#jacqueline keeler

[neechees]

who's katherine keeler? i tried looking her up but i didn't get any answers. also: people are actually believing that buffy sainte-marie is pretending to be native????? buffy sainte-marie is a pretend native like i'm a pretend biracial person.

I just realized im a stipid bitch, her name is Jacqueline Keeler. She's just that irrelevant that her name is forgettable tbh. but anyway Keeler is a Native writer/director (I think?) Who spends her time on twitter calling pretty much any and every mixed race (and now even NON mixed race I guess) Native person "pretendians" with fake or shaky at best (i.e "trust me bro") "sources". She often targets Black Natives, and besides Buffy, recently also called Sacheen Littlefeather a "pretendian". She very often uses Blood Quantum, tribal enrollment, & phenotypes as an indicator of who is "truly Native" or not, even though all of these come with their own problems of why theyre not ironclad indicators for Indigeneity.

Her reasoning for Sacheen is that Sacheen's family identify as White, & they said they didn't have any Native American ancestry: except the only reason they said they had "no Native American ancestry" is because KEELER CONTACTED THEM, LITERALLY TOLD THEM THEY DIDN'T AND TOLD THEM TO SAY THAT. They identify as White while Sacheen didn't because they were disconnected from their culture due to assimilation (but DID have Native parents), but Sacheen put in the work in her youth to become RECONNECTED and didn't speak with her family for years (because they're racist trump supporters & didn't support her reconnecting), to the point they weren't even invited to her funeral. So Keeler's "source" on Sacheen being a "White pretendian" is... herself. Keeler has had a weird vendetta against Sacheen for years & came out of the woodwork like a ghoul to call her a "pretendian" only after she'd died and couldn't defend herself.

But yes, for some godawful reason, people believe her even though she's such an unreliable source and a racist bully & has lied multiple times to fake evidence against "pretendians" who aren't actually pretendians .

[glendajackson]

RIP Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)

Glenda's love affair with acting began in her teens. Near Hoylake, in the North Country she comes from, there were three neighborhood cinemas, each showing two films a week. She hardly missed a one, and very quickly in her growing up, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford became her ideals.

They still are, and she longs to meet them. "They had incredible style and ability," she says. "They knew their medium and what they could do with it. They had a superb sort of arrogance. When they walked, they ground the poor beneath their heels." (When she was told of Glenda's devotion recently, Joan Crawford asked, "Who's Glenda Jackson?") Glenda remembers every film Joan Crawford made; and that she wore a different gown in every scene, no matter how humble the character she was playing. And, when her husband died, "the marvelous, tight-fitting black dress and widow's weeds she wore to the first board meeting of his company after the funeral."

For years, hunger was a commonplace in the lives of Roy and Glenda. They had five shillings (about 70 cents) between them when they were married 12 years ago. Their first flat was so inhospitable that they spent their nights in a "super four-poster," center stage in the London repertory theater where they were both working, and the bed was one of the props. An understanding carpenter would bring morning coffee when he awakened them. "It was the largest bedroom I ever slept in," says Roy.

It was the beginning of two years in which the only steady work either of them could get was waiting on tables, working in factories and pubs, selling in shops, where Glenda would steal little things like food or packages of razor blades that she could hide under her skirt. They don't apologize for this now. "It kept us alive," Roy says. "The terrible part about hunger" says Glenda, "is that you can never see when it will end."

Despite this hiatus in her career, Glenda has somehow managed to appear in about 200 productions, which could go far toward explaining why she is so skillful and adaptable as an actress. Often, when she was in repertory, she did a new play every week, seven shows plus morning and late-night rehearsals for next week. She would double as assistant stage manager, which meant sweeping out the theater at night, scrounging props and stage furniture, painting scenery.

Glenda was, she says, the first actress in London to go on stage completely nude. It was a play in which, incredibly, she was both Christine Keeler on her way to jail, and Jacqueline Kennedy at the funeral of her husband. Christine's bathtub, overturned, became the President's coffin. The whole skit lasted only four minutes.

Since then she has been willing to act in the nude, "as long as the purpose is not spurious or sensational." Clothes, she feels, like stage sets, often only hamper and distract from the action. "You can't equate nudity and sex," she says. "Actually, the greatest intimacy between two people doesn't depend at all on whether they can lie together naked."

What does she regard, then, as a convincing way to evoke intimacy? "Maybe a couple cutting their toenails. No one ever does that in public." In any event, she is delighted that "the whole enormous hang-up about sex is well and truly smashed, and a much saner attitude is around."

[skruffie]

It is such whiplash to like... have intense imposter syndrome to a point where I immediately wanted to leave the round dance within minutes of getting there, then finally starting to relax and make small talk with some people and then get lost in the actual dancing

then coming home and reading this screenshot quoting Jacqueline Keeler:

“Native American doesn’t mean Mexican Indians. It means Native people whose lands are under occupation here in the 48 states by the United States of America,” Keeler says, explaining that she is focused on political and legal status (Littlefeather was never an enrolled member of a tribe) because of the heavy ramifications of that experience across generations. “If you’re not enrolled in a tribe, you are not subject to Indian federal law [and] all of the trauma that happened under any of those terrible policies” such as the forced removal of Native children and placement into boarding schools and foster homes.

biiiig angry rant under the cut

I just can't get over the line "If you’re not enrolled in a tribe, you are not subject to Indian federal law [and] all of the trauma that happened under any of those terrible policies" because that is quite possibly one of the most insulting, stupid, and arrogant fucking things you can say so casually without even a second thought.

When I worked in state government I started to become a lot more informed about ICWA.

So like, did you know that if there's a child whose parents are enrolled but that child is not eligible for enrollment because of silly little things like blood quantum or being mixed from different tribes that all have different enrollment requirements, that child is legally not considered subject to Indian federal law?? ICWA is designed for Native children to be placed with their biological families first if taken into foster care, or within their communities, or within an Indigenous home before even considering a non-Native home. This is specifically because children were stolen en masse and given to non-Native families as recently as the 60s. I have given tobacco to and marched at protests with residential school survivors because quite a lot of them are still alive! Hello, the fucking epigenetics of trauma exist also!! PTSD research shows that descendants of trauma survivors have physical changes in their brain chemistry too.

Jacqueline Keeler exists in a world I guess where if you aren't enrolled then none of the trauma of displacement could ever happen to you, silly!! Except of course if you're taken into fucking foster care away from your family and culture, which is exactly the same trauma that your ancestors went through for generations!

Literally, just tonight at dinner, I was talking with a Tulalip guy who asked me if I worked for the school district and I said "nah but I'm an alumni from this district" (this was an event from the school district I graduated from as well as the local tribes) and we chatted a bit. I said I was Yurok and Métis and he was like "cool" and turned to one of his relatives and was like "Aren't you a bit Yurok?" and she went "What?? No". That's it. If I go on twitter I run into the fear that I'm going to get BraveWarrior3874429759 wanting the exact algebraic formula for what my BQ is before he decides if I'm faking or not. Or we get people like Keeler.

For years I've been really trying to think about the concept of being raised Indigenous. Racially I'm white, am always perceived as such, etc etc. That's reality. I think about my grandma and her brother who got raised by their grandpa who said "I never want them to feel like orphans" after their parents died. It was his own grandmother who was orphaned in the genocide. He moved to Los Angeles because it was safer to be seen as Mexican than as Native, and there are many other California NDNs that have the same family story like that. We're not enrolled but thanks to the help of relatives that died before we could know them, my mom and grandma still got literal reparations money for the land our family lost. When I reached out to the Little Shell tribe just to find more information on my ancestors on my dad's side, the sole enrollment officer (at the time, I'm not sure if they've hired new people now) told me we were cousins and gave me a lot of copies of documents should I try to enroll. I had already told her I can't but she did this anyway.

Toby Vanladingham, on twitter, had a thread a few months ago talking about how there's several Yurok tribal members that are enrolled because they meet the requirements in the tribal constitution in ways aside from just blood degree. He then went on to say that it really doesn't matter because they still recognize who is Yurok regardless of their enrollment status.

I can go on and on about this because the point isn't that we don't experience the trauma, it's that we are still welcomed to experience the culture and our family histories. That's the whole fucking point. My ancestors suffered greatly and made choices that I am still trying to understand in hopes that their descendants would not have to suffer. I think as long as I live I will never, ever understand the terror papa Andy felt or what Angeline went through in that school. I'm angry every time I remember my mom telling me how when she was a little girl and papa Andy told her "Don't tell anybody you're an Indian", and remembering her telling me that confusion growing up about what that meant. I go to these events in person and force myself to confront the immense discomfort over and over again because it gets easier each time, but only by small degrees, and I do this knowing that I am always going to be an outsider. I'm doing it anyway. Fuck Keeler and fuck this whole mindset.

[alinahdee]

THE CRASHING OF SACHEEN'S FUNERAL: How Jacqueline Keeler used an incomplete genealogy and string of media errors to smear Sacheen Littlefeather

[meret118]

TIL that "Sacheen Littlefeather" was a pretendian whose actual name Maria Cruz.

Littlefeather represented Marlon Brando at the 45th Academy Awards (better known as the Oscars) in 1973, where she – on Brando's behalf – declined the Best Actor award that he won for his performance in The Godfather. The favorite to win, Brando boycotted the ceremony as a protest against Hollywood's portrayal of Native Americans and to draw attention to the standoff at Wounded Knee. During her speech, the audience's response to Brando's boycotting was divided between booing and applause.

. . .

Littlefeather said her father was of Apache and Yaqui ancestry and her mother was of European descent. Shortly after Littlefeather's death, Navajo writer and activist Jacqueline Keeler interviewed Littlefeather's two sisters, who said that their family is not Native American and that Littlefeather fabricated her Native American ancestry. They also said that their father, who was born in Oxnard, California, was of Spanish-Mexican descent and had no tribal ties.[4][5][6][7]

-----

Details supporting the investigation at the link.

[flagellant]

Folks chose The King In Yellow! For the record, the actual titles being used for the parts are not directly (or even indirectly) relevant to the video, they're used as evocative allusions to the actual topic being discussed, just following a theme of using Lovecraft's writing and mythos as titlecards. For instance, The King In Yellow is referring to yellowcake uranium.

Anyway, sneak peek:

In the last weeks of 2017, President Donald Trump announced he was summarily reducing the Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent, thereby opening archaeologically rich sites to uranium mining[6]. Earlier this month (at time of recording), the Navajo Nation’s president, Buu Nygren, was forced to make a plea to President Biden to respect his nation’s sovereignty and signed legislation that would forbid uranium ore from being trafficked on Navajo highways, and asked Biden to use his executive authority to halt the transports preemptively.[7] Neither Biden nor his administration have responded positively to these acts of indigenous sovereignty. This is a pattern of behavior, going across party lines and down the years all the way to the Mayflower. I am left to wonder, then, whether there is a meaningful difference between the modern liberal’s perception of itself as progressive and the colonial settlers handing out smallpox to kidnapped children who are beaten and abused for the crime of not being Christian enough. I am left to wonder about the similarities between burial ground and basement, and about land that learns to hate. 

[6] Keeler, Jacqueline. 2017. “Trump’s message for tribes: Let them eat yellowcake.” High Country News. https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-trumps-message-for-tribes-let-them-eat-yellowcake/. [7] The Navajo Nation Office of the President. 2024. “Navajo President Buu Nygren signs resolution to urge President Biden to prohibit uranium hauling on Navajo lands.” Navajo Nation Office of the President. https://opvp.navajo-nsn.gov/navajo-president-buu-nygren-signs-resolution-to-urge-president-biden-to-prohibit-uranium-hauling-on-navajo-lands/.

Who wants a sneak peek at one of the next sections of the video essay

And do you want a sneak peek at Part 1: The King In Yellow or at Part 2: The Shunned House

[princessnijireiki]

The author was the one who told Sacheen’s sisters they weren't Native and then cited THEM as the source of the information.

Oh that's WILD?!

My main impression of the article tbh was that it was very scheisty & exploitative for the author to have clearly either done this research & sat on it until Sacheen died, OR made this her weird little research mission immediately after Sacheen's death (and I don't follow her drama, so I didn't know this in advance, but apparently this very much tracks for Jacqueline Keeler + she has a strong bias against Black & Latino Natives). But the main thing lending it any nuance was the fact that her sisters were willing to go on the record & say all these things.

Granted: racial claims aside, it seems like there was a fairly big family disjoint & had been for a while (Sacheen's sisters weren't personally notified of her death, they weren't invited to her funeral, and they claim her fabricated Tragic Indian backstory pulled from their dad's life, not her own, and unfairly maligned their parents), and the fact that they would even lend credence to a blind claim like that suggests there was more going on— like if I died tomorrow and a journalist called my sisters saying my description of our heritage was made up, they'd block that journalist & have the whole family talking evil on them in a heartbeat, yk? That just means these are old women with a complicated family story, but it makes me take pause a little bit, because... that's a strangely specific thing to go along with if your suspecions weren't already leaning that direction.

But I think what's saddest is that at the end, Keeler clearly tries to lead them to condemn Sacheen, and they still don't. (Quote: "When asked if she thought Littlefeather’s life or career would have been better if she had never claimed to be American Indian, Orlandi demurred.") Even when they say, "Yes, this is my take on what happened, yes, this was a lie," both Rosalind & Trudy refused to take that specific bait.

Either way, what happened at the Oscars, regardless of the degree of pageantry behind it, did still occur. And that was always Sacheen's big claim to fame. And either way, it was long overdue for the Academy to acknowledge they owed her an apology. But even accounting for the shady & malicious intentions behind this reporting, this whole thing feels like a glimpse into a very sad situation that may or may not have one or several grains of truth in it, but which was certainly and deliberately crafted to allow for no rebuttal from the dead.

[nomchonks]

if you see that article claiming Sacheen Littlefeather was a fraud, take it with a grain of salt and look into what other indigenous Americans are saying about its author.

[neechees]

did you hear about buffy sainte marie

Yes & she has essentially been bullied into calling herself White & I want to beat Jacqueline Keeler with a stick

[im-the-punk-who]

Leaders in a colonial state, even if they are decent people, are still colonial leaders. But my hope is with the leadership that is coming up – like AOC and Deb Haaland and Stacey Abrams – that we will have colonial leaders we can sit down and talk to and negotiate with, and who can try to educate the American public about the nature of this relationship so that people will see that this is a reasonable thing to do.

There’s a realization, for example, that simply talking about reforming the police isn’t having any impact on the violence being meted out by the police against Black citizens in this country. It’s a structure that we inherited from a white supremacist state.

We’re still running on Democracy 1.0. I mean, other countries have rebuilt their government. We can play whack-a-mole and go after every single pipeline project. But a structure produces these outcomes. To change the outcomes, we need to change the structure itself.

[the-aila-test]

Jacqueline Keeler’s AMA on Reddit 

[indigenousandangry]

So Cher called Jacqueline Keeler a bitch for calling out racism and cultural appropriation, specifically over her song “Half Breed.”

Then again, Cher also tried to make excuses for Rachel Dolezal so I can’t even be surprised.

[nativemissfit]

Why Navajo Hair Matters:

 It’s Our Culture, Our Memory, and Our Choice

 https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/arts-entertainment/why-navajo-hair-matters-its-our-culture-our-memory-and-our-choice/

“On Tuesday, after Labor Day weekend, my children went back to school. The week before, I had taken my son to the barber to get a haircut—but it was his choice. Such was not the case with another Navajo boy, Malachi Wilson, who was refused entry into his first day of kindergarten and told he would have to cut his hair to get an education. Ironically, Malachi’s school district, despite being 81% white, is in Seminole, Texas, has an American Indian warrior with long flowing hair as their mascot and refer to their students as “Indians and Maidens.”  Malachi was allowed to attend school after his mother contacted the Navajo Nation and provided proof her son was Native American. He received a religious exemption to allow him to keep his long hair, which was neatly braided and hanging down his back.”

[tepkunset]

Before you reblog that bullshit article about Sacheen Littlefeather

Please know it was written by J. Keeler, a notoriously ghoulish person who is obsessed with things like blood quantum, and is also especially racist towards Black Natives and Black people in general. Keeler has been widely denounced by NDN Twitter, but it seems that hasn't spread over to Tumblr yet because I've seen that article come up on my dash twice now.

She does her own "research" that has been faulty time and again, with zero apologies for the damage she's done. Do not trust a single word she says.

Read these articles instead:

And also, here's a relevant Twitter thread: