Honest injun? The incidence of fake Indians is almost epidemic

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.)