“My mom was Indian and my dad’s a cowboy,” says Heather Rae, who has parlayed her Cherokee heritage into becoming what the New York Post called “Hollywood’s top Native American producer.”
She is a member of the Indigenous Alliance of the Academy of Motion Pictures and has previously led the Sundance Institute’s Native American program. There’s just one catch: Heather Rae isn’t really Native American at all. Instead, she is just one more example of the recurring phenomenon today of white people attempting to escape the stigma of whiteness by posing as a “person of color.”
The Post reported Sunday that “a watchdog group called the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds is now demanding the Academy and the producer drop her ‘false claims’ while activists insist she’s at best 1/2048th Cherokee.”
