Why is Madison a hub for race fraud?

An investigation into race, gender, opportunity, and whiteness.

Note: Kay LeClaire’s pronouns were she/they and they/them, and our sources used both interchangeably. Tone Madison reached out to LeClaire for comment for this article, but did not receive a response.

The red clover boasts short, straight petals that grow in reddish-purple and lavender buds that begin to dot North American landscapes in spring. Their likeness can be found on vitamin bottles and tea boxes—medicinal in nature, clovers have historically been used to treat things as trivial as cuts and wounds, to more serious ailments like osteoporosis. Known also as the wild clover, cowgrass, and meadow trefoil, the red clover is a species easily found in Wisconsin. The same goes for other parts of the Midwest like Minnesota, and in Togo and the Netherlands, sprawling in pastures.

It makes sense, then, that when the tattoo collective giige was looking for a new name early last year, they chose Red Clover Tattoo Collective (RCTC)—something that all of its tattoo artists and apprentices regularly encountered in the collective’s hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. “It was something that also had a greater significance for the cultural backgrounds of everyone involved,” Red Clover tattoo artist and co-owner nipinet Landsem explained. “It’s a little more inclusive to us [than giige].”

Red Clover’s name change—and its accompanying new chapter—came at the heels of a controversy that broke apart giige’s then four-person group, and whose harm reverberated throughout the entire Madison community. As Madison365 first reported one year ago today, Kay LeClaire, giige’s front desk receptionist, was outed as being a “Pretendian,” or what the Indigenous Foundation defines as “a non-indigenous person who falsely claims Indigenous ancestry.” As a community organizer, artist, and educational figure, LeClaire was a prominent Indigenous person in Madison, who benefited greatly from the identity-related opportunities their fraud granted them. 

The revelation around LeClaire’s true identity was particularly hurtful because of how deeply integrated they were in a number of Madison communities. Claiming Indigenous heritage—specifically Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and two-spirit identities—granted them access to a paid residency with UW-Madison, collaborations with the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, and even a seat on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women task force. Overall, they accrued over $60,000 for their involvement in local initiatives, much of which was collected from their salary at giige. While LeClaire has since stepped down from these positions, their damage is long lasting. 

According to Landsem, the remaining three collective members had been trying to remove LeClaire from their position at giige for about four months prior to them being outed as a Pretendian, mainly because LeClaire would often not show up to work, was taking financial advantage of the business, and exhibited “abusive behavior.” But LeClaire “blocked [their removal] at every turn.” When the truth about their identity was finally made public—and even made headlines in international publications—LeClaire resigned. 

Amidst the shock and hurt, many community members were left confused. Jeneile Luebke, a professor at UW-Madison’s School of Nursing and member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, recalls that LeClaire abruptly canceled a funding collaboration with little explanation. “The way it was worded, I kind of got freaked out and was like, ‘Did I do something?,’” Luebke recalls. “It was within days of that that I found out about what was happening.”

After the news broke, Landsem and their colleagues began the work of fixing the damage LeClaire caused, working to rematriate the many Indigenous items they’d collected to “legitimize their costume,” including beadwork and regalia. Before returning these pieces to their rightful owners and makers, Landsem had to clean many of them of self-tanner and makeup stains. “It felt like something concrete that I could do to try and repair this weird hole blown open in this community,” Landsem explains. “It was good. It was a lot of work, but it was good.” Leaving the name giige behind—a name that LeClaire themself had chosen for the collective—“felt like a clean break. It felt good to leave that all behind and not have that connection anymore.”

It seems strange, perhaps, to tug on the tendrils of the past, especially when the future forged by The Red Clover Collective feels like one filled with so much hope and forward movement. It might even seem pointless to search for answers when connections have been deliberately severed, illustrated most concretely by LeClaire’s since-retired social media pages. It would be easy for us, and for the Madison community at large, to move on from this scandal quietly—as quietly as it took for LeClaire to sign off and let their exponential harm fall to a whisper in the months after they were outed. But at our core, we, Jenny and Rodlyn, are feminist researchers, and our shared commitment to justice and critical inquiry made it so we couldn’t let LeClaire’s betrayal go unquestioned, to attempt to get at the root of it. 

Academia’s role in transraciality: A “toxically fruitful” place for race fraud 

Our lives first merged on the steps of UW-Madison’s Sterling Hall, as students of color admitted into the same graduate program who found camaraderie in a city where that kind of genuine bond felt scarce. When we write, it feels natural for our voices to blend into a single unit: for us, “we” is symbolic of our struggles and our survivals, inside and outside of the academy. The “we” in this piece is us—two friends and thinkers—but also those of us who, despite being given immense opportunities by UW-Madison, have been burned with shame and doubt within its walls, emotions which feel even harsher when Madison’s warmth is unreaching, refusing to welcome us in fully.

Our two experiences are singular, but for those of us who are BIPOC, queer, disabled, or poor—whose existences are questioned in a town like Madison—how we moved around in these spaces were oftentimes reflections of each other, if not also distortions. One of us is a Filipina American woman who has become engrossed—if not altogether obsessed—with how whiteness (in all of its imperialist, systemic, and everyday forms) has shaped so many aspects of her own life and her ancestry. The other is a queer Latina who has just begun to unspool the confining and liberating threads of gender. For me, Jenny, queerness was never an entry point into this formidable city but rather, a reminder, a clear division between myself and the queer community that felt oversaturated, and frankly, too white. We were not even alumni of UW-Madison for a full year when LeClaire’s fraud broke, and as women and femmes of color, we grappled with the news together, filled with rage and hurt—not only for ourselves, but for the many LeClaire had harmed. 

The depth and extent to which LeClaire was able to deceive so many people doesn’t reflect Indigenous communities’ naivete or gullibility. Rather, it begs to question the systems in place that allowed them to carry out their racial fraud for so long and with such intricacy. In the two short years we lived in Madison as graduate students, LeClaire was far from the first person to be outed for committing such a farce.

In September of 2020, before we had even taken our first online class, our Director of Graduate Studies invited us to an optional Zoom meeting about an incident of race fraud involving a prominent academic figure that had made national news. Just days before, Jessica Krug published a personal essay on Medium—which read more as an admission of guilt than a meaningful apology—that had gone viral. In it, Krug admits that she had faked her Black-Carribean identity—the very one on which she’d built her entire academic career. Our department, rooted in feminist theory and a praxis of care, wanted to check in and provide space for us to process this news. 

Being new to graduate school and trying to elude the slippery touch of imposter syndrome, we found ourselves deeply confounded by the situation. The very moment we were in was only made possible by overcoming almost-insurmountable bouts of doubting that we belonged inside the ivory tower. Meanwhile, Krug had just confirmed that tokenizing a marginalized identity for white consumption allowed her to reap material rewards. What did this mean for our being there? For the two years that we had ahead of us? 

We were faced with a confusion, with a deep and unsettling reality: For most of our lives, we struggled to step into our identities of color, the things that made us most outwardly “other.” And while we were steeped in our doubt and our worry, there were people content with race-shifting, eager to lean into the ambiguity of their appearances, happily shedding their skin (and at times, literally painting on another one), to become someone else. We tried to distance ourselves from the news, to process quietly with one another and try to regain our footing. Within a week of Krug’s outing, CV Vitolo-Haddad, a PhD student at UW-Madison, would similarly be exposed for falsely claiming various identities of color, ranging from Black to Ethiopian to Latinx. 

Although Vitolo-Haddad had previously criticized Krug for her own racial fraud, it would become clear to us that they had one common denominator: UW-Madison. While this could just be a coincidence, it begs the question: what factors have come together to embolden the likes of Vitolo-Haddad, Krug, and LeClaire? How is Madison’s white culture constructed to receive “the other” in ways that cause more harm than good?   

It is not pure coincidence that Vitolo-Haddad, Krug, and LeClaire’s racial fraud was bolstered by being in and affiliated with the academy. A place often depicted as that of limitless exploration and opportunities of expertise, the university also functions as a business—one in which people can cash in on curiosity.

“Academia has this incentive to produce work and to add items to your CV,” Caitlin Benedetto, a local researcher of whiteness in the Madison area, explains. “It can be a really toxically fruitful place to commit acts of racial fraud. [In LeClaire’s case,] Indigenous art became very commodified.” 

In university spaces, expertise can also double as trust. “When you can pass off your identity as part of the work that you do, sometimes it can feel like attacking or questioning that person’s story about themselves,” Benedetto says. “It’s also questioning their authority in their field. And I think that’s usually taboo within academia for colleagues to question each other in that way.” In instances of race fraud, this conflation of academic credibility and cultural identity very masterfully eschews accountability. 

In our graduate classrooms, we witnessed firsthand how effortlessly entire identities became class projects for our white peers. Usually, introducing yourself meant explaining what you were currently working on—a chapter for your dissertation, an article for publication, or whatever new venture piqued your interest. As new graduate students, and more often than not, the only students of color in the room, we hung back, waiting for the opportunity to speak on why we were there in the first place—to fill the absence of faculty who looked like us, who taught from a point of experiential knowledge rather than the study of texts or as a result of anthropological research. 

Capitalizing on racial fraud to further your academic career is simply taking the structure already in place to its most sinister degree. As Landsem notes, universities’ obsession with “correcting past wrongs”—which only lead to empty efforts to “diversity” and “decolonize” its spaces—actually benefit racial frauds the most. 

“They don’t have to deal with any of the actual trauma of being a native person in that type of environment,” they explain. “They are the ones who produce all the poetry or they teach languages because everybody else is dealing with funerals and trauma and not having any money, and real life obligations.”

Weaponizing gender and gender identity: White women’s self-victimization

Inextricably linked to LeClaire’s race fraud is the fact that they presented as femme—making gender and gender expression important aspects of their false relationship with Indigeneity. Their close attention to detail artfully enhanced their facade, from self tanner and intricate garbs to hair that is curled to near perfection. They were frequently photographed in makeup, an ingenious and seemingly natural way to signal femininity. In fact, if you search the name Kay LeClaire on Google, amid the dozen results, you’ll find article after article with pictures of LeClaire that are, put simply, beautiful. 

While racial fraud is not committed by women and femmes exclusively, Indigenous Métis scholar and lawyer Jean Teillet has written about the gendered divide for people who falsely take on native identities, separating them by both motive and spheres of influence: In Canada, men primarily claim Indigeneity to gain hunting rights and access to land, while women most often occupy arts and academic spaces for social gain. 

In addition to the academy’s commodification (and downright fetishization) of cultures of color, this, in great part, has to do with white women’s relationship to victimization. Throughout history, white women have been deemed as the ones whose purity society must work to preserve, whose safety we must strive to ensure. Many white women have internalized this self-importance, weaponizing the rich currency of their social position to cry wolf at the expense of others’ harm, like in the case of Carolyn Bryant Donham, or lessen the consequences of their objective ills, like Elizabeth Holmes. On UW-Madison’s campus, white women are shrouded by a reliable cloak of protection—even when they’re undeserving of it, even when they’re the ones at fault. 

LeClaire masterfully used the rich history of self-victimization in their pursuit of racial fraud, standing tall on the shoulders of their deceitful foremothers. In their image, we see the ultimate victim, a racially ambiguous “woman” who is close enough to white that we seek to comfort her, hold her, and protect her from any unavoidable fall from grace. “Every person I’ve met who’s pretending to be native has to be the biggest victim in the room,” Landsem says.  And it worked: “[People] thought Kay was great because Kay played the part of a Sad Little Indian.”

Rather than trying to center themselves in every situation to the point of elaborate fraud, Benedetto advises white people to play “supporting roles” and “let people who are most directly affected by an issue tell you what they need.” “What they tell you they need might not be what you’re expecting,” she continues. She also notes that this often means not being on the frontlines, and instead, offering to help out with “the less glamorous side of things,” like making phone calls and providing material support. “Being a good coalition partner, a good ally, means you don’t assume that you know everything about what a community needs, especially if you don’t belong to it.”

Landsem adds that LeClaire’s racial fraud grossly misinterprets what it means to be native, further imbuing a white gaze on Indigeneity itself: In committing racial fraud, LeClaire perpetuated “this idea that native people are only their trauma, and they’re only all the bad things that have happened to them, and if you’re native, then you’re the most oppressed,” Landsem says. In a since-deleted virtual project, Collateral Damage, LeClaire claims their c-PTSD was linked to being “descended from native ancestors with similar trauma.” Similarly, at a 2019 Wisconsin Historical Museum project they would go on to recount their memories of walking into a supper club as a child and “seeing blatant images of red face, tobacco Indians…”  further questioning, “how can you feel safe in the kind of space that was created and designed, and is currently curated, to not include you?” 

Landsem further explained that whenever LeClaire was asked to speak on native issues, they were quick to highlight “poverty, substance abuse, and family trauma before anything else. She equated being native to being traumatized so heavily that all of her explanations of how she was native were not about who she was related to, who her family was, or who claimed her, but stories of poverty, abuse, loss, theft, and trafficking.”

LeClaire’s fraud was dependent on the sympathy of others, on accessing multiple sectors and communities so they could fit themselves into the mold that was most appealing in the moment. It might just be why, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, they referred to themselves as a “non-Black Native and Latine” but would eventually go on to drop that narrative. “It’s people who want to be victims who pretend to be native because they think that’s gonna give them the victimhood they want. But we’re not victims. The only people who see us as victims are basically sad white liberals,” Landsem says.

Co-opting queerness: adopting a two-spirit identity

It wasn’t simply LeClaire’s carefully constructed, hyper-feminine appearance that required upkeep in order to gain entry into Madison’s welcoming Indigenous community, but also their alleged queerness. In addition to claiming Indigeneity, LeClaire identified as two-spirit—a gender identity specific to Indigenous people that is often conflated with the non-Indigenous gender identity of being nonbinary. But as author and activist Chanelle Gallant argues, building off the research of native scholar Kim TallBear’s research, fluid Indigenous sexual diversities are distinct because they “challenge the very fabric of colonial societies” and connect “the body, gender, and sexuality to spirit and land” in unique ways.

The two-spirit identity, then, is inherently native, and something that only native people can claim. As Landsem notes, Myra Laramie received the idea of two-spirit through a “dream ceremony” in 1990, and the term was popularized thereafter and used as “an umbrella term for specifically Indigenous concepts of gender.” This, they point out, is the reason why it cannot be co-opted by non-Indigenous queer people. “It’s a ceremonial name […] It’s not something other people can just use or claim to have because when they do, it doesn’t have anything backing it up.” 

But in the expansive beauty of two-spirit identity—which pushes the bounds of gender, sexuality, and at times, monogamy—LeClaire saw yet another marginalized identity to botch and benefit from. According to a 2021 article published by The Capital Times, Madison “has benefitted from a reputation as one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly cities in the nation.” Within formal institutions like the workplace, the city has responded to emerging reports of harassment with “inclusive workplace policies” meant to ensure the “comfort” and “safety” of its employees. But as queer people, we don’t require policies or initiatives to secure our safety because often, we form chosen families and co-create senses of belonging with one another. At the cusp of two communities willing to take them in, LeClaire may have found it easy—or rather, convenient—to identify as two-spirit. 

To Landsem, LeClaire’s claims of being two-spirit were part of an effort to “make themselves seem more legitimate” and “to appeal to Madison’s white queer community by being slightly exotic and by being queer.” In other words, it was a “ploy to get more attention, to be multiply-marginalized.” 

LeClaire’s Indigenous and queer identities thus feel like tactical exaggeration on display, serving as a protective harness that diverts critical commentary or questioning. Put plainly, they twisted intersectionality to their advantage. As LeClaire was too busy exhausting themselves through the hoops of their own oppression olympics, they were appealing to white supremacy’s long standing legacy of white saviorism. 

Madison’s reckoning with its own whiteness: segregation and silence

Despite being internally and outwardly celebrated as a liberal beacon within a red state, Madison refuses to reckon with its own whiteness which gatekeeps activism, allows for racial fraud to thrive, and centers whiteness. 

For a town that is about 75% white, it makes sense that activist spaces look the way they do in Wisconsin’s capital. But as Benedetto points out, there are larger, strategic forces at play that keep many of these spaces overwhelmingly white, like the interconnected phenomena of gentrification, the city’s ongoing housing crisis, and stark racial segregation. With rent prices that are primarily accessible to young professionals and UW students (both populations that are overwhelmingly white), Madison’s communities of color are pushed off the isthmus, physically putting a barrier between them and the organizing work that takes place there. 

Benedetto further explains that the geography of the isthmus itself allows for a lot of incidental activism from those who frequent or have access to the Capitol area, who might not have experience in political organizing, but “want to get involved.” In particular, State Street—which delivers you from UW-Madison’s campus and directly to the steps of Madison’s capitol building—allows for students’ and young professionals’ organic and maybe even passive involvement in political actions. 

“You could be having lunch at a coffee shop on State Street, and then just see a protest go by and be like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I could do that,’” Benedetto says. Casual on-ramps like this for select groups of Madisonians make it so that political involvement isn’t necessarily reflective of a person’s dedication to a cause, but how convenient it may be to their lifestyle. “It’s all these different factors that are sort of pushing white people towards the front and people of color towards the back, in terms of visibility,” Benedetto says.

In conducting ethnographic research in Madison’s activist spaces, Benedetto noticed that whiteness is so integral that it goes without interrogation—in fact, if critiques of whiteness come up, they are immediately shut down. To her, this is reflective of one of the tenets of white supremacy culture itself: a right to comfort. 

“Something I always try to hold myself to, as a white person, [is] pointing [the whiteness] out, because it can be really uncomfortable,” she says. For some, being racially privileged and otherwise marginalized doesn’t give them “an eye on what being white actually does for them, or how that affects their perspective.” But the largeness of this blindspot necessitates its interrogation: “I want to embrace that discomfort and figure out what the root of it is, rather than just avoid it to keep everyone happy.”

In fact, white Madisonians’ inability to speak out when something is amiss has also played directly into the continuation of LeClaire’s racial fraud. In the aftermath of LeClaire being exposed, white people told Landsem that they had thought LeClaire wasn’t being truthful in some way. “People said they didn’t want to say anything about Kay because they didn’t want to risk being called a racist. And I’m like, why is that the biggest problem to you?,” they recall. “[People in Madison] are so focused on this idea of being progressive and being liberal that they’re more concerned with the optics that they are the actual practice.” Whether it’s a specific person or a group’s internal culture, refusing to name an issue grants it permission to flourish and strengthens its potential harm to entire communities. 

While there is no excuse for LeClaire, Krug, and Vitolo-Haddad’s actions, the exponential, white supremacist harm each of them has caused—especially to communities of color—points to a salient, albeit little-recognized fact: white supremacy hurts everyone, even white people.

We can only ever speculate what drives someone to commit such deep and expansive acts of deception. Benedetto suggests that one reason might be a “yearning [for] connectedness” in a nation that requires white people to be largely devoid of it. 

“In order to be accepted into whiteness [in America], it requires giving up some of your ethnicity and your ethnic specificity. For a lot of white folks who don’t have a lot of cultural ties to their ethnicity, that’s violence, right? That’s a loss,” she says. “Instead of doing the hard work of rebuilding what has been lost over generations, [these people] gravitate towards a community that already exists, that already has very strong cultural life ways that also has had to be rebuilt.” 

As a professor at UW-Madison, Luebke herself has borne witness to how difficult this work of tracing back erased (or otherwise absent) ancestral lineages can be for her Indigenous students. “There’s no one universal checklist,” Luebke says. While some of her students have used ancestry tests to find out if they have Indigenous blood at all, “other students might know what the tribe is, but they’re not enrolled.”

Many reasons can drive reconnection—when students come to Luebke with these inquiries or seek research opportunities with Indigenous communities, she’s always sure to ask them their “why.” Mainly, “it’s part of their self reflection, their self discovery, part of just growing up and feeling like there’s something missing from their life,” she says. “They want to reconnect because they want to have that sense of community and belonging.” 

It’s this same gnawing absence that might incorrectly cause white people to take up an ethnicity not their own. As Benedetto explains, “functionally having no ties to their ethnicity” can be “destabilizing for [white] people once they realize it. And the question is, how do you fill that lack? Do you fill it by trying to build the community that you lost? Or do you fill it by trying to pass yourself off as a member of a community you don’t belong to?” She also notes that in Madison in particular, these feelings of disconnection are exacerbated by the city’s inherent transience. The looming presence of the university and the medical software company Epic draw in transplants (just like us) at high rates, but the turnover is just as significant. 

While the pain born of distant cultural roots is legitimate and valid—and most clearly gets to the root of race fraud’s irony—Landsem argues that it further pushes settler colonialism to completion, a process driven by both delusion and greed. “I really see this as late stage settler colonialism,” they say. “This is people convincing themselves, because they want a claim to this land so much, that they must secretly be native.”

“There was no public apology” repair and reconciliation 

RCTC is now located on East Main Street, two blocks and one street over from its original location on the east side’s Willy Street. Landsem says that RCTC’s current iteration is much more reflective of what it sought out to be when it first started in 2020: a tattoo parlor and community space that centers queer, Indigenous individuals and fosters community care and mutual aid. “It’s nice to have other native folks around and no longer be the only native person in the space that was supposed to center native people,” Landsem says. With the addition of three new apprentices, Red Clover is in an exciting place of growth. “It just kind of felt like things really fell into place,” Landsem says. “The collective expanded really naturally.”

In terms of its values, the goal of Red Clover Tattoo Collective remains the same. “We want to provide a space for trauma-informed tattooing where it’s accessible for folks who aren’t cis-het white guys who want tribe tattoos and pride themselves on pain and tolerance,” Landsem says. For the collective’s artists and its clients, tattooing is “a collaboration that is based on consent. It’s not just about my portfolio, it’s you being happy carrying this thing on your body forever.”

And while Red Clover has hit a stride in its second iteration, Landsem is excited about all that’s to come for the collective. In addition to finding more opportunities to strengthen connections amongst its artists and apprentices, they’re also looking forward to Red Clover’s return to being a community space. “I think [2024] will be really exciting [with] trying to figure out how we can continue to support, engage with, and be part of the greater Madison community,” Landsem says. 

When asked about what healing has looked like within Madison’s Indigenous community over the past year, Landsem says “people have really come together” and that there has been an increase of events “for and by native people. That’s been really nice to see [because] that wasn’t happening before.”

But that doesn’t mean that the wounds LeClaire’s betrayal inflicted have fully healed: “I do think that folks are still on edge,” Landsem says. “Every time a Pretendian is outed, it just creates a lot of distrust. Not necessarily of each other, but of people perceived as outsiders.” Landsem adds that LeClaire’s actions have changed how they interact with folks who are looking for Indigenous community in Madison, despite a desire to still be welcoming. “I feel like I’m just more wary, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing,” they say. “It’s born of a protective instinct that comes from trauma.”

Amidst the joy, as the air remains thick with doubt and discomfort, it’s worth noting that in the year since LeClaire was outed, very few people have heard from them. A majority of their online accounts have since been deleted, and there are some speculations that they’ve left Madison entirely. To many, it seems like they had just disappeared. “I don’t know what happened to [Kay],” Luebke says. “It just seemed like there was no public apology or explanation.”

LeClaire’s ability to disappear quietly and retreat from the public eye—a privilege that Krug and Vitolo-Haddad have similarly been granted—begs to question what happens after someone is revealed to have been engaging in race fraud. When it’s all said and done, what exactly was the point of their elaborate deceit? Does being outed negate the goals they set out for themselves, or is the acclaim and material gain they collect along the way a worthy enough tradeoff? Would these people have kept on with their fraudulent behavior had no one exposed them? To put it bluntly, what exactly was the point? 

Since LeClaire’s controversy shook Wisconsin’s capital last year, more individuals have been outed for committing the same painful lies that take advantage of others’ desire to be in meaningful community with one another. This past October, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Professor Margaret Noodin left her position as the director of the Electa Quinney Institute at UW-Milwaukee when her Indigeneity was called into question and “she cannot point definitively to a tribal nation she is descended from.” 

It’s clear that the phenomenon of being a Pretendian, and committing race fraud more broadly, goes beyond any one person. We might never get to the bottom of why someone would be driven to lie at the expense of the community they’re trying to be part of. Any attempt at repair should not be done in the hopes of reentering the community that’s been harmed, but rather, an earnest effort to take accountability for what’s been done, and the trust that’s been broken. For true solidarity to be achieved, people who aspire to be good allies—especially white people—must decenter themselves. Having compassion does not mean we are the focal point. Movements are vast and varied, and to achieve systemic change, we must take up the role that is needed of us, not the one that we desire.