Category: The American Spectator
Here are North America’s top 5 fake Indians
The post-colonial grievance industry successfully infected the worlds of academia, entertainment, and politics over the past century with its anti-Western brand of revisionist victim politics. As a result, various middling individuals who were not personally injured by perceived historical injustices found it possible and even lucrative to exploit the guilt of the faultless many.
Following the recent revelation that the Sacramento native dubbed by Canadian state media as “one of the most influential indigenous writers and scholars of his generation” was never an Indian to begin with, Blaze News has finalized its top-five list of fake Indians in North America.
1. Thomas King
Since obtaining his doctorate in English/American studies from the University of Utah in the late 1980s, Sacramento-born Thomas King has made his supposed Cherokee heritage the center of his identity and output.
He taught native studies courses across the United States and Canada; lectured extensively on the subject of Native American identity, rights, history, and grievances; penned numerous books on theme, including “The Inconvenient Indian,” “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative,” and “A Short History of Indians in Canada”; had a comedy radio show on Canadian state radio where he periodically mocked white people and their supposed misconceptions about Indians; and spent decades engaged in Indian-related political activism.
For his efforts, King has been showered with numerous lucrative awards — including the National Aboriginal Achievement Award — and government grants. He was not only made a member of the Order of Canada but promoted to companion of the Order of Canada for exposing “the hard truths of the injustices of the indigenous peoples of North America.”
The 82-year-old writer turns out to have been of European stock all along.
Late last month, King, whose mother’s side of the family is Greek, told the Globe and Mail that in a Nov. 13 meeting with the director of the North Carolina-based Cherokee group Tribal Alliance Against Frauds and a supposedly Indian professor at the University of British Columbia, he was confronted with genealogical evidence indicating there was no Cherokee ancestry on either side of his family.
RELATED: The campus left’s diversity scam exposed in 30 seconds flat
Thomas King, an influential writer of European heritage. Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.
“I didn’t know I didn’t have Cherokee on my father’s side of the family until I saw the genealogical evidence,” said King. “As soon as I saw it, I was fairly sure it was accurate. It’s pretty clear.”
‘Indians don’t cry.’
King indicated he had previously heard rumors that he was not an Indian but that nothing came of them.
“No Cherokee on the King side. No Cherokee on the Hunt side. No Indians anywhere to be found,” King subsequently noted in an op-ed. “At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.”
2. Iron Eyes Cody
The group Keep America Beautiful’s iconic “Crying Indian” anti-litter public service announcement, which debuted on television in 1971, shows a supposed Indian, Iron Eyes Cody, dressed in beaded moccasins and buck-skin attire paddling his canoe down a river, past a dockyard, and onto a beach covered in garbage, where he sheds a tear at the sight of a vehicle passenger throwing a paper bag full of fast food out a car window.
This was hardly the first or only time Cody wore his feathers in front of cameras.
Iron Eyes Cody with President Jimmy Carter. Getty Images.
Cody, who the New York Times indicated initially resisted doing the commercial because “Indians don’t cry,” played an American Indian in numerous movies, engaged in Indian-related activism, and long maintained that he was the genuine article.
Although Cody claimed he was born in Oklahoma territory to a Cherokee Indian father and a Cree mother, he was in fact the son of Italian immigrants, Francesca Salpietra and Antonio DeCorti, who arrived in the U.S. two years before his birth in Louisiana. His original name was Espera DeCorti.
According to Snopes, he changed his name from DeCorti to Cody after moving to Hollywood in the 1920s and began masquerading as an American Indian.
3. Sacheen Littlefeather
Sacheen Littlefeather, Marlon Brando’s stand-in at the 1973 Academy Awards, refused the Oscar for Best Actor on behalf of the “Godfather” star, citing “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry … and on television in movie re-runs, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”
RELATED: No more stiff upper lip: My fellow Brits are fed up with ‘diversity’
Sacheen Littlefeather. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.
Throughout her life, Littlefeather claimed that she was an Apache Indian. Her sisters revealed, however, that Littlefeather, who died in October 2022, was the daughter of a Spanish-American and a woman of European descent.
The activist’s real name was Marie Louise Cruz.
‘Being Native American has been part of my story, I guess.’
Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Navajo Nation who undertook genealogical research for Cruz’s sister, reportedly found that “all of the family’s cousins, great-aunts, uncles, and grandparents going back to about 1880 (when their direct ancestors crossed the border from Mexico) identified as white, Caucasian, and Mexican on key legal documents in the United States.”
4. Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie is an Academy Award-winning folk singer who has claimed Native American heritage since the early 1960s.
In her agitprop and activism, Sainte-Marie has spoken from what Teen Vogue called an “indigenous perspective,” repeatedly condemning colonization and referring to America’s founding and the supposed erasure of American Indians as “genocide.” She also has touted herself as a “survivor” of an allegedly racist government welfare program that placed certain Native American kids in foster homes.
After five decades of claiming to have Indian heritage — at one stage claiming she was a “full-blooded Algonquin Indian,” at another that she was “half-Micmac by birth,” and finally that she was Cree, born on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan — she was outed by Canadian state media as a fraud.
Documents obtained by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, including her birth certificate, revealed that Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts; that her original name was Beverly Jean Santamaria; and that her parents were Albert and Winifred Santamaria, who were of Italian and English backgrounds, respectively.
The singer’s sister stated, “She’s clearly not indigenous or Native American.”
Sainte-Marie, who like Thomas King had been made a member of the Order of Canada, had her membership revoked after it was revealed she was another fake Indian. She was also stripped of her Juno Awards and Polaris Music Prizes, although she was reportedly able to keep the substantial cash prizes they came with.
5. Elizabeth Warren
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is another affluent liberal woman who masqueraded for decades as an American Indian for apparent personal gain, going so far as to contribute five recipes to a 1984 cookbook characterized as “recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families” called “Pow Wow Chow.“
Warren told reporters in 2012, “Being Native American has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born.”
While working at the University of Texas School of Law, Warren not only claimed “American Indian” status on her State Bar of Texas registration card but listed herself in the Association of American Law Schools annual directory as a minority law professor. Since she did not bother correcting her minority identification after the release of the 1986-1987 edition, it appeared that way in the next eight editions, reported the Boston Globe.
Just after she began formally identifying as a minority in the late 1980s, Warren landed a full-time job offer from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Three years after securing the job, university records reportedly indicated that Warren leaned on the university to ensure that her ethnicity was listed as “Native American” instead of “white.”
Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
UPenn’s April 2005 Minority Equity Report clearly lists Warren was a “minority.” According to the Boston Globe, for at least three of the years Warren taught at the law school, she was listed as the solitary American Indian female professor.
In the 1990s, Warren moved on to work at Harvard Law School, which was sure to note her supposedly Indian heritage. The Globe indicated that Harvard Law School used Warren’s fake minority status to justify not hiring more minorities.
‘I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as native my whole life.’
In 2018, President Donald Trump, who had long derided Warren as “Pocahontas,” challenged the senator to get a DNA test to prove she was Native American. The test results came back showing that she was only 1/1,024th Native American if at all.
When Warren ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020, over 200 Cherokee and other Native Americans signed an open letter to the senator noting, “Whatever your intentions, your actions have normalized white people claiming to be native, and perpetuated a dangerous misunderstanding of tribal sovereignty. Your actions do not exist in a vacuum but are part of a long and violent history.”
Dishonorable mentions
Among the others who have benefited greatly from pretending to be Indians are:
- Jamake Highwater was an award-winning writer and journalist who penned over 30 books, including “Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey” and “The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America,” usually from an American Indian perspective. Highwater led the public to believe that he was born to an illiterate Blackfoot mother and a Cherokee father, who dumped him in an orphanage, where a couple in Southern California picked him up and raised him. However, Assiniboine activist Hank Adams and Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson exposed Highwater as another fraud. Highwater’s original name was Jackie Marks. He was apparently the Jewish son of a Russian mother and a father of Eastern European descent who worked as an actor in Hollywood.
- Elizabeth Hoover is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who long claimed to be of Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent. Hoover admitted in May 2023, “I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as native my whole life.” The Berkeley professor confirmed that had she not been “perceived as a native scholar,” she may not have received some academic fellowships, opportunities, and material benefits. Despite admitting to causing harm and benefiting from her fraudulent identity, she did not resign.
- Heather Rae is an award-winning producer who served on the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Indigenous Alliance and previously led the Sundance Institute’s Native American program. She was accused by the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds in 2023 of lying about being Cherokee. Rae told the Hollywood Reporter in a puff piece that appeared to vex the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, “I think there’s a lot of nuance to this identity.”
- Joseph Boyden is a prominent Canadian novelist who was regarded at one point as “arguably the most celebrated indigenous author in Canadian history.” His writing largely centered on Indian characters and their experiences. Boyden, the recipient of numerous awards and grants, claimed over the years that there was Métis, Mi’kmaq, Ojibway, and/or Nipmuc blood in his family’s mix. In one instance, when buying a significant portion of land, he reportedly claimed to be Metis and showed a photocopied tribal card. When he was first exposed as another fraud in 2016, he claimed that his family’s Indian roots had been “whitewashed” due “to the destructive influences of colonialism.” While Boyden later admitted he was a “white kid from Willowdale,” he maintained that he had “native roots” on his Irish Catholic father’s side as well as on his mother’s side.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Leftist war on pro-life pregnancy centers faces Supreme Court reckoning
Women across America want real choices. Unfortunately, pro-abortion advocates have spent decades determining what “choice” women should want — while attacking pregnancy resource centers that offer women what they need.
For the past three decades, it has been my privilege to serve as a volunteer and board member at Aid for Women, a network of pregnancy centers and maternity homes in Illinois. The success of pregnancy resource centers like ours in offering women genuine support and resources has made us targets for pro-abortion smear campaigns, lawfare, and even physical attack.
Pro-abortion activists don’t seem to care if women, children, and families are cut off from the support they need.
On Dec. 2, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that perfectly encapsulates the targeting and harassment organizations like ours have suffered for years.
The case, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, will determine whether the New Jersey attorney general can arbitrarily demand private donor lists and other confidential information from First Choice Women’s Resource Center without cause.
It’s critical that the Supreme Court rule favorably toward First Choice Women’s Resource Centers and send a warning to those targeting pro-life work nationwide.
Pro-abortion attacks on pregnancy resource centers have escalated in recent years.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, pro-abortion radicals unleashed a summer of rage that included physical violence on nearly 100 pregnancy resource centers nationwide. These attacks were shocking to those of us stepping up to meet the need post-Dobbs, especially after fresh polling revealed that 60% of post-abortive women said they would have preferred to parent if they had more resources and support.
We were baffled why anyone would want to cut off support networks for women, many of whom clearly wanted to choose life, at a time when increased limits on abortion made our work more essential than ever. Even in blue states that do not have a single restriction on abortion, pro-abortion politicians have striven to strangle our support networks and shut us down.
Those of us at Aid for Women felt each of these attacks personally. Even still, we had no idea that we would soon experience pro-abortion “rage” firsthand.
This past August, our center staff served countless babies and moms, oblivious to the Democratic National Convention that was being held in our state.
At that convention, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ Democrat nomination acceptance speech fearmongered about President Trump’s abortion agenda, alleging that Trump and his allies would endanger women and their rights.
Just hours later, one of Aid for Women’s Chicago pregnancy centers was badly vandalized, with doors cemented shut and red paint thrown on the windows, graffiti reading, “Fake Clinic! The dead babies are in Gaza.” The political vitriol from the DNC undoubtedly inspired the physical attack on our center.
Unfortunately, the vandals only succeeded in hurting the very women they claim to champion.
The following day, a dozen pregnant mothers who had booked prenatal appointments at Aid for Women were unable to be seen by the organization’s physician and nurse practitioners due to the vandalism. Dozens more could not visit to pick up the diapers, formula, infant and maternity clothing, and household supplies that Aid for Women provides — all free of charge and all without any government assistance. Every service and item given to pregnant women is provided through the generosity of donors.
RELATED: The FDA’s deadly betrayal of pro-life America
STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
What those attacking our center failed to realize is that many of our clients live below or just skimming the poverty line. Some have housing insecurity. And their inability to access our center for the care that they needed likely affected them dramatically.
Unfortunately, pro-abortion activists don’t seem to care if women, children, and families are cut off from the support they need.
As we approach oral arguments in First Choice Women’s Resource Center, Inc. v. Platkin, the attacks on centers like ours serve as a powerful reminder that those offering alternatives to abortion have become punching bags of abortion extremists that will do anything to stop lifesaving work and promote abortion.
For example, the New Jersey attorney general is alleged to have singled out First Choice Women’s Resource Center because of its pro-life and Christian views. New Jersey officials allegedly have spent months harassing First Choice with crippling administrative requirements, threatening legal sanctions if the organization refused to produce private donor records and other private information — all of which is confidential to protect those involved from the very real threat of pro-abortion retribution.
Compounding this injustice was the shocking truth that New Jersey officials did not have a just cause for this burdensome lawfare and still have not submitted any evidence of wrongdoing by First Choice or any of its associates.
Despite this, donors and volunteers engaging in charitable work face the possibility of intimidation and retribution for putting their money — and their time — where their mouths are.
It’s critical that the Supreme Court end this unfair lawfare against First Choice and draw a line to stop pro-abortion attacks on pregnancy resource centers once and for all.
Cory Booker Obtains Female Wife in Boost to 2028 White House Bid
Cory Booker married a female woman over the weekend, closing the book on idle speculation about a man often described as “the Leonardo DiCaprio of American politics.” The Democratic senator from New Jersey wed his recently acquired fiancée, Alexis Lewis, at an intimate ceremony in Washington, D.C., over the weekend. The move satisfies a major public relations need for Booker and arrives with exquisite timing as he prepares to launch his 2028 presidential campaign.
The post Cory Booker Obtains Female Wife in Boost to 2028 White House Bid appeared first on .
Pritzker Rhetoric
“Pritzker Rhetoric,” editorial cartoon by Yogi Love for The American Spectator on Dec. 1, 2025.
The Spectator P.M. Ep. 173: Portland Debuts Bizarrely Woke ‘Tree Lighting’ Ceremony
Instead of having a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, participants at a Portland celebration made an effort to avoid mentioning the…
From The Bacchae to the ‘No Kings’ Rallies
In an ancient Greek play, a deluded woman carries the head of a Greek King onto the stage, whom she…
Hugh Sidey: The Last Honest Chronicler of the White House
It was 20 years ago on November 21, 2005, that Hugh Sidey died at age 78 while vacationing in Paris….
America, Please Put Some Pants On
Somerset Maugham once said that the well-dressed man is the one whose clothes you never notice. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean…
Truly, Spectacularly Stupid Purchases This Black Friday
One of the most fascinating things about capitalism is that you’re free to buy stupid things. You can buy millions…
The New York Times , Kristof, and the Ethics of War Reporting
Nicholas Kristof’s recent response to his readers regarding his Gaza coverage reveals troubling patterns in contemporary journalism’s approach to the…
