How the

Individuals previously identified as white now claim Native ancestry

Circe Sturm, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin

The Native American population in the U.S. grew by a staggering 86.5% between 2010 and 2020, according to the latest U.S. Census – a rate demographers say is impossible to achieve without immigration.

Birth rates among Native Americans don’t explain the massive rise in numbers. And there certainly is no evidence of an influx of Native American expatriates returning to the U.S.

Instead, individuals who previously identified as white are now claiming to be Native American.

This growing movement has been captured by terms like “pretendian” and “wannabe.”

Another way to describe this recent adoption of Native American identity is what I call “racial shifting.”

These people are fl eeing not from political and social persecution, but from whiteness.

I spent 14 years researching the topic and interviewing dozens of race-shifters for my book “Becoming Indian.” I learned that while some of these people have strong evidence of Native American ancestry, others do not.

Yet nearly all of the 45 people who were interviewed or surveyed for the book believe they have Indigenous ancestry and that it means something powerful about who they are and how they should live their lives. Only a tiny – but troubling – number makes blatantly fraudulent claims to advance their own interests.

History repeats

The search for meaning that characterizes racial shifting is part of an old American story.

Since the days of the Boston Tea Party, when nearly 100 American colonists dressed in Native American garb before throwing 95 tons of British tea into the Boston Harbor, white Americans have distinguished themselves from Europeans by selectively adopting Native American imagery and practices.

Yet as historian Philip Deloria argued in his 1998 book, “Playing Indian,” something happened in American society in the 1950s and 1960s that allowed white Americans greater freedom to appropriate nonwhite identities. White Americans, often with the encouragement of the counterculture and later New Age movements, began to seek new meanings in Indigenous cultures.

Those shifts are apparently reflected in U.S. Census data. The Native American population started increasing at a dramatic rate in the 1960s, growing from 552,000 to 9.7 million in 60 years. Prior to then, the Native American population had been relatively stable.

Backlash against assimilation

What distinguishes contemporary racial shifting from these earlier forms of appropriation is that most race shifters see themselves not as white people who “play Indian,” but as long-unrecognized

American Indians who have been forced by historical circumstances to “play white.”

Many argue, for example, that their families avoided anti-Indian policies like removal by blending into white society.

This gradual but fundamental shift over the last 60 years suggests a seismic upheaval in the American racial landscape.

Racial shifting is a rejection of the centuries-long process of assimilation, when different racial and ethnic groups were pressured to adopt white norms of behavior as a way of fitting into an American society that was defined by them. Racial hierarchies that