Kay LeClaire, the far-left Madison, Wisconsin-based activist who claimed an American-Indian heritage and clamored for radical causes she said benefitted the indigenous community, is facing public denunciation after being exposed as entirely white.
LeClaire, who went by the alias nibiiwakamigkwe [lower-case in the original] is a co-founder of giige [also lower-case in the original]. The arts-oriented group describes itself as “an Indigenous and queer space for the community in and around Teejop [a Ho-Chunk tribal word for the Great Lakes region].” Though female, LeClaire describes herself as “nonbinary,” denying she belongs to either sex.
The 28-year-old activist insisted for at least five years that she had Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. Her ethnic and sexual identitarianism — something she and others call “two-spirit” — won her local recognition that resulted in a paid residency at the University of Wisconsin and a seat on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force.
Among the leftist gadfly’s public better-known exploits was an effort in 2020 to demand that a white-owned music club called the Winnebago (a word originally referring to the Ho-Chunk tribe) change its name. The venue’s owners eventually did so, renaming their place the Burr Oak.
But last November, a little-known website called New Age Fraud Forum featured a posting from a genealogy aficionado going by the online nickname AdvancedSmite who consulted online records to discover LeClaire’s ethnicity is in fact German, Swedish and French Canadian. Over the last several weeks, news of AdvancedSmite’s findings made its way into the Madison community.
In a statement, LeClaire did not deny the revelations and said she did “not yet know how to respond adequately” but said that she will at least shed the pretense of being an American Indian and return indigenous-style art she has been accused of acquiring from others and describing as her own creation.
“Moving forward, my efforts will be towards reducing harm by following the directions provided by Native community members and community-specified proxies,” she said. “Currently, this means that I am not using the Ojibwe name given to me and am removing myself from all community spaces, positions, projects and grants and will not seek new ones. Any culturally related items I hold are being redistributed back in community, either to the original makers and gift-givers when possible or elsewhere as determined by community members.”
According to the website Madison365, LeClaire even described herself as “a 20-something white woman planning a wedding” in 2017 on her now-deleted Facebook page.
In the wake of the news, giige leaders denounced their former colleague.
“This person has both gone against our inherent values and perpetuated harm within the Teejop community and beyond,” the collective said in a statement. “Without our knowledge or consent, Kay LeClaire used our position as an Indigenous-led business to inflate their platform and expand their access to an already vulnerable community.”
Another organization to regret its association with LeClaire was the area arts journal Tone Madison, which retracted an opinion piece written by her in 2021 and offered an apology from publisher and editor Scott Gordon. LeClaire’s article rebuked the University of Wisconsin-Madison for flying the Ho-Chunk flag underneath the state and national flags.
“The ultimate responsibility for enabling this false representation on Tone Madison’s platform rests with me, as publisher of Tone Madison,” Gordon wrote. “While an unwitting mistake — I was unfortunately one of many people LeClaire had fooled across cultural, activism, and media circles, including many Native people — it does unconscionable injury to our community.”
LeClair’s deception is merely the latest prominent example of an American of European ancestry claiming to be an American Indian. In 1973, Sacheen Littlefeather spoke to an Oscars audience on behalf of actor Marlon Brando, who refused to accept an Academy Award, citing Hollywood’s allegedly poor treatment of indigenous Americans. Though the woman asserted personal standing to complain of this treatment, the late activist’s family subsequently revealed she was in fact of Spanish descent.
And in 2012, future Star News Network editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy researched claims by soon-to-be Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that she had a Cherokee great-great-great grandmother. Leahy reported on his findings for Breitbart, exposing Warren’s assertion as fabricated. In 2019, the results of a DNA test led the senator to apologize for repeatedly stating she had American Indian heritage to public audiences, on her State Bar of Texas registration card and to her erstwhile employer Harvard Law School.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Wisconsin Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
