Campaign aims to explore Latinos' Indigenous roots
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Young Totonac natives attend a training session for "Danza de los Voladores" in Mexico. Photo: Rodrigo Arangua/AFP via Getty Images
An Indigenous advocacy group has launched a video campaign to raise awareness of the diversity of Native people, including U.S. Latinos with Indigenous roots.
The big picture: According to the latest U.S. census, the number of U.S. Latinos identifying as multiracial soared during the last decade. Latinos who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native jumped 115%.
Details: Just before Thanksgiving, IllumiNative launched Good Relatives, an online campaign exploring "the diversity, beauty, and resiliency of Native peoples in the 21st century."
What they're saying: "The goal of this campaign is to really explore who native peoples are today, which means we're a very diverse population," Crystal Echo Hawk, founder and executive director of IllumiNative, told Axios.
- "What so many people don't understand is for the Latino population south of the border, so many of those people have roots in their own Indigenous nations."
- Echo Hawk said videos of Latinos' Indigenous links, as well as those on Black Americans and Asian Americans, will be released online next year.
Zoom out: The campaign comes amid a debate among Indigenous people on who can claim to be Native American.
- Some activists and academics have sought to out "pretendians" (short for "pretend Indians") while others say online shaming misrepresents the complexities of the Indigenous experience.
By the numbers: The number of people who identify as Native American or Alaska Native alone grew by about 27% to 3.7 million people over the last decade, according to the U.S. Census.
- The Native American population is now the largest it has been in modern U.S. history, also according to the census.
What we're watching: The Good Relatives campaign also comes as other Indigenous associations and artists are starting their own efforts to improve knowledge about Native Americans.
- Comedy Central writer Joey Clift, a member of the Cowlitz Tribe, recently released a humorous digital short, "Six things you didn't learn about Native American people in high school," to counter stereotypes.
- Clift said other videos are in the works.
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