Indigenous People's Day Has To Mean More
A library in Maryland recently canceled my event due to defamatory claims made by a Pretendian. In 2024, the library believed the fraud & silenced a Native woman ––this has to change.
Last Tuesday, I found myself standing in the parking lot of my mother's doctor's office listening to a DEI officer in Howard County, Maryland, tell me on the phone that the county's library was disinviting me from a Native America Heritage Month event I was scheduled to appear at on Nov. 2. Her reason was that she disapproved of my work on outing Pretendians.
I had been invited to read from my 2021 book STANDOFF: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Sacred Lands. My book addresses the disparate treatment in 2016 of the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the White Mormon Bundy family takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. I was not going there to discuss Pretendianism.
I had been expecting this call. I had already heard from the Navajo woman who had recommended me to the library that they had received a voicemail from a Kiros Auld. Auld and his mother and grandmother have publicly claimed to be Pamunkey tribal members or descendants since at least the 1980s. His mother has also promoted her artwork and her mother's as Native American, a violation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act as they are not enrolled in any tribe, state or federal.
The Auld family is on the Alleged Pretendians list assembled by Native Americans in various fields in 2021. I began the list (after a lot of requests by Native people) as a private closed Google doc, inspired by the “Shitty Media Men” list that helped draw attention to the #metoo movement. I have been interviewed and written about the list extensively in the past three years and compiled these links on my JacquelineKeeler.net webpage.
Kiros Auld's mother renamed herself Rose Powhatan, and she and his father, Michael Auld, ran what they called the Powhatan Museum of Indigenous Arts and Culture in Washington, DC for years. The museum was privately owned by the couple, and the building was valued at over a million dollars. It now serves as their primary residence. I am in the process of documenting funds they may have received for alleged exhibitions or to purchase the property.
The museum website is no longer active, but Kiros's father, Michael Auld, still lists himself on LinkedIn as the PowhatanMuseum.com “Co-Founder/Webmater[sic]/Installations for over 48 years.
There is a federally recognized Pamunkey Tribe. When Kiros appeared on an episode of the Canadaland podcast Pretendian Hunters and claimed he was Pamunkey, the tribal chairman forwarded me an email he sent to the Canadaland producers telling them Auld was a fraud.
The co-hosts, Robert Jago (Kwantlen First Nation and Nooksack Indian Tribe) and Angel Ellis (Muscogee (Creek) Nation), glibly accepted Auld's claims that I had incorrectly identified him as a Pretendian and then proceeded to defame my work solely on the false claims of a fraud. The episode title "Pretendian Hunters" refers to me, and the podcast series is ironically called "Pretendians." It attempts to build the co-host's credentials off the work of myself and others and then seeks to discredit me for good measure. They have not issued a retraction.
Auld has also published a chapter in Of Living Stone: Perspectives on Continuous Knowledge and the Work of Vine Deloria Jr., co-edited by David E. Wilkins (Lumbee) and Shelly Hulse Wilkins. The book, which came out in April, is written to honor the life's work of my grandmother's first cousin, Vine Deloria, Jr. Instead of inviting me to write a chapter, as a family member who continues the tradition of using our family stories to understand present-day issues (as I did in Standoff), Prof. Wilkins, invited a Pretendian to write a chapter defaming my work.
Attorneys have repeatedly told me that because I am classed as a "public person" because I am a published author and a journalist, defamation laws offer me no protection. I could spend $50,000 and still lose despite well-documented falsehoods spread about my work by frauds and their enablers. Now that Mr. Auld's lies have cost me a speaking engagement worth $6,000 in appearance and travel costs, I thought I had a tort case I could sue for contractual interference. However, my lawyer says Kiros' lies still fall under free speech.
What he told the library was that I was "a known, anti-black, hate figure. They know him locally as a former board treasurer of Native American Lifelines, an Indian Health Service (IHS) funded clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. The executive director, Kerry "Hawk" Lessard, who claims to be of Absentee Shawnee descent, is also on the Alleged Pretendian List. When we investigated her claims, we found her to be White with a family tree with no ties to her claimed tribe. She is a Pretendian engaged in ethnic fraud for self-gain.
He also falsely accused me of threatening his family. He is also posting on X, calling another Native woman his "abuser" and saying that he is having his day in court with her. All his cases against her have been dismissed. His family has in the past conducted spurious lawsuits against a member of the Maryland state-recognized Piscataway Tribe.
On Tuesday, I spoke to Dr. Kelly Clark, the Howard County Library's Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging Officer, who said she had found an online article denouncing my work and signed by "Indian leaders." The letter was published in 2021 and signed primarily by Pretendians opposed to the Alleged Pretendian List.
She cited their arguments that fact-checking suspected ethnic frauds amounts to colonial violence and that I am privileging a written record compiled by the U.S. government over the lived experience of people. Her credulous acceptance of the attempts of con artists to prevent accountability is particularly concerning for someone who works for a library that should be supporting research to facilitate an accurate understanding of issues. Never mind that silencing a Native woman in service of fraud is yet another example of how Native women are not believed –– even when they go missing and become MMIWs (missing and murdered Indigenous women).
Dr. Clark only spoke to me about my work directly after making her decision. She never talked to my editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, who nominated my piece on Sacheen Littlefeather in 2022 for a Pulitzer, before repeating the mischaracterization of my fact-checked published work as a personal grievance.
To address this reliance on defamatory content and reports about the nature of my work, I would be very grateful if you wrote letters of support for my work to Yolanda F. Sonnier, Esq., Administrator of Howard County’s Office of Human Rights (please also cc me).
I am also requesting your help today, on Indigenous Peoples Day (and my birthday), to fund a social media campaign to educate the public on the issue of Pretendianism. It is evident from this experience that people need a lot more education on why and what we do to hold con artists accountable for exploiting our trauma and falsely monetizing it.
It is also evident that my thousands of words written in carefully fact-checked articles are not being read. Nor are the interviews I have given on radio and television or presentations on panels being consulted.
So, I have decided to assemble a social media team to assist me in producing short TikToks or reels to disseminate the information I have to a larger audience. You can help in this by supporting my efforts via a GoFundMe I have launched: Support Jacqueline Keeler's Fight Against Pretendians (https://gofund.me/ac6c6334).
Thank you so much for any support you can provide. It will all make a difference, not just to me but to all Native people who struggle against marginalization and aggression from Pretendians. And yes, we will do a TikTok explaining how Pretendians harm Native people in the workplace and even in their families!