Reminding everyone just how powerless and marginalized certain communities are, yet another prominent and successful white woman has been busted for pretending to be a member of the oppressed Native American community.
Heather Rae, an award-winning Hollywood movie producer, joined Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, among others, in taking a meaningless white liberal woman lifestyle and transforming it into a full-fledged career by embracing high cheekbones and a supposed lineal connection to American Indian tribes.
The New York Post had the story, saying:
One of Hollywood’s leading Native American figures is being accused of faking her claims of Cherokee heritage, The Post can reveal.
Award-winning Heather Rae, 56, serves on the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Indigenous Alliance, previously headed up the Sundance Institute’s Native American program and claims “my mother was Indian and my father was a cowboy.” Multiple prior news reports have also cited her as having a Cherokee mother.
Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, an organization that does what its name implies, said that, at best, Rae might be 1/2048th native. The key takeaway here is that she’s just half the Indian Senator Warren is.
The New York Post said the “group accuse[d] her of profiting from usurping “real American Indian voices and perspectives” and being a fraudulent so-called “Pretendian.”
Amazingly, this story only gets better because Rae is connected to the Sacheen Littlefeather story. For those that don’t remember, Littlefeather accepted the 1973 Academy Award on behalf of Marlon Brando and then laid into the film community for its apathy toward Native Americans.
“Hello, my name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I’m Apache and I’m president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I’m representing Marlon Brando this evening and he has asked me to tell you … that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry,” she said on stage.
After her protest, Littlefeather’s career was effectively destroyed, and the now-disgraced Rae was part of a team that helped rectify that by honoring her with a program of her own in 2022.
As they say, though, it takes one to know one, and shortly after the 75-year-old woman passed away, her surviving kin outed her (Littlefeather) as a fraud. Her sister, Rosalind Cruz, spilled the beans last October, saying in part:
The shocking moment marked the first time, to my knowledge, that my eldest sister claimed she was part of a tribe — a bogus identity she deliberately concocted while wearing a borrowed buckskin dress for maximum impact.
My sister Marie, who had already spent a year in a mental hospital after trying to kill herself when she was 19, then assumed that fake image for nearly 50 years. Her elaborate ruse denigrates the memory of our late parents, Manuel Ybarra Cruz and Geroldine Marie Cruz, who were native Californians with no ancestral tribal ties.
I’m now ready to restore their honor by finally telling the truth: Our family has no known Native American heritage, including links to Arizona’s White Mountain Apache and Yaqui tribes, as Marie falsely claimed. Our father’s Hispanic lineage traces back to Mexico, while Mom’s ancestors were French, German and Dutch.
So there it is. From one fraud to another. Even fifty years ago, white women were cosplaying as so-called marginalized groups to curry favor and prestige.
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