Where Are They Now? Kay LeClaire edition

I began watching season 2 of Dark Winds recently. Based on novels by Tony Hillerman, the show features Navajo police officers led by Lt. Joe Leaphorn. As they solve crimes, we get to know the friends and families of the officers and the Najavo community in some part of Arizona that I cannot recall more generally. It's a fine show, although I would offer that this season isn't as good as the first in that the killer is identified early on so this season is more thriller than mystery.

But my crush on Jessica Matten continues unabated and I remain surprised that the show hasn't been canceled since it is based on novels by a white man and not a Native American.

Anyway, watching the new season brought to mind Kay LeClaire, a Madisonian who gained some well-deserved infamy earlier this year when she was exposed as a European-American and not the Native American that she was posing as. (Such people are called "pretendians".)

I wondered what happened to her since the racial revelation of late last year. My internet searches only return articles from this past January when the news reached Madison and people disassociated themselves from LeClaire. Hilariously, Tone Madison's editor couldn't find enough swords to fall on and sounded more blameworthy than LeClaire herself. It seems she just issued a statement, returned items she shouldn't have had, and then skulked off into anonymity.

It would be fascinating to have a chat with her.

Sites show that she got married a few years before this fiasco and, if she was still married when her cover was blown, what did her husband think? Not only was she going around claiming Native American ethnicity that she didn't have, but she was also altering her appearance. And I don't just mean donning Native American clothing; she was darkening her skin. Did her husband explicitly approve? Or did he give tacit assent by staying silent and just letting her get on with the deception? What about other family and friends? Did they know or look the other way?

Unsurprisingly, articles stick to the white woman pretending to be a Native American one. But what about the converse? LeClaire is apparently of German, Swedish, and French-Canadian stock. Does she actively dislike her ancestry? Or was it simply more fun and profitable to deny it? I tend to think that there's a line, even if not a thick one, between dallying with personae, on one hand, and self-loathing on the other.

While I am not privileged to LeClaire's thoughts, I do feel that her subterfuge was just as disparaging of European ethnicity as it was of elevating Native American.

Perhaps we will never know what went through her head. Or maybe she'll write a book in a couple years and have a Netflix series that's the equivalent of Fox Night at the Movies - Portrait of a Pretendian - made of it and laugh all the way to the bank.