Blood Feuds: The Fight Over Who Gets to Be Native American

The stories and records, Moorehead believes, offer proof that her forebears had a consistent presence in Rhode Island since the time of Massasoit, whose son, Metacom—a.k.a. King Philip—launched a bloody war against the British precisely 350 years ago this summer. Moorehead’s ancestry matters now because she, along with nearly 500 others, are members of a group that calls itself the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe, which is now in its fifth year of campaigning the state of Rhode Island to grant it official recognition as an Indian tribe.

It is another process, however—federal recognition—that is considered the gold standard for tribal recognition. There are now 574 tribes recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, and gaining entry into this exclusive group happens only after an applicant tribe proves that it has existed on what the BIA calls “a substantially continuous basis” since 1900. Anthropological and genealogical records can come into play, as can historical records. The stakes are high: Recognized tribes often receive the rights to their ancestral land, with some choosing to establish casinos to reshape their communities’ futures.

Beyond the federal process lies a simpler path to earn tribal recognition, one that is highly controversial: state recognition. While this designation typically doesn’t come with land rights or the approval to build casinos, it can unlock millions in federal dollars for housing, education, and healthcare benefits.

Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee stands firmly against the Seaconke Wampanoag’s recognition bid. His executive counsel, Claire Richards, effectively blocked their efforts last year, arguing that tribal recognition demands the scrutiny of experts—anthropologists, historians, and genealogists with special “expertise” and should not be decided via “legislative fiat.”

At the same time—and counterintuitively, perhaps—the Seaconke Wampanoag’s most fervent foes are other Native Americans. Dean Stanton, chief of the 2,500-member Narragansett Indian Tribe, headquartered in Charlestown, Rhode Island, argues that the Seaconke Wampanoag are trying to attain recognition—and benefits—without proving anything. “When we filed for federal recognition, which we received in 1983,” Stanton says, “we had to produce 27 volumes of data from precontact until present day. We were able to do that.” At the moment, the Narragansett Indian Tribe is the only federally recognized tribe in Rhode Island. (There are currently no state-recognized tribes in the Ocean State.) Chief Stanton’s concerns echo a growing sentiment across Indian nations, where many warn of an epidemic of fraudulent cultural groups—typically set up as nonprofit corporations—seeking tribal rights through the easier path of state recognition.

Yet not all state leaders share ­McKee’s skepticism. Here at home, Governor Maura Healey took a markedly different approach, granting recognition via executive order to the 200-member Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe of Plymouth. When questioned about the rationale, officials pointed to the text of the executive order, which based the recognition on the tribe’s presence “well before the arrival of the Mayflower” as well as an 1861 report recognizing the tribe and other 17th-century documents.

The landscape of tribal recognition keeps growing more complex by the year. More than 100 tribes currently hold state recognition without federal status, and their numbers appear to be swelling—though no agency or nonprofit tracks the total. The situation has grown particularly thorny around Cherokee identity, with some Native American traditionalists claiming that countless fraudulent Cherokee bands now seek legitimacy. Meanwhile, tensions have erupted in New England, where Vermont’s legislature recognized four Abenaki bands in 2011 and 2012, sparking protests from two established Quebec-based Abenaki First Nations, the Odanak and Wôlinak. The dispute reached the global stage last summer at a United Nations Indigenous rights session in Switzerland, where an Odanak official denounced these recognitions as “a direct entry door for the theft of our identity, our culture, our language, and our history.”

Back in Rhode Island, the debate rages during this legislative session. For some, granting the Seaconke Wampanoags recognition would dilute a carefully guarded status that must remain exclusive. For others, Moorehead and her allies represent the overlooked descendants of Colonial persecution, worthy of an expedited path to recognition and support. But these arguments ripple far beyond Rhode Island’s borders, raising questions: In this modern era of identity politics, who can claim Native American heritage? What proof must they offer? And who, ultimately, holds the power to decide?

All questions about the Seaconke Wampanoag’s legitimacy go back to the summer of 1675, when Metacom retaliated against the British seizure of Indian lands. What began as Metacom’s raids on Swansea soon erupted into a full-scale conflict across southern New England. A handful of tribes—the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, Abenaki, and Narragansett—banded together to fight the British. But the British had superior guns, and the Mohegan and Mohawk tribes allied with them. Though the conflict lasted barely more than a year, its toll was catastrophic—claiming more lives, proportional to population, than any other war in American history.

Metacom’s resistance came to a violent end in August 1676, when he was fatally shot by a Christian Indian. Within weeks, British captain Benjamin Church tracked down one of Metacom’s closest lieutenants—the aging Annawan—near what would later become the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border. In his book on the history of King Philip’s war, Church describes finding Annawan near Rehoboth, where Annawan surrendered and was later killed by Church’s men. According to Moorehead, these survivors from the Seaconke and Wampanoag tribes would settle on both sides of the Massachusetts-Rhode Island line, and later formed the original Seaconke Wampanoag community.

To write her 2014 book, Finding Balance, Moorehead spent decades searching for proof that since 1676, a cluster of Wampanoag existed in and near Seekonk, discrete from other bands of the tribe—the Herring Pond, for instance, the Gay Head, and the Mashpee, all in Massachusetts. This is no easy task, Moorehead points out, particularly because the war drove the surviving members from their homes and sent them underground as it eradicated their culture and lifeways.

The Seaconke Wampanoag’s current chief, Darrell Waldron, contends that New England’s Native cultures were so fragmented that survivors shouldn’t be obligated to document their roots. “You see what’s happening in Ukraine today. They’re being bombed and attacked and they’re fleeing for their lives,” Waldron says. “That’s what these Indians did. They’d go where they were safe, and then they’d move. Seaconke Wampanoag are still being discovered. We just recently found a group of them in the Bahamas.”

For the first 250 years after Annawan’s surrender at Rehoboth, there simply wasn’t much documentation about the Seaconke Wampanoag. George Washington University professor David Silverman, for example, wrote a 500-page history of the early Wampanoag, This Land Is Their Land, in 2019, but declined to comment on the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe, saying that he didn’t “know much about this community.” For her part, Moorehead argues that the Seaconke’s absence from the early historical record makes sense. “They kept really quiet,” she says of the people she calls her ancestors. “Nobody went outside of the community because when they did, they got harmed.”

The first documented proof of a Seaconke Wampanoag community dates to 1924. That year, the Seaconkes built the First Free Methodist Church in Seekonk. Moorehead, whose grandfather was the carpenter, has receipts from the construction.

Still, the term “Seaconke Wampanoag” did not see widespread usage until the mid-1990s. That’s when a fierce and flamboyant advocate for the self-proclaimed tribe emerged as a media darling. Chief Willie “Eagle Heart” Greene (1937–2016) was a South Providence native and world-class boxer who dedicated his life to his Wampanoag roots in midlife and, in 1997, organized the Seaconke Wampanoag as a nonprofit corporation and initiated an annual Seaconke Wampanoag powwow.

In 1998, he advised the Bureau of Indian Affairs that his group would seek federal recognition as a tribe. Though he never completed the process, in 2003 he sued Rhode Island and two towns, Woonsocket and Cumberland, in federal court, arguing that 34 square miles of land along the Blackstone River belonged to the Seaconke Wampanoag, per the terms of a 1661 deed. U.S. District Judge William Smith summarily dismissed the case, noting that, to prevail, Greene would need to prove that the land had never changed hands since 1661 (it had, in fact, changed hands many times).

Waldron assumed his role as chief six years ago. A savvy politico with deep connections at the Rhode Island State House, he has been the executive director of the Rhode Island Indian Council, an advocacy group, for nearly four decades. Each year, he raises millions to help Indians throughout the Northeast. For the past five legislative sessions, he has sought from the state an official designation as a tribe. “I want my people to be middle class—to have a college education and job training funds and medicine,” he says.

For Moorehead and her fellow Seaconke Wampanoags, the debate over the tribe’s eligibility for recognition is its own kind of trauma. She invited four fellow tribe members to meet with me, and all four demurred. “They are intimidated by the idea of anyone probing into their identity or having to prove their heritage,” she says. “No other ethnicity needs to constantly prove who they are.”

If questions loom over the Seaconke Wampanoag’s claims of a continuous presence in Rhode Island, Narragansett Chief Stanton offers an explanation. “After the King Philip’s War,” he asks rhetorically, “were they even here at all?” He argues that even occasional Seaconke Wampanoag presence in Rhode Island since 1676 doesn’t justify recognition. “Historically, we have people in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey,” he says of the Narragansett. “But we don’t claim those places. We claim Rhode Island because it’s the site of our last land holdings.”

Stanton’s skepticism is shared by others, including the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (TAAF). Founded three years ago in North Carolina, this nonprofit now leads a nationwide fight against people who it believes are fraudulently claiming to be Native. The group’s director, Lianna Costantino, a Cherokee, says that these pretenders are an insult to real Indians who were “almost successfully exterminated” by European settlers. And there are other skeptics. Writer and activist Jacqueline Keeler, an enrolled Navajo, has made a name for herself investigating what she calls “Pretendians.” Daniel Strong Walker Thomas, a Delaware Indian now living in Boston, prides himself on having coined the term “CPAIN,” which stands for Corporations Posing as Indigenous Nations.

History is littered with stories of individuals whose claims to Native ancestry are almost certainly false. The 20th-century “Native American” actor Iron Eyes Cody was of Sicilian descent. Academic Elizabeth Hoover, who got her Ph.D. at Brown University in 2010, then taught there for a decade, called herself Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. But in 2023, she was so thoroughly proven a phony that she issued a public letter of apology from her current post, at University of California, Berkeley. It declared, “I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life, based on incomplete information.” Then there’s Colby Wilkens, a romance novelist who once described herself on her website as “white/Native and queer.” After TAAF lacerated her in the press last year, she struck all mention of her ancestry from the site.

One of the alleged Pretendians TAAF has attacked is the most famous Seaconke Wampanoag: Rhode Island boxer turned actress Kali Reis, whom Vanity Fair described as “the first Indigenous woman fighter to become a world champion.” News stories in W Magazine, Men’s Health, and the Daily Mail have identified her as being of Cape Verdean and Seaconke Wampanoag descent, and Reis told one reporter that her Indian name—Mequinonoag, or many feathers—was “given to me by my mother. She is the medicine woman of our Seaconke Wampanoag tribe.”

Costantino, of TAAF, says she finds Reis’s claims that she’s Indian “nauseating.” TAAF recently put together a genealogy report that traces Reis’s ancestry back to her sixth great-grandparents. After combing through Census, military, and naturalization records, TAAF’s researcher, unnamed on the group’s website, wrote, “I did not find indication of American Indian ancestry. I cannot change history or documentation to fit a person’s narrative of American Indian ancestral claims.”

Reis did not respond to interview requests, but in a statement, her manager, Philip Grenz, refuted her attackers, saying that Reis “has always been very clear about her identity,” adding that “it is unfortunate that during this time of extreme national polarization, there are organizations attempting to weaponize identity politics to sow division amongst an already marginalized group.” For her part, Moorehead says she “watched [Reis] grow up,” and years ago was part of a Seaconke Wampanoag song circle called the Nettukkusqk Singers with Reis’s mother.

As Moorehead talks in her kitchen, large questions hang in the air: How many Americans could trace their lineage to the 1600s? And can historical documents truly deliver absolute truth? After all, the Census records that TAAF consulted to research Reis’s ancestry contradict one another: One of Reis’s great-grandmothers was listed as Black in 1900, white in 1910, and Black in 1920. What was written down in the moment was contingent on the biases of the Census taker and the conversation held at the door. Throughout history, Indians have had good reason to cloak their racial identity to avoid discrimination in a nation that didn’t give them citizenship or the right to vote until 1924. Public records may not yield any indication of Reis’s American Indian ancestry, but they also fail to prove that she isn’t Indian.

Conversely, David Cornsilk, a widely cited Cherokee genealogist who specializes in investigating fakers, notes that there are plenty of bona fide Native Americans who are not allied with a recognized tribe. On his own initiative, Cornsilk has discovered 1,000 such Cherokees. Habitually, he reaches out to these folks and urges them not to join what he calls fake tribes. “I try to bring them into the fold and association with other Cherokees,” Cornsilk says, meaning Cherokees belonging to federally recognized tribes.

In New England, though, seeking acceptance into a recognized tribe isn’t always an option—even for genuine Native Americans. The Narragansett closed their membership rolls in 2019. The Mashpee Wampanoag closed their rolls long before that, and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head only allows applicants who can directly trace their lineage back to members on the 1870 tribe census roll.

In bidding for recognition, the Seaconke Wampanoag are working to forge a new path forward in a world where so many doors have been shut. But do they have the standing to do it?

The question of who qualifies as a legitimate tribe has long been contentious in American law and policy. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has tried to answer this through strict criteria, but not all Indians accept that criteria: Many view it as a cruel and legalistic tool guided by the same Colonial impulse that inspired early American settlers to taxonify Indians, to measure their skulls and relegate them to remote, resource-deprived reservation lands.

There is no clear answer as to whether Waldron has standing, and as time rolls on, determining who’s Indian will become ever more difficult. More and more Natives will marry non-Indians, diluting bloodlines. Records will get lost. People will forget things and die.

Still, as the exact definition of “Indian” remains elusive, one thing seems certain: Indians will keep fighting one another, just as they did 350 years ago during King Philip’s War after white men arrived and pressed guns into their hands. “They’re just putting a carrot out in front of Indians,” Moorehead laments, referencing the white power structure, “and making us fight over it.”

Standing in her kitchen, leaning her weight on her good knee, she’s weary after sharing stories for two-and-a-half hours. A gentle sadness colors her words as she reflects on finding tranquility amid the growing conflict over Native American identity—a battle being waged between her own people. “All I know,” she says, “is that I was born an Indian, and I’m gonna die an Indian.”