at Emily Carr University here in Vancouver, and I wrote a story about my experience working there as an Indigenous employee. 

[00:02:02] CRISTEN: Unladies, I must clarify that when Michelle says she wrote a story, we are talking about a cover story for the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, headlined Big Lies on Campus. Dun dun dun.

[00:02:16] MICHELLE CYCA: It's hard to think of a more dramatic way to announce that you've left your job than writing an 8,000 word investigative feature about how the university handled a case of Indigenous identity fraud.

CRISTEN: Which is, as we're gonna talk about, a pretty popular topic lately.

[AUDIO STING]

[00:02:32] CRISTEN: Indigenous identity fraud is hardly a new phenomenon. What is it exactly? 

[00:02:40] MICHELLE CYCA: So Indigenous identity fraud, as you say, is not new. I think every Indigenous or native person has had the experience of some white person saying to them, oh, you know, my great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess, or, my family has native ancestry and that's why we're so close to the earth.

You know, these are, these are pretty common fantasies, I think. Um, and I think that's a bit different from Indigenous identity fraud, which I see as the practice of kind of capitalizing on that identity claim for power or profit. So using it to get a job or an opportunity or even taking up space in an Indigenous community and, and claiming to be a leader and speaking for people when you don't actually have, uh, the right to do that because you're not a member of an Indigenous community or an Indigenous nation, you're just kind of a cosplay.

And I think one of the reasons it's such a big story right now is because in the last couple years in Canada, definitely, and I think in the US there has been an effort to make more space for Indigenous people, you know, to, to give them these opportunities that have traditionally been denied to them. Um, you know, where they've been historically excluded from universities, from cultural institutions, you know, they're still, we are still underrepresented in films and TV and publishing.

So there's been a big push, there's been a lot of interest in Indigenous stories, Indigenous histories, Indigenous people, and I think that opportunity created a void that a lot of people rushed to fill. You know, they saw a chance to get a job that might have not been very attainable. Like, University professor is a very difficult career to break into.

But if you could check a box that said you were Indigenous, you had a better shot at getting it, and I think what we're seeing is a lot of positions that were open to Indigenous people that, maybe there wasn't a lot of attention paid to how people were applying or how they were being evaluated, or whether anyone was looking to see if they had the connections or background that they claim to have is really coming to a head.

As many of those people are being called out for misrepresenting their background and who they are. And I also think that's happening because there are more Indigenous people in general in these spaces. More Indigenous scholars, more Indigenous students, more Indigenous artists who can look at these claims and say this doesn't really add up. Like there's something kind of fishy here.

And I think it's kind of a domino effect because a lot of these stories have similarities that I think once people start to see the pattern of deception and, and how it tends to be presented, they, they notice it elsewhere.

Like, there's, you know, there's kind of commonalities in the way people explain their background, the way they explain away inconsistencies or, you know, account for the fact that they don't have any family or, you know, specific nations that they belong to.

And also I think crucially, a lot of people in the Indigenous community have had doubts or concerns for years. And I think they're finally starting to be listened to or have maybe support to express some of those concerns.

[00:06:13] CRISTEN: Could you give a couple of examples of what those patterns and tendencies look like?

[00:06:22] MICHELLE CYCA: Yeah, I mean, a big one I think that I kind of mentioned is like sort of a shifting claim a lot of cases involve people who claim to be, you know, of one specific ancestry and then maybe later they switch and claim another one or they add one on.

Other ones are like a real performance of indigeneity, so wearing a lot of regalia, um, you know, darkening their skin or hair often.

And then, and then I think the big one that stands out for Indigenous people, honestly, is when somebody has no connections, no family. I mean, there's a, a big history of people being disconnected, um, from their communities through things like Indian boarding schools in the US and residential schools in Canada through forced assimilation and adoption.

But it's, it is strange as an Indigenous person when you encounter someone who is like, no cousins, no aunties. You know who, who says maybe that they're Cree, but they can't tell you from what nation. They don't know any other Cree people like that. Our communities are small enough that that is generally a red flag.

[00:07:27] CRISTEN: Mm-hmm. 

[00:07:28] MICHELLE CYCA: People tend to know each other.

[00:07:31] CRISTEN: Growing up for you, what was your relationship like with your own indigeneity? 

[00:07:40] MICHELLE CYCA: Mine was, I think, typical for a lot of people. Who are like me, which is to say I'm mixed race. Um, so my grandmother on my father's side is, was born on the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and then she went to residential school like most people in her generation. So she attended St. Michael's residential school, which was recently the subject of an amazing podcast by Connie Walker called Stolen on Gimlet Media. But she, she didn't live on her reserve. After she finished at school, she moved away.

She eventually met my grandfather, and they settled in BC away from her community. So what that meant is, you know, my father was born out here, and I grew up not in my community. She didn't speak Cree with us because it had been forbidden when she was at residential school. We didn't grow up around our cultural traditions, which is a really, really common experience.

And because I lived in Vancouver, which is not, you know, Cree territory, I didn't know a lot of other Cree people. There were lots of other Indigenous people, from Coast Salish nations. And you know, I, I wasn't aware of this at the time, but there are other urban Cree people in Vancouver, but I, I kind of felt like we were the only ones.

And when people would ask me about it, when they'd ask me about our traditions or our history, I didn't know a lot. And I felt really embarrassed by that. Like that I wasn't really Indigenous cause I couldn't answer all their questions. And because I have fair skin, um, and I don't look like what a lot of people think an Indigenous person looks like, I often felt kind of like a fraud myself.

Like people would say, well, you don't look native, or they would say, I'm probably as native as you are because I have this Cherokee great-grandmother who's a princess. So I felt, I felt really insecure about it. I didn't feel ashamed of it and I knew where my family came from and we would visit our community in the summers. So I, I had those relationships. I just, I felt like I was doing it wrong somehow. Like there was a right way to be Indigenous based on the kind of depictions I saw in movies or on TV of these like stoic native people living on the land. And I just didn't feel like I identified with them. 

And then when I got to university, I kind of joined an Indigenous student community. And for the first time I met a lot of other Indigenous people who had grown up just like me. They, they didn't know a lot of their traditions. They, you know, they hadn't grown up with their language or their culture. They were trying to figure out that relationship now. And that really made me realize, one, I wasn't the only Indigenous person who felt like this. And also that it wasn't really my fault that I felt like that, you know, that my disconnection was the product of many generations of government policy designed to separate people from their culture to make them feel like they weren't really Indigenous. That that was the whole point of assimilation.

And that was when I, you know, I started being less embarrassed to talk to people about it, to understand it in that context of colonialism and, and to try and learn more. You know, by that point my grandmother had dementia. She couldn't really answer the questions that I was ready to ask at that point, but I think it was, you know, it was a, a way for me to understand that identity and start to learn about it.

And now, you know, I'm trying to learn more about Cree culture and language to, to embrace that identity and, and just to try and show people that there's lots of different ways that being Indigenous looks that are legitimate and, and encourage other people who feel disconnected that they have the right to, you know, find their way back to that culture and to embrace it because that's how we keep our nations and our traditions alive.

We live in this strange time where a lot of people have come to understand being Indigenous is like this biological detail. Like you get a 23andMe result that says you're 2% Native, or you find this like really far back ancestor like Edward Norton, who's like the 14 generations removed from Pocahontas or something, and you seize onto that. You think it makes you Indigenous. But being Indigenous is about being in relationship with Indigenous people.

It's about your, uh, your relationship with your nation or community with the people who you're accountable to. And so it's, you know, growing up and feeling like I didn't have that, I realized that I could change that by, by participating, by being in those spaces, by showing up, by learning and practicing.

And I think that was really powerful. Like the, the effort to erase Indigenous people was about breaking all those bonds between people in their language and their land between children and their parents, you know, and, and that's really painful. I think we're grappling with that legacy, but it was incredible to realize that some of that can be healed, you know, that we can put those pieces back together if we try.

CRISTEN: After you graduate from college, you ended up working in communications for Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. When did your role there start kind of not sitting well with you?

MICHELLE CYCA: It wasn't really until I started working more in a management role and and kind of going deeper into the heart of the institution that I started to have some concerns. Um, and, you know, seeing the ways that the stated values of the institution, that it was my job to weave into all of our written communications were not really being embodied by actions necessarily.

There's a big focus at that university, but I think every university, reputation management through saying the right things. You know, I think at that, at all universities, and I think in the United States too, it's quite standard now, for instance, to do land acknowledgements, which are a way to acknowledge that we live on stolen first nations land, an Indigenous land. But often, the, the action kind of stops with this statement. It's a lot more about saying and writing things than doing things. 

And, and that realization started to chafe a little bit, especially as I became aware of the ways that, you know, as the institution tried to center things like diversity and inclusion, that they really would sort of focus on employees like me that were part of these underrepresented groups, as if to say like, look, we have Indigenous people here, so things are going okay.

And it's very strange to be in that position of feeling kind of tokenized by the fact of your existence. 

[00:14:38] CRISTEN: Unladies, we need to take a quick break and when we come back, things get even stranger.

[AD BREAK 1]

[00:14:47] CRISTEN: So who is Gina Adams, and did you have any initial, kind of first impressions when she was first hired on at Emily Carr? 

[00:14:59] MICHELLE CYCA: So, Gina Adams was, is one of, four people who was hired at Emily Carr as part of this thing called a cluster hire.

Where the university said, you know, we, we should have more Indigenous faculty, uh, so we're gonna hire a bunch at once. And they put out a call for Indigenous scholars and artists who apply for these open faculty positions. And Gina was one of the people they hired. 

She was a visual artist, who came to Emily Carr from the US from a really small university in Colorado. And she was from Maine originally. And her background was like her, her relationship to her Indigenous heritage kind of similar to mine. She said her grandfather had been born on reserve, had gone to an Indian boarding school. She grew up, you know, separate from that culture and heritage and a lot of her work was about exploring that disconnection.

And so she was hired in 2019. I was actually on maternity leave with my first child when she started. But when I came back to the university, I, you know, I thought it was great that we had more Indigenous faculty because that was something that students often said was challenging for them, that they didn't have any mentors or teachers who, you know, could relate to their experiences or, or kind of guide them if they were making art about their, you know, that incorporated aspects of their culture background. 

So because it was Covid at that point in 2020 when I came back to work, I didn't meet her in person, just on Zoom meetings, but I got the sense that she was really well liked, her students really liked her, her peers really liked her. She seemed like a really caring and, and generous faculty member, which, you know, kind of made what came after painful. 

[00:16:52] CRISTEN: Yes. Okay. So Gina Adams was hired at Emily Carr in 2019, but it took a couple of years and an anonymous Twitter account called No More Red Face for things to really start unraveling. 

So what changed?

[00:17:11] MICHELLE CYCA: It wasn't in 2019 a big topic that people were thinking about.

And I think, you know, to Emily Carr's credit, when she was hired, this wasn't something that universities were worried about. They, they didn't really think people were taking advantage of these hiring opportunities to get jobs, which is partly why the hiring process didn't require, um, anything more than sort of a personal statement about someone's indigeneity. You know, it was like an honor system. 

So when she was hired, that was the vibe. That was what everyone was doing. They were hiring people who said they were Indigenous, and that was considered to be good enough because who would lie about something like that? Um, but in 2021 and early 2021, something had really started to shift.

There were a lot of stories coming out all at once. So Michelle Latimer was a really big one in Canada. She was a film and TV director who said she was Anishinabe, but then at one point claimed a specific community and that community said, hold on, we don't know you. That was a huge scandal.

And then there were a bunch of others kind of popping up at other universities, including two other universities in Vancouver. So it felt like a real local issue. And then, in March of 2021, this account called No More Red Face, which had posted about a few of these Indigenous academics, including one who had recently admitted that she wasn't Indigenous and apologized, so who, who was calling people out in a pretty attention getting and rigorous way. 

That account posted a thread about Gina Adams and in the thread they said that she didn't have any connection to the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, which is where she said her grandfather had been born, that he hadn't gone to the Carlisle Indian School, which is, you know, where she said he attended. It's in Pennsylvania. 

It was like a really big, Indian boarding school in the US. I think it might have been one of the first. They have very detailed archives and there was no mention of him in. And this account posted some genealogical research that suggested that her grandfather had actually been a white man who was born in Connecticut and who grew up in Maine, or who settled in Maine.

So really just saying, you know, everything about her story didn't hold up.

[00:19:35] CRISTEN: Do you remember the first time you read that Twitter thread and how you felt?

[00:19:45] MICHELLE CYCA: Yes, I was just shocked. I mean, there was a part of me that was, you know, every time I saw one of these stories about somebody at the University of British Columbia or at Simon Fraser University or someone from a United States university, a part of me was like, could this happen here? Like, what if this happened at Emily Carr? And so when it did happen, there was, there was a part of me that was like, this feels inevitable. 

But I was really surprised because I think, you know, people didn't have doubts about her before that thread. Like, she seemed pretty legit. So it was, it was genuinely shocking. 

And at the same time, the thread was so detailed, like it, it wasn't just a random accusation with no evidence. It was like nine or 10 tweets with sources cited and like screenshots of genealogical research and news articles. It was clear that someone had put in a lot of work, which made it hard to dismiss. 

So it was, yeah, I, I was just like, blown away. Um, and then I, I did end up emailing the, the sort of leadership of the university, the president and the vice president a few days after, just to say, you know, I've read through this and I feel like I have some perspective because I, I'm also the grandchild of a residential school survivor who, you know, didn't grow up with her culture. And there are things about this story about Gina's story that don't sit right with me. And there are questions in this thread that I think we should ask. 

I didn't get much of a response to that besides that they were reflecting and listening and thinking and all the go-to we’re reflecting, listening, the kinds of things you always hear. The, the gentle brush off, right? But like, we're listening and learning.

[00:21:40] CRISTEN: One of the patterns to this identity fraud that you mentioned earlier is the shifting story. When did, when and how did Gina Adams shift her her story? 

[00:22:00] MICHELLE CYCA: She shifted her story in a couple ways that were pretty subtle. Um, one is that at various times she's claimed to be Ojibwe and Lakota.

And despite my very best efforts to pinpoint the source of that claim, she's never explained why she claims to be Lakota. Um, or you know, what that connection would be. She's only ever talked about this one grandfather who was Ojibwe and her statement that she made, um, to members of the university and which is now published in an expanded form on her website.

Her statement is that her grandfather passed as white, that he had changed his last name when he got married to a French name Terrio, um, to assimilate. And that's why there were no records of him at the Carlisle Indian School.

That's why there were no records of him connected to the White Earth Nation. And so essentially she said her story couldn't be proven because of this detail. She said that no one knew what his name was at birth in her family. Um, so there were, and he had no birth certificate. She said they didn't even know how old he was.

So it was impossible to prove. Um, which is a, a pretty wild claim. I mean, to me, as an Indigenous person, one thing that stood out was if he had been born on a reserve, um, you know, even if it was like about a hundred years ago at this point, he would have some family there. Like people would remember who he was, especially cuz she had claimed to be a descendant of a famous chief who signed a big treaty with the United States government.

She said that was her great-great grandfather, so she knew his name. It would be possible to kind of put the pieces together and figure out her connection. So the idea that, you know, this Indigenous man had assimilated like so perfectly that there was no trace of him in the historical record, that he had convinced every single person he was white, which is surprising for someone who, you know is, is a hundred percent Indigenous ancestry.

It just seemed pretty wild, like pretty implausible. It was a, it was a pretty bold claim. But the, the university, Emily Carr, accepted it. And, and she continues to stand by it. She still says that, you know, she has no records and. that her story is true. 

[00:24:25] CRISTEN: And meanwhile, you are effectively the voice of this institution, Michelle!

[00:24:30] MICHELLE CYCA: Yes. Yes. I worked behind the scenes to craft some statements that we could use in case reporters came knocking, which were, you know, the standard deflections. We can't comment on issues related to staff or faculty. These are personnel issues that are private, that we take our commitments to reconciliation seriously, you know, that we wanna create a safe space for Indigenous people.

All of these things that allied the central question of the university's responsibility to ensure that if they hired someone for a job who said they were Indigenous, presumably over other Indigenous candidates who were qualified for that job, that maybe they should check if they did that job correctly.

That was kind of the moment for me where I realized I didn't wanna do this kind of work anymore, where I felt like my responsibility was not to Indigenous people who had questions, and who were anxious about what was going on. But I was really put in the position of defending the university's reputation and their public image at the expense of what I thought was the right thing to do, and the important thing to do for, for my community.

That was pretty much the moment I decided that I needed to get out of that job, which is a huge privilege. Like, I felt like I could leave that job. Um, when I quit, I decided just to freelance and, you know, I have a husband who also earns money, so that was possible for me to do. And I know a lot of other Indigenous people who've stayed in jobs that are kind of soul crushing because they don't have that freedom that I had, which kind of made me even more committed to, to talk about it and to write something about it because I, I felt like I had that privilege and I should spend it doing something valuable.

[00:26:26] CRISTEN: Once you started investigating, how long did it take you to validate, confirm that Gina Adams was not who she says she is?

[00:26:40] MICHELLE CYCA: Cristen, it did not take long. That's, that was the craziest thing to me is I thought it was gonna be like challenging. I mean, I was prepared to be wrong. I was, I started scratching this itch because I was like, you know, if it's true, I wanna find out. But I thought there's some small chance that her story is correct. 

And what I started to do was try and retrace the research that I'd seen in the original thread by No More Red Face. And I had her grandfather's name because she'd shared her statement about how he had changed it. So I knew the name that he had gone by his whole life. I knew where she lived. 

And so I started by looking at newspaper archives, in ancestry.com records for details and really, really quickly, like within a couple hours. It was like an afternoon. I had her grandfather's name, his place of birth, his marriage records, the names of her mother's siblings, where they were all born, where they grew up.

I had census records, like I knew the name of his parents. I had his father's World War I draft card, like ancestry.com is a crazy thing. It's just stuffed full of records. There was nothing like that in Canada. We're not as–maybe in Quebec–but we're like, not as into genealogy, I think. But it was very, very easy to find.

And he had spent the later part of his adult life in the small community in Maine, in York, Maine. And there were a lot of news articles about the family. Like there were lots of pictures. There were lots of stories about them. He wasn't like an obscure fellow. He was really in the public record.

So it was quite easy to, to confirm that that was her grandfather. There was clear links to her mother and to her. I read his obituary, which also confirmed his place of birth and where he grew up and that his name at birth had been Albert Terrio. It was not a name he assumed in midlife. That he'd never lived in Minnesota, that, you know, he had no, no apparent connection to the Ojibwe people or to this particular Nation. 

It was like a day's work. It was wild that it did not take long at all to unravel that particular fiction. 

And then the, the piece that took longer was getting in touch with the White Earth Nation because Nations are sovereign. They, they determine their own membership. And if for whatever reason there was some misconnection where they had adopted this man and claimed him, I was curious to find that out. And it took a little while to get a hold of them because I got the sense that they had been contacted by other reporters and they were really sick of talking about this guy.

But when I got the membership office on the phone, they confirmed that they didn't know him, that they looked him up and he seemed like an East coaster that nobody in the community knew he was, and that they were like a little bit upset that this woman was profiting off an association that, as far as they could tell, was not real.

[00:29:45] CRISTEN: How did Emily Carr respond when you obviously, you know, you go to them for comment, you're doing your journalistic due diligence, what do they say? 

[00:29:56] MICHELLE CYCA: Well, I let them know early that I was working on this story because I, I had left on good terms. And they weren't concerned at that time.

Like I got an email just saying, okay, well good luck with this journalism thing. They really didn't seem worried that I would find anything. And then in August when the magazine started fact checking my story, I think that's when they really realized the scope of the investigation I put together, the number of people I talked to.

I have the impression they thought I was gonna write like some little blog post or something. And I think I can only imagine the horror when they realized it was gonna be like a feature story in a national magazine. 

[00:30:36] CRISTEN: The cover story! 

[00:30:39] MICHELLE CYCA: Yes. It was the cover story, which is wild.

As far as I can tell, they, they did talk to Gina because they were contacted in early August by a fact checker, Ali Mad, who did an incredible job with this story and.

The story was published, early September, I think it was September 4th, and they released a statement later that day. It was the first day of the academic year in which they announced that Gina Adams had resigned two weeks before. So sometime between being contacted by the fact checker and when the story was published, she departed on terms that I can only imagine.

[00:31:16] CRISTEN: But not fired. 

[00:31:18] MICHELLE CYCA: No, they did not say fired. They said she had resigned. Um, I have yet to see anyone be fired for this, like for committing identity fraud. 

They don't wanna scandal. I, I also think that's why we see a lot of these stories in academia is it, it's really a field where like once you're in it and you have a faculty job, t's really hard to get someone out. It's a unique industry like that.

[00:31:46] CRISTEN: Yeah. So why do you think so many of these institutions obviously weren't doing their due diligence in the hiring process? And do you get the sense that that is maybe changing? 

[00:32:05] MICHELLE CYCA: I think universities now realize that this was a problem, like a flaw in their process, and that they can no longer just let people check a box for self-identification, that they have to check to make sure that they are who they say they are.

You know, that if I was hired for a job because I said I was a member of Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, they might wanna see my status card or call somebody from my community. I think they know that they have to do something more rigorous. 

The two things I think haven't changed is I don't think universities are really willing to scrutinize whether they might have made a mistake in the past. And the other thing I think that isn't happening yet is I don't think they figured out really how to do things differently in the future. Cuz it's, it's tricky. 

The University of Saskatchewan, which had a big case of this identity fraud, Carrie Bourassa. They announced, um, a few months ago that they were gonna start requiring proof of an identity for faculty positions and things like scholarships that were meant for Indigenous students.

But what they said was that they were gonna require a status card or like a Métis Nation card, which is a form of government ID that's like regulated by the federal government here. And there's a lot of Indigenous people that don't have them because a lot of them lost status through various exclusionary government policies, or they don't have one as like a political form of resistance, but they're like members of their community. Everybody knows who they are. They've had family there for a long time, or you know, they've been adopted or embraced by the community. 

And, and so requiring a status card, also risks excluding people, it's not, it's not a perfect solution. And I think the university's been criticized for it, but none of them really know what to do.

I mean, I think there's, um, a big consortium of Indigenous scholars, um, who have been led in part by First Nations University who are trying to figure out how to move forward on this issue. I think they have been kind of trying to develop some policy and practices by which maybe universities can work together to solve this problem in a way that's led by Indigenous people.

But I mean, to answer your question, I think everyone's aware it's a problem and nobody quite knows how to fix it yet. 

[AD BREAK 2]

[00:34:24] CRISTEN: Well, and okay. Obviously the identity fraud, that is a, a problem for sure. It also makes me wonder, like, is it reflective of a bigger issue that is even facilitating these conditions?

[00:34:40] MICHELLE CYCA: Yes, absolutely. There is a bigger issue. I mean, identity fraud cases, I worry, get too much attention, relative to other things because they're so salacious. Everybody loves a scammer story. Like, we can't get enough of George Santos right now. There's something so mind blowing about someone who's like pulled off a big deception like this, right? Like a heist. 

And people love to see someone punished for doing something wrong. So there's like a moral righteousness,m and in calling these people out, I, I can understand that instinct, but I, I do think it's not the biggest issue. I think it's a symptom of a bigger issue, which is that Indigenous identity has become understood by a lot of people as this individual thing.

You know, like I said, it's, it's something you can claim if you have 1% DNA on a 23andME test, or if you're Edward Norton, and you're like, Pocahontas’ great, great, great grandson. That, that, that's all it is. You know, it's just like, it doesn't, that, it doesn't entail any community connections that it isn't about the Nations themselves.

Which is the troubling piece because all Indigenous rights are rooted in sovereignty, in tribal sovereignty. The United States Constitution recognizes that tribes are nations. So, you know, they recognize the Cherokee Nation just like they recognize Canada. And, and that's the basis of rights, for Indigenous people. And if, if the conversation and the public perception starts to shift where the Nation is irrelevant and it's just about the individual and what they believe their identity is, it chips away at those in a, in a really scary way. 

So in the US there's the Indian Child Welfare Act, which, you know, prioritizes keeping Indigenous kids with their families and communities because there is a very long and disturbing practice of adopting Indigenous kids out to white families to assimilate them. A huge number of children were taken from their homes and their communities. And uh, and you know, the Indigenous Child Welfare Act was designed to fix that, to recognize that tribes have the right to their kids, that kids have the right to grow up with their families. 

And if we stop thinking about the role of tribes and nations. If, if we stop thinking of indigeneity as something that's connected to nationhood, it becomes a lot easier to chip away at the legitimacy of laws like that. 

And, you know, ICWA is under threat right now. It's in front of the Supreme Court. There are white families, uh, saying it's discriminatory, discriminatory against them and their desire to adopt Native kids. And that's happening in Canada, too.

People who claim to be Indigenous, who have formed in some cases very convincing and elaborate fake nations and associations are fighting for Indigenous land rights, for hunting rights, for fishing rights. They're saying, you know, we're just as native as you and we have all the rights to these things.

And I think that they're gaining more ground, especially as more and more white people join their ranks and say, yeah, I'm Indigenous too. 

That's what freaks me out. You know, it's, it's upsetting if someone is taking a job that they shouldn't have. That also has real implications. But the larger ones for dissolving the sovereignty of these Indigenous Nations is the one I think people should be terrified of.

Not to get too abstract, but yeah, it's, it's just reminded me like we focus on these stories about people and their lives, but we need to be thinking about the, the Nations and communities that they're claiming to represent and how they're impacted and how maybe their security and their rights are fragmented by these cases of fraud that are really a form of theft. 

[00:38:44] CRISTEN: One thing that really jumped out to me as I was reading up and researching for our conversation was that every single name that I ran across of these, this recent wave of, of fraudsters, they seem to all be women, and white women at that.

What do you make of that? 

[00:39:13] MICHELLE CYCA: So, I mean, I think the cases we hear about are definitely mostly women. I think partly because they're occupying a lot of these positions that get drawn into the spotlight, like academics, filmmakers, musicians. I, I do think there are a lot of men in the larger movement to kind of chip away at Indigenous rights and titles. In Canada, a lot of them are men who are specifically like fighting against Indigenous hunting and fishing rights.

But as you say, there's definitely a lot of white women in these, at the heart of these stories. And I, I was trying to think about like why that is, and I have a couple of theories. As I said earlier, there's a real cosplay element sometimes to people pretending to be Indigenous.

They're not subtle about it, right? It's like really the, the core organizing thing about their identity. And they often lean into these stereotypes about being Indigenous. Like they're really spiritual, they're really connected to the earth. They're really maternal. They're like, there's kind of a, it, it feels sometimes like a performance later when you look at it and how they've talked about it, how they frame themselves. And I think that's a role that women can more easily step into.

But the other thing I think is at play is that, you know, there's this like existential question, like, why would somebody do this? Why would somebody pretend to be Indigenous?

And I've read a pretty convincing theory that I think was published in The Atlantic. You know, it's white guilt is like a real motivator here. People feel bad about colonialism, and they have a hard time sitting with that. And so rather than identify with the oppressor, they'd rather identify with the oppressed.

And maybe there's some like little seed of truth that kicks us off. Like maybe they really do have one Indigenous ancestor 10 generations back, that makes them think like, oh, I'm, I'm part of this movement, too. I'm not a bad person. I'm not a bad white person. I'm not, I'm not complicit here. 

Like that's a, I think a lot of white women have have trouble, um, reckoning with their own privilege. They see themselves as oppressed, and that makes them dismissive of other people's oppression sometimes. I'm not saying everybody does that, but it's a, it's a phenomenon that I think we can observe.

And thinking the way to be a good person is to have the moral superiority that comes with pointing fingers at white people, rather than having to point that finger at yourself.

[00:41:47] CRISTEN: I also read that a number of the whistleblowers, including yourself, have been women too.

[00:41:56] MICHELLE CYCA: Yeah, it's, that's also very true. I mean one stereotype that I will say is often true about Indigenous women is that they tend to be pretty badass.

Especially if we think about older Indigenous women who have lived through, you know, in some cases residential schools, in some cases like the Sixties Scoop and other adoption initiatives of being excluded from academic positions, like to get to where they are, they've seen a lot of shit, and members of the younger generations like myself are, are grateful to them for that. And a lot of these women are, are leading the, the calls. And I think in part that's because they're angry and they're hurt. Often they're calling out people they've known for years or decades who they considered colleagues and friends.

And I think it's really painful for them to realize that someone that they trusted and considered part of their community lied to them. I think that's, that's definitely a factor. and I think some of them honestly are, are in these like very rare positions where they feel like they have the security and cultural capital to call someone out.

And I think it has costs. Like, I think a lot of Indigenous women who've spoken about this get harassment. I think they, you know, face punishment from their employers or are probably like seeing repercussions in their careers, and in their communities.

I would like to see, you know, Indigenous women not having to do so much of that work. Like I, I think that, for instance, white people have a responsibility to call out their friends and family if they see them doing this kind of cosplay, and suddenly declaring themselves Indigenous. And, you know, that's, that's something white people need to be calling their own communities in on.

[00:43:39] CRISTEN: Has it cost you?

[00:43:44] MICHELLE CYCA: You know, I don't think it has because I don't want to work at a university again. I don't think they would have me back in that field. I wanted to make this change and I was really lucky to have the luxury of burning that bridge. So I, I don't feel like I paid a cost besides all the weird emails I've got, you know, from defensive white people.

But I’ve got a special folder for those. 

[AUDIO STING]

[00:44:13] CRISTEN: Thank you so much to Michelle Cyca. Follow her on Twitter @michellecyca. That is c-y-c-a, and you can find her writing at her website, michellecyca.com, and you should absolutely read her McClain's piece, The Curious Case of Gina Adams. 

And if you want to go even deeper, which I highly recommend you do, a couple of standout books are Native American DNA, Tribal Belonging and The False Promise of Genetic Science by Kim Tallbear and Becoming Indian: The Struggle Over Cherokee Identity in the 21st Century by Circe Sturm.

I'll have links to those books and all of my sources, as always, over on the Unladylike website. Just go to unladylike.co/episodes to find the source post.

I will also be posting my full interview with Michelle Cyca over on the Unladies’ Room, the Unladylike Patreon. You can listen over at patreon.com/unladylikemedia for $5 or more a month. You can join and you get a new bonus episode every week. You also get full-length interviews with some of our standout guests, like Michelle.

Being a patron helps ensure the future of unladylike. If this podcast matters to you, please consider supporting the show over on Patreon, okay? patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

If you have episode topic suggestions, feedback, advice requests, you can email all of them to hello@unladylike.co. Or you can DM me on Instagram @unladylikemedia. You can also follow Unladylike on Twitter and TikTok as well @unladylikemedia.

Unladylike is a Starburns Audio production, executive produced, written and hosted by me, Cristen Conger. Aristotle Acevedo is our senior producer and engineer. Katherine Calligori is our associate producer. Music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzen. 

And til next week…

[00:46:25] MICHELLE CYCA: I know it's a heavy topic, but there's a part of me that's relieved that so many people are paying attention to it.

And I hope that they are kind of going on that journey from like the salacious stories to the serious issues of tribal rights and sovereignty. Like if they can wrap their head around the fact that it's wrong for someone to take an Indigenous person's job opportunity, then hopefully they can also get equally upset about the fact that people are taking away Indigenous nations’ rights and trying to chip away at their existence, in that way and replace them.