A pack of ghost wolves are going to bring you under

I am afraid of success. 

I am afraid to even share any of this.

Recently, one of the unhinged stalker "Pretendian Hunter!!!"  Tumblr blogs (the height of investigative journalism, I know) targeted me, albeit, not even remotely in the same way or at the same level that other people have been targeted. Even if it was wholly laughable--the social media that they linked disproved their claims, as did the screenshots from my website,--it was still unnerving. 

I know I said that I would not be giving this anymore time, space, or attention, but I thought it might be beneficial to speak on it again.

I've been thinking a lot about this in relation to what Emily Artful (who is rad, and you should absolutely support her) experienced at the hands of Creepshow Art (*allegedly)--the obsessive stalking, monitoring, and cataloging of Emily's life, and inventing details and timelines on her life she was not privy to.

This is exactly what these Pretendian Hunters!!!!! are doing.

The screenshots this person produced were from an older version of my website, which I changed  earlier this year. Not only did they not mention my Indigenous mother (shown in their own screenshot), but by the time they had posted that Tumblr post, I had already changed my website--meaning, they had been collecting and cataloging (in the same way that Creepshow Art *allegedly did to Emily Artful).

This is not about who is or who is not Indigenous; this is about power.

Calling someone a 'fake' is not a blank check to harrass or stalk people.

You don't owe anyone, least of all an internet stranger who does not come to you in a  Good Way, anything--least of all the most painful aspects of your life story. That's exactly what these people try to do: they go for Indigenous woman (and it's almost all entirely women) and extract their most painful and embarrassing experiences. These people are agents of chaos, who thrive off of making others spiral, whether it's mocking memorial posts to people's deceased loved ones or trying to make all of the adoptive Natives spiral, or even threatening singles mothers for daring to speak their ancestral languages. Depraved is the only description for these people.  There is no moral compass, this is not justice. They are not coming to you asking in good faith or in a Good Way. Even if traditionally we use certain ways to introduce ourselves, we also have to consider how the world has changed, and how easy digital stalking is. I'm not cagey or avoidant about who I am or where I come from, but I do respect the privacy of my family members who are not public figures. I've been stalked for over 25 years, and, yes, I am going to feel it out before I answer questions from an internet stranger leaving comments just demanding answers like a crack of thunder out of a blue sky. Given how readily available much of this information is, and how entitled people are towards it, a little discretion wouldn't hurt anyone.

Again, this isn't about who or who is not Indigenous. They constantly move their goal posts: DNA suddenly doesn't count, enrollment and kin that claim you doesn't count, the Indigenous is suddenly the wrong kind of Indigenous. 

The irrevocable damage these people have done and continue to do cannot be understated. The correction is never amplified as loudly as the disrespect; the same news outlets that latch onto stories of these Indigenous women being "fakes" (these 'Hunters' preying on this stereotype and public perception that Native people are not trustworthy and incapable of setting their own identity permeameters), but never publish the corrections. Native and non-Native people alike are so eager for this kind of content, so eager and ready to believe that these women, Sacheen and Buffy Sainte-Marie, who dedicated a substantial amount of of their lives to helping other Native people--to their own damn detriment-- are fakes. Why is that?

It was shown, with very little effort, that Sacheen Littlefeather was who she said she was. Again, with very little effort, the 'discrepancies' of Buffy Sainte-Marie's life story were met with the discrepancies of the intentional omitting of information. Neither Sacheen's nor Buffy's people were contacted prior to the publication of those hit pieces. With an incredibly minimal amount of effort, which an actual journalistic, scholar, or historian could have produced with their eyes closed: statements from her Cree family (which these people say don't count--does sovereignty matter or does it not?!), the fact that it is regular practice to create new birth certificates for adopted children, that there are thousands of displaced Indigenous people who were affected by these birth certificates, or that the National Sixties Scoop Healing Foundation has stood by Buffy--as have her family and her people. None of these things matter to any of these "Hunters." 

Again, it's not about who is Indigenous or not. It's about power. 

Both of these hit pieces employed the use of the unreliable narrators--bitter and untrustworthy family members, and an investigative team (which I hesitate to even dignify by calling it that) with no credentials and convictions on their records. Still people double down on blaming Buffy with their whole chest. 

My grandmother had this incredible expression, "consider the source," and I think that it's more than applicable here. It's not that I don't want to believe that Buffy isn't who she say she is, it's that I do not trust people who have no credentials, who openly cyber stalk, and who purposely omit information because it conflicts with the narrative they are crafting. People who have also been repeatedly disproven, very easily. 

I am afraid of experiencing even so much as a modicum of success, because they have already shown their depravity having no limits, and the lengths in which they are willing to stalk and bring down Indigenous women are boundless. Boundless.

Again, it's not about who is Indigenous or not. It's about power. 

They purposely go for your rawest and most vulnerable pressure points, purposely target your most painful and intimate life details in order to create even more pain for you--and open it up to a public discussion. It was no coincidence that that stupid Tumblr blog wanted me to bring up my father. This group has previously brought up the bad fathers of other notable Indigenous women in order to try to humiliate them. Yes, I mention my great-uncle--who would be my grandfather's brother-- which this stupid blog tried to claim I was not related to, because he is someone I am proud of. Claiming a relationship with my grandfather who died before I was born or the father I am estranged from would not be right--isn't that part of  what they always say, "who claims you?" Well, I said who claimed me. I also respect that my family members are private citizens, whilst I am not.

One of the things that I think people somehow still fail to understand, even as we approach 30-something(?) years into the internet's existence, is what we put on the internet is not our complete or whole lives.  We don't share everything. Even if some people's lives aren't as curated or as fake as others', we're still not sharing everything. Just because you cannot craft a  complete narrative based on someone's social media presence or posting does not mean that this person is lying. It means that you are a cyberstalker. Because these people are basing their narratives on what people are posting on social media now and not their entire lives, which, for many of us, predated social media (oh my God, that sounds ancient), there are going to be "parts missing." You don't get to "fill in" an "blanks" or invent narratives because you were not there. You don't know what my, or anyone else's, lived experiences are. 

You think that you can bring up things to humiliate me, and you greatly underestimate me, because, again, you were not there for my entire life. This Huckleberry has been forced to answer to the bad deeds of her parent her entire life. Your Lady Tremaine may trip the footman, but I have the other glass slipper.

You were not there for a lifetime of shame and humiliations and judgement for what was done to me and who my parents were. You were not there for the racist bullying. You were not there for every horrifying detail of everything that had been done to me being public knowledge, and that most people knew this about me, even if I had no idea who they were. You want me to talk about my father so you can bring up his criminal record, because you don't know, because you were not there, that this was done to me my entire life. 

And, you know, I don't have very many high expectations of nuance and empathy for the same internet who bullied Black and Native elders of a log flume ride or called a child Judy Garland a "b!tch" for being forced to wear Blackface under a grueling contract (not in any way excusing or justifying Blackface, but it's very telling, and legitimately terrifying, that the internet will go after a child under a brutal contract instead of the studio who made her do it or the wider systemic paradigms in place). The press and the Internet who are so readily primed to accept that Sacheen and Buffy are fakes, that it's acceptable to blame models for their fathers, aren't paragons of grace and virtue.

I remain afraid of even a modicum of success because I do not want to be the next target of their fixation.  Even if intellectually I know that what they would be doing is textbook defamation because they are acutely aware that is patently false--and this is part of the reason why they do it (and their own obsessive cataloging  have created great cases for the injured party). I am afraid that they will invite others, as they invite themselves, into other people's lives.  They don't care about who or who is not Indigenous, because they have repeatedly demonstrated that DNA, enrollment, kin claimed, c0l0nizer documentation as proof, matters to them. Even if they themselves do not meet these criteria, none of these things matter. 

My Great-Uncle's death and the circumstances that have surrounded that, have always frightened me, and it was another reason why I held myself back, for decades. Someone who gave so much of himself so visibly, and so selflessly could watch his entire legacy and all of its meaning be cut short by people who wanted to silence him.

These stalkers will stop at nothing. Not at Iskwē, not at Sacheen, not at Nikki La'es, not at so many others. No matter what the actual truth is, they will move the parameters so that they're lies become the truth (even if it doesn't).

I am a non-status Indigenous person who has been Indigenous their entire life--an entire life you were not there for.

If you want to ascribe to the MLM of eug3n!cs, I am not going to stop you. But if we limit our identities to the parameters set by those who are responsible for all this in the first place, Lord, love a duck, are we in trouble. (Especially when you consider that tribal governments, as with all governments, can also be unreliable narrators who aren't immune to the temptations of anti-Blackness and disenrollment over casino money.)

I have repeatedly made it painstakingly clear that I do not wish to be seen as a "Native artist." I do not want to be "discovered" every November. I do not want to be "the Native opera singer." Being Native or Indigenous has nothing to do with my craft. I don't want to be a diversity hire. I do not want my monetized Indigenous pain to be consumed by non-Native audiences. I have said over and over that I have a rare voice type in an incredibly elite artform, and I wish for that to be the forefront of the conversation. It's bad enough for me already that I did not go to a conservatory or attend a single YAP (yet another MLM), so I really balk at the idea of being perceived as a "diversity hire" because there are going to be people who think I already don't deserve to be there.

Of course, being Indigenous is a huge part of who I am, but my ethnicities are not the only aspects of who I am. I am not a brand. Being Indigenous is not my brand. My Indigeneity is not a performance on TikTok.

I know  by even talking a formal stance on this that I make myself a target. I know that my kin connections and my DNA do not matter--that if I were status, that that would not matter to these people. I've openly talked about the things that they would try to shame me for. If they want to drag up and interview kin that say what I have recounted never happened, I have the court documents in dozens of boxes in the closet.  If they want to drag up my many missteps as a mentally ill child and statements from the people who bullied me who pretended to be the victims, I've already spoke on that. If you want to blast me for standing up for the basic human dignity for people like Jay Silverheels, Johnny Lee, and Nick Stewart, go ahead, but I'd maybe reevaluate that if I were you. If you want to bring up some of my perceived less than perfect or uncharitable views, I am not sure cyberstalking gives you a moral high ground on that one.  If you want to catalog my every social media move using my full legal name saved in stories collections on your Instagram profile, that's textbook cyberstalking. 

Just because you may not like me, or may not like other Indigenous women, that doesn't mean you get to dictate who does or does not get to exist. My being an Indigenous person who just wants to exist doesn't take away from anyone, especially given that I am repeatedly, explicitly stated that I consider my ethnicity irrelevant to my line of work.

I am still afraid of success, because of the entitlement  people have in other people's lives, which has only heightened due to social media. And, you know, I don't have very high expectations from the group that brought you the rhetoric that you can only be considered a MMIP if you are part of a federally recognized group (like, I said, depraved) or self-identified journalists who write like middle schoolers.

I am terrified of even a modicum of success because these people want people like me, and others to be afraid. They will not rest until they are the only one true and last Indians. They will destory us all for their own gains.

And whilst I do not have the patience for fakes or people with Indian Princess grandmothers, this is not the way. This is not it.

I think it's time to take our collective power back.