Ethnicity-related critique from gender identity idealists and ideologues has been common since I came out as a TERF. Whether they are darkening doodles or whitewashing my ancestors, the genderists cannot seem to get past their preoccupation with the fact that I am mixed-race. In all this time, they’ve found nothing of substance that would suggest I have knowingly or negligently misrepresented myself. In fact, one contingent has even confirmed my family history, despite being too ignorant to comprehend what they had uncovered. Once you get to the 1600s, every other French immigrant has our family name and “married a native woman.” The comment in question, which I discuss in Part 2: The Cold War of Assimilation Policy, seemed to imply I have the right to be proud of my connection to these ancestors in the 1600s in Quebec, and their culture… as long as they are White/French. Otherwise, he suggested, there’s a jump discontinuity on that timeline and I am not actually my ancestors’ descendant any longer.
Those who bring my ethnic background into the discussion, in an attempt to impugn my integrity, will often insist that Natives had no concept of binary sex categories prior to colonization. But that is absurd. All cultures have a conception of man and woman because every culture does understand that one man and one woman are necessary to produce a baby. We were not humping rocks and hoping for the best. Indeed, the Mohawk origin story I heard first, involves a woman’s father’s ghost telling her where to go to be married to a man. The woman becomes pregnant, and then is pushed out of our equivalent of heaven by this man. She then had to build society by herself while pregnant, giving birth, and raising her daughter, who also became pregnant. You cannot tell me that we did not have an understanding that Fertile Earth/Sky Woman and Lynx were women. You cannot tell me that we did not know that women and men are different, and how we were different.
The concept of gender is used to convict Natives that do not wish to participate with gender ideology. The suggestion is made that we are race-traitors pretending to be something we are not. One locus of this is the contested term, two-spirit, often abbreviated as 2S. This term was introduced after I was born, in the early 1990s, to replace another term, berdache, which historically refers to certain men in certain tribes. I have had it insisted to me that not only did we Natives have no conception of the sex binary prior to colonization, but Iroquois specifically also believed that sometimes men are like women. They cannot have it both ways. 2S propaganda that fails to account for the cultures who did not support this practice simply queerwashes us, a form a whitewashing, in service of cultural assimilation.
Where in the name that of all who fall from the sky would the concept of 2S derive, if not from a prior existence of the concept of two distinct kinds of people? One is clearly a contingent concept, derived to explain why some men are not like other men. If we believed men were women, why would we have to explain why some men are different from other men? Would they not just be recognized as women, not as something other than women? 2S as a concept does not make sense without the sex binary to exist in contrast to. This source that acknowledges the lack of evidence for a berdache tradition in Iroquois culture, then attempts to flip the burden of proof and say it is nevertheless, somehow on Iroquois people to demonstrate we do not have this tradition, not on non-Iroquoian researchers to show that we do have one.
"C. Callender and L. Kochems attempted to sever the institution to be described here from that of the berdache by claiming that the Iroquois did not have berdaches.... the burden of proof lies on one who would assert the non-presence of the berdache in a particular tribe, and not the opposite." Richard Trexier Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order and the European page 220.
Every Native knee shall bow before the T and confess that the knowledge of gender Jesus has always been written on our savage hearts. The burden of proof always lies on the person making the positive claim. “Iroquois had berdaches” is the positive claim. The fact that some unrelated tribe had berdaches is actually not relevant.
Just because we’re both Native, it does not mean we’re the same, that our cultures are similar, or that we hang out. We’re not the Huron, the neighbors who gave us the name Iroquois, which means snake. ‘Iroquois’ began as a slur. I have seen a few translations for it. I am not familiar enough with Algonquin to know why there would be uncertainty as to whether the term meant snake, big snake, big snakes, or black snake. But it means some kind of snake and was applied to them by long-standing feuding enemies, before undergoing a linguistic process of amelioration amongst non-Algonquin speakers. Today, most people using the term do not know that the term was ever intended to slur the Haudenosaunee.
How does one prove that there were no berdaches in the absence of evidence of Iroquois berdaches? The gender blenders will collapse over 15,000 years, at least, and 2 continents worth of cultures, beneath this non-Native term, and shift the burden to Natives to prove we did not already believe in these modern ideas the first time Europeans dropped the anchor of the La Dauphine in New York. They will also look me in the eye and tell me, your ancestors did not know about women being different from men. That had to be taught! I mean, it is no wonder the continent was empty. We had no idea where babies came from, so goes the theory.
Just ignore the extensive documentation in the historical record of the fact that our sex-specific matrilineal, matrifocal cultural framework was already present and shocking to the colonizers coming from a backwashed culture where the men were in charge. They pretend that sex is a colonial construct, like race, even though we were historically declared savages for the fact that our cultures empowered women systematically. How did we empower women systematically without the knowledge of who the women were, and what made them women? My culture is inseparable from the understanding that men and women are different, that women are female, and that female is the sex that becomes pregnant rather than impregnates. It is neither a look, nor a vibe, but a capacity, function, and vulnerability. How do you have a matrifocal, matrilineal structure, if men can be women if they decide they feel like or are caused to look like women?
Such people who find themselves so inappropriately fixated on my racial background are motivated by a desire to establish that I am not “pure.” I have seen it referred to as an “authenticity kroner,” with a capital B, a few months back, when several feminist creators were publicly denigrating a woman for the fact that she had been officially recognized as a member of a particular Jewish denomination for 30 years, and did not keep it a secret. For more context on this saga, see my videos and essays related to the term “grass widow,” which was given a folk etymology by Yiddish speakers and scholars for several hundred years that it was somehow related to the term “agunah.” Agunah means “chained” and refers to a Jewish woman who cannot obtain a religious divorce. One could say that race-conscious commenters are attempting to call me a grass Native, but I digrass.
I wish I could say that TRAcist harassment has had no impact on me. I wish I could say I never doubted my mother or my upbringing. I wish I could say that my brown hue, exaggerated by detractors in the form of a caricature, had not led to rejection by some family members on the ethnic Mormon branch, specifically, when I was not even out of college. I wish Mormons had not applied European antisemitism to Natives systematically, as a matter of religious faith. But these essays exist because I did question, yet again, if I am right to resist the veil of whiteness obscuring my truth - my biracial, métis experience and appearance. I even removed a video, that I now must find in order to reupload, in the hopes that if I separated who I am - who my ancestors were - from this work I have produced (an impossible and self-defeating task), I could dissuade the people attacking me and dragging my family’s honor. This harassment teaches métis people that we ought to be ashamed to be mixed. We ought to hide it. That is the stigmatization of mixed descendants mentioned by Dr. Belmessous.
I see now that this response is the legacy of inherited generational trauma, from centuries of dedicated pursuit by the white Christian nationalist racial puritans, and I am left with anger that métis people are so systematically targeted for this harassment. I am angry we are targeted for being women who could be claimed by the white Christian nationalists, who nevertheless convert to or remain in minority ethnoreligious understandings. Culture and ancestry must be seen, for the sake of many, including reconnecting babyscoop adoptees placed into white families and stripped of their consciousness of Native identity, as independent features and avenues towards Nativeness. Unifying culture and ancestry is how we get both nationalism and blood quantum attempts to dilute our ways and teachings out of existence via metissage. What could we accomplish as a Native political bloc if all métis and all reconnecting Natives had consciousness of Native identity and corresponding investment in Native cultural-political survival, tribal sovereignty, and federal respect of Native treaty land rights?
These racially-motivated pests are instead preoccupied by the fact that I am not Ishi, the putative “last wild Indian” that UC Berkeley (my alma mater) actually turned into a museum exhibit, while he was very much still alive.
Ishi was put on display at the museum, where outsiders could watch him make arrows and describe aspects of Yahi culture. There is no historical evidence that shows if Ishi had a choice in the matter….After Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, Pope immediately performed an autopsy, taking Ishi’s brain and using it for eugenics-centered research based on a “hierarchy of intelligence,” according to campus professor of medical anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
There is a fetishization of Native people that gives rise to this disappointment that I am not wild. They are seeking a source of Native culture, i.e., a source of power, and my source has been, to them, racially polluted, like so many rivers feeding Native lands. They have believed, since colonial times, that cultural practices emanate from biology, so this casts doubt on my reliability as a cultural source. And that inspires misogyny - the uncontrolled rage at the breast infants sometimes manifest. And yet I am still their source. And yet I still produce what I produce, at the rate I produce it, in defiance of their sound and fury.
Ishi means “man” in the Yana language, and is his name of convenience because in his culture, a person did not say their own name until introduced to new people. Someone else had to say it. And everyone in his tribe who knew his name was killed in the California Genocide. So UC Berkeley did the equivalent of taking a Holocaust survivor, placing him in a menagerie, and having him make dreidls for tour groups under a sign that says, “the last natural Jew.” I was not taught much about this genocide by California public schools, even though we spent multiple days making scale-model Spanish missions - labor death camps for Natives - in 5th grade California public school. We focused heavily on the architecture, and the swallows, and not what they represented.
In the late 1820s, Mexico rebelled against Spain and won its independence. Within a decade, it also declared that the missions had to vest half their property to the Indians while the other half went to the friars and government officials. It was the beginning of the end for the missions. By the late 19th century, the missions were in ruins, abandoned by the friars who could not continue operating them without the slave labor of the Indians, whose numbers had been decimated by hard labor, starvation and disease. It is estimated that California's Indian population was about 310,000 at the beginning of Spanish rule. At the close of the 19th century, they had been reduced to approximately 100,000.
Southwest Natives and mestiz@ are encouraged to think of themselves as being immigrants and foreign regardless of how long their lineage has been in this area. I sought to further understand the dynamic of racialization in college, and was awarded a small research grant to conduct ethnographic interviews on the border of the US and Mexico, with individuals whom I strongly disagreed with. This was dug up a few months ago by those upset at my “there are no male women” heresy, as some kind of evidence that I support the wound that will not heal, the scar on the Earth, just because I have studied people who support it. Me preguntan que si yo se como hablar español.
I am descended many times over from the New France assimilation project. This is a standard that is good enough to qualify my American-born grandmother as Danish, descended many times over from the handcart Mormon pioneers, but it is not good enough for some, to qualify me as Iroquois or even métis. She has fully integrated into non-Mormon society, so why am I allowed to be proud to be an assimilated ethnic Mormon? I do not practice Mormon affiliation. I was not raised with Mormon traditions or culture - barring the cultural transmission I received from the relevant relatives. But surely, that is not good enough!
They say I need to accept that I have become so mixed I have no cultural claim to any component. I reject this logic. Once you have mixed people intermarrying with mixed people, the odds that any offspring born to the community have no Native ancestors becomes vanishingly small. People realize that, and it shapes values. In the tribe, or assimilated, a mother wants her child to have the best of what she had and the best of what she didn’t have. We know that the assimilated did not simply abandon their culture, much to the chagrin of the assimilators.
In a fit of prima facie incoherence, the commenter in Part 2 stated that even legitimate ancestry can be invalidated through cultural deprivation of the child. This attitude has implications for international and transracial adoptees as well as the children of the Residential School project. If we allowed for mixed race people with mixed cultural backgrounds, that would undermine the fantasy of race as a means to explain cultural practice. I am racially required to pick a lane here, or they may be forced to confront the fact that race does not determine culture - that we are choosing to practice and pass on something other than white Christian nationalism.
This reasoning that cultural reclamation is impolite in some way also forces contemporary Native identity into a time-constrained cupboard. European cultural practices and languages are allowed to change over time. Yet if I was not raised with this person’s idea of racially appropriate cultural practices - presumably, precolonial or bust - then I am not “really” Native. This is the heart of the ideology of the people who choose to separate children from their parents at the border. Forcible transfer of children of one group to another group is legally considered genocide, even if no one dies. Who would have motivation to embrace that sort of racial thinking, and who might have reason to reject it?
Assimilation was policy due to the overwhelming numerical disadvantage encountered by the French, combined with the incredible sex disparity among French immigrant colonists. I cite Dr. Belmessous in emphasizing that these records are incomplete and biased towards recording only some marriages and births. This period precedes attempts to document “race” and the censuses conducted in the 1600s missed much of the settlement and ignored Europeans and Natives living outside the settlement. For this reason, I doubt the census of New France lists any of my ancestors as white, much less that it reliably captured all of them. Neither name nor religion nor French citizenship is a reliable proxy for “whiteness” or Europeanness in these records, due to assimilation and Frenchification. The French granted French citizenship, French names, and French religion to Natives en masse, for political, strategic, and evangelical reasons. We are also talking about a time period of about 2 centuries after the invention of the printing press and 2 centuries prior to the discovery of electricity. Many events went undocumented.
We do know that this community was very disproportionately seeded by the unions of Native mothers and French fathers. It was sown by Native mothers who intentionally left their tribes to live amongst the predominantly male colonists, as well as the rogue male French trappers and adopted French children who lived among the Natives, intermarrying back and forth, for centuries. Such women were later systematically stripped of Native identity by the genocidal Canadian government if they married outside of the tribe.
Leaving the tribe to live with the trappers was a departure from cultural practices that had males living with the wife’s mother’s family - a matrifocal family structure - but that does not mean they abandoned everything they had ever learned. Some French trappers, meanwhile, left the settlement to go live amongst their wives’ families, more in line with cultural practices of their wives. It was somewhat of a beaver free-for-all. We are now one people and share one blood and one history. We cannot be divided now, nor did the European half culturally erode the Native half. Nor will you carve any of our children from their mother’s line by saying they are too much like their father.
The commenter from Part 2 makes the assimilationist claim that if my ancestors participated in the assimilation project - if cultural practices evolved due to cultural merger - I mystically and irrevocably lost my connection to my ancestors’ ancestors. I am become francise. I have been civilized. This view of ancestors is wholly out of line with beliefs, attitudes, and practices towards ancestors that I was raised with. For more information, start here with
“The Universality of Ancestor Worship” by Steadman, Lyle B. et al. “The Iroquois represented the eastern woodlands of North America. Burland (1985:65) states that the Iroquois have "a great number of ancestral spirits. Not only did the ancestors watch over men in their daily activities, but they could also be visited in dreams." According to St. John (1989:136), "Iroquois both respect and fear the dead and therefore conduct a number of feasts for them."
The idea that anyone alive could prevent my ancestors from guiding their descendants or from knowing who their descendants were, is entirely foreign to me. The theory of racist ghosts is all the more bizarre. The ancestors have watched from then to now - not from the bosom of Abraham but from across the room and inside a dream. How would they not know? Which episode did they miss? What I know of Catholicism does not explain that belief pattern. I did not encounter Lutheranism until I was 11, and we joined the church solely so I could attend the school. My relationship with the Jesus spirit/ancestor was understood within this larger model of the other world, which I initially assumed everyone else shared. I had a series of experiences in school that taught me that other people did not have this other world-model superceding the Jesus part.
I have no native understanding of the monotheist perspective because I was not taught this as the truth, as a sufficiently young child. I took the Lutheran Confirmation class not out of religious fervor but because that was the behavior that achieved the goal of obtaining a mid-sermon snack. Yet I was taught before I could speak about spirits, ancestors, and the other world we were most connected to in dreams. “Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is older, he will not depart from it” was on a plaque in front of the Lutheran middle school I attended for 2 years. Truly, I have not departed from any good lesson I was taught about these spirits of the dead.
Complicating the matter of who is Native, who is Mohawk, etc., is the fact that the Iroquois are mildly infamous for a cultural practice known as mourning wars. A “mourning war” is essentially going to your neighboring town and yoinking someone to replace your dead relative. Such a person was held captive prior to being either executed or adopted into the tribe as a replacement family member. Adoption involved a religious conversion ritual whereby the spirit of the dead relative was believed to enter the body of the captive, and then after that point, the captive was that deceased person, and was now kin to their survivors. If we recognize tribal autonomy, we must respect that these genetically distinct individuals still became Iroquois when granted Iroquois citizenship, similar to how the Natives were made French.
Tribal sovereignty demands recognition that this sort of adoption be considered valid if the self-governance considers it valid. Such a woman’s children would then belong to the adopting tribe, though a genetic test might say otherwise. Is it impossible that a person could be claimed by the adopted lineage - specifically the spirits of the dead, who cannot be cross-examined by a secular government? Are we to believe that if all Iroquois women died, the ancestors in conjunction with the surviving male relatives would not be able to adopt replacements? That’s just the end of the Iroquois? We had a good run, guys, but we’ve hit a spiritual checkmate. And if the family is separated from the larger governance but has need to spiritually adopt, what then? Is the adoptee a reverse agunah, unable to obtain the religious approval, or can the family members in conjunction with the ancestors adopt anyway? It is my right as an American to interpret and practice my cultural spiritual system differently from other people including religious authorities as well as other religious denominations.
Following adoption, the surrogate was considered to house the spirit of the deceased relative. Mormon baptisms of the dead seem tame by comparison. I have spoken with at least one Native spiritualist who developed a belief in the inverse process. They came to understand a loved one’s brain injury to represent the spiritual departure of the loved one and a usurper spirit in their place. This was the reason the loved one was now different. In times of confusion, which challenge a person’s faith in the security of their positioning in this world, people fall back on what they were taught when they felt most safe. This creates a unique experience of the spiritual dimension to this sort of tragedy.
What are we to make of this? The commenter hegemonically presumes that there was a jump discontinuity somewhere in my mudblood pedigree, and at that point, my ancestors transmuted into pure whiteness ("white and delightsome” as the original Book of Mormon put it until 1981). In that moment, the spirits and the ghosts of the dead ceded the territory and stopped trying to contact the francised. They sold their stock in my life. Clearly, this is a religious conclusion that no secular authority outside of sovereign tribal jurisdiction has a right to enforce upon me, an American citizen with freedom of religion.
The racialists claim that the Native women themselves arrived at a point where their childhoods stopped influencing their behavior towards their children. They stopped teaching spiritual beliefs to their children. Their children recognized the superiority of colonizer culture and the foolishness of their Native mothers. The culture was put in a box and buried. We are to never speak its name, for fear of disturbing its decadence. French culture provided every lesson these mothers would need to teach their children. Native culture had nothing to add to French culture, because French culture was the civilized version of Native culture. It is a ludicrous, simplistic, and racist model of the past. We were never savages.
Proud to be a Remix Part 4: The Preoccupation with Purity