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Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Despite federal government targeting DEI programs, cultural graduations continue to empower, honor Spokane grads
May 19—Tere Graham attended the African American Graduation Ceremony more than a decade ago after graduating from Eastern Washington University. Although she previously lived in Spokane and attended Lewis and Clark High School, it was during this ceremony that she first felt connected to the Spokane community. "I just saw a sea of folks who look like my aunts and uncles, and I said, 'This is pretty cool.' I never experienced that before," said Graham, program manager for the Unity Multicultural Education Center at Gonzaga University and volunteer for the African American Graduation. For decades, cultural and identity-based groups — including African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and the LGBTQ+ community — have hosted graduation celebrations honoring students at all levels, from middle school to college. Despite ongoing political threats to diversity, equity and inclusion programs organizers of these events in Spokane emphasize that the ceremonies are not about politics; they're about fostering a sense of belonging and worth for young people. "When I crossed that stage as a college graduate, they were there and they're still here. So, I love to offer that to our generation," Graham said. Diversity, equity and inclusion DEI initiatives can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment. Shortly after, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson established an equal opportunity policy, mandating affirmative action for federal contractors. However, when President Donald Trump returned to office earlier this year, he rescinded DEI-related policies during his first week. "We have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government, and, indeed, the private sector and our military," Trump said during a joint session of Congress earlier this year. "And our country will be woke no longer." In February, a letter from the U.S. Department of Education referenced "segregation by race in graduation ceremonies" would warrant withholding federal funds to schools if schools continue to offer them, though a federal court in April prevented the department from acting on the contents in the letter. Sarah Wixson, an attorney with Stokes Lawrence in Yakima, said one problem with the current wave of attacks on DEI is that the term means different things to different people. Under Trump's presidency, she said, many began to see it as discriminatory rather than inclusive. "People view DEI as being discrimination, and I don't think that's a correct way of looking at it, but that's where we are now and where we weren't two years ago," Wixson said. She said she works with various employers who have since abandoned their DEI programs out of fear of being targeted or defunded. Still, she admires the organizations that continue to hold space for students to celebrate their culture and identity. "I think everybody else's culture is just as important. It's a huge point of celebration," Wixson said. "Not everybody celebrates the same way." Frances Mortel, the cultural programs manager for Asians for Collective Liberation Spokane, also said within the past few years that the term "DEI" has become twisted. The Asian American Graduation Ceremony was a reminder to her that DEI isn't a specific brand. "As part of Asian American Heritage Month, we had guest speaker Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and really inspiring activist," Mortel said. "It was really inspiring being reminded after both of those talks that our work is actually beyond just what DEI has become." The fourth annual Asian American Graduation, held in May, was organized by ACL Spokane in partnership with the Empire Health Foundation. She said they had about 40 grads attend the celebration. Fernanda Mazcot, executive director of Nuestras Raíces Centro Comunitario, said that, with increasing attacks on DEI and the Latino community, they had to rethink safety plans for this year's 30th annual Latino Graduation Ceremony. Canceling, however, never crossed their minds. "We know this is a very significant event for young scholars and graduates, especially first-generation college students, to share this event with their families, but we did partner with the Peace and Justice Action League here in Spokane," Mazcot said. "They are just kind of walking around campus, just making sure everything's good, and folks are feeling safe." For Graham, the main question around the African American graduation wasn't a matter of "if" there would be a ceremony but "when." "When we see these students walk across this stage, we're one inch closer to not having to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, not having to talk about who's feeling micro aggressions in their classrooms," Graham said. During the ceremony, Graham said they gave out an African kente stole, a symbolism of interconnectedness to their heritage and its history that is deeply connected to Africa's rich weaving traditions, which dates as long ago as 3000 B.C. The more than 30 graduates at the 16th annual Lavender Graduation hosted by Eastern Washington University's Eagle Pride Center were similarly adorned with rainbow stoles to represent their identity or ally-ship with the LGBTQ+ community. At the intimate ceremony on EWU's campus, many knew each other from their time at the school and in their pride center, where EWU graduate Zoe Swenson worked for about four years as a peer adviser. Even for those outside EWU reveled in the sense of "found family," like North Central High School graduate Anabell Sweet. "We have people who come into the Pride Center or to even these events, and it's because their families don't support them, so they're looking for kind of a family within the community," Swenson said. Sweet is bound for Washington State University to study early childhood education. For her, the graduation was just as much a time to feel celebrated as it was to see others who walked in her shoes earn their degrees — those who can relate to being called slurs or not being accepted by parts of their family. "I'm excited to see and celebrate all these other people who have gone through the same struggles, more struggles than I have," Sweet said. "To just have that space to be like, 'You did it. Despite everything, you did the dang thing.' " Organizers of the annual Spokane Native American Community Graduation sang a similar tune of its importance. Evanlene Melting Tallow has sat on the graduation's committee for 24 of the 29 years it has existed, working at EWU as a project coordinator and recruiter. Not only is the event significant to honor and adorn graduates with a Pendleton stole, but encourage the young minds watching. "We definitely need to be able to show you know that these graduates look like them who are in the audience," Melting Tallow said. "These are the people who eventually are going to be doctors, who are going to be engineers or teachers or welders." It's a real point of pride for her to drape the traditional Pendleton stole over the shoulders of a student she once saw in the audience. Creating a cycle of prosperity for her community is personal to her, the first in her family to graduate college. "I always said, 'I will not be the last,' " she said, supporting her point by rattling off numerous academically decorated family members, including her two kids who walked in the Spokane Native American Community Graduation. "When you start a movement, and we are starting a movement, it always has rippling effects," she said. The ceremony, hosted at Gonzaga, has several cultural elements otherwise absent from traditional school-based affairs, including an Indigenous drum group. This year, the committee also decided to honor a late teenager who would have walked with her class but died this year in a car accident. Her family received a Pendleton sash and a friend held a photo of her as she walked across the stage to recognize her efforts towards graduating. That personal touch is part of the significance of these ceremonies to supplement whole-school graduations, said Melting Tallow, a citizen of both the Blackfeet Nation of Montana and Blood Tribe of Canada. "Our people have gone through a lot, but we're resilient. We will continue to have this celebration every year, because we want to show that we have students who are very productive in our communities, from different degrees and graduating from high school," Melting Tallow said. "We are here, we are resilient, and we are going to keep moving forward." The thought that cultural graduations have been targeted in the Trump administration's efforts against DEI shocked Kitara Johnson Jones, who owns and operates a DEI consulting agency and attended dozens of cultural graduations in her former role as multicultural director for Spokane Community College. "There's a rite of passage thing to happen, that's a cultural thing that you aren't going to be able to erase ... especially in communities where it doesn't often happen, it takes a whole village to get them there," Jones said. Jones is confident cultural graduations will persist in some fashion with or without the federal government's approval. The government hasn't historically been the provider of Indigenous powwows or celebrations at Black churches, she said, these came straight from the communities themselves. "You can't erase people and you can't erase history or heritage or a culture; you just can't," Jones said. 'Proving your worth' During the Hispanic/Latino Graduation Ceremony organized by Nuestras Raíces Centro Comunitario, Edmundo Aguilar, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Washington, said that graduating and being proud of their culture is important for students to move forward. "Today, you all are pushing back. You all are fighting back by proving your worth, despite all the barriers that you are facing and all that is happening," Aguilar said. Hispanic and Latino students from middle school all the way to college were honored with a serape stole, a brightly colored, woven stole used to represent Mexican cultural pride, heritage and identity. Among them was Angel Maldonado, a recent graduate of Gonzaga University. Maldonado said he majored in elementary education, following in his mom's footsteps to become a teacher. "My mom is the only one of her siblings to ever go to college. She's also the youngest and she's also a teacher, so I think it's really special for me, to not only to get an education, but to also become a teacher, kind of following in her footsteps," said Maldonado, who's from Brewster, Washington. "It just feels really nice and rewarding." For him, attending the Latino ceremony was a way to show that he and others aren't backing down, despite attacks on DEI and on the Latino community, especially under Trump's administration. "I mean, many cultures, but us as Mexican Americans, I think these kinds of fights fall onto our shoulders, and I think just being a part of this ceremony really shows we know what we're really about," Maldonado said. "Just keep looking forward. Follow your dreams." Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Third annual powwow held at Flett Middle School Saturday, open to the public
May 2—Flett Middle School will host the third annual Pauline Flett Powwow Saturday, a free public event hosted by the students and celebrating the culture and history of the region's native peoples. "We call it a learning powwow, in that we're trying to help our students learn how to put it on, market it, put it up and run it," said school Principal Matthew Henshaw. "Our overall purpose is allowing our Native students to see representation in the school of their own culture being celebrated, and helping our kids learn about Pauline's vision and her legacy." The middle school, opened in 2022, is named after the late Spokane tribal elder Pauline Flett, who co-wrote the first Spokane-English dictionary and is credited with playing an instrumental role in preserving the Spokane Tribe of Indians' Salish dialect. School leadership, wanting to honor the legacy of their namesake, started guiding their new students to host the event the first year it opened. "It gives our Native youth pride in who they are and where they come from," said Margo Hill, a Spokane tribal member and urban planning professor at Eastern Washington University who was among the community leaders who worked with Henshaw to launch the 2022 powwow. "It's just a beautiful opportunity to see what tribal communities are doing and that the kids can celebrate their culture," Hill added. The powwow will be held in the school gymnasium at 5020 West Wellesley Ave. and is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. The event will consist of two repeating sessions, with grand entries at noon and 5 p.m. and a number of contests, including hand drum, red dress special, and a golden age category for dancers who are 50 years of age or older. Dinner will be held around 5 p.m. Henshaw estimated there were about 30 vendors this year that the middle schoolers would be helping set up their stands, selling custom artwork and jewelry, and more.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
EWU graduates first class of nursing program
May 2—The first cohort of a new nursing program at Eastern Washington University flipped their tassels from the right to the left during a commencement ceremony Friday morning. The crowd in the Reese Court arena on the Cheney campus cheered and stomped the bleachers. "You are now an Eagle for life," Kelsey Hatch-Brecek, director of the alumni association, told the new graduates of the College of Health Science and Public Health. "Our alumni community is filled with entrepreneurs, innovators, leaders, artists, scientists, athletes and changemakers. And today, we get to add nurses to that list." The School of Nursing, which began in fall 2023, graduated 40 students with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. Of those students, 37 are from in-state, most are from Eastern Washington and most have jobs lined up at local hospitals. Donna Bachand, nursing program administrator and department chair, believes the program will help address the state's nursing shortage. Washington ranks high among states facing a severe nursing shortage, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, with an estimated shortfall of more than 13,000 registered nurses. The program based at EWU's Spokane campus is about a decade in the making. Bachand took the helm seven years ago and spent much of that working through regulations to build the program until it received funding from the Legislature in 2022. "The pandemic really highlighted the deep need the region has for nurses," Bachand said. The first class had 132 applications, including 80 EWU students who had done prerequisite coursework. "I don't know how to describe what it's like sitting in a room by yourself for years before hiring faculty and seeing your first student, but today is the culminating event," Bachand said. "My heart was beating on the front row, thinking please don't cry at the microphone. It's very emotional. It's just gratifying." Alexana Bueno is a first-generation college student from the Tri-Cities who will return there to work as an oncology nurse working with cancer patients at Kadlec Regional Medical Center, where she interned. Her path to graduation hasn't been easy. She moved from Washington to Mexico when she was only a few years old and returned when she was 17, speaking little English. She picked up the language during her last two years of high school. Compassion that nurses showed her when members of her family were dying inspired her to work in health care. Her father died when she was a child in Mexico. She couldn't see him when he was in the hospital, but the nurses talked to her about how he was doing. Then, after she returned to the United States, her brother had a stroke. "Again, nurses were there for me," Bueno said. "They took excellent care of him. He passed, but they were always there for me and my family." Bueno said support from EWU's College Assistance Migrant Program helped her navigate college life, especially as she commuted two-hours each way from the Tri-Cities until she found housing. "They helped me so much because my English was limited, they explained everything to me," Bueno said. The nursing program also was challenging because she had to learn medical terms in English, but her teachers and classmates supporter her through it. "I know it is going to be an adjustment, but I'm really excited to go back to my community and serve as a nurse there," Bueno said. She wrote "Borderless Dreams" in cursive on her graduation cap. "I'm very proud of all of our grads," Bachand said. "I'm very proud of the work my faculty have done to help them reach this milestone in their career paths. I can't wait to see what they do." EWU's nursing school will compliment other nursing programs in the area. Gonzaga University is graduating 76 bachelor of science in nursing graduates this spring along with 107 masters of science in nursing and 12 doctors of nursing practice, according to spokesman Dan Nailen. Washington State University is graduating about 245 undergraduate nurses and another 67 with advanced degrees across the Spokane, Tri-Cities, Yakima and Vancouver campuses, spokeswoman Gina Raebel said. James Hanlon's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Wall Street Journal
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Trump's Campus Crackdown Reaches Far Beyond Ivy League Schools
President Trump's high-profile fights with universities have so far centered on the Ivy League. But the wider conservative effort to reshape America's campuses, largely under the banner of fighting antisemitism, extends to colleges from coast to coast and ones that aren't household names. At least 60 universities across the country, some of them state schools like Eastern Washington University and Ohio State, are under investigation by the Education Department for alleged antisemitism. The task force that's taken on Harvard and Columbia has publicly named eight other targets. And additional schools are being singled out by Republicans aligned with White House priorities.
The Independent
24-04-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Meet the ‘race fakers' — and the people tracking them down
'Welcome to Peripheries. I am Rachel Dolezal, your host,' begins the first episode of the podcast. 'So today I'm going to share with you a letter I received from someone I'm going to called Afina. She writes: Dear Mrs Dolezal, though we have never met, I felt the need to reach out and apologize for the way our society has treated the question of race and has attacked your character.' The letter goes on to describe a complex upbringing from the perspective of a first-generation American raised by Arab parents. Why do her friends of Moroccan or Egyptian descent, she asks, not count as 'African American' on federal forms? What is she supposed to say if she's asked whether she's Black or white, with no added information allowed? 'Like I said, I just wanted to reach out and extend my empathy. Identity is a troubling question and it's even further complicated when it's highlighted in such a public forum,' Afina's letter concludes. 'You will certainly be in my thoughts. I genuinely hope that you will continue to fight for justice.' What is the justice that Rachel Dolezal, years after her very public outing as a white person masquerading as a Black one, hopes to achieve? Much of the anger surrounding her outing was not so much personal as focused on her professional life: the fact that she was working as a professor of Africana studies at a prestigious university, for instance, and that she had previously headed up a chapter of the NAACP. But the anger was compounded by the fact she has steadfastly refused to apologize since being outed. In fact, she has doubled down. In a 2019 Netflix documentary, The Rachel Divide — four years after she'd been outed by her family —Dolezal described herself as 'unapologetically Black'. Her sons expressed sadness that she had been held to account. The documentary provided some evidence for why Dolezal might have chosen to identify so strongly with a community that is not her own — she grew up with a number of adopted Black siblings, while her own biological family largely rejected her; she found positive reinforcement and camaraderie while advocating for Black people in her former home of Spokane, Washington — but the inconvenient truth was that she hurt a lot of people by masquerading as something she was not. Real Black people lost out on heading up that chapter of the NAACP or teaching on 'the Black woman's experience' at Eastern Washington University. They want her to be able to see that. Defiant, Dolezal continues to respond that she is a real Black person, too. In the second episode of Peripheries, Dolezal discusses positions 'transracialism' as a revolutionary new social justice movement. 'You know, for kids we say: It's okay to be different, think for yourself, be free, don't let anybody bully you, be yourself, follow your heart,' she says. 'We don't tell kids, like, follow your body. We say follow your heart, right? And then, when kids become adults, it seems like on social media and just in society, we kind of cheer on the bullies and insist that everybody has to conform to categories and boxes or face this cancel culture or social punishment, jokes, shaming and that kind of thing. And I think that as a society and a human race, we really need to kind of decide: Which one is it? Are we going to cheer on the unique individuals who dare not to fit into a mold and are going to pioneer their own path or are we going to cheer on the bullies who punish them for deviating from what others think they should be?' It's clear that Dolezal sees herself as one of those persecuted pioneers. Peripheries has a Patreon with multiple levels of subscribership, and the rewards for signing up include receiving an 'exclusive Peripheries mug, with logo painted by Rachel Dolezal' and a printed poster of one of Dolezal's drawings for the podcast. So far, there are only 11 subscribers, contributing just $88 per month to her bank account. Despite her fame (or perhaps notoriety), it's clear hers is not a majority view. In episode nine of Peripheries, Dolezal makes mention of White Girl Within, a controversial book by the Black academic Ronnie Gladden who identifies as a transgender woman and 'transracially' white. On Gladden's website, the book is described as telling ' the true-to-life and improbable story of a black man named Ronnie who is struggling with an internalized (and nameless) 'White Girl' identity,' later adding that 'the nuanced tapestry of the manuscript is firmly and consistently centered on this fundamental question: What will it take for Ronnie, the Black man, to transition to better approximate and present his repressed white female identity?' Dolezal describes Gladden's work as something that 'encourages us to expand our concept of acceptance and inclusion.' Others feel, quite simply, that Gladden is faking it all for attention. Recent history is littered with people who have been outed as 'race fakers'. Some of them were outed by their own family — such as Native American icon Sacheen Littlefeather, whose sisters outed her as white after her death; or Muslim activist Raquel Saraswati, born Rachel Seidel, whose mother told The Intercept that her daughter is white rather than Arab, South Asian or Latin American, as she variously claimed — and others were outed by groups or organizations. A number of political reporters and publications were able to establish fairly quickly that Republican representative George Santos is not actually Jewish, for instance (Santos has since tried to walk back his claims and says he is 'Jew-ish', which is also under question.) And it was the Native American-run organization Tribal Alliance Against Frauds that recently outed the author Erika Wurth and the Queens University professor Robert Lovelace. Their methods include complex genealogical investigation conducted mostly by tribal volunteers. In Wurth's case, that included the construction of a family tree going back six generations. Jacqueline Keeler is a Native American journalist who has been helping to expose 'Pretendians' since 2015. Indeed, she was the reporter who Sacheen Littlefeather's sisters contacted after her death to refute Littlefeather's claims about a Native identity. In 2021, Keeler released the 'Alleged Pretendians List': a Google doc of people who are either suspected or proven to have passed themselves off fraudulently as Native. Everyone included has publicly claimed in interviews, books or in Congress that they are Native American. And the list is not without its controversies. 'Rather than raising her people or doing anything useful she is engaging in toxic identity politics in which many real Natives are caught in the crossfire,' wrote one poster on the Native American subreddit. 'I am just confused about her motivations for putting out a hit list for supposed 'Pretendians',' another concurred. '…Identity is nothing if not super complicated. Her work seems to be very divisive and very hurtful to a lot of innocent people.' Criticism of Keeler's work always takes a similar view: 'Pretendianism' isn't a pervasive problem, surely, so why laser-focus on it so much? Surely it's not worth all the negativity? On a Zoom call from her home, Keeler says that she herself started out assuming the same thing. She was asked to write a couple of articles for The Daily Beast in 2015, she says, and 'frankly, before that, I didn't think it was much of an issue. The way I understood it, there was occasionally a Pretendian who would pop up every 20 years, and that would be a problem. But I didn't realize it was so extensive, so pervasive. And that's why I released the Alleged Pretendians List — to kind of just show how the landscape is populated by fraud and also how they became gatekeepers.' Gatekeeping is a term that comes up again and again when you talk about racial identity; in The Rachel Divide, Rachel Dolezal asks: 'Who are the gatekeepers of Blackness?' Others within and without the Native community claim that gatekeeping is a useless pursuit, and that if people want to embrace Lakota or Cherokee culture because they recently found out they have a great-grandparent who comes from that tribe, it essentially harms nobody. Keeler disagrees. Her work is important, she says, because too many Pretendians seek to become gatekeepers themselves, 'particularly leading Native departments in universities, deciding what grad students can study and what they cannot study, and who gets ahead and who doesn't.' 'It was really interviewing Native professors' that convinced her of this, she says. She would often be writing a completely separate story for a newspaper and would contact such academics for their professional opinion. But then, during the conversation, they'd tell her a tale that became familiar: 'They would tell me: By the way, my department has just hired a Pretendian fraud, and we tried to stop it but the administration wouldn't listen to us. And in fact, one professor told me that he was told by his dean that because he had questioned a Pretendian — just asking them very mild questions, like, 'Oh, so who's your family? What community are you from?' — which is normal, you want to connect, but no, that's very intimidating to frauds — he was told he was racist. And so he was told by the dean of a major university in the Midwest that he was not fit to lead a Native Studies department because he was racist against white-presenting Native people.' In other instances, Pretendians in college departments became outright sinister when questioned. 'Another professor, in the Great Plains region, she was actually threatened physically by a Pretendian who would carry a knife around the department… She basically stopped teaching in person because of the violent threats.' Keeler maintains that for every person hurt by their inclusion on her list, there are hundreds of Native Americans put at a disadvantage by frauds and con artists pushing them out of their rightful places. Pretendians claim scholarships intended for true Natives, rise through the ranks of academic institutions, and lead conversations about subjects they don't understand in Hollywood and politics. 'The main issue is that as long as frauds are speaking for us, our voices are not heard,' she says. 'It also messes with the data. Like, if everyone can self-identify — and the US census actually relies on self-identification — it's hard to get good data on how Native people are really doing. Because it's all mixed in with all these people who are self-identifying.' She first realized this was a problem when the Washington Post conducted research around whether Native people found the name of the Washington Redskins offensive. 'I looked at the data around the polling, and one of the things that became very clear to me was that it was strange that a huge portion of the respondents were from Arkansas,' Keeler says. 'And they were men over 50, like I would say it was like 30 percent of the respondents. And I'm like, well, first of all, Native men have very short lifespans. By the time my dad was 55, he told me he was the only Native man still alive from his high school class. So you wouldn't have a randomized sample of Native people in the country that would include 30 percent men over 50. I mean, it'd be more like if it was representative, truly, it would be like 2 percent.' Additionally, Keeler knew that Arkansas was one of the 'removal states', where Native Americans were driven out en masse and where numbers are incredibly low. It didn't make any sense that the random telephone polling done by the newspaper would have found so many people of Native descent. 'What does appear was happening is that they relied on self-identification when they did the phone calls for the survey. And basically, you know, some white guy in Arkansas is like: Well, I like the Redskins. I'm gonna put my thumb on the scale and I'm gonna say I'm Indian. I think I have Indian ancestry, so I'm gonna answer the question, you know?' Skewed samples like these are irritating, says Keeler, but they pale in comparison to what other Pretendians can end up damaging through their willful ignorance or fraud. She knows of at least one instance where someone presented themselves as Native to enter an experimental medical research study for cancer, without thinking about how that could affect the data on cancer outcomes for Native Americans for future generations. That, Keeler adds, is in her opinion 'basically criminal'. And then there are the 'box-checkers', the people who claim scholarships and bursaries intended for disadvantaged Native students. Those people might never rise through the ranks and become prominent professors in Native American Studies, she says, but they still vastly outnumber the small amount of genuinely Native people left in the US and they drain resources not meant for them. 'And you have to understand the Native community is so poor,' Keeler adds. 'If one of our family members has a PhD and can make a six-figure salary, that helps the entire family on the reservation, you know? My parents were professionals living off the reservation but if my grandparents needed a new windmill to feed their cattle, we all had to chip in $5,000 to make that happen. So these tentpole positions are crucial in helping to lift Native families out of poverty. But then you deny them those positions because Pretendians are holding their space, right? And it creates a situation of intimidation and further marginalization and impoverishment of Native people.' Keeler intends to continue her work — which she sometimes does with the aid of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds — because she sees no sign that the Pretendian wave is abating. She mentions fake tribes populated entirely by white people who have gone so far as to claim the remains of Native ancestors who have nothing to do with them. She cites New York Times op-eds advising Deb Haaland, the Native American secretary of the interior, on what to do next in Joe Biden's administration — written by a Pretendian. She knows of celebrities whose Native ancestry has been investigated by tribal genealogists and Mexican genealogists, and who have been shown to be entirely Mexican. Keeler accepts that some people, especially adoptees, might have made genuine mistakes about their own identities. But, when she contacts them to let them know they're not the Natives they think they are, they often double down, Dolezal-style. Once, she showed a woman genealogical charts and immigration papers going back for generations that proved her family came over to the US from Ireland in the early 1900s. The woman responded that the papers must have all been a clever ruse by her family to avoid racism by presenting themselves as Irish. She still claims that she is Native to this day. What causes such behavior, I ask? Keeler shakes her head. She says she can only speculate, and that it seems like a 'personality disorder, really akin to narcissism'. For Keeler, outing Pretendians is a necessary part of a wider crusade for racial justice. 'These are our homelands that are under occupation by the most powerful government in the world,' she says. 'And so we have things that we want to work on and to talk about to the government. And we don't need a Pretendian going and speaking for us at a Congressional hearing. We need real Native people to do these things because we are the only ones that have an actual stake in the game, in the outcomes.' She adds that she doesn't expect full-blooded purity from anyone; she only expects honesty. Keeler herself is 'not a typical Navajo': Her paternal grandmother is of mixed ancestry, whereas 90 percent of Navajo are full-blooded Native. 'I don't present my dad's mom as a full-blooded Lakota traditional,' she says. 'I represent her for what she was — an Episcopalian Dakota church lady. I try to be accurate about myself.' She smiles a somewhat strained smile. 'And that's all I ask of other people.'
