In May of 2017, Juan Mancias became an overnight sensation in France. Standing over 6 feet tall with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair, a medicine wheel-emblazoned ribbon shirt, beaded belt, and feathered medallion bearing the seal of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, he was conspicuous on the streets of Paris, and he had a message: French banks were financing the desecration of sacred Native lands and burial sites. They were, he said, aiding in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people in Texas through their support of natural gas pipelines and export terminals.
“It’s the same thing for 500 years,” Mancias told Observatoire des Multinationales. “We were occupied by the Spanish, by the Mexicans, then by the Texans, then by the Americans. And now it’s the oil industry.”
Three months before Mancias arrived in France, the last camps at Standing Rock emptied. For nearly a year, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and environmental allies had gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL. Oil was now flowing through DAPL, but activists and environmental organizations kept the momentum of the protests going.
In South Texas, Mancias had been fighting the same battle on a different front. He and Bekah Hinojosa, a grassroots activist in the Rio Grande Valley, spent weeks organizing against the proposed Rio Grande terminal and Rio Bravo Pipeline. The $18-billion projects would carry tens of millions of tons of natural gas each year to the export terminal in Brownsville, where it would be liquefied and shipped overseas as LNG. The battle led them to collaborate with Rainforest Action Network on a study documenting what it identified as the projects’ threat to the area, which included Carrizo/Comecrudo lands. The proposed industrial corridor, Mancias said, threatened the tribe and Garcia Pasture, a village site near Brownsville with human burials, ruins, and a rare coastal ecosystem the World Monuments Fund, an organization dedicated to raising global awareness of endangered cultural heritage sites, declared “threatened by natural resource extraction.”
“It used to be one of the places that we would gather as different clans and set up our lean-tos and be there for awhile while we were fishing,” Mancias said. “That’s why we were real concerned.”
The report circulated. People were paying attention.
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5 takeaways from our investigation into the ‘ghost’ tribe that got millions in climate funding
Les Amis de la Terre, or Friends of the Earth France, saw an opportunity: French banks — including BNP Paribas and Société Générale — were, at the time, still financing DAPL and petrochemical industries in South Texas, including the Rio projects. Organizers believed they could pressure them to stop.
“We had a broad objective of trying to prevent more financial flows and loans going from France to this project,” said Lorette Philippot, with Les Amis de la Terre, who worked on the campaign. “We had the difficulty to try to mobilize people on a project that was happening far away with impact on people that were far away.”
By early spring of 2017, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, and Les Amis de la Terre had a plan: Mancias and Hinojosa, who was a Sierra Club campaigner at the time, would travel to France to help launch an international divestment campaign. They would work alongside Indigenous activists and allies involved with Stand Up With Standing Rock, a European solidarity tour aimed at demanding banks divest from oil and gas projects in North America.
Over the next week, they appeared in nearly a dozen print and radio outlets, including Le Monde and Radio France. They spoke at rallies. They built a symbolic oil pipeline inside a Paris branch of the bank Société Générale. A video of Mancias discussing Indigenous rights went viral. The pair were applauded by shareholders at BNP Paribas and booed by those at Société Générale. Mancias even secured a meeting with newly elected President Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic advisors, where he explained how the United States government ignores Indigenous rights in Texas.
“It was a very strong narrative and it helped us mobilize a lot of media at the time because there were these chiefs coming to France to address French companies,” said Philippot. “It was very strong, it was very new, so it helped really create attention.”
Juan Mancias, center, appears at a demonstration in front of the George R. Brown Convention Center ahead of Super Bowl Live events in Houston in 2017. Marie D. De Jesus / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
In the wake of Standing Rock, the global climate movement was eager to elevate Indigenous voices in the fight against fossil fuels, and Mancias stepped up. By leveraging the story of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe as a victim of ethnic cleansing at the hands of fossil fuel interests, the European campaign eventually helped push the two banks to withdraw from U.S. oil and gas projects. This high-profile victory launched Mancias and the tribe into the international media ecosystem, transforming them into environmental media darlings.
Mancias’ visit to France was a massive public relations victory for the climate movement.
But an extensive review of historical and genealogical records reveals that key documents underpinning Mancias’ claims to being of Carrizo/Comecrudo descent contain significant historical inconsistencies and cannot be verified or authenticated. His platform instead rests on family lore that has generated immense financial and social capital for Mancias, who is the group’s chairman, while fueling a broader trend that has detrimental global repercussions for Indigenous Peoples and the fight to address climate change.
“At the time we met him in the United States, Juan Mancias was clearly recognized as a representative of Indigenous communities,” said a spokesperson for Amis de la Terre France. “Regardless of his origins or ancestry, we believe that everyone has the right to oppose LNG projects and their financiers.”
Everyone had a reason to believe the story Mancias told. And somewhere in the years of campaigns and headlines, the question of whether it was true fell away. The story worked, and that was enough.
If you’re a Native reader, you know the word pretendian — its history, the personalities attached to it, and the debates over identity and “pretendian hunting.” The next two paragraphs are not for you. Feel free to skip ahead.
Pretendian — a portmanteau of “pretend” and “Indian”— describes someone who poses as Indigenous but is not. The term has broken out of Indian Country in recent years, with coverage, unmaskings, and think pieces by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers alike in outlets ranging from The Atlantic and National Public Radio to the New York Post and others as far away as Aotearoa, New Zealand. You know these people; some of your friends and family may even be pretendians, and the problem is bigger than your weird aunt with high cheekbones waving the results of a recent DNA test. Instead, tribal nations and international bodies agree that Indigeneity is a political identity requiring verifiable citizenship within a historically continuous community.
The consequences of false claims to Indigenous identity are not abstract and have brought pretendians significant financial, professional, and cultural benefits. In 2017, three fake Cherokee tribes received $300 million in federal contracts by claiming minority-owned business status. Twin sisters Amira and Nadya Gill received more than 158,000 Canadian dollars earmarked for Inuit kids after pretending to be tribal members. Scholars Elizabeth Hoover and Andrea Smith built careers on bogus claims of Indigenous identity. Perhaps most famously, an investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2023 found that Buffy Sainte-Marie, the internationally known singer whose career spanned nearly six decades, had falsified her claims of tribal identity and was born in Massachusetts to Italian and English parents.
Tribal Recognition 101
Recognition indicates whether a group has a formal political and legal relationship with a government — not simply whether individuals have Indigenous ancestry. Recognition can come from the federal government or a state government.
Federal recognition establishes a government-to-government relationship with the U.S. The Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes 575 tribal nations. Each is inherently sovereign, with partial exemption from state and local jurisdiction, the ability to place land into federal trust, some civil and criminal jurisdiction over its lands, and other rights.
State recognition: Some states recognize tribes within their borders, but these tribes lack the inherent sovereignty that comes with federal recognition. They cannot exercise jurisdiction over land or access most federal programs, though some economic and business opportunities are available, such as the Small Business Administration’s section 8(a) program.
Non-recognized groups are, legally speaking, voluntary associations or nonprofits. They have no governmental authority, cannot exercise sovereignty, and lack legal standing as tribal nations under federal or state law.
Who qualifies as American Indian? Generally speaking, members of a federally recognized tribe. Tribal nations set their own criteria, such as lineal descendancy or blood quantum requirements, through formal, legally binding processes based on genealogical documentation. This is in contrast to informal systems in which leaders grant membership at their discretion.
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Stories are powerful, and in the world of climate action, an idealized Indigenous narrative can be more malleable, and more valuable, than facts. In France, the story of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe provided exactly what activists needed to pressure international banks into divesting from oil and gas: a moral front line. It was a victory built on a collective willingness to believe a story that no one bothered to question, let alone investigate.
In the years since he returned from Paris, Mancias has transformed the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, which lacks federal and state recognition, into a formidable environmental force. He has raised more than $5 million from major philanthropic foundations and joined heavyweights like Earthjustice and World Monuments Fund, and he has engaged with several United Nations agencies to battle oil and gas terminals, President Donald Trump’s border wall, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Those partnerships have allowed the Carrizo/Comecrudo to behave as a tribal nation in the public eye while evading the responsibilities — and burdens of proof — genuine sovereign nations must bear. That has brought financial windfalls and international influence, revealing a troubling shadow recognition system, one in which well-heeled environmental organizations, well-meaning but unwitting journalists, and trusting international human rights bodies unknowingly prop up unverified Indigenous groups and pretendians to wage the climate war at the expense of legitimate Indigenous Peoples, tribes, and organizations.
For Indigenous policy experts, the elevation of unverified groups by environmental organizations represents a systemic issue that extends far beyond any single region. Speaking broadly about the nationwide trend of illegitimate actors and unverified groups entering the environmental movement, Kyle Whyte, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a climate justice scholar at the University of Michigan, noted the widespread damage caused by this dynamic.
“It’s actually hurting, I would say at an exponential rate, the possibility for Indigenous people to be major players in climate change,” said Whyte. “It’s completely undermining the potential that tribal nations and Indigenous people have.”
Juan Mancias, as seen in the Carrizo/Comecrudo YouTube video “Teaching of the Hands.” Courtesy of Juan Mancias
The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, which also goes by Esto’k Gna, claims historical connection to the Texas Gulf Coast and Rio Grande Delta, a region with a thin record of its Indigenous history. While many primary documents about tribes in the region exist in the official archives of Spain, Mexico, and Texas, as well as parish records and municipal files, these threads have rarely been woven into a cohesive narrative.
Spanish archives from the 16th through 18th centuries contain information on more than six dozen distinct groups in the region, but do not describe a unified “Comecrudo” or “Carrizo” tribe. Instead, Comecrudo, which is Spanish for “eats food raw,” and Carrizo, which translates as “river cane,” were simply derogatory, catchall descriptors colonizers applied to bands, tribes, communities, and groups that likely knew little of each other. These fragmentary colonial records capture little of the lived history of South Texas Indigenous communities, reducing complex human beings and societies to scattered chalk outlines of births, baptisms, and geographic displacements.
Indigenous homelands in South Texas have played a reluctant host to the shifting, militarized edge of the Spanish, Mexican, and, later, Texan and American frontiers. Nearly 50 years of perpetual war against Native peoples into the late 19th century ended in forced removal and genocide. By the 1870s, many surviving tribal nations had been pushed out of the state altogether, including the Waco, Kiowa, and Tonkawa, all of which are now based in Oklahoma — a brutal reminder of Texas moxie. Historians have called the state “a cauldron of racist violence.”
These landscapes appear in the Carrizo/Comecrudo video ‘Teaching of the Hands.’ Courtesy of Juan Mancias
Few authoritative books compile the Indigenous history of South Texas. The most prominent, Martín Salinas’ Indians of the Rio Grande Delta, was praised for painstakingly compiling what one reviewer called the “recorded sherds of Indian existence” in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Those sherds, created by Spanish colonizers and military leaders, document Carrizos and Comecrudos at Spanish missions into the 19th century, and is punctuated by an 1886 visit from noted Swiss ethnologist Albert Gatschet, who found elderly Comecrudos living on the riverbanks of the border town of Reynosa Diaz. Some could still speak their language, which he wrote down, but after Gatschet the tribe disappears from the historical record.
For more than a century, the prevailing academic and historical consensus has held that Gulf Coast groups like the Carrizo, Comecrudo, and Karankawa ceased to exist as distinct societies by the late 1800s. According to the Texas State Historical Association, leading anthropologists, and historians, the surviving populations of South Texas died from colonial violence and disease, or they were assimilated into Mexican and Tejano society, leading to their de facto extinction as distinct cultural groups. To modern scholars, these tribes simply do not exist today.
According to Mancias, those scholars are wrong. He insists the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe and its history, culture, and language survived.
Mancias claims that in the 1940s, his grandfather, Juan Ramirez Mancias, a Carrizo/Comecrudo chief, led 29 tribal families from their traditional homelands along the Rio Grande 600 miles north to the Texas Panhandle. There, the families adopted identities as Mexican farmworkers and deliberately assimilated into the Hispanic population. The Mancias family, however, secretly maintained its Indigenous identity, language, and oral histories — the only people to keep the tribe alive. Mancias has said he knew as a child that he was Indigenous, and that he was dismissed and marginalized for it. He claims to have endured anti-Indian racism and expulsion from school for fighting his tormentors, but he never abandoned his convictions or his grandfather’s orders to “go get our land back.” Mancias says he is the hereditary leader of the tribe due to his family’s singular role in preserving its identity and history, and that those convictions have fueled his mission of protecting his ancestors’ homelands from billionaires, pipeline companies, banks, and the federal government, while rebuilding those homelands one parcel at a time.
“They almost annihilated us,” Mancias told a reporter in 2024. “That genocide continues.”
The story Mancias tells echoes the Book of Exodus in the Bible: a multigenerational quest to return home that requires concealed identities, years in hiding, and a history physically carried forward — ending, at last, in a hard-fought, triumphant return.
“This is pretty standard for people to make a life out of a story like this,” said Kim TallBear, who is Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, professor at the University of Minnesota, and an expert in Indigenous self-definitions. “This is a pretty standard hiding-out-in-the-wilderness kind of thing, and it is very common in the South.”
When ‘Hiding’ Doesn’t Hold Up
When unverified groups cannot prove continuous existence, some rely on a common defense: They were hiding. Like the Carrizo/Comecrudo, who claim their ancestors survived by blending into the Mexican-American population, some have argued that oppression forced them underground.
In Vermont, four state-recognized Abenaki groups — the Elnu, Koasek, Missisquoi, and Nulhegan — say their ancestors lived in hiding for nearly 200 years, citing the state’s 20th-century eugenics and sterilization policies as the primary reason for their secrecy.
Yet the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Vermont’s attorney general found no evidence of a hidden, continuous Abenaki community in the state, and historians found nothing to prove the eugenics policies specifically targeted Abenaki people.
The federally recognized Odanak First Nation in Quebec has explicitly rejected the Vermont narrative and have said their ancestors never went underground. Experts call “hiding” a convenient loophole that weaponizes historical trauma to excuse a lack of genealogical proof.
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Mancias said around a dozen of the 29 families who moved north remain active in the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, but would not provide a full list or contact information for them. But he said his ancestral claims go back even further. He has told journalists his lineage starts with Chief Naz’tazea, a Carrizo/Comecrudo warrior, and his son, Manuel Cavazos — the lone survivor of an alleged massacre of more than 300 Carrizo/Comecrudo people in 1801 at the hands of Spanish soldiers, acting with Catholic priests, along the Devils River in South Texas.
The sole basis for this claim is an unverified 19th century document that Mancias insists he discovered in the archives of the Texas Railroad Commission — a find he has repeatedly said corroborates his family’s oral history and confirms his relation to Naz’Tazea and Cavazos. According to Mancias, the report details an 1871 incident in which surveyors for the Gulf, Western Texas, and Pacific Railway stopped work after excavating an earthen mound containing the skeletal remains of more than 300 people. The document chronicles a subsequent military investigation during which an elderly Cavazos testified through a Spanish and Apache interpreter about the slaughter and his miraculous survival.
Mancias has recounted the story many times. In 2002, he read the alleged report aloud while testifying before the Texas Senate on the need for a state agency for Native American affairs, including a quote he attributed to Cavazos: “As I have said many times before, even though I am old, it will never pass in my eyes on what happened to my family when I was a little boy of 11.” In 2019, Mancias provided additional passages to a reporter, including a particularly graphic recollection from Cavazos that Spanish soldiers “put our little ones on spear tips and held them up for all to see. My sister was with child and Long Spears cut her with their knives where her unborn baby slept.”
‘I didn’t make it up.’
Juan Mancias
Mancias has been inconsistent about when he discovered the document. He told Grist that he had to threaten the state Railroad Commission to release it in the late 1980s, but also told Texas state senators that he’d discovered it only the week before his 2002 testimony. He has also placed the discovery in 2005, and in a recent interview claimed the report was not translated until 2023 because it was written in what he called “Castilian/Galego” Spanish. That translation, Mancias said, was done with the help of reporter Frank Hopper at Indian Country Today, now ICT, but the article in question was published in 2019.
“I didn’t translate the story,” Hopper wrote in an email. “I don’t have the original document. I tried researching the massacre online but could find very little.”
Mancias would not share the document despite repeated requests, blaming technological issues and suggesting that state officials may have altered or removed it from public viewing. “I know that it exists somewhere, and maybe they changed it, so I can’t do anything about them changing it,” he said when confronted with our findings.
Extensive searches of digital and physical repositories within the Texas State Library and Archives Commission found no evidence that the report exists. Instead, it revealed multiple discrepancies and historical anachronisms in Mancias’ story.
Mancias has been inconsistent on where the massacre occurred, with the railroad report naming two counties that did not exist at the time it was allegedly created and hundreds of miles from the traditional territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo. He claims the document was written in a dialect of Spanish that would not have been used by an American railroad company operating in Texas almost 30 years after statehood. His chronology has also been historically illiterate: There weren’t any railroads operating in the area until nearly a decade after the discovery of the human remains purportedly occurred. None of the individuals named in the deposition, including the interpreter and a former Civil War captain, were found in the military and genealogical databases examined.
“I doubt any railroad survey crews would have been in such a remote area 10 years before the tracks were being laid,” said Rick McCaslin, the Texas state historian. “I strongly doubt that an Anglo company would have a deposition in Spanish without a translated version to accompany it.”
Don Hofsommer, a railroad historian and author of several books on the topic, also noted that the Texas Railroad Commission — the agency Mancias claims held the report — was not established until 1891, two decades after the alleged survey. “Typically, railroads did not move that sort of information to the public domain,” said Hofsommer. “It’s extremely unlikely that such a document would have migrated, and I can’t see any reason why it would have migrated to the Texas Railroad Commission. Improbable.”
“I didn’t make it up,” said Mancias.
The Texas Railroad Commission did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Mancias has cited the purported document as evidence to his claims in federal court. In 2019, he sued the federal government, alleging genocide against the Carrizo/Comecrudo people, the desecration of sacred sites, and the use of discriminatory waivers to expedite border wall construction. He asserted “absolute land sovereignty” over six South Texas counties and sought sweeping remedies: an immediate halt to border wall and energy development, the transfer of land from corporations to the tribe, and $1 trillion in reparations — including $400 billion up front and $200 billion annually for 500 years.
When a judge required Mancias to specify the basis for alleging that the Carrizo/Comecrudo held a legal interest in the territory, Mancias submitted the text of the alleged Devil’s River report but did not produce a physical copy. Mancias later dismissed the lawsuit after the government challenged his legal standing to sue as an unrecognized tribe. In 2020, Mancias cited the railroad report in a Sierra Club lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s border wall, but neither he nor the environmental group provided the original document in the court filings, instead referencing the article Hopper wrote for ICT in 2019.
The alleged report is the only documentary evidence Mancias has publicly referred to in order to establish his connection to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe.
A lack of proof extends to his other ancestral claims, including the foundational lore of his activism: a childhood command from his grandfather to “go get our land back.” When pressed by the judge in his 2019, $1-trillion lawsuit against the federal government about whether he held traditional title to the lands he was suing over, Mancias admitted that while his grandfather claimed to own land in Peñitas, Texas, the family had “never been able to find a recorded deed or a document verifying this.”
A typed transcription of the purported 1871 interview with Manuel Cavazos, submitted by Juan Mancias as an attachment in the federal lawsuit Mancias v. United States of America. PACER
Grist also reviewed census, birth, baptism, marriage, and death records spanning the mid-18th century to the end of the 20th century from across Texas and in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, Mexico. They show Mancias descends from a well-documented colonial family with deep roots in northern Mexico, including at least three documented Indigenous ancestors born in Mexico between approximately 1770 and 1800. They lived six to seven generations ago and are among the roughly 64 to 128 direct ancestors a person has at that generational depth. However, parish records show this Indigenous ancestry likely originates from the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains, not the Rio Grande Delta, the historic territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo. More crucially, those ancestors are found on Mancias’ maternal line, not paternal — the foundation of his Indigenous claim. Those genealogical records also do not support Mancias’ assertion that he is related to Manuel Cavazos — the historical paper trail breaks at the precise generational link required to connect Mancias to the Devil’s River survivor. Nobody by that name, or the name Naz’tazea, appears in any records, including those by Gatschet, the Swiss ethnologist. Mancias did not respond to a detailed request for comment outlining our findings.
“If you go back six generations, that’s a lot of ancestors,” TallBear said. “Why are you focusing on the one who might or might not have been Indigenous? Even if there’s an actual Indigenous person, who cares? That’s not a claim. Ancestry alone is not a claim.”
That point is essential to understanding Indigenous identity. Tribal nations, the federal government, and international human rights bodies agree that Indigeneity is fundamentally a political and collective identity, not a private matter of individual racial descent or even blood quantum. As recognized by both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and international bodies like the United Nations, a group cannot simply self-identify into existence or reexistence; legitimate Indigenous Peoples must demonstrate historical continuity by tracing an unbroken line of political authority, typically through formal treaties, acts of Congress, or historical archives that document unbroken, collective lines to preinvasion and precolonial societies. When recognition politics shift from collective, land- and place-based rights toward individual rights that rest on ancestral claims, Indigenous Peoples, rights, and movements face compounding harms — a point scholars emphasize. To avoid that, and distinguish inherently sovereign tribal nations from groups composed merely of individuals claiming descent, the United States relies on a formal, if imperfect, legal system to vet claims of nationhood.
It’s important to note that recognition status indicates whether a group has governmental authority and collective political rights as a sovereign nation. It does not, in and of itself, validate individual Indigenous heritage, just as the lack of federal recognition does not invalidate it. But it does determine whether a group is a sovereign governmental authority or merely an association or nonprofit organization. Indigenous leaders and scholars say that failing to respect those political boundaries enables individuals and groups fraudulently claiming Indigenous heritage for professional, political, and financial gain, ultimately harming legitimate Native communities.
Mancias rejects these bedrocks of Indigenous identity.
“We don’t abide by the colonial mentality of a procedural recognition process,” he said, referring to the tribe’s lack of political status.
Still, Mancias submitted a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, in 1998 with the intent of petitioning for federal recognition of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe. Although Mancias frequently cites the multimillion-dollar cost of the process as the primary barrier to proceeding, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the group continues to interact with the agency. In March 2016, Mancias and his daughter Christa Mancias submitted a signed letter to the BIA to officially update their tribal council roster and maintain the petition.
This is a scanned copy of an envelope, postmarked March 28, 2016, containing an update to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe’s 1998 letter to petition the Department of the Interior for federal acknowledgment. Grist obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. United States Department of the Interior via FOIA
The financial barriers and public condemnation of the recognition process haven’t stopped Mancias from emulating those federal systems. Since the 1990s, when Mancias established a nonprofit under the tribe’s name and began fundraising, he has created a tribal government with himself as the hereditary leader, recruited members, and issued identification cards. During the Texas Senate hearing in 2002, Mancias claimed the tribe had 352 members. By 2009, that figure had risen to 9,000 and by 2017 to 17,000 before tumbling to 2,500 four years later. It jumped again to 6,500 in 2024. This year, Mancias claims 30,000 members, a surge that would require adding roughly 65 members every day for an entire year. Mancias said membership is granted through lineal descendancy.
“It’s family connections,” said Mancias. “Because of the blood that runs through us.”
That recruitment strategy helped bring in Christopher Basaldú, one of the tribe’s most prominent and outspoken members. Basaldú grew up in South Texas hearing family stories of his Indigenous heritage, but that changed when he met Mancias. According to an article featuring Basaldú, who did not return requests for comment, Mancias asked for his family names and where his relatives were born, then declared: “Those are my families, too. We’re related. You’re Carrizo.” Basaldú has since co-founded the tribe’s closest ally fighting oil and gas terminals, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, along with frontline activist Bekah Hinojosa, whom Mancias also claims is a “distant cousin.”
Presented with our findings, Hinojosa said, “I’m not aware of any familial ties with Juan Mancias.”
Over the last two decades, global leaders have increasingly looked to Indigenous Peoples for solutions to climate change. That shift started in 2004 with the release of the landmark Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, which pushed Indigenous ecological expertise into the mainstream. Three years later, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues — among the largest global gatherings of Indigenous leaders and advocates — dedicated its annual session to climate change, helping establish Indigenous stewardship as a pillar of global environmental policy.
Institutional acceptance deepened in 2014, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change formally recognized Indigenous expertise as an important resource for climate adaptation, a stark departure from earlier reports that marginalized or ignored those perspectives. The following year, the Paris Agreement wove Indigenous ecological knowledge into its framework.
Then came Standing Rock. Nearly a year of intense protest put Native people in the international spotlight and pushed the Indigenous climate movement to the fore.
Juan Mancias addresses a crowd in Zuccotti Park during an environmental justice rally in New York City in June 2024. Gina M. Randazzo / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock
Eventually, the federal government caught up. In 2021, the Biden administration elevated Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge to federal policy and established an interagency working group to ensure Native stewardship informs decision-making. “Tribal and Native communities have stewarded these lands since time immemorial,” said Brenda Mallory, who chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality, at the time. “Their voices and their expertise are critical to finding solutions to address the climate crisis, an issue that disproportionately affects tribal and Native communities.”
Mounting recognition brought an unprecedented flood of money. In 2021, a coalition of governments and private funders unveiled a $1.7 billion pledge to support Native-led land defense, the largest investment ever in Indigenous climate action. By the time world leaders gathered in Brazil last year for the COP30 international climate summit, that commitment had expanded to an additional $1.8 billion for Indigenous and locally led conservation efforts. If the climate crisis is a defining marker of this century, Indigenous Peoples are becoming keystone parties in the fight to address it.
How an Indigenous Claim Can Attract Millions
The Carrizo/Comecrudo aren’t the first to turn an unverified Indigenous claim into major environmental funding. In 2019, The Los Angeles Times found a similar pattern in California, centered on one man’s multimillion-dollar nonprofit empire.
Mati Waiya, born Frank Rocha, identifies as a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, an unrecognized group separate from the federally recognized Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. In 1997, Waiya founded the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation.
The foundation was created to provide environmental preservation, education, and advocacy.
Between 2005 and 2018, it generated more than 130 news stories in outlets like The New York Times and NPR. That profile helped the nonprofit acquire a 67-acre former golf course for $5.5 million — nearly two-thirds the size of Santa Ynez’s own 99-acre reservation.
The Times later found that Waiya’s family originated in Mexico, with no documentation to support his claims of Chumash ancestry. The investigation also revealed that the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation had raised more than $12 million in just four years.
Today, Waiya sits on the board of the Center for Biological Diversity and other nonprofits. In 2023, Wishtoyo listed total assets at $30.7 million from grants and contributions. Waiya, his wife, and one other employee earned $366,000 combined last year.
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When that unprecedented funding reaches legitimate tribal nations, the impact is undeniable. “One million dollars that goes into an entity with accountability and due process and cultural integrity could allow [it] to actually do things that lower carbon footprints or protect themselves from the fossil fuel sector,” said Whyte, the University of Michigan professor.
But the sudden influx of money also created a lucrative new pathway for bad actors. That shift led some funders and advocacy groups to unwittingly elevate people and organizations with no legitimate claim to indigeneity, said Whyte. “After Standing Rock and during the Biden administration, you have philanthropy and federal resources focused on Indigenous people,” he said. “They didn’t have a lot of long-term relationships with tribes or with Indigenous people with legitimate organizations.”
Historically, financial support for Indigenous people and organizations has been dismal. A 2019 Native Americans in Philanthropy report found that between 2002 and 2016, large U.S. foundations gave, on average, 0.4 percent of their total funding to such communities and causes. Similarly, tribal leaders quoted in a 2021 study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy reported that nonprofits had denied requests because program participants were already deemed successful.
“We interpreted that as, They just want to fund drunk, starving Indians on the reservation or on skid row in the city. They’re not interested in what Native American leaders can contribute to society,” said one survey participant. These misconceptions, fueled by racist stereotypes, have been documented in other studies. Research has also found that philanthropy fundamentally misunderstands Indigenous experiences, tribal sovereignty and governance, and organizations operating in Indian Country — to say nothing of the growing problem of people fraudulently claiming Native identities.
“They didn’t understand, for example, that maybe in a certain region there was a legitimate tribal nation or Indigenous organizati