Questioning author who calls himself Nasdijj

[blackcrowheart]

Honest Injun?
The incidence of fake Indians is almost epidemic.

By John J. Miller
www.nationalreview.com/flashback/miller200601271228.asp

EDITOR'S NOTE: "Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become
one of multicultural literature's most celebrated memoirists — by
passing himself off as Native American?" So asks L.A. Weekly in its
current issue, which features a story by Matthew Fleischer on an
author who calls himself Nasdijj and claims to be a Navajo.

Fake memoirs have made news lately, with the revelations surrounding
James Frey, the author of the best-selling book A Million Little
Pieces. Nasdijj, for his part, may simply be the latest in a long
line of Indian hoaxers, whose ranks also include the radical
professor Ward Churchill and Forrest Carter, the author of The
Education of Little Tree.

Last year, NR's John J. Miller reported on the phenomenon of Indian
hoaxers, in the March 28, 2005 issue.


In his book The Education of Little Tree, Forrest Carter tells the
tender tale of becoming an orphan and growing up in the Appalachian
boondocks under the careful watch of his Cherokee grandparents. The
book is full of sweet lessons about the importance of family and the
need to live in harmony with nature. There's quite a backstory to it
as well. First published in 1976, The Education of Little Tree
received warm reviews and garnered a cult following, but wasn't a
commercial hit. Ten years later, the University of New Mexico Press
bought the rights to it for just $500.

That purchase ranks as one of the publishing industry's most
lucrative coups: The Education of Little Tree has since sold
hundreds of thousands of copies. "The values as well as the prose
touched many who didn't usually read," wrote Prof. Rennard
Strickland in a foreword to the original paperback
edition. "Students of Native American life discovered the book to be
as accurate as it was mystical and romantic." On June 23, 1991, the
book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback
nonfiction. It remained there throughout the summer and well into
the fall, eventually rising to the top position. Then, on November
10, it vanished — and reappeared on the bestseller list for
paperback fiction.

That's because it had been exposed as a fraud. Forrest Carter was
really Asa Carter, a white supremacist who had written speeches for
Alabama governor George Wallace in the 1960s. Wallace's viciously
memorable line — "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation
forever!" — probably came from Carter's pen. Carter, who died in
1979, was a forerunner to such fabulists as Stephen Glass and Jayson
Blair. He was no Indian and his famous book was no memoir.

Carter was one of the more spectacular examples of a white person
trying to come off as an Indian. There is a long history of this
make-believe behavior, going back at least as far as the Boston Tea
Party. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the emergence of fraternal
orders and other organizations that aped Indian identities. Yet
nobody seriously believed the Campfire Girls were the authentic
daughters of Sitting Bull. That's not the case with some of the most
recent forms of real Indian bull, as Carter and The Education of
Little Tree demonstrate. "It's an epidemic," complains Vernon
Bellecourt of the American Indian Movement. "These people are
culture vultures, and their motive is to make money."

Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans claiming Indian
ancestry on their census forms jumped by a factor of six. Neither
birthrates nor counting methodologies can account for this explosive
growth. Instead, the phenomenon arises in large part from the
increasingly idealistic place Indians occupy in the popular
imagination. Much of it is based on harmless sentiment mixed into a
hash of unverifiable family legends and wishful thinking among folks
who hang dreamcatchers from their rearview mirrors. But for a
distinct subset, it's all about personal profit. They're
professional imposters who have built entire careers by putting the
sham into shaman.

The most famous of these pretenders is probably Iron Eyes Cody, the
actor who starred in those Keep America Beautiful television ads
during the 1970s. It turns out that the tear — actually glycerin —
trickling down his sad face wasn't his only deception. Iron Eyes

Cody was born Espera DeCorti, the son of Italian immigrants. His
black hair and bronze skin apparently came from his mother's
Sicilian side. Although many Indians who met him harbored doubts
about his true identity, Iron Eyes turned his trickery into a
successful career in Hollywood. He performed as an Indian in more
than a hundred films, all the while insisting that his father was
Cherokee and his mother Cree. His published autobiography is a pack
of lies. The full truth came out only after his death in 1999.

The latest phony Indian to be unmasked is Ward Churchill, the
University of Colorado professor who recently ruffled feathers for
calling the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center "little Eichmanns" whose massacre was a "penalty befitting
their participation in" global capitalism. Churchill is an all-too-
predictable product of the modern academy. He is a tenured "ethnic
studies" specialist, but he does not hold a doctorate in anything,
and his scholarship, if it can be called that, is riddled with
errors and left-wing posturing. The man is a buffoon.

Churchill can get away with so few credentials and such a heap of
sloppiness because he claims to speak on behalf of a disenfranchised
minority. The basis for this assertion rests on Churchill's
ancestry, which he has variously described as three-sixteenths
Cherokee and one-sixteenth Cree. Yet he has never provided any
documentary evidence on his background, which Indians commonly do to
prove their status within a tribe. He did gain membership to the
Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in 1994, but it was an associate
membership that was temporarily available to people who aren't in
fact Indian. (Bill Clinton, who has said that his grandmother's
grandmother was a Cherokee, is also an honorary member of the
Keetoowah.)

"You can spot these phony baloneys across the continent," says Suzan
Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee who first met
Churchill about 15 years ago. "Right away, I could tell he was a
faker because he refused to talk about his family."

Churchill served in Vietnam — he has boasted about going on
dangerous jungle missions, but Army records indicate that he mostly
drove trucks — and at the time he listed himself as "Caucasian." He
switched this to "American Indian" in 1978, when he filled out an
affirmative-action form as part of his application to become a
lecturer in Native American studies at Colorado. He has maintained
this identity ever since, though the only corroboration he can
offer — apart from his obvious fondness for the long-hair-and-dark-
sunglasses look of a reservation activist — is his own word.

A less extravagant but more common fraud than masquerading as
an "ethnic studies" expert involves the marketing of non-Indian arts
and crafts as "Indian-made." The problem became so pervasive that
Congress toughened truth-in-advertising laws against it in 1990.
Businesses caught violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act face
penalties up to $1 million. That's peanuts to the gambling industry,
of course, and the fast growth of tribal casinos has prompted many
Americans to embark on genealogical hunting expeditions. The
enormous Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, for example, was built by a
small band of people who didn't normally refer to themselves as
Pequot Indians until they realized a tribal identity was their
ticket to gambling riches.

For others, Indian ancestry is a gateway to government set-aside
programs. A public-works contractor in California managed to qualify
as a disadvantaged businessman because a great-great-grandparent's
contribution to the family gene pool had made him 1/64th Indian.

One of the most common forms of exploitation involves white writers
who don't pretend to be Indians themselves but who claim special
insights into Indian spirituality. In 1968, Carlos Castaneda, a UCLA
graduate student in anthropology, published The Teachings of Don
Juan, which was allegedly based on his clandestine visits with a
reclusive Yaqui sorcerer in the Sonoran desert. The book purports to
describe the mystical secrets of an ancient Indian faith, which
happened to involve using a lot of hallucinogenic drugs. Castaneda's
ramblings were in tune with the turn-on, drop-out times. His book
became an international bestseller. Castaneda spent the next three
decades refusing interviews and issuing sequels based on his
supposed encounters with a man nobody else ever met. He died in 1998.

Another bestselling author, Lynn Andrews, has been dubbed "the
female Carlos Castaneda," and it wasn't meant as an insult. Her
first book, Medicine Woman, described a journey into the far reaches
of Manitoba, where she met a pair of female sages. Then she returned
home to Beverly Hills and has spent the rest of her life peddling
New Age gobbledygook in subsequent books, through online courses,
and at Hawaiian retreats. She is just a small part of a cottage
industry that offers sweat-lodge "purification ceremonies" and tour-
guided "rites of passage" in the wilderness. In 1993, the National
Congress of American Indians became so frustrated by all these
perversions of authentic religious traditions that it issued
a "declaration of war" against "non-Indian 'wanna-bes,' hucksters,
cultists, commercial profiteers, and self-styled New Age shamans."

Nobody likes a con artist, and it isn't difficult to find harsh
critics of white people who "play Indian" for personal gain. One of
their most scathing detractors has labeled Castaneda "the greatest
hoax since Piltdown Man," called Andrews "an air-head 'feminist'
yuppie," and branded Ruth Beebe Hill's Hanta Yo — yet another book
of doubtful legitimacy — a "ludicrous performance." Taken together,
these charlatans have "made a significant recent contribution (for
profit) to the misrepresentation and appropriation of indigenous
spirituality." What's more, they've "been tendered some measure of
credibility by the 'certified scholars' of American universities."

But that's not all. By impersonating Indians and making them look
like fools, these imposters are guilty of "cultural genocide."

That would seem to make them little Eichmanns, too. The author of
these words? Ward Churchill.

[blackcrowheart]

Sherman Alexie Speaks Out on Nasdijj

www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/sherman_alexie_speaks_out
_on_nasdijj_31564.asp?c=rss

This week's issue of Time includes an essay by Sherman Alexie (left)
in which he discusses his early attempts to expose Nasdijj as "a
literary thief and a liar," and possibly, as he worried at the
time, "a talented and angry white man who was writing as a Native
American in order to mock multicultural literature." Now that the
truth is out there, Alexie writes, "[Nasdijj's] lies matter because
he has cynically co-opted as a literary style the very real suffering
endured by generations of very real Indians because of very real
injustices caused by very real American aggression that destroyed
very real tribes."

I had some questions of my own after reading Alexie's essay online,
so I shot him an email wondering what, if anything, he'd done after
his initial efforts to alert Nasdijj's publisher were rebuffed. "I
was aware that Nasdijj had moved to other publishers, and that he was
doing a little bit of the college speaking tour," he replied. "But
I'd given up on exposing him because nobody seemed to care. And
whenever I try to expose these hoaxsters and exploiters, I'm the one
who is accused of racism and imperialism and essentialism." He adds
that the Native artistic community has long been aware of frauds like
Nasdijj, "but white folks don't pay us much attention. A friend of
mine emailed me to say that the whole thing made her sad because if
an Indian of my success and influence can be ignored and/or dismissed
by publishers then what does that say for less powerful Indians?" For
that matter, he wonders, "Do you think the publishers might listen to
me now?" It's a legitimate question, and one without an obvious
answer. After all, as Alexie points out, Ward Churchill remains
a "leftist academic hero" despite the debunking of claims to Cherokee
heritage because he's "exactly the kind of Indian his white leftist
academic compatriots want him to be [...] an Uncle Tomahawk with a
vocabulary."

[blackcrowheart]

When the Story Stolen Is Your Own
It was hailed as a great Native American memoir, but this writer
smelled a fake

By SHERMAN ALEXIE
SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR
Posted Sunday, Jan. 29, 2006
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1154221-1,00.html

In 1999 a Native American writer, born fragile and poor on a
destitute Indian reservation, published an essay, "The Blood Runs
like a River Through My Dreams," in Esquire. It earned a National
Magazine Award nomination and was later expanded into a memoir of the
same title that became a finalist for a PEN/Martha Albrand Award.
That rez-to-riches tale of courage and redemption sounds like a
Horatio Alger story, doesn't it? It should be a movie. Or at least an
episode of A&E's Biography. Of course, I'm biased, because, well,
it's my story. Kind of.

I did not write "The Blood Runs like a River Through My Dreams." But
raised fragile and poor on the destitute Spokane Indian Reservation
in Washington State, I published a story, This Is What It Means to
Say Phoenix, Arizona, in Esquire in 1993. My story, which features an
autobiographical character named Thomas Builds-the-Fire who suffers a
brain injury at birth and experiences visionary seizures into his
adulthood, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and the basis
for the film Smoke Signals, which won the Audience Award at Sundance
in 1998.

Nasdijj, the one-name author of The Blood Runs like a River Through
My Dreams, claimed to be the son of a Navajo mother and a white
father. His memoir features a child named Tommy Nothing Fancy who
suffers from and dies of a seizure disorder. Quite the coincidence,
don't you think?

Of course, after reading Nasdijj's essay and book, I suspected that
he was a literary thief and a liar. As a Native American writer and
multiculturalist, I worried that Nasdijj was a talented and angry
white man who was writing as a Native American in order to mock
multicultural literature. I imagined that he would eventually reveal
himself as a hoaxer and shout, "You see, people, there is nothing
real or authentic about multicultural literature. Anybody can write
it."

Angry, competitive, saddened, self-righteous and more than a little
jealous that this guy was stealing some of my autobiographical
thunder, I approached Nasdijj's publishers and told them his book not
only was borderline plagiarism but also failed to mention specific
tribal members, clans, ceremonies and locations, all of which are
vital to the concept of Indian identity. They took me seriously, but
they didn't believe me.

And how do I feel now that the author of an investigative story in
L.A. Weekly believes that Nasdijj is a fraud and actually a white
writer named Timothy Barrus? Vindicated? Well, sure. I dream of
leaving "I told you so" messages on many voice mails, although unlike
James Frey's publisher, who initially supported his lies and moral
evasions about his exaggerated memoir, A Million Little Pieces,
Nasdijj's publisher dropped him because of personality conflicts even
before the L.A. Weekly story came out. Of course, Frey has sold
millions of books and will probably sell a few million more. Nasdijj
hasn't sold millions of books, and he will probably fade into
obscurity. In response to the L.A. Weekly story, Nasdijj posted a
rambling statement on his blog saying that people should pay
attention to "real scandals" like poverty.

So why should we be concerned about his lies? His lies matter because
he has cynically co-opted as a literary style the very real suffering
endured by generations of very real Indians because of very real
injustices caused by very real American aggression that destroyed
very real tribes. He isn't the first to do it. In 1991 the American
Booksellers Association gave its book-of-the-year award to Forrest
Carter's Cherokee-themed memoir, The Education of Little Tree,
despite the documented fact that Carter was really Asa Carter, a
rabid segregationist and the author of George Wallace's infamous war
cry, "Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"

I can only hope that Nasdijj's readers will look to Oprah for
inspiration. After initially defending the essential truth of Frey's
memoir, a selection for her book club, Oprah changed her mind,
admitted that she had been duped, invited Frey back onto her show and
called him a liar. When was the last time a public figure like Oprah
admitted to being wrong? When was the last time a powerful person
like Oprah issued a genuine public apology? I think all the people
who profited from Nasdijj's fraud should take heed of that lesson and
issue public apologies to Native Americans in general and to Navajo
in particular. And I hope we won't be waiting for that apology as
long as the rivers flow, the grasses grow and the winds blow.

-- Sherman Alexie, a member of the Spokane tribe, is the author of 17
books, including Ten Little Indians, his latest

[Okwes]

Nasdijj Admits He’s Barrus
And he is already shopping a post-truth tell-all

By MATTHEW FLEISCHER
Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 11:02 pm
On Friday, three days after L.A. Weekly broke its investigation into the true identity of the writer who calls himself Nasdijj, Ballantine announced it would no longer ship copies of Nasdijj’s The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping or Geronomo’s Bones and retailers would be allowed to return copies left on the shelves. “It looks pretty conclusive,” Ballantine spokeswoman Carol Schneider said of the charges against Nasdijj, whose real name is Tim Barrus. The writer apparently agrees -- on Saturday, for the first time, Barrus signed his real name to a blog posting .

Meanwhile, an email seen by L.A. Weekly suggests that Barrus is already attempting to parlay his newfound notoriety into a tell-all memoir. In an ironic twist, he calls the new work a novel. The email, addressed to an editor at Penguin, appears to have originated from Nasdijj’s private account. It reads in part--

Outed From the Box.

I am Nasdijj. I am the author of several critically claimed books and I am a PEN Book-of-the-Year award-winner. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, and I have been nominated for a National Magazine Award. My books have been published by Random House/ Ballantine/ Crown. WWNorton. Houghton Mifflin.

I have written a new novel called YEAR OF THE HYENA: THE STORY OF NASDIJJ.

In this book I tell the story of "the scandal of Nasdijj" and who Nasdijj really is -- AND -- WHAT IT HAS BEEN LIKE TO BE NASDIJJ. This is my story. No one else has the truth. No one can tell this story like I can.

This book deals with my founding of Refuge House, a shelter for boys with AIDS, and the current swirling controversy about who I actually am (the media does not have it right).”


A spokeswoman for Penguin would only confirm that Barrus was “shopping around.”

Following the publication of “Navahoax,” the Raleigh News and Observer, for whom Nasdijj wrote book reviews, discovered that the author’s social security number (used in paying Nasdijj) could be positively matched to Tim Barrus.

Likewise an editor at Esquire was able to confirm that the check sent to the author of its piece The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams, was made out to “Tim Nasdijj Barrus.” An editor’s note was also added to the online version of the piece: “In January 2006, doubts were raised about the identity of the author, Nasdijj. Esquire has been unable to refute those challenges or to confirm the truthfulness of the following essay. Consequently, its veracity is in question. We maintain access to the story here, for those who are interested and for the record. But we can no longer stand behind it with confidence as an honest account of the author’s experience.”

Barrus, who is in touch with the L.A. Weekly but has declined to comment on the record thus far, made his first public comments to the News and Observer, responding to the charges against him by email-- “The real scandals are racism, poverty, disease, AIDS, FAS [fetal alcohol syndrome], autism, a medical system that is a train wreck, an environment that can barely breathe, and a war that is a self-created nightmare,” he said.

A lengthy post on his blog, titled “The Real Scandal,” followed in which he denounced the shallowness of American celebrity culture, the nationwide ignorance of the enormity of AIDS, and, in a manner consistent with past Barrus postings, the evils of publishing.

A companion post on his wife Tina Giovanni’s blog continued “The real scandal” motif, but focused instead on the issue of Autism. Both posts were subsequently removed and on Saturday morning Nasdijj posted anew with an entry reading only “Deserving Death for Evil Deeds.” The lone phrase was accompanied by a picture of two young men, blindfolded and noosed around their necks, waiting to be hung by masked assailants.

Mid-day, however, he added a long post titled “Deserving Death for Evil Deeds, by Tim Barrus.”

I am writing this one for myself. So it doesn't really matter what you believe or don't believe. What you want to believe you want to believe. If I am the devil incarnate then I am the devil incarnate.

This one is for me.

As I write this, I have hit the road again.…

Am I hiding out. You bet. Go. Go. The road is what I am at home with….

Now that my head and my balls have been chopped off by the Red Queen's guillotine, why in the world should I CARE what people think. Thank god almighty, I am free at last.

To read the full blog, see www.nasdijj.typepad.com/.

[Okwes]

Navajo life, or just pale-faced lie?

The writer known as Nasdijj is actually Timothy P. Barrus.
Staff File Photo by John Rottet
Story Tools Printer Friendly Email to a Friend
Enlarge Font Decrease Font
Related ContentAuthor had written for The N&OMore Local & State BBC tunes in to Triangle
Three die in trailer fire
N.C. Marine killed in Iraq
GTECH wins lottery deal with state
Sonar site called bad for sea life
'Yes' vote on school bonds no fast fix
Bull City loyalists think it's just right
N.C. sues TVA for cleaner air


Craig Jarvis, Staff Writer
Former Chapel Hill author Nasdijj won national acclaim writing memoirs about his brutal childhood as a Navajo Indian in the Southwest and as a father to two adopted sons who died of AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome.
In truth, he was Timothy P. Barrus, a man of Scandinavian descent who grew up in a solidly middle-class neighborhood of Lansing, Mich., and had a career writing gay pornography, according to public records and several people who know Barrus.

The likelihood that Barrus had fabricated his past -- and parlayed the fiction into three successful nonfiction books -- was first raised Wednesday in a lengthy article in a Los Angeles newspaper that outlined similarities between Barrus and Nasdijj.

On Thursday, The News & Observer was able to confirm that they are the same person. The paper had a Social Security number for Nasdijj because it had paid him for free-lance work. A check of the database of public records collected by Accurint, a private company, matched Barrus to the Social Security number. And an Esquire editor said the magazine had made out a check to "Tim Nasdijj Barrus" for the 1999 article that was the author's breakthrough piece.

Barrus, 55, couldn't be located and did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview. Nor did his wife and adult daughter.

The revelation comes at a time when the publishing world is grappling with the disclosure that memoirist James Frey took liberties with his best-selling book, "A Million Little Pieces." But while Frey embellished parts of his life, Barrus appears to have made up an entirely new one.

"It's different from Frey," said Esquire magazine editor-in-chief David Granger. "Frey exaggerated. If true, this is made up from whole cloth."

Granger said in an interview that the magazine discovered Thursday that it had made a check out to "Tim Nasdijj Barrus" for the writer's article about Tommy Nothing Fancy, his supposedly adopted son. The article was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and it led to a book contract.

Granger said the magazine is unsure what to do until the facts are sorted out further.

"We have no idea if any parts of the story are true," Granger said. "We can't determine if he's not Native American -- we don't know."

Publisher 'disturbed'

Carol Schneider, a spokeswoman for Ballantine, which published two of Nasdijj's books, was in the same boat.

"We are disturbed," she said. "We would be very unhappy to be part of this if, in fact, that's all true."

Ballantine broke off its relationship with the author in 2004. Schneider said it was not because of questions about his identity, but she wouldn't elaborate.

After the Esquire piece, Nasdijj published "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams" in 2000, followed by "The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping" -- which won a PEN award -- and "Geronimo's Bones." He wrote that he was the son of an alcoholic Navajo mother and a white cowboy father who raped and beat him. He said he grew up in migrant labor camps.

His former brother-in-law, Stephen Cheetham of Lansing, said Barrus had no such life. Cheetham said he hadn't seen Barrus since the 1970s, but over the years his two children told him what they heard of Barrus from their mother.

"I had heard that he was writing stories under different names," Cheetham said Thursday. "Something about how he claimed to be a Vietnam veteran at one point, claimed to be a Native American Indian at another point.

"His parents were a very middle-class, working, typical American family. He was never involved in Vietnam, he was never a Native American Indian, his parents weren't Native Americans -- there wasn't anything like that in his past."

Nasdijj lived in Chapel Hill in the late 1990s and early 2000s, just as he began to receive national notice. Local bookstore owners recall packing the house when he had readings.

Tom Campbell of The Regulator Bookshop in Durham said about 100 people showed up for one reading.

"I'm sorry to hear this, that's for sure," Campbell said. "I wonder if the parts in [the book] about being homeless, teaching school on the reservation -- I wonder if that's true.

"If he never had a son that died -- that's a lot further than what Frey did."

Kathryn Henderson of Market Street Books & Maps in Chapel Hill said Nasdijj also drew a crowd there. "People were taken with him," she said.

The LA Weekly spent months looking into Nasdijj's past and found several people who were suspicious of the author's memoirs, including writer Sherman Alexie, who said he thinks Nasdijj used material from his books. A film producer told the LA Weekly that he canceled plans to make a movie of "The Boy" when the author wouldn't cooperate with the producer's fact-checking.

In the 1980s, Barrus gained attention in some gay circles as a writer of pornography; other gay writers didn't think his work sounded authentic.

"I had some serious doubts about how gay he ever was," said Lars Eighner, a writer of gay literature who had mainstream success with his books. "It's a house of mirrors when you deal with him."

Barrus' third novel was about gay soldiers in Vietnam, but taken as a fictionalized memoir. Eighner said his gay literary friends didn't believe Barrus was ever in Vietnam.

Eighner also said Barrus had such a distinct writing style that he recognized it when he came across Nasdijj's Web site recently.

Barrus eventually remarried and moved with his wife to San Francisco, then came to Chapel Hill. He first emerged as Nasdijj in 1999. He dropped out of sight after leaving the Triangle more than a year ago.

The LA Weekly said Nasdijj's assistant, responding to an e-mail message sent to the writer, responded that he was in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico and couldn't be reached.

Cheetham, the former brother-in-law, said Barrus was writing in a journal when he knew him and hoping to one day be published.

"Tim was always a storyteller," he said. "Evidently, that hasn't changed a bit."

Staff writer Craig Jarvis can be reached at 829-4576 or [e-mail].

[blackcrowheart]

Ballantine pulls Navajo memoirs

By HILLEL ITALIE
The Associated Press
www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/13791712.htm

The publisher of two memoirs by Nasdijj, an award-winning Navajo
author whose identity has been strongly challenged, said recently that
it would no longer ship his books and would accept returns of copies
from booksellers.

"This looks pretty conclusive," Ballantine spokeswoman Carol Schneider
said after The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C., reported that
Nasdijj's Social Security number matched the number of a white man,
Timothy P. Barrus, who had a prior career writing gay pornography.

The two memoirs, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping and Geronimo's
Bones, had few copies in print, Schneider said. The Boy and the Dog
Are Sleeping, published in 2003, won a PEN/Beyond Margins award. A
paperback edition of Geronimo's Bones, a memoir about reservation life
praised as "frank and funny" by Publishers Weekly, came out last fall.

Doubts about the background of Nasdijj were first raised last month by
an alternative publication, LA Weekly, in a story that cited documents
and interviews with scholars, American Indian authors and his
acquaintances and colleagues.

The News & Observer had Nasdijj's Social Security number because it
paid the author for several book reviews, the last of which was
published in 2004.

Barrus, 55, could not be located and did not respond to interview
requests from the newspaper or The Associated Press. In a long posting
on his blog, www.nasdijj.typepad.com, Nasdijj did not acknowledge any
wrongdoing, writing, "The real scandal is that the real story of
Nasdijj could never, ever be published because no publisher has the
courage." He also referred to Oprah Winfrey, who chastised memoirist
James Frey for taking extensive liberties with his bestselling A
Million Little Pieces.

"Oprah is NOT a dialogue. It is ENTERTAINMENT and GOSSIP! THE REAL
SCANDAL IS THAT THERE ARE HOMELESS IN AMERICA!"

Nasdijj emerged in 1999 with an article in Esquire about his adopted
son, a Najavo named Tommy Nothing Fancy, and the boy's death from
fetal alcohol syndrome. The article was a finalist for a National
Magazine Award and led to a book contract with Houghton Mifflin, which
in 2000 published The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams.

Nasdijj has written that he was born in 1950 on a Navajo reservation
in the Southwest, the son of a violent white cowboy and an alcoholic
mother who died when he was 7. He lived in migrant camps around the
country and suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome.

In one interview, he said as a child he was "hungry, raped, beaten,
whipped, and forced at every opportunity to work in the fields."

Records show Barrus is from Michigan.
email this
print this

[Okwes]

Even Dine College Swindled by "Devil Incarnate"

"If I am the devil incarnate then I am the devil incarnate." -
Timothy Barrus, "Deserving Death for Evil Deeds" internet post

According to humanities instructor, Linda Arellano, Dine College has
stopped using gay-erotica novelist's, Timothy Barrus, book "The
Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, October
4, 2000)".

Despite being dropped from classroom use, it is still being sold at
the Dine College Book Store.

If you have a problem with this author or this book, "The Blood Runs
Like a River Through My Dreams (2000)", contact the publisher,
Houghton Mifflin at the following link:
www.hmco.com/contact/contactform.html.


LA WEEKLY: Publication who broke story.
www.laweekly.com/index.php?
option=com_lawcontent&task=view&id=12522

LA WEEKLY: "Navahoax", original article
www.laweekly.com/index.php?
option=com_lawcontent&task=view&id=12468&Itemid=9

The Book Standard
www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/author/article_displ
ay.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001918431

[Okwes]

Harjo: Fakers and phonies and frauds, egad: There ought to be a law
Posted: February 10, 2006
by: Suzan Shown Harjo / Indian Country Today

www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412438

Another Indian impersonator is unmasked: Nasdijj, who masqueraded as
a Navajo and made a pile of money from best-selling books about his
life as a poor reservation kid with an alcoholic mother.

It turns out that Nasdijj is a very white man with some very dark
secrets. He really is Tim Barrus of North Carolina. He did not grow
up on or near any Indian territory. Neither parent is Navajo or
Indian of any nation. His mother was not a drunken Navajo.

At the very least, Barrus and his promoters owe all Navajo people,
especially the women, an apology.

Nasdijj's true identity was exposed by Matthew Fleischer in an
extensive article in LA Weekly's Jan. 25 issue, ''Navahoax,'' which
asked the question: ''Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica
become one of multicultural literature's most celebrated memoirists -
by passing himself off as Native American?''

The Nasdijj expose hit the stands the day before Oprah Winfrey's
grilling of author James Frey about misrepresentations in his
memoir. In less than one week, Random House's Ballantine imprint
announced it would cease shipping Nasdijj's ''Geronimo's Bones''
and ''The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping.''

Nasdijj was the darling of publishing for a hot minute. He won a
prestigious award intended for Native writers. Critics heaped praise
on his writing; one called it ''achingly honest.''

Native people who read Nasdijj's work did not believe he was a Native
writer because there was nothing familiar about the content. Non-
Natives embraced his work because of its familiarity - it ''derives
its special power from his ability to capture the universal emotions
that we all share,'' as one book cover put it.

It is this very familiarity that allows pseudo-Indians to rise so far
so fast in circles controlled by non-Indians. They write with what
non-Indian reviewers like to call ''universal appeal,'' meaning that
they appeal to other non-Indians because they are non-Indian.

Once these pseudo-Indians are revealed as the non-Indians they
actually are, many of their enablers continue to support them, even
chiding those who have brought the hoax to light as mean-spirited,
small-minded or jealous.

And what happens to the posers? Like actors who've deep-ended in
their roles, they either hold on to their fictionalized personae
until the laughing dies down and then adopt a ''so what'' attitude -
so what if I'm not actually an Indian? I'm now an Indian expert by
virtue of having portrayed an Indian - or they shift into another
shape to please a new audience.

And what happens to all the damage they caused and the money they
made and the accolades they garnered under false pretenses? They
abscond with the money and goods and leave the mess for the people
they pretended to be.

The pseudo-Indians should not be held harmless. They should be made
to pay. There ought to be a law, you say? I couldn't agree more.

During the hearings in the 1980s on amendments to the Indian Arts and
Crafts Act, I testified on behalf of the National Congress of
American Indians that Congress should establish a new law that would
authorize a tribe to bring a federal action against those who profit
from false claims that they are people of that tribe.

And what about people who don't profit from their false Indian
identities? This is not the norm. In the vast majority of these
cases, the non-Indians are pretending to be Indians for profit of
some kind - for tenure, a job, a book contract, a record deal, a
movie role. Look into the eyes of a pseudo-Indian and you see gold.

A new cause of action for Native nations should be more than a cease
and desist order. Budding pseudo-Indians should know that there are
potential consequences for identity theft.

There should be a law for Navajo Nation to sue Barrus for the profits
he made while committing the crime of stealing tribal identity.

There already are ways for Native writers, who were finalists for the
Native writing award that the Poets, Essayists and Novelists
organization bestowed on Barrus, to seek redress. Both Barrus and
PEN should hope that the snubbed writers don't use those laws to
recover damages.

Some Native nations might not want to engage these fakers. Some may
not consider this offense against Native people to be offensive;
perhaps the same ones who think that the mascoting of their tribal
identities and heroes is not a problem. So, they wouldn't sue the
pseudos.

Other tribes could exact some of the profits the pseudos made off
their good names and reputations, and could provide time in the
slammer for the offenders to reflect on their next career moves.

Here are four ways Congress could legislate to address this problem.

First, enact a statutory cause of action for Native nations to pursue
impostors across state lines, try them in tribal courts and impose
triple damages against those found to be guilty. These are offenses
against a particular people, who should have the authority to do
something about them. This authority does not exist under current
law.

Second, amend the Indian Arts and Crafts Act to include all artists,
including but not limited to writers, dancers, singers, actors and
curators. The law now covers only visual artists. When its penalties
were increased more than 15 years ago, many pseudo-Indians traded
their visual art careers for writing and curating careers, and
continue to vex Native peoples.

Third, amend the Federal Trade Commission's Indian arts and crafts
statute to include all arts marketed to the public. The FTC pursues
these cases as consumer fraud and encourages arts and crafts outlets
to clearly mark products as Native-made and non-Native made.

Bookstores do not differentiate between books written by Native
people and those whose authors are not Native. Anyone can write
about anything they want, but the public should be informed about
which books are in a Native person's voice and experience, and which
are not.

Fourth, enact an updated version of the pseudo-Indian act, which was
first introduced in 1933, as part of the Indian Reorganization Act
package. The bill would have made it a ''crime to represent one's
self to be an Indian, and providing punishment therefore.'' Its
language was simple and direct:

It shall be unlawful for any person other than an Indian to represent
himself to be an Indian for the purpose of obtaining employment or
any contract for the rendition of services, or of obtaining
pecuniary or other assistances, or of securing to himself or to any
other person any of the privileges or benefits conferred by law upon
Indians. Any person violating the provisions of this Act shall, upon
conviction thereof, be fined not more than $2,000 or imprisoned for
not longer than one year, or both.''

Congress needs to enact new authorities and to remove present
restrictions against tribes acting on their own in these areas.
Congress also needs to exercise its oversight responsibilities and
let the federal agencies know that this is a priority, and to
provide monies to enforce existing laws.

Congressional members and staffers know what to do to properly
address the Barruses who perpetuate a fraud on Native and non-Native
people. The question is: Why don't they do it?

Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of
the Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for
Indian Country Today.

Sam