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Grace Dillon

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Advanced Smite:
Grace Dillon is on the alleged pretendian list. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this post. I haven’t checked her genealogy. The fakes all seem to stick together though. The jacket is a dead giveaway.

https://twitter.com/pretendianslist/status/1401668006346887171?s=21&t=wTONu-Z2ep_JA7WOoE5TWQ

Diana:
Hi Smite, I already did a quick look-see and both her parents are dead. Her father is from West Virginia and I went back a couple of generations and all are white. Her mother is from South Carolina..? and is also white. I'll have to look into her mother a little closer when I have some time. That's as far as I got. As far as I can see no one in the family is from the Great lakes area. All southern states.




--- Quote from: advancedsmite on April 25, 2022, 03:27:11 am ---Grace Dillon is on the alleged pretendian list. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this post. I haven’t checked her genealogy. The fakes all seem to stick together though. The jacket is a dead giveaway.

https://twitter.com/pretendianslist/status/1401668006346887171?s=21&t=wTONu-Z2ep_JA7WOoE5TWQ

--- End quote ---

kaeqcekam:
This is beyond ridiculous. The academy needs to do some deep cleaning. I would not be please to paying tens of thousands of dollars only to find out that my professor is a lying liar. I don't care if they are decent at their job, they are not decent people. So, I hope it's clear now that these unethical pretendians do in fact benefit from their fraud. How does one start a thread? Can one be started on Grace Dillon?

educatedindian:
Already begun, you are now on it. There's a lot of work to do first. That list is one of the most problematic for me. All it does is list. No evidence, nothing to back it up. Some definitely deserve to be there, but even then, there's no reason given for anyone to believe the list. That site is everything we try to avoid in here.

Dillon is probably best known for the term indigenous futurism, trying to make science fiction serve Native needs. A long list of works, and in some good company.

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https://www.pdx.edu/indigenous-nations-studies/our-faculty-and-staff
CORE FACULTY:
Theodore Van Alst JR. Department Chair & Tenured Associate Professor
Cornel Pewewardy (Comanche & Kiowa) Founding Director & Professor Emeritus
Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) Tenured Professor
Judy BlueHorse Skelton (Nez Perce & Cherokee)    Assistant Professor

ADJUNCT FACULTY:
Rachel Black Elk (Lakota/Lumbee) Carma Corcoran (Chippewa-Cree)
Savahna Jackson (Klamath/Modoc) Gabe Sheoships (Walla Walla/Cayuse)
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith (Kalamath/Modoc) Jermayne Tuckta (Warm Springs)

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The rest of the dept is 100% Native. Pewawardy is not just a professor for decades, he's an artist, musician, and Vice Chair of the Comanche Nation. It'd be amazing if she managed to fool so many for so long.

And in the works she published, there is an anthology including Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie. Again, if she's fooled people, it's on a level we've never seen before.

Dillon does say Anishnaabe, but I haven't found any mention of rez or band, or descendant or unenrollled either. [ETA- I stand corrected. See Cellophane's post and others below. There are also a few sites mentioning her claiming Metis.]

This is different from Noodin where it depends on language skill. Dillon has her degrees in English, but is part of an interdisciplinary study that includes history and others, and writes and presents as an insider. Bolding is mine.

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https://www.pdx.edu/news/grace-dillon-consults-new-horror-movie-antlers
Grace Dillon, professor of Indigenous Nations Studies at PSU, consulted on the film.

Dillon, who is herself Anishinaabe, was asked by director Scott Cooper and producer Guillermo del Toro to collaborate on the film to ensure that the depiction of the Windigo was respectful.

While “Antlers” is set in a small Oregon town, the tradition of Windigo Manitou originates from Algonquian-speaking peoples along the northeastern coast. “There are really a lot of tribal peoples that are connected very strongly to this spirit entity,” she says.

There are also different interpretations of the Windigo. “Our sense of Windigo — and that's what they went with — in our language, Anishinaabemowin, refers to greed. It's all about greed,” she says....

Dillon also sent Cooper objects that ended up being used in the movie, including the book Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History. The book was written by PSU professor Shawn Smallman and includes a foreword by Dillon. It discusses a time when the fur trade was falling off due to overhunting and Indigenous people were accused of being Windigo and placed on trial....

On the set Dillon met Chris Ayre, a prominent Cheyenne and Arapaho filmmaker who was born in Portland and grew up in Klamath Falls. “He is one of our biggest native filmmakers,” says Dillon....

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So far I haven't found anything online even criticizing her, except the listing on Alleged Pretendians. Her name was put on the list June 2021, based on "professional genealogist specializing in Quebecois/Metis." No professional name given, no genealogy shown. But Google gives one of the top auto suggestions for her as "pretendian."

There's a lot more needed before we can say.

cellophane:
From The NishPossessed: Reading Le Guin in Indian Country (2021):
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/26779/ada12-thenis-dil-2017.pdf
(Bold is mine)


--- Quote ---Aaniin!
Aaniin is our word for “hello” in Anishinaabemowin. It literally means I see the light in you. And I see many lights today. So much that it is Sâgassige gisiss—the sun has come out of the clouds.

I’m Anishinaabe, “Nish” for short, and my family are from two nations, Bay Mills Nation and Garden River First Nation, along with many, many relatives––Saulteaux on the Canadian side, and all sorts. Once you proliferate, you proliferate. You move and relocate a lot.

Unlike adrienne, I cannot tell you that I grew up on Star Trek—because I lived in the woods. And by woods, I mean we lived in very simple ways. We had no plumbing; we had lots of candles, lots of fires. We lived very, very differently. At the time, I didn’t know that. My dad taught me to create the wiigwaas from birchbark, which is sacred to us. You can create birchbark canoes that really don’t leak. And when you develop that kind of talent or skill as an Indigenous person, it’s something that you want to pass down. Many of our relatives could work it out with a basket, but my dad could work it out with a canoe, only from birch material. We had no TV or theaters or anything where I could become connected to any concept of Star Trek.

So naturally, when I went out to school at UC Riverside, I was absolutely fascinated by all things popular culture because I’d had no background in it whatsoever. And people still to this day will throw out things and I’ll have this horrible “waaah, take notes, I don’t know” feeling. I didn’t know about The Beatles, Elvis Presley—all the things that people think are just a part of your DNA. Our DNA was quite different.

I grew up in what was a pacifist anarchist community and it was the reason why I was very attracted to the novel The Dispossessed. It was native-founded and then we invited others in, because, as Anishinaabe people, that is our thinking. Simon Ortiz, who was Acomo Pueblo, talks about the word for “people” in his language as hanoh. But when he describes it, he makes it very clear that hanoh is not just for his nation. They’re very cognizant of self-recognition and being a nation, but hanoh is extended as a personal hanoh of your community to the hanoh globally of the world. We do that, too, but we use water.

When we greet others and go other places, we talk in our language about the waters: our wetlands with the rice, our mountains, but always the waterway. We’re always figuring out the waterway. And when I go anywhere––this has become a habit of mine––I’m always checking out the waterways to whatever place we’re headed to. It makes sense, then, that even though I’m a professor in Indigenous Nations Studies, I do not just do “scholactivist” projects, but also actual forms of activism for water protectors. Because water protectors are needed not only at Standing Rock but at many, many other places as well.
--- End quote ---

From Bradbury’s Survivance Stories (2013):
http://www.web.pdx.edu/~dillong/GraceDillonFinalv1.pdf
(Preprint, published in Gloria McMillan et al., Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars: Biographical, Anthropological, Literary, Scientific and Other Perspectives.)


--- Quote ---When I was a child, I spoke as much Finnish as I could capture from the pacifist-anarchist community where my father, mother, six brothers and sisters and I attended open meetings to debate scripture and the latest news out of Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue, and as much Anishinaabemowen as I could gather from my grandfather, an Ojibwe who cooked for the lumberjack camps during timber harvest and who vexed my parents whenever we visited by fishing Eskimo Pies from a glossy white fridge that had a bullet hole straight through its door. But mostly I spoke the lingua franca of the Cold War era; nin jaganashim, in other words. This all happened in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (which is not really Michigan) and not so long ago, though the U.P., back then anyway, must have slipped time in an effort to remain quiet and feral, while electric metropoles like Cheybogan, Peshtigo, Petosky, and others tempted us to cross borders. But we never did. Civilization might as well have been 65 million miles away.
--- End quote ---

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