Stop saying you're Native if you aren't enrolled in a tribe.

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The worst part of telling people I'm Native is that in any social interaction, someone will inevitably claim to also be Native American.

They'll tell some tale about an old and distant relative that neither they nor their parents ever met who was a full-blooded "Cherokee princess," and because of this, they themselves are also Native American. (Never mind the fact that North American Native tribes had no form of royalty in any sense.)

Not surprisingly, the same people that claim Native ancestry never cite a specific band or nation — Cherokee is the go-to claimed tribe, but when claiming, they typically don't know anything specific, even though there are three different recognized Cherokee tribes. We call these folks "Pretendians."

To be Native American, you don't claim a tribe; a tribe claims you. I am an enrolled Sicangu Lakota, and my reservation is the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in Okreek, South Dakota. If you can't point to a specific band or nation of Native America that claims you as one of their own, you aren't Native. It's as simple as that.

With the recent surge of 23andMe-esque DNA tests, people have been doing this way more often. Pretendians fail to recognize the fact that Native tribes reject DNA evidence as a means of proving Native status. Also, due to blood quantum laws, being Native is based on the pedigree of our blood, making us one of three organisms on Earth determined that way, along with horses and dogs.

The worst part of this is that Pretendians love to claim Native ancestry, but when was the last time they did something for the betterment of a tribe? They never know or care about Native issues like MMIW ("Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women," a modern-day genocide of Native women), the fact that suicide rates for Native teens are 2.5 times higher than the national average, and that Native teens have a death rate two to five times higher than that of whites in the same age range.

If you claim to be Native for vanity and you don't care about us, then you are contributing to the problem.