Is “Queen Chief Warhorse” Native? And Who Gets To Decide?

Do you know about the Indian Arts and Crafts Act? It is a federal law that says that items marketed as being American Indian must be supported by documentation that the maker is a citizen of a federally recognized tribe. There’s a lot of pushback on that law because a lot of people who are Native can’t get enrolled due to the way that a tribe’s criteria is laid out. It isn’t fair, as many point out, but changes can be made to those criteria. Many tribes are making those changes, and many have other ways of recognizing individuals who don’t fit the criteria for enrollment.

The thing is, there’s a lot of hucksters out there, claiming American Indian identity.

Do you remember when that Sacajawea coin came out? There was a group in the Midwest who said they were a tribe, and, they marketed a small bag in which you could store your coin. When they were called out as fake, they had to return the money to people who bought those bags (I didn’t bookmark the page. I’ll look for it but, in the meantime, if anyone finds it, please let me know).

And do you remember that group that said it was a tribe, and was selling “citizenship” to people in other countries (particularly Mexico)? Those individuals bought that citizenship and came to the US, only to find out they’d been the victims of a fraud.

Latoya points to the idea of sovereignty and how a group decides. “Queen Chief Warhorse” has a group, and, she’s Queen and Chief of that group. Apparently, they think that’s fine. Therein is the key. Who is “the group” and what are they doing to become recognized? If Latoya has Native ancestry in her family line and she starts researching it, I don’t think she would create a tribe and start wearing a headdress at various functions. I don’t think “Queen Chief Warhorse” is like the two fraudulent tribes I noted above, but I do think her speech and adoption of stereotypes is undermining her claim and chance of recognition. “Queen Chief Warhorse” says she is Chahta, which is Choctaw. Does she have any contact with the Choctaw Nation in Mississippi? Or the one in Oklahoma ? If she and her group want to learn what Chahta’s culture was/is, they could go to either one of those nations and learn from them. Have they done that? If you’re trying to recover something you lost, where do you start looking?

Latoya also says that the conversation leaves us “not much further than before” but I think she’s wrong about that. She knows a lot more, as do her readers. Prior to this, I think the conversations at her site (regarding identity) were grounded in pop culture, and Gyasi and I are trying to ground them in the politics of Indigenous nations.

If you want to learn more, the Cherokee Nation has an excellent video:

As David Cornsilk (citizen of the Cherokee Nation) said to me, Mayor Landreau’s recommendation of her as a speaker isn’t without context, too. If she’s successful in convincing people of her group’s status as a Native nation, the city stands to gain money from those who would give her group funding, based on its claim as a Native nation.

If you read Gyasi’s piece and you’ve read this far on mine, I hope you feel that you know a lot more now than you did before. Carry that information with you, and share it with others. And the next time you could across someone who says she’s the queen of an Indian tribe, I think you’ll hear that claim in a different way than you did before.

Part of why you accepted the idea of an Indian “Queen” is due in large part to what you learned in school. Most children’s books you read were full of errors. The stories might have been page-turners or award-winning, and they might have felt accurate, but they weren’t. American Indians in Children’s Literature, in publication since 2005, has been providing readers with critical analysis of those books, and, tools to help you spot the problems yourself. If you’re reading this essay at another site, please visit American Indians in Children’s Literature, and let parents and teachers know about the site, too. In the top right are lists of books that accurately represent American Indians. For your convenience, they are grouped by grade level.

Update: Sunday, May 6, 2012, 4:38 PM

Over the last couple of days, I’ve watched several videos in which “Queen Chief Warhorse” talks about her group. To view them, search Youtube and Google videos using “Chief Warhorse” as your search term. In watching them, I found some answers to questions I posed above:

Page 3 of 4 | Previous page | Next page