Reader’s Reviews > Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice > Status Update

Re: Rebecca Roanhorse cultural identity theft

Agoyo, A. (2020, June 24). The Elizabeth Warren of the sci-fi set': Author faces criticism for repeated use of tribal traditions. Indianz.com.
https://indianz.com/News/2020/06/24/t...

Nicole Demerin was a member of what is now called the international Gothic Association. It is a group where ethnic fraud runs rampant. Rebecca Roanhorse, for example, is not a legitimate indigenous writer. She’s a pretendian. Leah is often associated with literary ethnic frauds so I’m not the least bit surprised.

Obit continued: “An outspoken member of the International Society of Gothic Scholars, Demerin represented the U.K.-based organization in a televised interview during the society’s annual conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1998. —Cynthia Henthorn.”
Art by Nicole Demerin, a black and white 8 x 10 Cibachrome print, titled Medusa (1988). https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/caa-ne...

Obit continued: “She was also instrumental in putting together exhibitions of the DNR Xerox Project, a traveling installation comprised of artwork created by AIDS patients on the Do-Not-Resuscitate forms. The project was featured at a number of venues, including The Bearded Lady in San Francisco (1994) and the Kraine Theatre Gallery (1993) and the Ridge Street Gallery (1991, 1990), both in New York.”

Obit continued: “A graduate of the Hunter College M.F.A. program in 1988, Demerin’s work was included in The Uncanny: Perverse and Convulsive Beauty at Artemisia in Chicago in 1997. She was perhaps best known for organizing group exhibitions, most notably No More Nice Girls (1994) and Abortion a priori: Artists Support Roe v. Wade (1992) both at ABC No Rio in New York.”

Demerin Obit continued: “She was particularly attracted to the pathological nature that the femme fatale embodied: danger, death, seduction, and societal transgressions of every sort. In appropriating this iconography, she transformed monstrous specimens of taboo feminine archetypes into powerful images of women reveling in their own sexuality—certainly in control of it’s they boldly confronted the viewer.”

Obituary in CAA News, Newsletter of the College Art Association, Vol. 29, No. 2 (March 2004), p. 23.

“Nicole Demerin, an artist and exhibition organizer, died December 25, 2002, at the age of 42. Demerin sought to reclaim the femme fatale in her photography, which was inspired by depictions of female abjection and original ‘bad girls’ found in fin-de-siècle art and culture.”

One concerning thing that happens when Leah controls someone’s death is that obituaries often totally leave out the person’s family. There is never anything about who they are survived by. There is very little information at all. It’s just announced that the person has joined the ancestors and that’s it. No questions. No explanations. Nothing.

Leah is creepy after deaths in the community. Leah misuses the names of other organizers after they have died, for personal gain and clout. I have witnessed Leah using the names of people she actually abused and co-opting their work and names after their deaths. It’s extremely fucked up. Leah targets disabled people who she expects to die young. Nicole Demerin was 42 when she died on 12/15/2002.

Patty Berne enabled Leah’s harmful and abusive behavior for many years. Patty was a world class enabler and facilitated a lot of abuse, shielding predators in the community from accountability.