From Indianz:
Three men who created a fake tribe at an Arby’s restaurant are guilty of violating federal racketeering laws, a judge ruled last week.
The “Wampanoag Nation, Tribe of Grayhead, Wolf Band” and its founders filed numerous legal claims against officials in Utah. The targets responded with a countersuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations [...]
From Alternet:
Last month, it was revealed that the New York Times and Manhattan publishing world were deceived by Love and Consequences, a faked memoir by a white girl who claimed to live the life you only hear about in Dr. Dre songs. The damage control was so good, the book never saw daylight, and we [...]
Here are the materials in US v. Refert, an Eighth Circuit case affirming the conviction of a woman convicted of impersonating an Indian for purposes of receiving health care.
CA8 Opinion
Appellant Brief
Appellee Brief
From Slate:
In 1930, shortly after the studio release of his movie The Silent Enemy, Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Indian identity began to crumble. He was a celebrity by that time, having boxed Dempsey and dated movie stars, but he was not, it turned out, a full-blooded Blackfeet Indian who had been [...]
From the NYTs:
In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.
The problem is that none of it is true.
The District of Utah has a few of these cases involving people claiming to be members of the “Wampanoag Nation, Tribe of Grayhead, Wolf Band,” trying to hide behind federal Indian law in order to avoid federal and state regulation. This one is called Burbank v. United States District Court of Utah. It involves a [...]
Ethnic Fraud?
Tribal scholars say some faculty are falsely claiming American Indian heritage to boost their job prospects.
By Mary Annette Pember
From Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
For American Indian scholars, securing a job in higher education can sometimes be as simple as checking a box. Most of the country’s colleges and universities [...]
From reznet:
The Education of Oprah Winfrey
By Hillel Italie
NEW YORK (AP) — Oprah Winfrey has pulled a discredited children’s book, Forrest Carter’s “The Education of Little Tree,” from a list of recommended titles on her Web site, blaming an archival “error” for including a work considered the literary hoax of a white supremacist.
“The archived listing was [...]
From the Lincoln Journal Star:
A Texas judge issued a permanent injunction Monday prohibiting an unrecognized American Indian tribe and its self-proclaimed chief from selling tribal memberships in an alleged scam to defraud illegal immigrants by falsely claiming the documents would provide protection from deportation.
District Judge Noe Gonzalez ruled that Malcolm Webber and his Wichita-based Kaweah [...]
A few years ago, I saw a presentation by an FBI agent based out of Bismarck, North Dakota in which he described how many of the survivalist, tax protester-type of virulent anti-government “citizens” had gone way underground after 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act. A couple years later, some of them reappeared as Indians and [...]
