Guest Columnist María Elena Gaitán: Shape Shifting for Power
The UCLA Pretendian
SHAPE SHIFTING FOR POWER
“First they tried to get rid of us. Then they tried to assimilate us. And when all those things failed, they said, 'Well, if we can't get rid of you, we'll just become you.”
~Riley Yesno, Anishinaabe scholar and writer~
A Pretend Indian is a person who falsely claims to be indigenous. But Pretendianism is far more harmful than mere pretending. It is an act of colonial violence that has plagued Canada in the recent period, and also exists throughout the United States.
This stolen identity claim allows the race-shifter, mostly but not always a white person, to move from cultural appropriation to cultural identity theft, someone who takes advantage, benefits and steals the possibilities and opportunities intended for indigenous people, by passing as one.
In the U.S. we have seen this with people like Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who headed the Spokane NAACP and taught in Africana Studies, claiming to be African American but wasn’t. We saw it when Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Cherokee, a powerful white woman who benefitted from her false claim at Harvard Law School, but wasn’t, and we have seen singer/song-writer Buffy Saint-Marie claim to be Cree and Algonquin but isn’t.
Now in academia… meet UCLA Chicana Studies professor and graduate student advisor, Maylei Blackwell, who first claimed to be a Chicana scholar and later emerged as a two-spirit Cherokee oral historian scholar and healer …but isn’t.
Pretendians Defining Chicana Scholarship
Blackwell, who teaches and guides graduate students, first positioned herself as a “Chicana” scholar.
That’s how she introduced herself to me some 25 years ago, when she called me on the phone one day to demand a statement about a white feminist political event I attended as a Chicana activist student in 1971 in Houston Texas.
“Did you lead the walkout?” Blackwell demanded on the other end of the phone.
“Who are you, and why are you asking me?” I said.
“I’m a Chicana scholar writing about that Conference.” she answered. “Were you the one who led the Walk Out? I want to hear it from you for my book, and if you don’t tell me then I’ll just publish what I have without you.”
I could tell from Blackwell’s tone that she was daring me to defend the Walk Out she accused me of leading, an action she could’ve never understood because she’s not a Chicana, she has not lived the struggle. In fact, the Walk Out is a form of resistance that practically shut down the school system in East L.A. 3 years earlier in 1968, when high school students Walked Out demanding an end to discrimination against Mexican American students in schools. Their demands included bilingual education, the teaching of Mexican American culture and history and hiring more Mexican American teachers and administrators.
Some of the young women who went to the Houston Conference in 1971 were no doubt part of those Walk Outs or had supported and been politically forged by them. But decades later, this was Blackwell’s crude invitation for me to put my political life experience at the service of her first book, Chicana Power, a slogan she usurped for the title of the book upon which she has built her entire career, a book based on lazy research about an overblown event. I refused.
“The people who pretend to be us are not our allies, no matter how much they “respect” and “honour” and “help” through uplifting us through their good works. They are discrediting not only their own achievements but all of our achievements by making a mockery of the sacred…” ~K.J. McCusker~
Chicana Power — Fake it Till You Make It
Originally a highly criticized essay, Blackwell’s first book, Chicana Power is based on this 1971 Conference and has always been under suspicion for its inaccuracies and use of chisme and hearsay to defame and revile the over 300 Chicana student activists who protested the white feminist agenda imposed by the organizers. More than half of the Conference Walked Out in protest.
Years later, Blackwell would cast the protestors as retrograde villains in her book; according to her we were rude, inexperienced, backward and ungrateful. So Blackwell branded us as ‘Loyalists’, meaning we were Loyal to the men and to machismo, lackeys who could not think for ourselves. Las malas. At the same time, she anointed the ‘Feminists’, meaning those who didn’t walk out, those who stayed behind, those who approved the Conference resolutions, as visionaries. Las buenas.
Long before she self-identified as a Cherokee scholar, Blackwell’s mediocre research for the essay that became the book, caused Dr. Shirlene Soto, Chicana historian at CSUN, to point out the following:
• scholarscompass.vcu.edu Ethnic Studies Review Volume 26: 2
The strength of the essays varies considerably. For example, Maylei Blackwell’s essay on Chicana print culture falters in its effort to provide a balanced historical account. Accusations are repeated without adequate documentation. For instance in her discussion of the walkout at the 1971 Houston Mujeres por la Raza meeting, Blackwell reports that “several claim” that “the women who staged the walkout” were “sent” to Houston” by a certain faction of Chicano nationalists based in Los Angeles with whom the splinter group was affiliated”. Who were these women and what point is the author making? …
Reviewed by: Shirlene Soto California State University, Northridge
Blackwell, a non-Chicana, is the first academic to ever discredit and slander over 300 Chicana activists at a single event that she historicized and misrepresented to fit her own sectarian narrative about the false birth of Chicana feminism. But nothing could be further from the truth. This 1971 Conference was not the birth of Chicana feminism. It was the site of a messy ideological abortion, and Blackwell has the dubious honor of being the first ‘scholar’ to denigrate and devalue the hundreds of activist Chicanas who protested this attempt to usurp the voices of an entire movement by Walking Out and removing our bodies from the conference, refusing to participate.
The 1971 La Raza Women’s Conference
In Early May, over 600 Chicana student activists from all over the country, from the cities and from the fields, from the little and not so little towns, came to Barrio Magnolia, once called ‘Little Mexico,’ the largest Mexican settlement and oldest Barrio in Houston, Texas, to attend Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza, including me.
Through word of mouth and organizational relationships, we arrived in much larger numbers than they had dreamed of. Why? Because we were young women activists with greater mobility and resources than our mothers had ever known, and this allowed so many of us to communicate, travel and attend political activities in various parts of the country, including this Conference. This was the Chicano Movement, and we were in it.
Most importantly, we went because we responded to the expression Viva La Raza, meaning Long Live Our People, an active slogan of the Chicano Movement, that the organizers hijacked to announce a Conference that had nothing to do with the Chicano Movement. It had much more to do with the white feminist ideologies that were emerging from Europe and the Democratic Party at the time.
Using the expression La Raza in the Conference call, was both deliberate and naïve. It was certainly not intended only as a call to the Mexican American Democratic Party Ladies. Didn’t the conference organizers realize they could not just grab a Chicano Movement slogan like La Raza without calling to activist Chicanas?
What was their goal? To declare and publish a set of predetermined resolutions that would define Chicana feminism for all of us, whether we agreed to it or not, as if Chicana feminism could be born at one pinche YWCA conference. So, we showed up and all hell broke loose.
The TV news broadcaster who organized the Conference together with the YWCA, usurped La Raza (from ¡Viva La Raza!), an expression the YWCA didn’t even know how to spell until they hosted this event. The organizers were never part of the Chicano Movement. To the contrary, some, like Francisca Flores, were political activists and leaders in the Democratic Party, heavily influenced by the privileged white feminist ideologies of the time, including the influence of the National Women’s Political Caucus, (founded 2 months later), whose leadership included ex Playboy Bunny and CIA agent, Gloria Steinem, founder of MS Magazine.
More than 600 young activist Chicana students went to Houston at our own expense, expecting to participate in a Movimiento conference, not a conference where you had to RSVP or where they charged admission and had no place for you to sleep, a Conference where there were many white ladies walking about in suits and beehives.
We were in the Movimiento, organizing on many political fronts and already having internal discussions about birth control (since so many of us were on the pill) and women’s reproductive rights especially forced sterilization, a human rights violation many of us knew about because it had happened to women in our lives.
In the Movimiento, Chicanas made the trains run on time. We faced all the dangers, outside and inside of the Movimiento and put ourselves, our bodies and lives in peril any day of the week, on the picket line, fasting for justice, boycotting grapes and lettuce and any other product that came from the suffering of farm workers, facing police brutality and jail time, marching across the state and bearing witness to the conditions of our own people, often the poorest of all. We protested the Catholic Church as well as the war in Vietnam where Chicano men were dying in disproportionate numbers.
We fought for the freedom of political prisoners, including Ricardo Chavez Ortiz an extraordinary and humble Mexican working man in East L.A., a husband and father of four who had faced untold racist hardships and then one day he hijacked a jet with an unloaded pistol. His only demand? A chance to be heard, to address the Spanish-language media about the hardships he was facing as a Mexican immigrant.
We Chicana activists who protested the brutality of the militarized police force in our daily lives and the shitty racist public schools in our neighborhoods, We who established community health clinics and literacy programs including for people who were incarcerated, We who stood in front of Safeway asking customers to boycott non-union produce at the risk of being cursed and spit on, We who held press conferences and fought relentlessly for ethnic studies, who organized to demand that Cal State L.A. rename one of its buildings ‘Zapata Tower’ and for the establishment of a Chicano Studies Department I barely recognize today, We who were struggling for the establishment of a third political party El Partido de La Raza Unida, We who put our bodies and lives in danger for this and much more —were activist Chicana students, young and militant and caught up in the mass movements for peace, justice and self-determination that raged across the country, if not the world.
Some of us were boconas and peleoneras who always spoke out when we wanted to, although not without repercussions. And of course there was male supremacy in the Chicano Movement, especially but not exclusively in the military-like groups and in certain activist families. But weren’t the worst and most deadly forms of patriarchy already being practiced by white men, the ones who started wars and affected everyone’s lives with their racist, classist, sexist and oppressive policies and structures?
Didn’t we have a right to come to our own conclusions in our own time, about solutions to issues of gender inequality and reproductive rights including forced sterilization, a topic that the conference agenda refused to adopt? Didn’t we have a right to evolve our own political consciousness without white feminism being shoved down our throats by Democratic Party ideologues and the YWCA? Didn’t we deserve to be remembered as courageous, intelligent Chicanas who resisted white feminism and the YWCA (with its ridiculous albeit well intended 3-year plan to eradicate racism), rather than being dragged through the mud of Maylei Blackwell’s vulgar ambition, accused of being ‘Loyalists’ sent by the men, idiots who were ordered to disrupt this Conference.
On the last day, the Conference organizers prepared to approve resolutions that included matters of sexuality and family ties, issues that Chicanas had not yet taken up formally amongst ourselves as a Movement, even though Chicanas in certain groups were expressing issues of gender equality and respect from the men. At the conference, these issues were being driven by white feminism and were not only controversial and audacious, but politically and culturally offensive and divisive.
Yes, in fact I am the person who got up at the Conference to call for the Walk Out, a Walk Out that symbolized our rejection of an imposed racist, classist agenda, that excluded the local poor and working Mexican women in Magnolia, Houston’s oldest barrio, where the shiny new YWCA was located. Even journalist scholar Betita Martínez said the event had not dealt with the issues of poor and working women.
But I did not do this alone. Every day of the conference, the growing numbers of dissident Chicana activist students, notably from UCLA and Cal State LA, had been caucusing and worried about the disturbing agenda and resolutions at a YWCA hosted event, where our voices and opinions were being silenced. On the last day, I was asked by the dissident women to call for a Walk Out, we would boycott (another activist action) the imposed conference resolutions and agenda. So I did and it was an honor.
The Women of Barrio Magnolia
Over 300 Chicanas walked out of the air-conditioned YWCA and walked into Houston’s Barrio Magnolia. We gathered at the park across the street and spread out into the neighborhood, knocking door to door for about a 3–4 block radius. We introduced ourselves and invited the resident women of Barrio Magnolia to join us at the Park for a dialogue and encounter of our own. Una Plática. We told them the YWCA had organized a conference for women to which they had not been invited, and that we Walked Out when we found out. We wanted to know their names, their opinions about their lives, what they needed and how they felt as Mexican women living in Gringolandia, and they responded.
Soon after we knocked on their doors, the women of Barrio Magnolia came by the dozens with their babies and small children. They brought food, snacks and drinks and spoke with us at length about their own conditions of life, aspirations and problems, much of it rooted in poverty, and we listened. Some people took notes, but our mistake was in not being prepared to fully document our actions and the results of our community encounter, neither in published writing nor in photographs, because we had no idea this was going to happen, nor could we have guessed that years later a fake Chicana would create her own self-serving story about the hundreds of dissidents she discredited, while the ones who stayed at the conference and put their stamp of approval on the ‘feminist’ resolutions, were celebrated by Blackwell as the visionaries.
Las Desaparecidas
Another warped and grossly inaccurate article written and published about the 1971 Conference was by Mirta Vidal, a Eurocentric Argentine academic from the Socialist Workers Party coming from France, where the starting point of second-wave feminism was born. But Vidal failed to mention in her sectarian feminist description of the ill-fated event, that over one-half of the Conference attendees had walked out in protest! Instead, she put us in our place by writing an opinion piece titled WOMEN: New voice of La Raza, where she completely erased us from history. According to her, The Walk Out never happened, over 300 Chicana student activists were never there, never had a voice, we were disembodied, rendered mere absence and disappeared by Mirta Vidal.
The pretenders never pay the price of their actions: it’s always those who have supported them that do. Their lies disrupt an incredibly delicate balance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations — our infighting makes us look confused and weak. Playing Indian creates more prejudice and hostility…And we have to call it what it is: violence. It’s far worse than getting slapped in the face; the mockery of who we are is traumatizing because it continues to shake the foundation of our philosophy and spirituality. It creates fractures where we should be building, creating concordance and strength.
~K.J. McCusker~
Part II
Pretendians Defining Indigenous Scholarship
Most recently, Blackwell received a book prize from NAISA (Native American Indian Studies Association) — the premiere international & interdisciplinary professional organization for scholars, graduate students, independent researchers, and community members interested in all aspects of Indigenous Studies, for her latest book, Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Activism. But thanks to the Cherokee Scholars at NAISA, this summer they rescinded Blackwell’s book prize because “the author’s claims to Cherokee heritage are misleading and a misrepresentation of Cherokee norms of belonging. Therefore, the author’s misrepresentation of these norms casts doubt on the quality of the book for a Native American and Indigenous Studies audience.” In other words, Maylei Blackwell’s claims to Cherokee ancestry and ‘scholarship’ were rejected.
“NAISA Council has the ultimate authority to determine which works of academic scholarship are recognized with its publication awards.”
The NAISA revocation of her book prize and the challenge to her claims as a Cherokee person, were soon followed by an apology from the UCLA Chair of Chicana/Chicano and Central American Studies.
Message from the Chair
Faculty of the UCLA Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies offer our gratitude to the members and the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) for bringing to light that our colleague, Maylei Blackwell, has been misrepresenting herself as Cherokee. Upon receiving the news, we have taken this moment to learn and stand in solidarity with the Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. We recognize that Indigenous communities are diverse in their understandings and norms regarding membership, belonging, and citizenship; and we respect the sovereignty of the Cherokee whose norms of belonging are very clearly defined. Upon Blackwell’s admission, we are also reflecting on the multi-layered harms such misrepresentation has caused. Within our department, we are committed to supporting current and former students — some of whom chose to work with her precisely because they believed she was Indigenous — as they are especially affected. As we continue to grapple with questions around the layers of harm and possibilities for accountability, we look to Indigenous scholars’ work. We recognize their labor and contributions on these painful matters.
The apology was promptly taken down, followed by a public letter from an anonymous collective of over 20 Chicana/o and Central American UCLA Studies Graduate Students, calling for Maylei Blackwell’s resignation.
Mea Culpa: Shedding Pretendian Crocodile Tears
Less than a week before the NAISA announcement on August 5, 2024, when Blackwell already knew she was in hot water, she posted a damage control ‘Letter of Apology and Accountability’ on her website on July 31, 2024, in which she blames her own deceased white mother and family lore for her Pretendian life! Quite a statement for a self-identified feminist scholar and researcher, who never bothered to research her own ancestry until she was exposed.
She says:
“I very recently have come to question the story my mother told me about who I am. These existential questions have shaken the very Earth I stand upon and who I know myself to be in the world…This past spring of 2024, I started to do my own genealogical research. Through this process I eventually began to question my family’s claims to Cherokee ancestry. By July, the only evidence I had found was that my mother’s side of the family is white…I am not Cherokee, regardless of what I was told. I am taking responsibility for the harms I have caused by not investigating this claim earlier. I profoundly regret any harm my credulous acceptance of my family’s stories has caused. For these reasons, I have ceased identifying as a Cherokee descendant.” https://mayleiblackwell.com/ancestry/
Blackwell, neither Cherokee nor Chicana, as she claimed in our conversation years ago, has shapeshifted according to her personal needs, including the thousands of dollars in research grants and other resources and recognition she must have received as a Pretendian, while constructing a career by sowing seeds of discord and disunity, deepening conflicts among Chicanas and among Indigenous women, instead of providing dialogue and spaces for us to come together, to heal and grow — all of this while passing as ‘one of us’.
Pretendian Maylei Blackwell has made it her business to make us fit her narrow-whitewashed version of feminism, and she did this by going whole-hog shopping in our lives, in the intimacy of our spirituality and cultural practices, while she built herself a successful counterfeit career without any repercussions, until now.
Thanks to NAISA she has finally been revealed as a Pretendian, after rising through the ranks in academia falsely representing our voices, theorizing about our lives and political movements as Chicanas and Indigenous women, becoming a thought leader and positioning herself for academic recognition and a fat retirement plan with good health benefits at UCLA, based on lies.
And Now The Pretendian Defendians…
I never imagined how many sycophants and toadies would defend Blackwell’s Mea Culpa ‘Letter of Apology and Accountability’ when she posted it on her own Facebook page. Without ever bothering to mention that NAISA was revoking her book prize and rejecting her claims to Cherokee heritage, she conveniently described herself as the unsuspecting explorer and discoverer of her own fake identity. The professional researcher found out through her own initiative, then ‘shocked’ beyond words…announced to the world, that she is not Cherokee… just hours before the NAISA announcement.
I was flabbergasted to see the great majority of responses to her FB post that were consoling and expressed comforting reassurances of solidarity with the Pretendian professor, including a recent Chicana Mac Arthur Fellow who proudly declared “I stand with you,” putting the influence of her recent Genius Award at the service of a Pretendian. There were also responses by disoriented students, friends and fellow academics who (with few exceptions) went to great lengths to soothe the poor woman’s anguish, torment, suffering and victimhood. Pobrecita Maylei Blackwell. But not really.
“A key feature of structural racism in the U.S. in the historical and institutional siphoning of material wealth from indigenous people and other people of color and its redirection toward white individuals and families, communities and institutions, white race shifters thus serve white supremacy, no matter their liberal individual good intent…they are still complicit in the structural appropriation of resources from indigenous communities. Race shifters direct conversations away from the priorities of the indigenous collective.”
~ Dr. Kim Tallbear~
Why is Academia Such a Haven For Fakes?
The presence of Maylei Blackwell in the César E Chavez Chicana/Chicano and Central American Studies Department at UCLA, remains an abomination. Her false identity claims, her arrogance in discrediting and slandering hundreds of activist Chicanas at a political event that happened in 1971 (when Blackwell was a toddler); her damaging interactions with Indigenous women by setting up ideological confrontations while pretending to teach decoloniality, all the while knowing full well that gender has been understood in distinctly different ways across societies; these are forms of academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, academic fraud and lack of academic integrity bar none. She should immediately step down from a position that rightfully belongs to someone who has not committed violence and is not lying through their teeth about who they really are, to take advantage of what is not theirs.
After all the damages she has caused by conflating her fake indigenous ancestry with the real struggles of Chicanas and Native women of the Americas, after the damage to the students who studied under her, the ones who believed her claims to Cherokee ancestry and who used and cited her ‘scholarship’ in their own work, the ones who thought she was a two-spirit Cherokee healer, Blackwell leaves a trail of tears most recently expressed by UCLA graduate students who are now calling for her resignation.
Call them by Their True Name: Harmful Pretendian. (link)
Yes. Blackwell needs to step down after decades of misrepresenting our voices and stealing our stories, of defaming and slandering hundreds of young activist Chicanas while claiming to be an oral historian, causing and deepening divisions while being paid as a thought leader and institutional decision maker; while lying about her own Chicana and then Indigenous ancestry, someone who has posed and risen through the professional ranks through acts of settler colonial appropriation.
With honorable and significant exceptions, the field of Chicana Studies is lacking in sufficient serious (let alone inspirational) scholarly works to inform our lives and help us understand the world, not disorient and make us hate each other based on falsehoods. This void, this lack of solid academic research and publications about Chicanas was the perfect crack for a Pretendian to grow in.
It is disturbing to think of how many generations of unsuspecting Chicana and Chicano university students have been assigned to read Blackwell’s first book and been shaped by her deformed theories and corrupted feminist histories. Yet her racist, narrow, revisionist ideas have been fully capable of vilifying hundreds of Chicana activists, all because we refused to kowtow to white feminism at one YWCA hosted conference in 1971.
In effect, through her works, Blackwell’s career has been constructed by sowing seeds of discord and disunity, and deepening conflicts among Chicanas and among Indigenous women, instead of creating a theoretical space for us to cultivate unity and come together — all this while passing as ‘one of us’.
Not long ago, in her eagerness to impose her own settler colonial, sectarian, feminist beliefs based on totally mistaken norms of monism (the opposite of dualism), Blackwell held meetings of indigenous women in L.A. and during their dialogues, rather than magnifying an equitable and inclusive concept of feminism as a part of dual rights, under an ancestral cultural concept where the human being is a dual being, both female and male, instead Blackwell did the opposite.
Using her academic Pretendian credentials, she choreographed confrontational encounters between the different groups of indigenous women in an ongoing quest to impose her own Pretendian concept of ‘indigenous feminism,’ and then published her little well-funded experiment.
Based on her idea of what it means to be a ‘feminist’, what Pretendian Maylei Blackwell has done best over time, besides lying about her cultural identities, is to create and deepen dissent, weaponizing divisions among Chicanas and among Indigenous women across geographical borders, sowing and exploiting whatever differences may exist among us, dividing and labeling us according to her own settler colonial feminist academic views.
Blackwell has used academia to designate who are the good and acceptable Chicanas and Indigenous women, and who are the bad ones. Whose thoughts, behaviors and cultural practices are correct and forward thinking, and who is backward and out of it. She has stolen and reinvented stories, histories and cultures for her own benefit to position herself as the expert of us, when in fact she is an outsider who is reinforcing and escalating difference, so she can referee the battles from the comfort of her Ivory Tower. In the meantime, she grabs more grants, resources and sycophants, to do settler colonial academic work by continuing to build recognition and fabricate intellectual authority.
As she continues to build her career on the backs of Chicanas and Indigenous women, the question of how she got there is central. While there is no doubt Blackwell has pushed her way into and violated our most intimate cultural and spiritual spaces, how did she get there? UCLA hired her.
The University of California must stop hiring Pretendians because Blackwell is not the only one. Have the Regents ever discussed policies and procedures to address this abuse of power and unethical behavior? Is there any guidance or rules crafted in consultation with NAISA about how to approach the matter? Without guidelines, the Maylei Blackwells will continue to travel through our worlds, our customs, realities, suffering and historic traumas, usurping our identities and shape shifting like colonial settlers on an ideological rampage snapping photos and taking notes along the way. . . because no one made them prove their false claims.
Maylei Blackwell has used academia well, including the guidance of her internationally respected thesis advisor, Angela Davis, and the mentorship of the esteemed Chicana scholar and publisher, Norma Alarcón. In the meantime, more grants, more awards, more resources and recognition have been garnered to do Settler Colonial Academic Wanna Be Two-Spirit Healer work, intellectually violent, spiritually and materially abusive, and profoundly damaging in the end.
________________________________
Sincere thanks, respect and appreciation to all the people who I learned from and/or who spoke with me or shared resources to help me render this complex narrative, most especially to NAISA and the Cherokee Scholars without whom we would still be in the dark; to the memory of Dr. Shirlene Soto and the beloved Betita Martinez; and to the UCLA graduate students collective from the Chicana/Chicano and Central American Studies, who had the courage to take a position in solidarity with the Cherokee People, calling for Maylei Blackwell to step down from her unmerited position as a UCLA scholar.
Many thanks to Dr. Kathryn Sophia Belle and La Belle Vie writing community that has held me up and given me courage to say what I said.
Finally, sincere thanks to Em Sedano and La Bloga for sharing this essay.
Meet María Elena Gaitán
 |
| foto: Misha Erwitt |
María Elena Gaitán is a writer, translator/interpreter, musician, performance artist, teacher and truth-teller from the People’s Republic of East L.A. The topic of this essay will appear in a chapter in her upcoming memoir.
