Post by blackcrowheart on Oct 3, 2007 14:23:35 GMT -5
An epidemic of ersatz Indians
John J. Miller, National Review
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.
John J. Miller, National Review
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.