From Apache To Cree To Mohawk, here are some great pretenders that never were.

In 1980, on a lunch break from our security guard gigs, I mentioned Iron Eyes Cody. “The crying Indian from the pollution commercial?” my Navajo lunch-mate asked, adding. “You know, he’s not really Indian. All the Indians know he’s Italian. But he represents us so well, with such dignity, that we won’t give him away.” Oh, sure, I thought. When Cody died 20 years later, news reports screamed, “Incredibly, Cody was not an Indian!” and around the country, Indigenous people replied, “Yeah, we knew that. Good guy.”

For centuries, many tribes have judged belonging not just based on DNA—sorry, Sen. Elizabeth Warren—but welcoming those who’ve proved themselves worthy in some way; hence the A Man Called Horse sub-genre. But there are signs that their patience is at an end, especially in Canada. That’s at least in part because thousands of Pretendians are trying to grab First Nation benefits like paying no gas sales-tax on the rez.

For her entire career, Oscar-winning singer and song-writer Buffy Sainte-Marie has been known as a Saskatchewan-born Cree. But a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation located her Massachusetts birth certificate, and while she claims to have been adopted, and told that her biological parents were First Nation, she has been removed from the prestigious Order of Canada. 

Back stateside, on Oscar night 1973, model and actress Sacheen Littlefeather became an overnight celebrity when, identifying herself as an Apache standing in for Marlon Brando, she refused his Godfather Oscar, because of “…the treatment of America Indians today by the film industry, on television, in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.” She was booed by some, applauded by many more. She later claimed six security guards had to restrain John Wayne from rushing the stage, an incident apparently no one else witnessed. She claimed to have been blacklisted as a result of that night, but she never had a billed performance before the incident; afterwards she was featured in four Westerns. Nearly 50 years later, in 2022, then-President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences David Ruben held a ceremony at the Academy Museum to apologize, saying in part, “The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified.”  In October of that year, she died, and before the end of the month, an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jacqueline Keeler, the very spearhead of the Pretendian exposure movement. According to Sacheen’s sisters, Rosalind Cruz and Trudi Orlandi, Sacheen was not Apache but White Mexican-American. They might have remained quiet, but they were furious that, in a new form of cultural appropriation, middle-class Sacheen had, for talking points, appropriated her father’s impoverished upbringing—and the parental physical abuse her father suffered—as her own.

A gifted writer, first-time novelist Forrest Carter became a best-seller overnight when Clint Eastwood bought and filmed The Outlaw Josey Wales. He followed it with The Education of Little Tree, his memoir of being raised by his Cherokee grandparents. He might have gotten away with this entirely fabricated autobiography, but an appearance on The Today Show led to his exposure not only as non-Native, but as Asa Carter, former speechwriter for segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, and one-time powerful Ku Klux Klan leader.

Perhaps the most positive Pretendian story is that of Archie Grey Owl, who in the 1930s became the face of the United Kingdom’s conservation movement. In 1999, Richard Attenborough cast Pierce Brosnan in his film Grey Owl, streaming everywhere, as Archibald Belaney, an English youth who sailed to Canada and reinvented himself as a half-Native trapper and guide. Archie’s Mohawk bride, Gertrude Bernard, convinced him to protect the beaver rather than trap it. They became a sort of living exhibit at Prince Albert National Park, and he toured England as a spellbinding spokesman for preserving wilderness. While his true origins were exposed at his passing—and yes, the Indigenous people already knew—in 1983 Gertrude was inducted into the Order of Canada for a lifetime of animal rights work, opposing the poisoning of wolves and fighting to ban leg-hold traps.