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Make Native America Great Again | Pretendians #3
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Make Native America Great Again | Pretendians #3
Update: 2024-05-28
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Oklahoma's Republican governor Kevin Stitt is a card-carrying member of the Cherokee Nation. So why is he also considered the most "anti-Native governor" in history? A look at his family history reveals some wild surprises, and shows how Indigenous identity can be used as a weapon against Native nations.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Canada land, funded by you.
00:00:03
Hey, Robert.
00:00:04
Did you know that here in Oklahoma, we have one of the very first card carrying enrolled Native American governors in U.S.
00:00:12
history?
00:00:12
I did not know that.
00:00:14
Governor Kevin stood here.
00:00:16
I'm actually a member of the Cherokees, and we love our Indian community.
00:00:20
Well, that sounds like progress.
00:00:22
Well, you'd hope so, wouldn't you?
00:00:25
But, uh, unfortunately...
00:00:27
The current governor, Kevin Stits, the most anti-Indian governor in the history of the state.
00:00:32
Let's say an Indian steals your car.
00:00:36
There hasn't been a governor in modern times that has destroyed that nation-to-nation relationship.
00:00:44
And there are tribal governments who want Tulsa to look like the Navajo reservation.
00:00:49
The governor is meant on destroying tribal sovereignty, even if it costs the state tens of millions of dollars.
00:00:55
And for me to do something that's bad for Oklahoma, for the benefit of, uh, you know, one race, I'm not gonna do it.
00:01:01
From Kenneland Podcasts, this is Pretendians, a show where we investigate the impact that fake frauds and phonies have on real Native people.
00:01:11
My name is Robert Jago.
00:01:12
I'm a freelance writer from the Quantlin First Nation in Duksek, Indian tribe.
00:01:15
And I'm Angel Ellis, a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation located in Old Mulgee, Oklahoma.
00:01:20
I've been a writer, editor, journalist for about 15 years.
00:01:24
In the heartland, where the field strikes wide, there's a warrior rising to change back to tide.
00:01:34
He's one of your people, he's got papers to prove it, but he doesn't show them off unless it's time to use it.
00:01:45
Folks, group of the can, vote Cherokee, he's a blessing that's the true chore, listen to Oklahoma,
00:01:55
this guy's a trooper.
00:01:57
The skies are two fur, yellow rumours, skies are two fur.
00:02:12
Okay, first things first, Robert, today's episode is going to be a little bit different.
00:02:21
How so?
00:02:22
Well, it's not about a person who decided to impersonate being Native.
00:02:27
As we've established in the earlier episodes, if a legitimate Native Nation claims you, and if you carry their sacred, laminate card, you're the real deal.
00:02:35
Kevin Stip meets that criteria.
00:02:38
He was born a member of the Cherokee Nation.
00:02:40
So in that case, what's he doing on a show about pretendians?
00:02:43
Well, I promise you, he very much belongs here, but you're going to have to saddle up for this one and let me tell you why here in a bit.
00:02:51
Okay, you've got my attention, who is he?
00:02:53
Here's how he tells it.
00:02:55
I'm a pretty typical Oklahoma son.
00:02:57
I attended first grade in Wayne, Oklahoma, population 700, and then I graduated from Norman High School.
00:03:05
I spent many summers in Skytook helping my grandparents on their dairy farm, and I spent Sundays in church listening to my dad preach.
00:03:13
My dad raised me and my two brothers to believe we could do anything we put our minds to.
00:03:20
He would tell us, don't ever give up.
00:03:23
Don't ever quit.
00:03:24
The future doesn't just happen.
00:03:26
You make it happen.
00:03:28
So dream big.
00:03:29
So Kevin Stip looks like he sounds.
00:03:32
He's a beefy Christian Southwestern Republican in high school.
00:03:36
He played football and in college, he joined a fraternity.
00:03:39
His Oklahoma upbringing was pretty different from mine on the res, though.
00:03:43
Okay.
00:03:44
Well, wait, I know nothing about Oklahoma gives me the lay of the land.
00:03:48
So Oklahoma is this highly conservative state.
00:03:52
It has this long legacy of racism and violence, and people are literally allowed to wear guns on their hips here.
00:04:00
So Norman, Oklahoma, we're Kevin and his family eventually settled down.
00:04:05
It's like an affluent city, you know, near Oklahoma city and a division one college town.
00:04:11
If that means anything to you, well, if it's American, it must be about football.
00:04:15
It's definitely a reference to football.
00:04:17
Okay.
00:04:18
So I guess the stereotype is that it wouldn't be normal for a native guy to get rich and move to the suburbs.
00:04:27
Yeah, that's not really typical here.
00:04:29
It's starting to happen, but it's not the standard at all.
00:04:33
His father is a pastor of the Riverside Church and it's described as an independent, charismatic church.
00:04:40
Often people will say, Pastor Stip, did you ever think in your wildest dreams that you would have a son who would be the governor of Oklahoma?
00:04:51
And I said, do you want to know the truth?
00:04:54
We impact the destiny of our children.
00:04:58
And then I read in Psalms 112 that the seed of the righteous shall be mighty men on the earth.
00:05:07
So I took that promise.
00:05:10
And when I would pray over my boys, I'd be praying I'd lift them up when I said, God, you promise that the seed of the righteous would be mighty men of God on this earth.
00:05:21
And I decree that my boys are going to be mighty men of God.
00:05:26
So faith becomes a really central focus for Kevin.
00:05:31
He's getting ready to go to university and he picks a university and still water Oklahoma.
00:05:37
He becomes a Oklahoma state university cowboy.
00:05:40
And it's kind of symbolic in my mind, like he lives in this town where OU is located and that's like one of the major native schools in the state.
00:05:51
A lot of native kids like to go to the University of Oklahoma and they have prominent native programs.
00:05:57
But Kevin doesn't want to go to school there.
00:05:59
He actually goes to the ag school and still water an ag school.
00:06:03
This is a university where you become a farmer.
00:06:05
Yeah, they have a really prominent farming program.
00:06:08
They kind of have this like historic cowboys against Indians kind of mentality.
00:06:14
And he chose the cowboys.
00:06:16
Oh, let me tell you about the mascot at the school that he picks.
00:06:21
Okay.
00:06:22
Their mascot is Pistol Pete.
00:06:24
Pistol Pete.
00:06:26
He was a US Marshall.
00:06:27
He was a bounty hunter.
00:06:28
He was quite the colorful character modeled after Frank Eaton, the original Oklahoma state cowboy.
00:06:34
In 1885, Frank then became a scout in the fight against Dronomo and their patches.
00:06:40
His school's mascot is the guy who's going out for the federal government and hunted Indians.
00:06:50
And this is kind of where this phase where he's at school at OSU is where we see Kevin Stitt really kind of emerge in his own personality.
00:06:57
And you know, I know how he made his living while he was in college.
00:07:01
Do you remember the movie Obrother, where art thou?
00:07:03
I love that movie.
00:07:04
It's like one of my top 10 favorites.
00:07:06
So big Dan Teague going around selling the Bibles.
00:07:10
Yeah, that's John Goodman.
00:07:11
Bible sales, the word of God and bulk is a word.
00:07:14
Don't get a big day.
00:07:15
So about the money boys.
00:07:17
Well, Stitt's doing that kind of a job.
00:07:22
He's in that line of work.
00:07:24
His clients are folks in the gated communities who want to carefully control the education that their children are being exposed to.
00:07:32
They don't send them to public schools.
00:07:34
They homeschool them and all these materials that, you know, he's selling door to door catered to that religious education kind of environment.
00:07:44
So I'm kind of picturing a sales pitch.
00:07:46
And the sales pitch doesn't begin with as a proud Cherokee citizen.
00:07:49
Oh my gosh.
00:07:51
I don't think so.
00:07:51
And can you imagine like an identifiably native person going into a gated community selling things door to door?
00:07:58
So this company that he works for actually got banned by Harvard University for recruiting on their campuses and other universities ended up banning it as well because they felt that the students just weren't safe to go door to door.
00:08:11
So Kevin is fucking killing it.
00:08:14
He becomes their top salesperson in less than a year.
00:08:18
His colleagues in the college newspaper that I dug up some of his flat brothers say that Kevin was the man on campus.
00:08:28
He's involved in intramurals.
00:08:30
He goes to parties.
00:08:31
He's actually studying accounting and they say that he's a very driven guy.
00:08:36
Like, yes, he comes to the parties, but he doesn't fuck around and do things he shouldn't do.
00:08:40
He's actually very goal focused and he's relentlessly pursuing his goals.
00:08:46
That's how they describe him.
00:08:47
But I couldn't find anything about Kevin being native.
00:08:51
And this is what's odd about Kevin and the stiff family.
00:08:56
Now let me be clear.
00:08:58
It's not unindigenous to be a Christian and it's not unindigenous to be conservative.
00:09:02
Either we have plenty of those.
00:09:04
There are plenty of natives who fit both of those descriptions.
00:09:07
But it is odd that there's just no trace of Kevin or his dad mentioning their Cherokee identities at this point or connecting with Cherokee community.
00:09:16
I know a lot of native preachers.
00:09:19
They have huge circuits in native communities.
00:09:22
They hold big congregations and they do church with all the native things you would expect.
00:09:27
There's church at the arbores and and the fourth Sunday meals.
00:09:32
And it's it's pretty common, but Kevin's dad isn't one of those preachers.
00:09:36
He's a pretty public person who is only in meshed in affluent white Oklahoma society without any indication of being native at all.
00:09:44
I reached out to Governor Stitt's office to see if he talked to me for this episode.
00:09:48
I never got a response.
00:09:50
So he's graduated school.
00:09:53
He's gotten married and he's going to start his company.
00:09:56
And the big thing is Kevin brags that he's like got a thousand dollars to his name.
00:10:01
And he puts his home up for equity and he starts a mortgage lending company.
00:10:06
So Gateway is a mortgage lender.
00:10:10
We originate.
00:10:11
We buy and we service home loans.
00:10:13
So I started the company here in Tulsa back in January of 2000.
00:10:19
And today we have over 1,100 employees and we have 155 offices.
00:10:24
We do business in 40 states.
00:10:26
Within a few short years, the home mortgage crisis is happening and his company is one of them.
00:10:32
That's getting a big shit trouble because they're doing shady deals.
00:10:36
And they're not really seeing if people can afford the homes they're buying.
00:10:39
And so multiple states ban his company from doing business in them.
00:10:43
And it's just kind of looking like he's one of those mortgage bankers who caused that home housing crisis of 0809.
00:10:51
So there's this big structural crisis in the United States.
00:10:54
And he has a moderate cog in it.
00:10:56
Yeah, the thing his company was doing is what many companies were doing.
00:11:00
How did the mortgage industry destroy itself and set off an economic collapse that ruined the finances of millions of Americans?
00:11:08
Executives tend to hold themselves blameless, saying that no one could have seen the disaster coming.
00:11:13
So it's 2016 eight years past the subprime mortgage crisis.
00:11:18
We've put that behind us.
00:11:19
But now Stits throwing his name in for the governor's race and he's on the Republican ticket.
00:11:24
I'm Kevin Stitt.
00:11:25
I grew up in Norman, dad was a pastor and mom stayed at home.
00:11:30
You know, I paid my way through school selling books door to door.
00:11:34
After college, I started Gateway Mortgage Group here in Tulsa with an old computer and a dream.
00:11:40
Kevin Stitt conservative Republican, a different kind of candidate for governor.
00:11:49
This is when Kevin Stitt for the first time declares himself publicly as a member of the Cherokee Nation.
00:11:57
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00:12:07
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00:12:14
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00:12:19
I'm used to stories of people suddenly presenting themselves as native, showing up with a 10 and a headdress or a feather tattoo, but that doesn't seem like his style.
00:12:31
Oh God, no, you're not going to earn any of the Republican votes in Oklahoma by going sacred.
00:12:36
Kevin doesn't change his style.
00:12:38
He's still in the dockers, he's still rocking his polo shirts and the business suits, no tattoos, he doesn't talk about being Cherokee on the campaign trail much.
00:12:48
He just slips it in on the down low in circumstances where it helps him most.
00:12:53
The first time I ever really caught a glimpse of Kevin Stitt being of a native background was when I saw one of his male outs for governor.
00:13:03
He says on this mailer that he's Cherokee and then on the border all the way around, there are Cherokee words in the Cherokee language with the Cherokee's actual alphabet.
00:13:15
That's not like the English alphabet at all.
00:13:17
These weren't super widely circulated mailers and it actually took some like tracking down to find a few of them.
00:13:24
What's the response to the Indian country?
00:13:26
No one I knew in Indian country had heard his name before.
00:13:30
I spoke with Graham Brewer, he's a Cherokee journalist who was reporting for high country news.
00:13:35
And in fact, we're from the same town, we're from, we're both from Norman, Oklahoma and I had trouble finding people here who remembered him too.
00:13:42
I mean, I think most people in native communities still didn't really know who he was or who his people were or what his policy points were.
00:13:52
But when you talk to tribal leaders, they were very optimistic that he was going to be beneficial to tribal nations in Oklahoma.
00:13:59
Chief Baton, the Choctaw Nation, specifically saying that he had really high hopes.
00:14:05
At the same time, there's this enormous tribal sovereignty case working its way into the Supreme courts of the United States.
00:14:13
And McGurt versus Oklahoma asked the Supreme Court, who has jurisdiction over crimes committed on the Muscogee Creek Nation's reservation.
00:14:22
The outcome of this case is going to have really huge impacts for the Muscogee Creek Nation and maybe all of Indian country.
00:14:31
This is when Kevin Stitt declares himself publicly as a member of the Cherokee Nation, and we're all thinking, this could be a really good thing.
00:14:40
Indian country is pretty excited at the possibility of having a native governor.
00:14:44
Maybe he'll have our backs was did actually saying anything about the issue or is he just saying I'm a Cherokee wink.
00:14:51
He was just kind of quietly saying, by the way, I'm Cherokee.
00:14:56
But what I thought was weird and at first got my attention was that he's not seeking a tribal endorsement.
00:15:03
Like if I as a Muscogee citizen ran for governor, I would be like, Hey, Chief Hill, would you endorse me?
00:15:11
And I would be like out in public talking about being a friend to the natives, right?
00:15:17
But he doesn't do that in his campaign.
00:15:19
There's no handshaking at powwow's, there's no going to the res and campaigning and he doesn't go to community dinners and he doesn't really make a big deal to talk with other natives.
00:15:31
Maybe people should have been more skeptical, but what choice do we have, right?
00:15:36
There's Kevin Stitt.
00:15:37
There is Drew Edmondson, who's basically drafted the first gaming compact at the state of Oklahoma ever had with the native tribes and it took some of our gaming revenue.
00:15:48
He's running for office in our other choice.
00:15:51
Joey Exotic, you remember that name, the Tiger King.
00:15:55
Oh, with a mullet and a mustache.
00:15:57
Yeah, my name's Joey Exotic and this is Sarge.
00:16:00
It was like a mythical character living out in the middle of un-fucked Oklahoma who owned 1200 tigers and lions and bears and shit.
00:16:08
The freaking Tiger King, who I'm not even sure you can consider a serious candidate.
00:16:13
You have to know ladies and gentlemen, my name is Joseph Maldonado Passage and I'm running for the state governor's office of 10,000, 19.
00:16:21
Right.
00:16:22
So your choice are the Tiger King.
00:16:25
Number two is the Democrat who robbed you of your casino revenues and number three is somebody who says to Cherokee, but that's literally the only thing they say about being native.
00:16:36
Right.
00:16:37
Welcome back to the Oklahoma's election 2018 coverage and there you see a Kevin Stitt will be the 28th governor of Oklahoma succeeding fellow Republican Mary Fallon.
00:16:48
And just a few months later, fuck, Kevin Stitt lets all of us know how he really feels about the natives.
00:16:55
He writes this op-ed in the Tulsa World newspaper and it's like one of the first things that he does as governor.
00:17:03
He writes that as a Cherokee citizen and as the governor, he thinks the profit sharing deals that the native tribes have with the state of Oklahoma are unfair, unfair to the state of Oklahoma.
00:17:16
So he says he's going to renegotiate these deals so that a lot less money goes to the natives.
00:17:22
Here's how Graham Brewer described it.
00:17:24
I remember Stitt had a press conference at one point where he blown up the language of the compact onto like a big poster board and it and it was like saying,
00:17:34
you know, that the compact did dissolve on this date.
00:17:37
But then he failed to put the second half of the sentence after the comma, which was that the tribes had some control over when that would be and what that renewal would look like.
00:17:46
And so that's kind of when you started seeing this pattern in Governor Stitt's rhetoric that really kind of like misconstrued or misrepresented, like not only just like relationships with tribes,
00:17:58
but like like what tribal identity is and like what the legal limits are to some of these like jurisdictional questions.
00:18:06
Basically, the McGurt decision said that we still have reservations in our state.
00:18:11
Everybody has been operated that we don't have reservations since 1907 since statehood.
00:18:17
And that's what I still believe.
00:18:19
Then in 2020, the Supreme Court upholds the McGurt case, which is a huge relief to us as Muscogee people.
00:18:26
You'll remember it's one of the reasons why so many natives supported Stitt.
00:18:30
They hoped he'd go to bat for us on this case turns out he was pushing hard the other way.
00:18:36
And then he goes on Fox News complaining to Tucker Carlson, how unfair it is that natives in Oklahoma have rights that the rest of the state does not have Robert, you need to hear this.
00:18:47
What does it mean for your state that it's no longer part of the United States parts of it or what is this?
00:18:53
We have now had a change of rules.
00:18:56
The state if is Indian involved has lost jurisdiction to prosecute those crimes.
00:19:01
And when you think about who's an Indian, you could be one 500th, one 1000th.
00:19:07
I've actually got my Indian card, my six children with blonde hair and blue eyes.
00:19:12
They all have their Indian card.
00:19:13
So our police are having a tough time because you can't tell who an Indian is and who's not an Indian in Eastern part of Oklahoma.
00:19:20
So this is on the basis of race.
00:19:22
So depending upon the racial category you're in, you're treated differently by law enforcement seems to be what you're saying.
00:19:29
That's exactly right.
00:19:30
Luckily, the laws he's trying to change are federal.
00:19:32
So they're out of state jurisdiction and the courts throw out his cases.
00:19:36
But the anti native stuff he does in Oklahoma isn't just about money or lawsuits.
00:19:41
It's cultural too.
00:19:42
He starts rebranding the whole state of Oklahoma.
00:19:46
And he removes all indigenous symbols on all the state branding.
00:19:49
Oklahoma's slogan used to be Native America.
00:19:53
It was written on our license plates tourism campaigns and all the state literature stood wipes that away.
00:19:59
Now all the state tourism materials and license plate just have a generic star in the slogan.
00:20:05
Imagine that.
00:20:06
What do we meant to imagine?
00:20:10
Imagine that you're north of Texas.
00:20:12
That's what I say when someone says something completely bonkers.
00:20:15
And I don't really agree with them.
00:20:16
I just go, uh, imagine that was less your heart taken.
00:20:20
Yeah.
00:20:21
Yeah, what's your heart was already taken by someone else?
00:20:23
Let us uniquely uninspired idea for branding.
00:20:27
And remember, this is branding.
00:20:28
It's meant to distinguish you and to make you unique.
00:20:33
You know, if I say the show me state, which one's that?
00:20:36
That's Missouri.
00:20:38
Golden State.
00:20:39
California Empire State.
00:20:40
New York.
00:20:41
Imagine that.
00:20:42
Wow.
00:20:44
Wow.
00:20:45
Yeah, it falls totally flat.
00:20:47
It really is like an extra chapter of a racer and from the history books.
00:20:52
It's like, yeah, you were here, but we're just going to wipe you off again.
00:20:59
The next big thing that starts really emerging is that he refers to race and he suggests every time he speaks about the McGurt Supreme court ruling or gaming rights or hunting and fishing rights,
00:21:11
he says that people should have the same rights regardless of race.
00:21:15
And he says it's not fair to have two sets of rules and that these natives can do something and the white folks can't.
00:21:22
Let's say an Indian steals your car, then the state of Oklahoma can't prosecute that person.
00:21:29
I think that's a problem.
00:21:31
I'm actually member of the Cherokees and we love our Indian community.
00:21:36
I mean, there are neighbors.
00:21:37
There are friends.
00:21:38
I will fight as long as I'm governor to make sure that we're one state with one set of rules, regardless of your race or where you live.
00:21:46
We should all be under the same rules.
00:21:49
He starts really pushing that rhetorical, racial language.
00:21:53
It starts to sew a lot of seeds of discontent amongst Oklahoma.
00:21:56
And so people in their little suburban neighborhoods are starting to look over at their neighbors who might have a tribal car tag and they're like, you're the asshole who's doing all these things and you get all these privileges.
00:22:08
And I don't.
00:22:09
I guess the argument that I would make about race in this case is that you can't just be a native American show up in Oklahoma and have separate rules.
00:22:18
You actually have to be a citizen of a sovereign nation that has a compact with the United States.
00:22:23
The problem when Kevin Stitt uses race as a signifier is that it's not really about that.
00:22:29
The tribes exist because of a sovereign nations agreement with another sovereign nation.
00:22:35
And the thing that he's overlooking are that a lot of people overlooking is that these agreements between the Muscogee and the Cherokee and the Seminole and whomever else and the United States government has nothing to do with the state.
00:22:47
There's no other treaty that America makes where a state would come in and try and override it.
00:22:52
Like you're not seeing Texas override NATO or something NATO treaty or you're not seeing Washington state overriding the North American free trade agreement.
00:23:01
So I mean, what he's doing here is really, really extreme.
00:23:04
Here's Graham Brewer again.
00:23:05
I think there's a lot of people outside of Indian country, certainly not native people that like don't really understand the difference between racial identity and political identity when it comes to indigeneity or,
00:23:17
you know, are familiar with these concepts at all.
00:23:19
With this long list of stuff that he's done, it sounds like this guy is really, really hostile to native people.
00:23:25
Is he actually a member of the Cherokee nation?
00:23:28
That's the million dollar question.
00:23:30
This episode of pretendians is brought to you by AG one.
00:23:36
Robert, we've both been trying AG one.
00:23:39
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00:23:40
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00:23:43
What are you noticing since you started?
00:23:46
The first thing I noticed since I walked to work every day was a bit more of spring in my step on my morning walk.
00:23:53
The walk home, I feel more energized too.
00:23:54
That's all uphill.
00:23:56
So I'm thinking it's helping sustain my energy throughout the day.
00:23:58
It's also helping with my digestion too.
00:24:01
You know, that makes a lot of sense because AG one has a lot of good stuff in there like vitamin C, magnesium, digestive enzymes.
00:24:09
They call it a foundational nutritional supplement.
00:24:12
AG one recommends drinking AG one first thing in the morning, every morning on an empty stomach for optimal absorption, makes one scoop of AG one with about eight to ten ounces of cold water and drink.
00:24:22
Some people also like to add a squeeze of lemon, mix it with oat milk or served over ice.
00:24:28
Remember to always keep your AG one of the fridge for optimal freshness.
00:24:31
If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG one try AG one and get a free one, your supply of vitamin D three K two and five free AG one travel packs with your first purchase at drink AG one.com forward slash pretendians that's drink AG one.com slash pretendians check it out.
00:24:49
This guy's unlike any native we know.
00:24:57
So is he even for real?
00:24:58
And I know some journalists who have tried to go figure out why his relationship to that tribe is Graham Brewer teamed up with another reporter Simon Romero and their investigation into its ancestry was published as a collaboration between high country news and the New York Times.
00:25:15
To understand his ties, you have to go back to before Oklahoma was even a state in 1889.
00:25:22
The area that we call Oklahoma was owned by natives and it was broken down into the lotment land.
00:25:27
That means each native manwoman and child got a hundred and sixty acres collectively it was referred to as Indian territory and around this time oil is being discovered.
00:25:38
So Graham Brewer's 2020 investigation in high country news found that Kevin is only enrolled Cherokee because one of his ancestors fraudded the government and paid to be on its roles.
00:25:51
Stit had only one direct tie to the tribe, which was Francis Dawson his ancestor Francis Dawson paid one hundred dollars ahead for him and his family to be added as Cherokee citizens.
00:26:02
With say, why would anybody do that?
00:26:04
It's just to get some free land the reward a hundred and sixty acres for a hundred bucks.
00:26:09
So that land is worth about 11 million dollars today and if you own land as an indigenous person who's a member of a tribe.
00:26:19
It's not taxable.
00:26:20
There was this easy way to get land and all it took was payment to one of those land agents registering as an Indian on the roles and he got some acres.
00:26:29
How common was this?
00:26:31
It was actually so fucking common because they already knew the land had oil.
00:26:35
This is like killers of the flower moon stuff.
00:26:38
You know, they know that this land is valuable and so they start allowing and it's common practice.
00:26:44
The Lucinda Hickory Foundation is doing research and it found that most federal land bureau agents did take these bribes.
00:26:52
It was so common practice.
00:26:53
It was like their bonus.
00:26:56
Governor Stit denies this claim and he calls it unsubstantiated slander.
00:27:02
We do know that the Cherokee Nation, you know, this is around nineteen hundred.
00:27:06
The Cherokee Nation was disputing some of these people who were on these roles and they were trying to appeal it.
00:27:13
According to the court transcripts that the when the Cherokee Nation challenged Francis Dawson's enrollment, the federal courts decided at the time was that the roles were final.
00:27:26
So around nineteen hundred, the Cherokee Nation tried to disenroll Francis Dawson, but the federal government ruled in favor of the Dawson family and they were kept on the roles.
00:27:36
So the Cherokee Nation right now doesn't technically have a process for disenrollment.
00:27:40
Well, I think we should take about twenty steps back here.
00:27:47
I mean, the whole premise of this series is that we're looking at people who are pretendians and we define pretendians in a specific way and that is people who are indigenous, who are citizens of indigest nations.
00:27:58
That is a person who is a native person.
00:28:01
So if we're going citizenship first and we're looking at the sacred card, well, he's a citizen, so he's not a pretending full stop.
00:28:07
No.
00:28:07
But the tribe tried to kick his ancestor off in the nineteen hundred not only does Kevin not show because I mean, I know natives who just don't know their culture or don't know their language and they're trying to reconnect Kevin doesn't even do that.
00:28:19
He basically is just like, yep, the federal government let me in and the rest fuck you.
00:28:26
I'll do what I want and it really doesn't even seem like he's ever cared about Indian people.
00:28:31
I mean, caring about Indian people isn't really the test of sovereignty.
00:28:36
It's just a test of like good taste.
00:28:38
If I had to do a prediction, though, I think that someday when governor stood is not the governor, I feel like the chair keys are going to boot him.
00:28:46
I was put my money on it.
00:28:47
Okay.
00:28:48
So what is he up to now?
00:28:50
Right.
00:28:50
He's in his last term.
00:28:52
So Kevin's not going to be governor anymore unless he pulled some miracle out of his ass and We'll have to just watch.
00:29:00
I feel like he's got a a life left in politics, but I don't think it's going to be in the state.
00:29:05
I think he's going to jump fed.
00:29:06
Right.
00:29:07
Because I've seen him pop up in the news quite a bit lately, especially with this Texas border stuff.
00:29:11
It sounds like he's sort of trying to set a stage for him to get interior under a Trump administration.
00:29:17
Yeah, he really would be that conservative solution to the native problem, but I would encourage whoever would appoint him to that office to really look at his track record in court.
00:29:29
He loses a lot.
00:29:32
I mean, so does Trump.
00:29:33
Yeah, that's true.
00:29:35
So Robert, as you heard, Kevin Stitt has some extreme ideas about natives.
00:29:42
He just fundamentally does not recognize the sovereignty of tribal nations.
00:29:47
He uses his Cherokee status, which he inherited from his pretendian ancestor to lend credibility to his wild ideas.
00:29:55
Now, when he was just in the government at the state level, there were some limits to how much army could do to us.
00:30:00
But imagine this guy as the token Indian of a Trump administration.
00:30:04
I just scarce the hell out of me.
00:30:08
Hi, governor Kevin Stitt here.
00:30:10
I am so thankful for President Trump's leadership.
00:30:15
This crisis that President Biden has created at the border is unbelievable.
00:30:19
Just found out that President Trump just gave me his endorsement from our real ex.
00:30:23
This is Rick Santorum.
00:30:24
When it comes to the issues that are most important to us, protecting the unborn, defending our borders, and standing with President Trump and his conservative agenda,
00:30:35
I know Kevin Stitt is the man for the job.
00:30:38
I'm a battered mudded warrior, running for the throne.
00:30:44
Going to break the barriers, make this country my own.
00:30:50
Or with my boots on the ground, I'm chasing a dream or a public and Native American.
00:30:56
Hear my battle screams, going to rise from the ashes, hear the Lord's arms call.
00:31:04
And that's our show.
00:31:06
Next time on Pretendians, there are monsters in those digital waters and she's certainly one of them.
00:31:12
I was a white person doing this work, would you be asking me that question?
00:31:15
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00:31:18
Additional production from Caleb Thompson.
00:31:20
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00:31:22
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00:31:25
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00:31:47
Thanks for listening.
00:31:48