The Rise of the "Pretendian"

I'm shocked that people would game the system. OK, I'm not shocked; it's what people do. From The Other McCain: Fake Indian Syndrome

This paranoid obsession with identity has had the effect of incentivizing fraud, as in the notorious case of Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren, who spent years falsely claiming to be Native American in order to qualify as a “diversity” hire in academia’s affirmative action regime. Such cases are apparently common, as in the recent example of Kay LeClaire.

Click thru for the side-by-side photos of LeClaire from 2012 and 2021. The hubris is amazing.

Kay LeClaire started making a public spectacle of herself as an indigenous activist around 2017, claiming to have various ancestral claims to Native American identity, until some anonymous person on the Internet began researching her genealogy and determined that, in fact, LeClaire’s ancestry is German, Swedish and French Canadian. And, as I say, such “pretendians” are a proliferating phenomenon in academia, especially in Canada:

The size of the list from Canada is in part due to the push to get indigenous representation in college staffs. Claim "native status" and get a leg up on the competition, at least until you get caught.

And the US isn't immune. Like I said, gaming the system to get an advantage is what humans do. One way to do that today is to claim to be descended from the native population. Even though, as is noted in the linked post above, genealogy information is so readily available on the internet, it is hard to believe anyone could keep this ruse up for the long term.