I was recently quoted in a Boston Globe article "Should museums verify claims of Indigenous ancestry? Fruitlands show postponed over this ‘profoundly divisive’ issue" about the postponement of an art installation featuring Indigenous artists at the Fruitland Museum. Gina Adams and Merritt Johnson voluntarily withdrew their work from the show due to questions about their claims to tribal identity. Full disclosure, Merritt Johnson, who claims to be of Mohawk and Blackfoot descent, is on the list of Alleged Pretendians I have been investigating. We found she had no Native ancestry, and I covered this in a Pollen Nation magazine podcast. I compared her very white family tree to my mother-in-law's actual Mohawk Johnson family tree. My husband's family are from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario and are descendants of Molly Brant and her husband Sir William Johnson and her brother Chief Joseph Brant. My mother's father was the Mohawk Bear Clan chief at Six Nations and represented them at the first meeting of the United Nations after World War II.
However, since the Boston Globe article came out, Indianz.com did further reporting, "Museum won’t verify claims of tribal ancestry after artists withdraw from show: Native women raised alarms about exhibition in Massachusetts" and some of the details were honestly shocking to me. I had not realized Gina Adams, who falsely claimed to be of Native descent and was the exhibit's co-curator, had sold her work to my own alma mater, Dartmouth College. I had also been aware that she had made an extremely exploitive series of quilts featuring Tribes' treaties with the United States, including the Yankton Sioux––my father's own tribe.
Also, looking at the "Echoes in Time: New Interpretations of the Fruitlands Museum Collection" webpage, I found other questionable tribal affiliations listed in artists still part of the exhibit. These include Betsey Garand (French Canadian, English, Abenaki), Brenda Garand (French Canadian, English, Abenaki), and Mimi Gellman (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe, Ashkenazi Jewish, Metis). So, I contacted researchers I work with and took a look at the family trees of the Garand sisters and Mimi Gellman. Then, I wrote an email to the Boston Globe writer with some of my findings and concerns.
"I'm a Dartmouth alum, and Native alumni of Dartmouth are contacting the college about their acquisition of Gina Adams' work.
Also, as a Yankton Sioux, I am appalled and devastated that she sold a quilt with my dad's tribe's treaty on it. She monetized our trauma. Also, my grandmother was a star quilt maker. She never sold her work but gave it to family and donated it for good causes and raffles for the community.
Looking at the Garand sisters' family tree, they have no Abenaki connections. Their father's family is almost entirely French Canadian. There is one ancestor from New England, but she is of English descent. Her family was kidnapped by a French Canadian party when her village in Massachusetts was raided. Abenaki and Mohawks took part in the raid, but she was already married to a French Canadian man, and her family was spared death and later were not taken as captives by the tribes but allowed to live in Quebec with their in-laws.
Mimi Gellman is a 5th generation descendant of a Native woman of an unknown tribe. The rest of her mother's family tree is French Canadian. I can't verify her claims to the Rattlesnake clan, etc. But it seems unlikely as historians don't know her ancestor's tribe. The connection to Red River Settlement is legitimate. Her ancestor was a prominent and wealthy white man who was a stakeholder in the North West fur trading company. But his descendants appear to have married white people and not other Metis for the past 5 generations."
I am saddened but not surprised that the claimed Native ancestry of these artists, who capitalize on the alleged tribal identity for their careers, is either non-existent or extremely remote. But, it is still very troubling. I hope museums and other institutions will do their due diligence from now on. However, I don't hold out much hope for that. Shockingly, the Fruitland Museum's managing director of art and exhibitions, Jessica May, refuses to even consider the possibility that anyone would lie about being Native American or Indigenous. Even worse, the Fruitland Museum has a Native American advisory board, but they were not even made aware the installation was in the works, much less consulted.
Systems of accountability must be developed. It is not realistic to think people won't lie to promote their own self-interest. And indeed, with the investigation into ethnic fraud I've been conducting, we have found that 96% of those we have investigated either have no Native ancestry whatsoever (81%) or have unverifiable claims (15%). Unless someone can prove that such a high percentage of "Native" people have totally white family trees and are victims of "paper genocide," our findings are evidence of widespread deceit.
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