Still processing the information
Early in 2020, an Indigenous artist urged the owners of a new music venue in [Madison] to change its name.
It was called The Winnebago, after the street on which it stands. Many Indigenous people and allies let the owners know that wasn’t the best name for a white-owned music venue. One of them was nibiiwakamigkwe, also known as Kay LeClaire, a founding member and co-owner of the queer Indigenous artists’ collective giige, and budding leader of Madison’s Indigenous arts community.
I don’t think it’s all that clear that using indigenous names is bad if you’re not indigenous. You could be promoting awareness of indigenous culture, which could be not bad, it seems to me.
Anyway the owners eventually changed the name.
“I’m glad the owners have decided to no longer profit from the identities of Indigenous peoples,” LeClaire wrote in an editorial for Our Lives Wisconsin. “I’m glad the name is going, but I’m not happy the institutions that allowed it to be stolen in the first place remain. For over 500 years, Indigenous Peoples have not controlled our narratives and representations. Our exclusion has been built into inclusion for others.”
But there’s a catch: she’s not indigenous. It’s one of those stories.
Since at least 2017, Kay LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. Additionally, they identify as “two-spirit,” a term many Indigenous people use to describe a non-binary gender identity. In addition to becoming a member and co-owner of giige, LeClaire earned several artists’ stipends, a paid residency at the University of Wisconsin, a place on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force and many speaking gigs and art exhibitions, not to mention a platform and trust of a community – all based on an ethnic identity that appears to have been fully fabricated.
Not to mention being “non-binary”/”two-spirit” while also being on a missing and murdered women task force.
LeClaire made an evasive “statement”:
“I am sorry,” they wrote. “A lot of information has come to my attention since late December. I am still processing it all and do not yet know how to respond adequately. What I can do now is offer change. Moving forward, my efforts will be towards reducing harm by following the directions provided by Native community members and community-specified proxies. Currently, this means that I am not using the Ojibwe name given to me and am removing myself from all community spaces, positions, projects, and grants and will not seek new ones. Any culturally related items I hold are being redistributed back in community, either to the original makers and gift-givers when possible or elsewhere as determined by community members. Thank you.”
Given to her by whom, one wonders. She was asked, but answer came there none, nor did she specify what “information” came to her attention.
LeClaire graduated from Hamilton High School in Sussex, Wisconsin, where they were known as Katie Le Claire, in 2012 (despite later telling a Capital Times reporting intern that they were raised in Northern Wisconsin). They apparently attended the University of Wisconsin and in the summer of 2018 married fellow Hamilton alum Adam Pagenkopf, a research specialist at UW.
What pronouns does Adam Pagenkopf use??? We’re not told.
It’s not yet known exactly how much money LeClaire made by claiming Indigenous heritage, but it’s clear they worked their way into many institutions and exhibitions.
Which is very bad if the institutions are indigenous and you’re not, but stunning and brave if the institutions are female and you’re not.
Why is that?
She likely could have “passed” as Metis but the fact that she didn’t even know much about their history when asked about it is even more astonishing if she made the claim. They are fairly important to the history of the region I grew up in. Louis Riel’s story is well-known as a leader of their attempts to gain rights in both Canada and the U.S.
‘Kay LeClaire, a founding member and co-owner of the queer Indigenous artists’ collective giige,’
Giige’s web page is down, but Google plucks the following lines from it:
‘Queer and Native American owned tattoo shop and artist collective in Madison, WI.’
‘is an Indigenous and queer owned and operated collective in …’
Nothing left for satire.
Adding to the Cultural Appropriation pile is the unauthorized use of “two spirit” by people trying to show that trans people “have always existed.”
https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/toward-an-end-to-appropriation-of-indigenous-two-spirit-people-in-trans-politics-the-relationship-between-third-gender-roles-and-patriarchy/
That said, the word “Winnebago” is very popular in Wisconsin. I don’t live far from Lake Winnebago, and Winnebago campers (though headquartered in Iowa) are a common sight. It was the name of the street the music store was on. Complaining about it just seems like stretching. Had the opposite situation been true — white settlers erasing virtually all references to American Indian names or cultures — this would have seemed a more egregious sin.
Everything must be forcibly teamed, so here’s another story from Madison about that.
There’s more of the same, but that’s quite enough. My grandmother in the 1930s ran a 40 acre farm in Missouri while her husband worked whatever job he could and grew food for people with the help of my four year old mom and her seven year old sister. They could tell you a few things about real hard work, isolation, and resilience too.
So this fawning bit of fluff about queer farming is just so much bull, as they used to say around the farm back then. It also smacks of the sort of “magic” indigenous thinking that the woke supposedly decry when it’s white cis-normative folk doing it, but heaven forfend they do as they say themselves.
This story reminds me of the news item that peaked me with respect to wokeism. I’m not sure if I have all details correct as it has been 10-12 years, but… an American museum hosted a Japanese culture event, with kimonos the for visitors to wear while they browsed, shouted down by the usual noisy ones as cultural appropriation. The event was promoted by Japanese people as an international cultural outreach effort and the kimonos were the genuine article rather than some cheap knockoff, but the shouters were adamant that not even Japan gets to give the okay to such an event.
It will not surprise any to learn many of the shouters were not Asian, and many of the Asian shouters were not Japanese.
Anyway, something caught my eye and suddenly I have a new pet peeve. The article says ” One of [the Indigenous people and allies] was nibiiwakamigkwe”. Okay, nibiiwakamigkwe is a name? Why does it not start with a capital letter? I can predict the answer: the language from which this name originates does not capitalise names / does not have capital letters in its alphabet at all, therefore we must follow this linguistic rule for all names from that language.
But that’s not how transliteration works. When converting the sound of a word from one language to another, you represent those sounds as well as the destination alphabet and its phonology permit, and then you treat the word with the rules of that destination language. That means in this case, capitalising the N of nibiiwakamigkwe.
And I can hear the counter-yelling already. That’s cultural or linguistic imPEEEERealism!!!! and I am a cruel oppressor for even suggesting transported words should have different rules in other languages. Or perhaps only if the other language is English; I am certain that if my name was transliterated into that language, I would not be accommodated if I were to insist on a capital H (equivalent) in that language.
J.A., that article looks like it can be condensed down to ‘not all farmers are straight white and Christian’. Amazing, you don’t say, this is my surprise face etc.
If Katie was born female, and is married to a born male, how is it she/he/they/??? is queer? Because queer doesn’t really have any meaning, anyone can claim it. And all the honors and privileges that go with it, usually at the expense of women (though if she/he/they/??? is a woman, perhaps not so much other than normalizing the ridiculous farce of gender delusions).
Holms @ 5, I wrote about the kimono nonsense here, it was more recent than 10 or 12 years ago. I’ll find it, wait a second…
Not here but FTB – I thought it was post-rift but it was just before rift.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/07/everyday-kimonoism/
Interesting. (To me anyway.) My view on it was as ambivalent as my view on using an indigenous name is on this post.
Oh and here’s Papito making the same analogy in 2020:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/guest-post-appropriation-or-flattery/
Re Holms @5,
Of course most indigenous languages weren’t written down until westerners came along, adapting the Roman alphabet to the phonology. In many (perhaps most) such cases it was Christian missionaries who did the dirty work, so that they could translate the Bible for the poor illiterate heathens.
That’s some heavy cosplay right there in those pictures.
One question that jumps out to me: did she darken her skin? It looks a lot like she darkened her hair and her eyebrows. Did she darken her skin too? That’s beyond pretendian.
You think the German-Americans will have her back?
One thing that jumped out at me in the article:
Why the parentheses around “them” and “person”? That suggests that Goforth used other words there; perhaps the verboten “her” and “woman”. It’s highly dishonest to replace the words a person used like that when quoting them, and the replacement of “woman” (if that’s what they did) changes Goforth’s meaning. As she makes clear when they use her own words, she’s interested in helping young women specifically, not young people in general.
Translation: I got caught doing a Dolezal.
Look on the bright side; now you get to join the ranks of “Grey Owl” and “Iron Eyes Cody,” among others.
Every treatment of cultural appropriation I’ve seen has left me thinking that, like trans and non-binary, the concept is intentionally squirrelly so as to allow maximal use of motte-and-bailey, bait-and-switch rhetoric. That’s not to say that there’s nothing to it: the motte is by definition an uncontroversial position.
Here’s a question that’s made for some fun pub conversation: what qualifies one as native or indigenous?
I’m not sure there’s an answer that includes those currently called such and excludes those who aren’t, at least not while being intuitively satisfying.
There are “official” definitions having to do with tracing ancestry and registering with tribes (and tribes registering with the federal government). That answer has generally bothered me, because it puts a higher value on family tree than on cultural familiarity.
” what qualifies one as native or indigenous?”
I am descended from someone who migrated from England to the Massachusetts area in 1640 something. That’s far enough back that I wouldn’t be startled to learn that a First Nations person married into my line of descent somewhere along the way.
If that turned out to be the case I don’t think that would really qualify me as native. Certainly I am not culturally First Nations except to the extent that Canadian culture generally adopted such things as canoes and maple syrup.
Jim Baerg, I once worked with a guy who apparently had a small amount of indigenous DNA (no more than Elizabeth Warren, and probably less). In order to hire a white guy for the job when the top ten spots on the register of qualified individuals were all filled by females, the office went to great lengths to get him on the Native American rolls so he could get ten extra points on his test score and move up high enough to boot out the two women with higher scores.
This was quite disgusting. Those special points for Native Americans (or people of color or women) are to redress opportunities kicked away from them by the white male culture. It is to assist people who have suffered from various forms of oppression.
This guy lived as a white guy and had privileges I couldn’t even dream of – the doted on son of an upper middle class family, a college education at a school I couldn’t afford…and he was getting a position based on the oppression of a people he had never lived among, an oppression he never felt.
Got it great both ways, didn’t he? Had all the perks of being a white male…didn’t have to suffer the oppression or prejudices…but then got to use the oppression of others to move into a job I would have killed for (not that it would have done any good; if I killed him, they would have just hired another guy somehow – they did not hire women in permanent, full time jobs, but would hire men of color. Just needed the penis.).
The funny thing is, one of the women on the register was working as part-time help; she applied for full time and was told there were no jobs open. Two days after that, this young man was hired for the non-existent job.
New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans, a group that researches Pretendians, has a thread on LeClaire, who used to claim Cuban ancestry.
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=5635.msg48858#msg48858
Re. “Queering the family farm”, and merely growing vegetables for human consumption — does anyone else find this very weak?
A properly “queered” family farm should be a multi-national corporate owned fertilizer factory or some such.
Re #20
Wow, that is quite a thread, with receipts and everything. Thanks for providing it.
Second that. Interesting.