See also: Another Fake Indian Princess Professor
An interesting question is why such a disproportionate fraction of affirmative action cheaters in this century have been women.
Let’s focus on whites who claim American Indian status: Pretendians. Was the gender gap always like this?
I don’t think so. American Indian culture tended to be extremely masculine. So in the past it appealed more to guys than to gals, who were more likely to pretend they were French, the most female-appealing culture par excellence.
iSteve commenter Ennui observes:
Chuck Norris claimed to have experienced discrimination due to his native blood. So did Burt Reynolds.
In fact, it was a part of the Walker, Texas Ranger plot, experiencing some adversity due to native blood.
I haven’t looked into the validity of their claims. Norris was born in Oklahoma and his father had a binge drinking problem, so it’s hardly ludicrous. (By the way, several of my classmates in elementary school took karate lessons from Chuck at the Chuck Norris Karate Studio on Ventura Boulevard.)
But the point is that it was cool to be seen as a little Indian. Being descended from ultra-masculine Indian braves was part of a badass rebel image, since it didn’t come with tangible affirmative action benefits. It was cool, but it didn’t help get you tenure.
Now, it’s socially beneficial, so it doesn’t fit within a masculine code of honor to use some tenuous claim to being Native American to get affirmative action. You can’t write a Chuck Norris joke about Chuck claiming to be a little bit Indian to get hired by Cal State Northridge as an ethnic studies professor.
In recent years, the main DNA testing companies have reported very few whites (or blacks) as having noticeable Amerindian ancestry relative to the number who claim it.
Being part Indians was long glamorous. For example, for three generations, it was believed that two members of the Baseball Hall of Fame were substantially Indian, pitcher Chief Bender and outfielder Zach Wheat.
Bender was clearly part Indian (although probably less than half), having grown up on an Indian reservation and attended the Carlisle Indian school, where Jim Thorpe was later a student.
Wheat was for over a century assumed to have had a Cherokee mother, but the Society of American Baseball Researchers recently explained:
However, Wheat did deny it in his own words in September 1916. In the interview – which called him unusually talkative that day – Wheat pleaded, “And say, will you please say for me that I am not an Indian? They have been calling me a Cherokee so long that I almost believe it myself. My nationality is American of Scotch-Irish descent. They started calling me ‘The Indian’ for a nickname when I played with Shreveport and Mobile before I came to Brooklyn in 1909. It has got so that a lot of people really believe that I am an Indian.”
My assumption is that while there has been some genetic interchange between Indians and Scots-Irish, over the last several hundreds years there has been more even more cultural interchange.
For example, a late in-law of mine from West Virginia believed he was part Indian.
Was he? I dunno. Maybe, maybe not. But perhaps it helped him deal with the demands of his job for decades in the Navy as a nuclear reactor technician tending the powerplants of boomer subs at the bottom of the ocean.
I’m part Scottie from Star Trek, part Crazy Horse, so I can deal with this.
