Reuters
Cherokee Indians: We are free to oust blacks
US government wants second-largest Indian tribe to recognize as citizens 2,800 descendants of slaves that were held by Cherokees
updated 9/14/2011 9:00:20 AM ET
The nation's second-largest Indian tribe said on Tuesday that it would not be dictated to by the U.S. government over its move to banish 2,800 African Americans from its citizenship rolls.
"The Cherokee Nation will not be governed by the BIA," Joe Crittenden, the tribe's acting principal chief, said in a statement responding to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Crittenden, who leads the tribe until a new principal chief is elected, went on to complain about unnamed congressmen meddling in the tribe's self-governance.
The reaction follows a letter the tribe received on Monday from BIA Assistant Secretary Larry Echo Hawk, who warned that the results of the September 24 Cherokee election for principal chief will not be recognized by the U.S. government if the ousted members, known to some as "Cherokee Freedmen," are not allowed to vote.
The dispute stems from the fact that some wealthy Cherokee owned black slaves who worked on their plantations in the South. By the 1830s, most of the tribe was forced to relocate to present-day Oklahoma, and many took their slaves with them. The so-called Freedmen are descendants of those slaves. After the Civil War, in which the Cherokee fought for the South, a treaty was signed in 1866 guaranteeing tribal citizenship for the freed slaves. The U.S. government said that the 1866 treaty between the Cherokee tribe and the U.S. government guaranteed that the slaves were tribal citizens, whether or not they had a Cherokee blood relation.
The African Americans lost their citizenship last month when the Cherokee Supreme Court voted to support the right of tribal members to change the tribe's constitution on citizenship matters.
Read the full story HERE.
Showing posts with label Native American/Indigenous. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Native American/Indigenous. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
American diplomat becomes music star in Paraguay
Miami Herald
Posted on Tue, Jun. 24, 2008
American diplomat becomes music star in Paraguay
By BENJAMIN N. GEDAN
Becoming famous in this poor and isolated nation would not seem like a huge challenge. But even here, U.S. Ambassador James C. Cason seemed an unlikely candidate for national celebrity.
That was before he learned the obscure Paraguayan Guaraní language, recorded a music album of indigenous folk songs and sold 1,000 tickets to a concert in a downtown theater. Now, in the final year of his four-decade diplomatic career, Cason has suddenly become the toast of Paraguay, or at least the country's most unusual pop star.
''He's been on TV and in all the newspapers,'' said Nelson Viveros, 16, who traveled to meet the ambassador recently in Encarnación, by the Argentina border. ``It's strange, but people love it.''
Until January, it appeared Cason, 63, would go quietly into retirement in Miami, whose Cuban-American community he knows and where he was considering running for office or seeking a job related to Latin America.
Paraguay is the last foreign service posting for the New Jersey native, following assignments in Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Bolivia, Panama, Uruguay, Italy, Venezuela and Portugal. Before moving to the capital city of Asunción in 2005, he spent three years as chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
Cason made a name for himself in Cuba, too, earning a reputation as an aggressive critic of the Castro government. He organized workshops for dissidents, distributed short-wave radios across the island and once displayed a mock jail cell to bring attention to the plight of political prisoners.
Cason had little on his resume to suggest a career in show biz. He never sang professionally, played no instruments and understood no Guaraní, spoken by 96 percent of Paraguayans.
He did not begin studying Guaraní until his last month in Havana, hiring a Paraguayan medical student to tutor him for three hours a day. In Washington, awaiting Senate confirmation, the State Department located a replacement instructor, a Paraguayan who once taught Peace Corps volunteers.
Using a pair of out-of-print text books, Cason, already fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, arranged three months of private lessons.
''I've never been to a country where I couldn't speak the language,'' Cason told The Miami Herald. ``These words are very hard to retain. It's pure consonants. You've got to just bang them into your head.''
In low-key Paraguay, the new ambassador showed hints of showmanship on his first hour on the job.
Upon arriving in December 2005, he stepped off the plane wearing the traditional hand-embroidered Paraguayan ao poi dress shirt and greeted local reporters in Guaraní, delivering a three-page speech. Not even embassy staff knew he had studied the language.
In Asunción, he recruited his third tutor and began watching Guaraní TV and filling his iPod with vocabulary lessons that shared time with the Beatles, Buddy Holly and Whitney Houston on his playlist. He soon discovered Guaraní music, translating 1920s songs about emigrants longing for Paraguay and Paraguayan soldiers who march into battle afraid their girlfriends will stray in their absence.
Singing in Guaraní did not occur to Cason until a few months ago, when his wife Carmen, an admirer of the ambassador's Peter, Paul & Mary renditions around the house, recommended that he hire her piano teacher for voice lessons.
As Cason tells it, his hidden talent was soon discovered.
CONNECTIONS HELP
But even in little Asunción, it seems being ambassador helped in navigating the music scene. The piano teacher, for example, turned out to be Benito Román, the choral director for the UniNorte opera. After only a month of lessons, Román mentioned his new protégé to the country's most celebrated soprano, Rebecca Arramendi.
Before long a duet had been scheduled for a 10,000-seat amphitheater in Itá.On stage in a straw hat, Cason warned the audience that he was an amateur vocalist, before joining in four songs.
''I'd never sang in my life in front of anybody, in any language,'' Cason recalled. 'But when I sang the first line of the first song, they all started screaming and cheering. I said, `OK, I can do this.' ''
Not all reactions have been as positive.
BAD REVIEWS
In a review of the CD release show in the Ultima Hora newspaper, a critic noted that Cason ''sat on a stool with the lyrics in front of him'' during the entire performance, appearing ''nervous or unsure about the tune and pronunciation of Guaraní.'' The newspaper La Nación was more direct: The ambassador, it said, ``sang in the monotone of a tired bird.''
Following the show in Itá, Cason said, fan mail poured into the embassy -- as did invitations to festivals and for a (nonsinging) cameo as a cardinal in the opera Tosca. The songs he had performed in Itá went into heavy rotation on local radio stations.
A short time later, after a government tour of the Itaipú dam, Cason surprised the band at a local restaurant by leading a group of ambassadors in a sing-along. Then, at a rural festival and cattle auction, he gave another impromptu gig.
Though he does not leave his post until the fall, he is already planning his life in Miami, where he hopes to sell his album and perform with visiting Paraguayan musicians, possibly inviting local Cuban bands to jam.
Cason insists that he decided to record the album as a souvenir, a gift for his two sons and proof that he had once spoken Guaraní. Still, in April, he recruited a platoon of professional violinists, guitarists and accordion players, some urged out of retirement, to join him in the studio. He spent $2,500, logged 32 hours of recording sessions and even wrote a song, Campo Jurado, the album's opening track.
''Paraguayans cry when they hear it,'' Cason said.
To generate buzz for the CD release, Cason did the Paraguayan interview circuit, giving more than 15 interviews to magazines, newspapers, TV and radio shows. The Gran Teatro del Banco Central sold out; outside, tickets sold for 50 percent above face value.
FUNDS FOR STUDY
Between the ticket and CD sales, Cason has raised more than $20,000 for scholarships for English language classes in Paraguay, according to Livia Melgarejo, spokeswoman for the Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano.
It is not as clear if he has succeeded in his other mission: improving the U.S. image here. Just two months ago, Paraguayans elected Fernando Lugo to be the country's first leftist president in more than six decades.
On a recent tour of Encarnación, however, it was clear that Cason himself has become a popular figure.
At one stop, the opening of a rural English language center, the ambassador's voice filled a lobby crowded with fans.
''He recorded a CD in our language. That was something,'' Juan Horacio Duré, secretary of health for the regional government, said after meeting the ambassador.
``I've never before met any U.S. representative who could speak Guaraní.''
Posted on Tue, Jun. 24, 2008
American diplomat becomes music star in Paraguay
By BENJAMIN N. GEDAN
Becoming famous in this poor and isolated nation would not seem like a huge challenge. But even here, U.S. Ambassador James C. Cason seemed an unlikely candidate for national celebrity.
That was before he learned the obscure Paraguayan Guaraní language, recorded a music album of indigenous folk songs and sold 1,000 tickets to a concert in a downtown theater. Now, in the final year of his four-decade diplomatic career, Cason has suddenly become the toast of Paraguay, or at least the country's most unusual pop star.
''He's been on TV and in all the newspapers,'' said Nelson Viveros, 16, who traveled to meet the ambassador recently in Encarnación, by the Argentina border. ``It's strange, but people love it.''
Until January, it appeared Cason, 63, would go quietly into retirement in Miami, whose Cuban-American community he knows and where he was considering running for office or seeking a job related to Latin America.
Paraguay is the last foreign service posting for the New Jersey native, following assignments in Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Bolivia, Panama, Uruguay, Italy, Venezuela and Portugal. Before moving to the capital city of Asunción in 2005, he spent three years as chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
Cason made a name for himself in Cuba, too, earning a reputation as an aggressive critic of the Castro government. He organized workshops for dissidents, distributed short-wave radios across the island and once displayed a mock jail cell to bring attention to the plight of political prisoners.
Cason had little on his resume to suggest a career in show biz. He never sang professionally, played no instruments and understood no Guaraní, spoken by 96 percent of Paraguayans.
He did not begin studying Guaraní until his last month in Havana, hiring a Paraguayan medical student to tutor him for three hours a day. In Washington, awaiting Senate confirmation, the State Department located a replacement instructor, a Paraguayan who once taught Peace Corps volunteers.
Using a pair of out-of-print text books, Cason, already fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, arranged three months of private lessons.
''I've never been to a country where I couldn't speak the language,'' Cason told The Miami Herald. ``These words are very hard to retain. It's pure consonants. You've got to just bang them into your head.''
In low-key Paraguay, the new ambassador showed hints of showmanship on his first hour on the job.
Upon arriving in December 2005, he stepped off the plane wearing the traditional hand-embroidered Paraguayan ao poi dress shirt and greeted local reporters in Guaraní, delivering a three-page speech. Not even embassy staff knew he had studied the language.
In Asunción, he recruited his third tutor and began watching Guaraní TV and filling his iPod with vocabulary lessons that shared time with the Beatles, Buddy Holly and Whitney Houston on his playlist. He soon discovered Guaraní music, translating 1920s songs about emigrants longing for Paraguay and Paraguayan soldiers who march into battle afraid their girlfriends will stray in their absence.
Singing in Guaraní did not occur to Cason until a few months ago, when his wife Carmen, an admirer of the ambassador's Peter, Paul & Mary renditions around the house, recommended that he hire her piano teacher for voice lessons.
As Cason tells it, his hidden talent was soon discovered.
CONNECTIONS HELP
But even in little Asunción, it seems being ambassador helped in navigating the music scene. The piano teacher, for example, turned out to be Benito Román, the choral director for the UniNorte opera. After only a month of lessons, Román mentioned his new protégé to the country's most celebrated soprano, Rebecca Arramendi.
Before long a duet had been scheduled for a 10,000-seat amphitheater in Itá.On stage in a straw hat, Cason warned the audience that he was an amateur vocalist, before joining in four songs.
''I'd never sang in my life in front of anybody, in any language,'' Cason recalled. 'But when I sang the first line of the first song, they all started screaming and cheering. I said, `OK, I can do this.' ''
Not all reactions have been as positive.
BAD REVIEWS
In a review of the CD release show in the Ultima Hora newspaper, a critic noted that Cason ''sat on a stool with the lyrics in front of him'' during the entire performance, appearing ''nervous or unsure about the tune and pronunciation of Guaraní.'' The newspaper La Nación was more direct: The ambassador, it said, ``sang in the monotone of a tired bird.''
Following the show in Itá, Cason said, fan mail poured into the embassy -- as did invitations to festivals and for a (nonsinging) cameo as a cardinal in the opera Tosca. The songs he had performed in Itá went into heavy rotation on local radio stations.
A short time later, after a government tour of the Itaipú dam, Cason surprised the band at a local restaurant by leading a group of ambassadors in a sing-along. Then, at a rural festival and cattle auction, he gave another impromptu gig.
Though he does not leave his post until the fall, he is already planning his life in Miami, where he hopes to sell his album and perform with visiting Paraguayan musicians, possibly inviting local Cuban bands to jam.
Cason insists that he decided to record the album as a souvenir, a gift for his two sons and proof that he had once spoken Guaraní. Still, in April, he recruited a platoon of professional violinists, guitarists and accordion players, some urged out of retirement, to join him in the studio. He spent $2,500, logged 32 hours of recording sessions and even wrote a song, Campo Jurado, the album's opening track.
''Paraguayans cry when they hear it,'' Cason said.
To generate buzz for the CD release, Cason did the Paraguayan interview circuit, giving more than 15 interviews to magazines, newspapers, TV and radio shows. The Gran Teatro del Banco Central sold out; outside, tickets sold for 50 percent above face value.
FUNDS FOR STUDY
Between the ticket and CD sales, Cason has raised more than $20,000 for scholarships for English language classes in Paraguay, according to Livia Melgarejo, spokeswoman for the Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano.
It is not as clear if he has succeeded in his other mission: improving the U.S. image here. Just two months ago, Paraguayans elected Fernando Lugo to be the country's first leftist president in more than six decades.
On a recent tour of Encarnación, however, it was clear that Cason himself has become a popular figure.
At one stop, the opening of a rural English language center, the ambassador's voice filled a lobby crowded with fans.
''He recorded a CD in our language. That was something,'' Juan Horacio Duré, secretary of health for the regional government, said after meeting the ambassador.
``I've never before met any U.S. representative who could speak Guaraní.''
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Oglala Sioux could regain Badlands national parkland
From the LA Times
Oglala Sioux could regain Badlands national parkland
The National Park Service is considering giving back the southern half, which was confiscated from the Indian tribe during World War II.
By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 8, 2008
BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. — The southern half of this swath of grasslands and chiseled pink spires looks untouched from a distance. Closer up, the scars of history are easy to see.
Unexploded bombs lie in ravines, a reminder of when the military confiscated the land from the Oglala Sioux tribe during World War II and turned it into an artillery range. Poachers who have stolen thousands of fossils over the years have left gouges in the landscape. On a plateau, a solitary makeshift hut sits ringed by empty Coke cans and shaving cream canisters. It is the only remnant of a three-year occupation by militant tribal activists who had demanded that the land be returned.
Now the National Park Service is contemplating doing just that: giving the 133,000-acre southern half of Badlands National Park back to the tribe. The northern half, which has a paved road and a visitor center, would remain with the park system.
The park service has dissolved 23 parks and historic sites since 1930, but none has been returned to tribes. "It's really exciting for us to think about walking down this road," said Sandra J. Washington, head of planning for the service's Omaha office, which oversees Badlands. "The intention is to be as honorable as possible."
The change would require congressional approval and the process is in its earliest stages, with officials still to decide whether the south section should be handed over solely to the tribal government, become a separate park run by the tribe with help from the park service, or left as is.
Tribal members seem torn. Some say they should be able to build homes there. Others push for a pristine nature preserve. Still others want more development to draw tourists to the massive fossils that remain.
The park service recently held several forums on the reservation and elsewhere in the region to gauge public support for these options. At a forum at Crazy Horse School in Wanblee, S.D., William La Mont, 44, was one of several who argued that the tribe would still need the service's help. "The tribe's not ready," he said. "The tribe's in the red."
Keith Janis, 48, one of the activists who staged the 2000 occupation, believes the land should be returned to its original owners or their descendants to do with as they please.
"That's not respecting the rights of the people who have nothing," Janis said of the proposal that the land remain a park. "The whole national park system is environmental racism against the Indian people of this country."
Many of the most renowned national parks -- Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon -- were formed after the federal government forced tribes from the land.
"The national park is a sort of wonderful ideal, but it's an ideal that was created," said Karl Jacoby, a professor at Brown University who studies Western history. "There weren't empty wilderness areas in the United States. They had to be created by the removal of Indians."
The confiscation of the land that is now the south end of Badlands National Park is fresher in locals' memories. In 1942, the military gave more than 800 people a week to move out.
Anita Ecoffey, 65, remembers her father describing what it was like to flee from his home taking only what he could carry, leaving the land where he had buried his parents.
"To me this is worse than what happened at Wounded Knee," said Ecoffey, recalling the infamous 1890 massacre of Sioux by the U.S. Army. "These were people's homes."
Legally, the land remained tribal property. But the government continued to oversee it after the war.
Control of it was handed to the National Park Service and the area was incorporated into Badlands National Monument, which became a national park in 1978.
Under an agreement signed in 1976, the park service operates the south unit jointly with Oglala Sioux park officials.
But the tribe has complained that the service has never lived up to many of its promises.
The government said it would build a cultural/visitor center to draw tourists to the southern half of the park, about 40 miles southeast of Rapid City. Instead, the only visitor center in the south is a converted trailer along an isolated stretch of blacktop. Until recently, Oglala Sioux rangers complained that the park service barely gave them any support, making it impossible to patrol the area and giving fossil poachers free rein.
"Everybody just takes advantage of it," said Birgil Kills Straight, executive director of the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority.
Relations have improved since Paige Baker, a Mandan/Hidatsa Indian raised in North Dakota, became superintendent of Badlands National Park in 2006. Baker stocked the park gift shop with books on Indian history and argued for a change in the southern section's status. Top Interior Department officials in Washington have agreed to abide by his recommendations, he said.
The park service "has got to listen to tribes," Baker said. "We have not done that as well as we should."
On the 30,000-member Pine Ridge Reservation, a patchwork of tiny towns and ranches centered in the nation's second-poorest county, tribal members aren't accustomed to trusting the federal government. But they say they believe the talk of the park's return is legitimate.
At the Wanblee forum, Marie Randall, 88, pointed proudly at the photos of the south unit on a bilingual flier the park service was handing out. "This is our foundation, this is our life," she said. "As long as we have this, the Indian will never end."
Washington, of the park service's Omaha office, said that the south section of Badlands is one of two national parks where the land is owned by a tribe and operated jointly with that tribe. The other is Canyon de Chelly National Park in Arizona, on Navajo land. Other parklands were taken from tribes long ago and their acreage is not currently owned by tribes. It's unlikely the park service would take similar steps with those parks.
Park service officials say they were already contemplating the hand-over before the 2000 occupation. A handful of tribal members took over a high tableland known as the Stronghold, believed to be the spot where the Sioux made their last stand against the U.S. military after fleeing from Wounded Knee.
Janis said he believed it was the aggressive stance during the occupation that pushed the park service to propose giving back the land. He said the terrain would be more protected that way. "The people took better care of it when it was theirs," he said. "Even the fossils were respected."
Some environmental groups are enthusiastic about the proposal. Jonathan Proctor, Southern Rockies/Great Plains representative for Defenders of Wildlife, said the Oglala Sioux had been better environmental stewards than many states. Pine Ridge has already helped restore declining populations of long-tailed fox and black-footed ferrets.
"The tribes don't get enough respect for what they do for wildlife," Proctor said. "It's not our land; it belongs to the Oglala Sioux. Who are we to tell them what to do with their land?"
Oglala Sioux could regain Badlands national parkland
The National Park Service is considering giving back the southern half, which was confiscated from the Indian tribe during World War II.
By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 8, 2008
BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. — The southern half of this swath of grasslands and chiseled pink spires looks untouched from a distance. Closer up, the scars of history are easy to see.
Unexploded bombs lie in ravines, a reminder of when the military confiscated the land from the Oglala Sioux tribe during World War II and turned it into an artillery range. Poachers who have stolen thousands of fossils over the years have left gouges in the landscape. On a plateau, a solitary makeshift hut sits ringed by empty Coke cans and shaving cream canisters. It is the only remnant of a three-year occupation by militant tribal activists who had demanded that the land be returned.
Now the National Park Service is contemplating doing just that: giving the 133,000-acre southern half of Badlands National Park back to the tribe. The northern half, which has a paved road and a visitor center, would remain with the park system.
The park service has dissolved 23 parks and historic sites since 1930, but none has been returned to tribes. "It's really exciting for us to think about walking down this road," said Sandra J. Washington, head of planning for the service's Omaha office, which oversees Badlands. "The intention is to be as honorable as possible."
The change would require congressional approval and the process is in its earliest stages, with officials still to decide whether the south section should be handed over solely to the tribal government, become a separate park run by the tribe with help from the park service, or left as is.
Tribal members seem torn. Some say they should be able to build homes there. Others push for a pristine nature preserve. Still others want more development to draw tourists to the massive fossils that remain.
The park service recently held several forums on the reservation and elsewhere in the region to gauge public support for these options. At a forum at Crazy Horse School in Wanblee, S.D., William La Mont, 44, was one of several who argued that the tribe would still need the service's help. "The tribe's not ready," he said. "The tribe's in the red."
Keith Janis, 48, one of the activists who staged the 2000 occupation, believes the land should be returned to its original owners or their descendants to do with as they please.
"That's not respecting the rights of the people who have nothing," Janis said of the proposal that the land remain a park. "The whole national park system is environmental racism against the Indian people of this country."
Many of the most renowned national parks -- Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon -- were formed after the federal government forced tribes from the land.
"The national park is a sort of wonderful ideal, but it's an ideal that was created," said Karl Jacoby, a professor at Brown University who studies Western history. "There weren't empty wilderness areas in the United States. They had to be created by the removal of Indians."
The confiscation of the land that is now the south end of Badlands National Park is fresher in locals' memories. In 1942, the military gave more than 800 people a week to move out.
Anita Ecoffey, 65, remembers her father describing what it was like to flee from his home taking only what he could carry, leaving the land where he had buried his parents.
"To me this is worse than what happened at Wounded Knee," said Ecoffey, recalling the infamous 1890 massacre of Sioux by the U.S. Army. "These were people's homes."
Legally, the land remained tribal property. But the government continued to oversee it after the war.
Control of it was handed to the National Park Service and the area was incorporated into Badlands National Monument, which became a national park in 1978.
Under an agreement signed in 1976, the park service operates the south unit jointly with Oglala Sioux park officials.
But the tribe has complained that the service has never lived up to many of its promises.
The government said it would build a cultural/visitor center to draw tourists to the southern half of the park, about 40 miles southeast of Rapid City. Instead, the only visitor center in the south is a converted trailer along an isolated stretch of blacktop. Until recently, Oglala Sioux rangers complained that the park service barely gave them any support, making it impossible to patrol the area and giving fossil poachers free rein.
"Everybody just takes advantage of it," said Birgil Kills Straight, executive director of the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority.
Relations have improved since Paige Baker, a Mandan/Hidatsa Indian raised in North Dakota, became superintendent of Badlands National Park in 2006. Baker stocked the park gift shop with books on Indian history and argued for a change in the southern section's status. Top Interior Department officials in Washington have agreed to abide by his recommendations, he said.
The park service "has got to listen to tribes," Baker said. "We have not done that as well as we should."
On the 30,000-member Pine Ridge Reservation, a patchwork of tiny towns and ranches centered in the nation's second-poorest county, tribal members aren't accustomed to trusting the federal government. But they say they believe the talk of the park's return is legitimate.
At the Wanblee forum, Marie Randall, 88, pointed proudly at the photos of the south unit on a bilingual flier the park service was handing out. "This is our foundation, this is our life," she said. "As long as we have this, the Indian will never end."
Washington, of the park service's Omaha office, said that the south section of Badlands is one of two national parks where the land is owned by a tribe and operated jointly with that tribe. The other is Canyon de Chelly National Park in Arizona, on Navajo land. Other parklands were taken from tribes long ago and their acreage is not currently owned by tribes. It's unlikely the park service would take similar steps with those parks.
Park service officials say they were already contemplating the hand-over before the 2000 occupation. A handful of tribal members took over a high tableland known as the Stronghold, believed to be the spot where the Sioux made their last stand against the U.S. military after fleeing from Wounded Knee.
Janis said he believed it was the aggressive stance during the occupation that pushed the park service to propose giving back the land. He said the terrain would be more protected that way. "The people took better care of it when it was theirs," he said. "Even the fossils were respected."
Some environmental groups are enthusiastic about the proposal. Jonathan Proctor, Southern Rockies/Great Plains representative for Defenders of Wildlife, said the Oglala Sioux had been better environmental stewards than many states. Pine Ridge has already helped restore declining populations of long-tailed fox and black-footed ferrets.
"The tribes don't get enough respect for what they do for wildlife," Proctor said. "It's not our land; it belongs to the Oglala Sioux. Who are we to tell them what to do with their land?"
Saturday, June 07, 2008
2006 Interview w/Jingle Dress Dancer Karen Pheasant
Read the full interview post at Native Dance
Franziska von Rosen: Karen, I really enjoyed watching you dance at the Odawa Powwow this year. I understand that you won the Women’s Jingle Dress competition. Can you talk about the origin of the dress and the dance style?
image
Karen Pheasant: The first time I saw the dance was in the '70s. It had been around for many years prior to that. It was only done within the Lake Superior region. Just like the Prairie Chicken dance, which is a common powwow dance now, but thirty years ago, even twenty years ago it was only done in Blackfoot territory, in the same way the Jingle Dress was only in Anishinaabe territory.
The Jingle Dress has societal origins; it is done in the Lodge and is associated with special protocol and rites. The women who were jingle dress dancers were part of the ogitchedah dah kwe, which means warrior women. Now when we think of warriors it’s not in the western sense of a warrior going to battle. It’s true that the women are the warriors, but they are more like the backbone of the people, keepers of the household, the families, and the communities. And so this dance was bestowed on the people through a dream. Songs, dress and stories were given through the dream to a family.
In the '70s, a collective of women plus the singers traveled across the northern plains, across the provinces and as far as the state of Washington to sing the songs, show the dress and dance and tell the story of what it is about. Not long after, within 10 years, other tribal women appropriated the dress and the dance was done, sometimes without the accompaniment of the proper songs.
In the summer of ‘89 or ‘90, there was a Kiowa girl from Oklahoma who had seen the Jingle Dress dance at various powwows. She was inquisitive and went to her family because she wanted to know more about it. She was a girl with a traditional foundation and philosophy; because she was a southern dancer, she was aware that there had to be more to it than just the physical aspect of the jingle dress. So she and her uncles, the Gray Horse Society Drum, went to the Lake of the Woods area. They went with their appropriate gifts and they went with the intention to learn where this dance came from.
The uncles approached the grandmothers at the Lake of the Woods powwow. The grandmothers got together that evening and did the dance. They had a translator and the grandmothers told about where the dress came from, how the dresses are, how the dance is. Then the songs were sung. The songs are currently called side-step songs. So the grandmothers showed the dance. Before that though they talked about giving thanks, giving appreciation for the life that we have and acknowledging our gifts. The grandmothers danced, and they did their version of the side-step. After they showed all the women - there were dozens, dozens, and dozens, many, many women from all across Canada and the United States that attended this event. The women took to the floor and danced their version of the side-step, each one of them taking their own personal spot on the floor. The song started and they danced. Midway through the song - and this happened a couple of times - the grandmothers stopped the song and let them know that that was not what they had shown; that was not how they danced.
The grandmothers went to the floor one more time to show the dance. And with careful observation one could see that their full attention was connected to one another. The women were in close proximity to each other, side by side. They didn’t have autonomous spots in the powwow area or dance floor. They were connected with one joining circle. That was the importance of what they showed. And the feet were bound to the earth, close to the earth, in the side-step dance. The young women took to the floor and did it again until they had done it as the grandmothers had shared. At the end of that transfer where the Kiowa girl was shown this dance, the grandmother selected ten women who they felt were representative of what they had just taught. I am honoured that I was one of the ten women selected.
...
FvR: Can we talk a little about the sound of the jingles themselves. What does it mean to you to hear the sound of those jingles?
KP: Without a doubt the sound is of vital importance. Say 10 years ago I would be at a celebration where there would be dozens and dozens of us and there would be nothing as astounding as the sound of all the Jingle Dress dancers.
In contemporary times there have been myths created to talk about those sounds. And by myths I mean in the Western sense, not the indigenous sense. I did a workshop recently and one of the participants asked about the cones. She was taught that there are supposed to be 365 cones on a dress and she had the understanding that she was supposed to only put on one cone per day for 365 days. I have often heard this myth expressed by inquisitive non-dancers or very new dancers. Rarely have I heard this from cultural historians.
So in 2005 the Native American Museum in Washington D.C. hosted a one-day conference prior to their anniversary powwow and the focus of the panel discussion was origins and history of our dances. During the weekend of the powwow they also included jingle dress historians. I was head lady dancer at this gathering.
So at this conference the key speaker addressed this myth. He recalled how the grandmothers made this dress and attached all the cones, and it generally was done in one sewing. The cones were made from snuff can lids. We use a lot of tobacco as First Nations people. So the cones were made from the snuff can lids. We are true environmentalists and ecologists; we use, we don’t waste.
...
Franziska von Rosen: Karen, I really enjoyed watching you dance at the Odawa Powwow this year. I understand that you won the Women’s Jingle Dress competition. Can you talk about the origin of the dress and the dance style?
image
Karen Pheasant: The first time I saw the dance was in the '70s. It had been around for many years prior to that. It was only done within the Lake Superior region. Just like the Prairie Chicken dance, which is a common powwow dance now, but thirty years ago, even twenty years ago it was only done in Blackfoot territory, in the same way the Jingle Dress was only in Anishinaabe territory.
The Jingle Dress has societal origins; it is done in the Lodge and is associated with special protocol and rites. The women who were jingle dress dancers were part of the ogitchedah dah kwe, which means warrior women. Now when we think of warriors it’s not in the western sense of a warrior going to battle. It’s true that the women are the warriors, but they are more like the backbone of the people, keepers of the household, the families, and the communities. And so this dance was bestowed on the people through a dream. Songs, dress and stories were given through the dream to a family.
In the '70s, a collective of women plus the singers traveled across the northern plains, across the provinces and as far as the state of Washington to sing the songs, show the dress and dance and tell the story of what it is about. Not long after, within 10 years, other tribal women appropriated the dress and the dance was done, sometimes without the accompaniment of the proper songs.
In the summer of ‘89 or ‘90, there was a Kiowa girl from Oklahoma who had seen the Jingle Dress dance at various powwows. She was inquisitive and went to her family because she wanted to know more about it. She was a girl with a traditional foundation and philosophy; because she was a southern dancer, she was aware that there had to be more to it than just the physical aspect of the jingle dress. So she and her uncles, the Gray Horse Society Drum, went to the Lake of the Woods area. They went with their appropriate gifts and they went with the intention to learn where this dance came from.
The uncles approached the grandmothers at the Lake of the Woods powwow. The grandmothers got together that evening and did the dance. They had a translator and the grandmothers told about where the dress came from, how the dresses are, how the dance is. Then the songs were sung. The songs are currently called side-step songs. So the grandmothers showed the dance. Before that though they talked about giving thanks, giving appreciation for the life that we have and acknowledging our gifts. The grandmothers danced, and they did their version of the side-step. After they showed all the women - there were dozens, dozens, and dozens, many, many women from all across Canada and the United States that attended this event. The women took to the floor and danced their version of the side-step, each one of them taking their own personal spot on the floor. The song started and they danced. Midway through the song - and this happened a couple of times - the grandmothers stopped the song and let them know that that was not what they had shown; that was not how they danced.
The grandmothers went to the floor one more time to show the dance. And with careful observation one could see that their full attention was connected to one another. The women were in close proximity to each other, side by side. They didn’t have autonomous spots in the powwow area or dance floor. They were connected with one joining circle. That was the importance of what they showed. And the feet were bound to the earth, close to the earth, in the side-step dance. The young women took to the floor and did it again until they had done it as the grandmothers had shared. At the end of that transfer where the Kiowa girl was shown this dance, the grandmother selected ten women who they felt were representative of what they had just taught. I am honoured that I was one of the ten women selected.
...
FvR: Can we talk a little about the sound of the jingles themselves. What does it mean to you to hear the sound of those jingles?
KP: Without a doubt the sound is of vital importance. Say 10 years ago I would be at a celebration where there would be dozens and dozens of us and there would be nothing as astounding as the sound of all the Jingle Dress dancers.
In contemporary times there have been myths created to talk about those sounds. And by myths I mean in the Western sense, not the indigenous sense. I did a workshop recently and one of the participants asked about the cones. She was taught that there are supposed to be 365 cones on a dress and she had the understanding that she was supposed to only put on one cone per day for 365 days. I have often heard this myth expressed by inquisitive non-dancers or very new dancers. Rarely have I heard this from cultural historians.
So in 2005 the Native American Museum in Washington D.C. hosted a one-day conference prior to their anniversary powwow and the focus of the panel discussion was origins and history of our dances. During the weekend of the powwow they also included jingle dress historians. I was head lady dancer at this gathering.
So at this conference the key speaker addressed this myth. He recalled how the grandmothers made this dress and attached all the cones, and it generally was done in one sewing. The cones were made from snuff can lids. We use a lot of tobacco as First Nations people. So the cones were made from the snuff can lids. We are true environmentalists and ecologists; we use, we don’t waste.
...
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed
Reuters/MSNBC
Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed
Images show Indians painted bright red, brandishing bows and arrows
By Stuart Grudgings
Reuters
updated 4:38 p.m. PT, Thurs., May. 29, 2008
RIO DE JANEIRO - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.
The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.
"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.
One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on.
Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.
"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.
Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Hip Hop Finds New Home on the Reservation
Native American hip-hop emerging on Reservations. NPR has the audio story.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
A Native American's Last Testament: Opera
A Native American's Last Testament: Opera
By Sasha Khokha
NPR Music
Weekend Edition Saturday, March 29, 2008 - Joseph Mondragon was just 8 years old when a man with an olive-green soldier's coat came to live in his family's basement in Monterey, Calif. The year was 1929.
"Grandma said she knew he was coming," Mondragon said. "She felt it; she had a premonition that he was coming to open the gates for our people and let the Caucasians know the Indian way, the history of our people, which nobody knew for a long time."
The man was John Peabody Harrington, a linguist from the Smithsonian who spent four decades gathering notes on native languages spoken from Alaska to South America. He'd come to record the oral history of Mondragon's dying grandmother, Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes. She was a famous herbal healer and the last known fluent speaker of Mutsun, the language of the Amah Mutsun tribe that lived near California's central coast.
Today, her grandson Joseph is 86, and he's sharing his own memories of Ascencion Solorsano with a different sort of translator: an opera singer.
Mezzo-soprano Helene Joseph-Weil is a music professor at Fresno State. She first learned about Ascencion Solorsano 20 years ago, when she saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"I was so moved by it," Joseph-Weil says. "And there was something about her photo that just mesmerized me, that I suddenly said: 'I have to sing her. How can I sing her?'"
Along with award-winning composer Benjamin Boone, a fellow Fresno State professor, she is working to put Ascencion Solorsano's oral history into a piece called Ascencion. They're calling it an "ethno-historical cantata."
"She trusted Harrington," Joseph-Weil says. "She said in one of our direct quotes to him it's a curious thing that the Americans waited until all those that are dead and finished to find out about the tribes and their language, and they just scribbled down any old thing. But she said, 'Together, you and I are going to make that right.'"
In a scene called "Lamentation," Boone tries to express the horror of Native American genocide through wide leaps in the choral parts — dramatic sounds that are almost discordant.
The work has won the praise of historians and Native American scholars like University of California-Davis professor Martha Macri. She's spearheading an effort to digitize the oral histories Harrington collected. She says that setting these histories to opera is an innovative idea — and one that she thinks Joseph-Weil has handled respectfully.
"It's not someone trying to imitate native culture and pretend," Macri says. "She has really taken her great respect and regard for Ascension and translated it into an art form that is her art form. It can seem quite incongruous, but in fact she's presenting Ascension's life and words to an audience that might not otherwise come across it."
For the song of Ascencion Solorsano's death, Joseph-Weil and Boone made the first recording of the bells at Mission San Juan Bautista in California, and arranged them for a chorus. Ascencion Solorsano was buried at the Mission cemetery, home to some 4,000 Native American graves from different tribes.
Ascencion Solorsano's descendents say they hope the new cantata will help people learn about her tribe. Today, there are some 600 members, and they're still struggling for federal recognition.
By Sasha Khokha
NPR Music
Weekend Edition Saturday, March 29, 2008 - Joseph Mondragon was just 8 years old when a man with an olive-green soldier's coat came to live in his family's basement in Monterey, Calif. The year was 1929.
"Grandma said she knew he was coming," Mondragon said. "She felt it; she had a premonition that he was coming to open the gates for our people and let the Caucasians know the Indian way, the history of our people, which nobody knew for a long time."
The man was John Peabody Harrington, a linguist from the Smithsonian who spent four decades gathering notes on native languages spoken from Alaska to South America. He'd come to record the oral history of Mondragon's dying grandmother, Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes. She was a famous herbal healer and the last known fluent speaker of Mutsun, the language of the Amah Mutsun tribe that lived near California's central coast.
Today, her grandson Joseph is 86, and he's sharing his own memories of Ascencion Solorsano with a different sort of translator: an opera singer.
Mezzo-soprano Helene Joseph-Weil is a music professor at Fresno State. She first learned about Ascencion Solorsano 20 years ago, when she saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"I was so moved by it," Joseph-Weil says. "And there was something about her photo that just mesmerized me, that I suddenly said: 'I have to sing her. How can I sing her?'"
Along with award-winning composer Benjamin Boone, a fellow Fresno State professor, she is working to put Ascencion Solorsano's oral history into a piece called Ascencion. They're calling it an "ethno-historical cantata."
"She trusted Harrington," Joseph-Weil says. "She said in one of our direct quotes to him it's a curious thing that the Americans waited until all those that are dead and finished to find out about the tribes and their language, and they just scribbled down any old thing. But she said, 'Together, you and I are going to make that right.'"
In a scene called "Lamentation," Boone tries to express the horror of Native American genocide through wide leaps in the choral parts — dramatic sounds that are almost discordant.
The work has won the praise of historians and Native American scholars like University of California-Davis professor Martha Macri. She's spearheading an effort to digitize the oral histories Harrington collected. She says that setting these histories to opera is an innovative idea — and one that she thinks Joseph-Weil has handled respectfully.
"It's not someone trying to imitate native culture and pretend," Macri says. "She has really taken her great respect and regard for Ascension and translated it into an art form that is her art form. It can seem quite incongruous, but in fact she's presenting Ascension's life and words to an audience that might not otherwise come across it."
For the song of Ascencion Solorsano's death, Joseph-Weil and Boone made the first recording of the bells at Mission San Juan Bautista in California, and arranged them for a chorus. Ascencion Solorsano was buried at the Mission cemetery, home to some 4,000 Native American graves from different tribes.
Ascencion Solorsano's descendents say they hope the new cantata will help people learn about her tribe. Today, there are some 600 members, and they're still struggling for federal recognition.
Friday, September 07, 2007
House votes to cut Cherokee funding over Freedmen Issue
House votes to cut Cherokee funding
Decision follows tribal decision to oust descendants of black slaves
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:33 a.m. PT Sept 7, 2007
WASHINGTON - The Cherokee Nation would lose some of its federal funding under House legislation passed Thursday if it doesn't reinstate descendants of its former slaves as tribal citizens.
The bill delays the funding cuts until the issue has been addressed in federal court, potentially giving the Oklahoma-based tribe years before it would lose any money. Critics said it sends a clear signal that lawmakers are not happy with the Cherokee decision earlier this year to oust descendants of black slaves, known as Cherokee freedmen.
"The fact that the Cherokee freedmen issue has been raised on floor of the House of Representatives demonstrates the gravity of the issue," said Rep. Diane Watson, a California Democrat who introduced broad legislation earlier this year to cut off Cherokee funding. "If the Cherokee Nation does not move expeditiously (to) comply with its treaty obligations, Congress is poised to take stronger action."
The Cherokee language was included in a bill authorizing funding for Native American housing assistance, which passed 333-75.
'I think this can be worked out'
The House originally adopted an amendment from Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., prohibiting money from going to the tribe unless it reversed its freedmen decision. It later softened the language with a second amendment from Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., that would delay the funding cuts as long as the Cherokee continue recognizing the descendants' tribal status as the matter works its way through federal court.
Mike Miller, a Cherokee spokesman, said the tribe appreciates Boren's efforts to slow things down.
"No federal court has ever said that the Cherokee Nation does not have the right to determine its own citizenship," Miller said. "What this does is allow an opportunity for the facts to be presented in an impartial forum in court."
"I think this can be worked out," Boren said, estimating that the tribe gets about 10 percent of its $300 million in annual federal funding through the housing assistance bill.
Race versus tribal identity
The dispute dates back to a post-Civil War treaty with the U.S. government. In that treaty, the tribe - which originated in the Southeast but was forcibly moved to what is now Oklahoma in the 1830s - agreed to free its slaves and give them full rights as tribal members.
The freedmen were considered tribal members from 1866 until 1975, when a vote of the tribe denied them citizenship. The Cherokee Supreme Court decided in 2006 that vote was in error and restored the freedmen's rights.
After a petition drive, the tribe passed a referendum March 3 amending the tribal constitution to again disqualify freedmen. The vote affected more than 2,800 freedmen who had applied for citizenship.
The tribe insists the issue has nothing to do with race and is a sovereign matter of tribal identity. Cherokee leaders said recently that freedmen would continue receiving tribal benefits until the issue is resolved in court.
The bill is HR 2786.
Decision follows tribal decision to oust descendants of black slaves
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:33 a.m. PT Sept 7, 2007
WASHINGTON - The Cherokee Nation would lose some of its federal funding under House legislation passed Thursday if it doesn't reinstate descendants of its former slaves as tribal citizens.
The bill delays the funding cuts until the issue has been addressed in federal court, potentially giving the Oklahoma-based tribe years before it would lose any money. Critics said it sends a clear signal that lawmakers are not happy with the Cherokee decision earlier this year to oust descendants of black slaves, known as Cherokee freedmen.
"The fact that the Cherokee freedmen issue has been raised on floor of the House of Representatives demonstrates the gravity of the issue," said Rep. Diane Watson, a California Democrat who introduced broad legislation earlier this year to cut off Cherokee funding. "If the Cherokee Nation does not move expeditiously (to) comply with its treaty obligations, Congress is poised to take stronger action."
The Cherokee language was included in a bill authorizing funding for Native American housing assistance, which passed 333-75.
'I think this can be worked out'
The House originally adopted an amendment from Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., prohibiting money from going to the tribe unless it reversed its freedmen decision. It later softened the language with a second amendment from Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., that would delay the funding cuts as long as the Cherokee continue recognizing the descendants' tribal status as the matter works its way through federal court.
Mike Miller, a Cherokee spokesman, said the tribe appreciates Boren's efforts to slow things down.
"No federal court has ever said that the Cherokee Nation does not have the right to determine its own citizenship," Miller said. "What this does is allow an opportunity for the facts to be presented in an impartial forum in court."
"I think this can be worked out," Boren said, estimating that the tribe gets about 10 percent of its $300 million in annual federal funding through the housing assistance bill.
Race versus tribal identity
The dispute dates back to a post-Civil War treaty with the U.S. government. In that treaty, the tribe - which originated in the Southeast but was forcibly moved to what is now Oklahoma in the 1830s - agreed to free its slaves and give them full rights as tribal members.
The freedmen were considered tribal members from 1866 until 1975, when a vote of the tribe denied them citizenship. The Cherokee Supreme Court decided in 2006 that vote was in error and restored the freedmen's rights.
After a petition drive, the tribe passed a referendum March 3 amending the tribal constitution to again disqualify freedmen. The vote affected more than 2,800 freedmen who had applied for citizenship.
The tribe insists the issue has nothing to do with race and is a sovereign matter of tribal identity. Cherokee leaders said recently that freedmen would continue receiving tribal benefits until the issue is resolved in court.
The bill is HR 2786.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
In Amazonia, Defending the Hidden Tribes
In Amazonia, Defending the Hidden Tribes
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A01
COLIDER, Brazil -- At first, few believed the story that two brothers told about four unknown Indians who suddenly appeared to them one afternoon on the outskirts of their village.
Like most Kayapo Indians, the brothers -- named Bepro and Beprytire -- live in a government-demarcated reserve, wear modern clothing and get energy from solar-powered generators. But the four unclothed visitors were a different kind of Kayapo.
They spoke in an antiquated tongue that seemed a precursor to the language spoken in the village, located in the Capoto-Jarina Indian Reserve in central Brazil. The four men had come from a tribe that had remained in the forest, the brothers said, untouched by the modern world.
Over the next seven days, the doubt expressed by the villagers evaporated when they saw more than 60 of the Indians emerge from the forest, sleeping in huts on the edge of the village.
Then as quickly as they had come, the Indians disappeared. They haven't been seen since.
The Indians' brief appearance this spring was enough to put them into the center of a debate that is increasingly challenging governments throughout the Amazon region: How should the rights and territories of isolated populations be protected when the locations of those groups remain largely unknown?
In recent months, Brazil and Peru have set aside protected areas for so-called uncontacted groups, which have never been spoken to and rarely -- if ever -- glimpsed. Brazil is believed to have more uncontacted tribes than any country in the world, and the government this year announced that as many as 67 tribes could be living in complete isolation -- considerably more than the 40 estimated earlier.
Previously uncontacted tribes have been discovered periodically since deep Amazon exploration began in the late 1800s. In the 1970s, for example, such tribes as the Panara were found as construction crews built roads into the forest, and periodic discoveries of small tribes continued in the following decades.
Today, because the Amazon region is shrinking by thousands of square miles a year, the chances of unintentional encounters involving such groups grow. The issue has become a significant focus for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai, the government agency that oversees indigenous groups.
Indigenous rights advocates have issued calls to protect largely unexplored areas of the forest from logging and mining. But the renewed focus on uncontacted groups has also sparked suspicions among skeptics, who believe the groups could be more mythical than real and suspect the numbers are exaggerated by special interest groups seeking to block exploration projects.
"It is like the Loch Ness monster," said Cecilia Quiroz, legal counsel for Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency in charge of doling out prospecting rights to energy companies eager to explore the country's vast interior. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."
'Why Now and Why There?'
Megaron Txucarramae grew up in the village where the uncontacted Indians approached the two brothers in late May. He was 2 years old when anthropologists first made contact with his own branch of the Kayapo tribe in the 1950s. He regularly heard his elders tell the story of how one part of the tribe had fled the anthropologists' advances to remain alone in the woods, never to be seen again.
Now Megaron is the regional representative for Funai in Colider, the nearest city to Capoto and two nearby reserves. The land, set aside for the Indians and protected from development, is a sprawling green expanse of dense jungle. Together, the three Kayapo reservations in the area are roughly the size of the Czech Republic.
When he heard of the isolated tribe's recent appearance, Megaron quickly flew to the village of Kapot to collect evidence. He took a miniature tape recorder with him, giving it to one of the brothers to slip into the pocket of his shorts while he spoke to the Indians. Taking pictures, he concluded, was out of the question.
"No one had a camera, and even if someone had had one, they were afraid of machines," Megaron explained later. "If anyone pointed a camera at them, the situation could have been very dangerous."
The group remained highly suspicious of the villagers, agreeing to talk only with the two brothers whom they had initially approached. They accepted bananas and cassava offered by the brothers but rejected rice because it wasn't part of their traditional diet, Megaron said. One of the old men in the group had a scar on his side, a wound that the villagers attributed to a run-in with illegal loggers, who occasionally were involved in bloody confrontations with Indians in the region in the 1990s.
"The man told Beprytire he had been hurt by a 'strong sound,' " Megaron said. "So we are guessing that he had been shot."
Most of the Indians were unclothed, though some of the men wore penis sheaths and most were partially covered by body paint. Some of the men also had plates inserted in their lower lips, creating the decorative protrusions seen in various Amazonian tribes.
Megaron closed the village to visitors -- a lockdown that remains in force. Officials were afraid that the previously uncontacted Indians could easily become sick. As has been proved in the past when uncontacted tribes are introduced to other populations and the microbes they carry, maladies as simple as the common cold can be deadly. In the 1970s, 185 members of the Panara tribe died within two years of discovery after contracting such diseases as flu and chickenpox, leaving only 69 survivors.
Antonio Sergio Iole, head of health services for Funai in Colider, quickly assembled a team of doctors and Kayapo assistants ready to travel to the village on a moment's notice. The team immediately realized how many difficult questions the tribe's appearance had raised for local authorities.
"Even the simple things are complicated," said Iole, who said his team remains on call to travel to the village should the tribe reappear. "How should we act in the first moment we approach them? Would they accept vaccine? Would they let us inspect their mouths? Listen to their hearts? Would they allow a doctor to treat the women? How would they physically react to treatment? Some vaccines have side effects -- how would they interpret a fever? And how would they react if we had to take someone away, even if it was for their own good?"
After the tribe left the village, Iole -- still in Colider -- began to notice that some other people around town were asking different questions:
Why couldn't anyone get a picture? Why was no one except the Kayapo allowed into the village? How could a group of people remain uncontacted in the 21st century? Could someone be making this whole story up for some sort of personal or political gain?
"I don't believe it -- this is an area with lots of loggers and farmers who are always going out into the forest, making studies," said Albeni de Souza, 22, a university student who works in a hotel in Colider. "Even the Indians from the tribes on reservations walk around the forest all the time. Someone would have seen them before."
That kind of doubt spreads easily in towns such as Colider, where logging companies and farmers have cleared most of the surrounding area and small planes regularly fly overhead. From the air here, the land looks much like the American Midwest -- a patchwork of farms. The picture is much different less than 250 miles away in Kapot -- unreachable by car and boat -- on the edge of an Amazon forest that is almost as big as the continental United States.
But even some officials have expressed doubt. In Peru, the representatives of Perupetro have questioned the timing of the appearance, which came weeks before the country plans to auction 19 oil and gas exploration licenses. Some of the concessions are located near the border with Brazil, where some nongovernmental organizations argue that uncontacted tribes reside.
Last month, the Peruvian government rejected oil exploration plans by Barrett Resources, a U.S. company, and by Spain's Repsol YPF, in part over concern about uncontacted tribes.
While not denying the existence of some isolated groups, Quiroz -- Perupetro's legal counsel -- was skeptical about the recent appearance of the Kayapo tribe.
"In this age of globalization," Quiroz said, "you have to wonder why now and why there."
Vanishing Without a Word
Several years ago, Brazil's government changed its policy regarding isolated tribes: Instead of taking the initiative to try to contact them, it now aims only to protect them. Contact is made only if the Indians themselves initiate it or the tribe is in imminent danger.
Funai officials plan to fly over the forest in the coming weeks to try to locate the area where the tribe is based, Megaron said. The plan after that is to build a small field station in the forest -- not to contact them but to protect the area and make sure loggers and farmers do not come near them.
That plan, of course, would be unnecessary if the Indians chose to make contact again -- a possibility that many of the local Kayapo hope happens.
"Everybody wants to see them, because we love to compare them with ourselves," said Bepko, 26, a Kayapo who lives in the village of Kubenkokre in a nearby reserve. "We just want to hear their stories and learn about what their lives have been like."
According to the stealth tape recording made by the brothers, there is evidence that at least some in the tribe would like to return.
Megaron said he was able to decipher the language sufficiently enough to determine that a young member of the tribe was trying to convince his elders that the contact was a good thing.
"The son told his father not to be afraid, that they would protect each other," Megaron recounted. "He then talked to his mother and tried to tell her that everything was okay and that the other group of Kayapo was their relatives."
It was later, Funai said, that a tribal leader emerged from the forest and persuaded everyone to leave the village.
"They might have been scared of the sound of airplanes," said Luis Sampaio, a biologist who for 12 years has worked with the Kayapo in the reserve, which features a small landing strip. "Or they could have been scared by the clothes they saw people wearing -- we are not sure."
Megaron said they left without explanation or warning.
"Uncontacted Indians," he said, "don't say goodbye when they leave."
Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A01
COLIDER, Brazil -- At first, few believed the story that two brothers told about four unknown Indians who suddenly appeared to them one afternoon on the outskirts of their village.
Like most Kayapo Indians, the brothers -- named Bepro and Beprytire -- live in a government-demarcated reserve, wear modern clothing and get energy from solar-powered generators. But the four unclothed visitors were a different kind of Kayapo.
They spoke in an antiquated tongue that seemed a precursor to the language spoken in the village, located in the Capoto-Jarina Indian Reserve in central Brazil. The four men had come from a tribe that had remained in the forest, the brothers said, untouched by the modern world.
Over the next seven days, the doubt expressed by the villagers evaporated when they saw more than 60 of the Indians emerge from the forest, sleeping in huts on the edge of the village.
Then as quickly as they had come, the Indians disappeared. They haven't been seen since.
The Indians' brief appearance this spring was enough to put them into the center of a debate that is increasingly challenging governments throughout the Amazon region: How should the rights and territories of isolated populations be protected when the locations of those groups remain largely unknown?
In recent months, Brazil and Peru have set aside protected areas for so-called uncontacted groups, which have never been spoken to and rarely -- if ever -- glimpsed. Brazil is believed to have more uncontacted tribes than any country in the world, and the government this year announced that as many as 67 tribes could be living in complete isolation -- considerably more than the 40 estimated earlier.
Previously uncontacted tribes have been discovered periodically since deep Amazon exploration began in the late 1800s. In the 1970s, for example, such tribes as the Panara were found as construction crews built roads into the forest, and periodic discoveries of small tribes continued in the following decades.
Today, because the Amazon region is shrinking by thousands of square miles a year, the chances of unintentional encounters involving such groups grow. The issue has become a significant focus for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai, the government agency that oversees indigenous groups.
Indigenous rights advocates have issued calls to protect largely unexplored areas of the forest from logging and mining. But the renewed focus on uncontacted groups has also sparked suspicions among skeptics, who believe the groups could be more mythical than real and suspect the numbers are exaggerated by special interest groups seeking to block exploration projects.
"It is like the Loch Ness monster," said Cecilia Quiroz, legal counsel for Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency in charge of doling out prospecting rights to energy companies eager to explore the country's vast interior. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."
'Why Now and Why There?'
Megaron Txucarramae grew up in the village where the uncontacted Indians approached the two brothers in late May. He was 2 years old when anthropologists first made contact with his own branch of the Kayapo tribe in the 1950s. He regularly heard his elders tell the story of how one part of the tribe had fled the anthropologists' advances to remain alone in the woods, never to be seen again.
Now Megaron is the regional representative for Funai in Colider, the nearest city to Capoto and two nearby reserves. The land, set aside for the Indians and protected from development, is a sprawling green expanse of dense jungle. Together, the three Kayapo reservations in the area are roughly the size of the Czech Republic.
When he heard of the isolated tribe's recent appearance, Megaron quickly flew to the village of Kapot to collect evidence. He took a miniature tape recorder with him, giving it to one of the brothers to slip into the pocket of his shorts while he spoke to the Indians. Taking pictures, he concluded, was out of the question.
"No one had a camera, and even if someone had had one, they were afraid of machines," Megaron explained later. "If anyone pointed a camera at them, the situation could have been very dangerous."
The group remained highly suspicious of the villagers, agreeing to talk only with the two brothers whom they had initially approached. They accepted bananas and cassava offered by the brothers but rejected rice because it wasn't part of their traditional diet, Megaron said. One of the old men in the group had a scar on his side, a wound that the villagers attributed to a run-in with illegal loggers, who occasionally were involved in bloody confrontations with Indians in the region in the 1990s.
"The man told Beprytire he had been hurt by a 'strong sound,' " Megaron said. "So we are guessing that he had been shot."
Most of the Indians were unclothed, though some of the men wore penis sheaths and most were partially covered by body paint. Some of the men also had plates inserted in their lower lips, creating the decorative protrusions seen in various Amazonian tribes.
Megaron closed the village to visitors -- a lockdown that remains in force. Officials were afraid that the previously uncontacted Indians could easily become sick. As has been proved in the past when uncontacted tribes are introduced to other populations and the microbes they carry, maladies as simple as the common cold can be deadly. In the 1970s, 185 members of the Panara tribe died within two years of discovery after contracting such diseases as flu and chickenpox, leaving only 69 survivors.
Antonio Sergio Iole, head of health services for Funai in Colider, quickly assembled a team of doctors and Kayapo assistants ready to travel to the village on a moment's notice. The team immediately realized how many difficult questions the tribe's appearance had raised for local authorities.
"Even the simple things are complicated," said Iole, who said his team remains on call to travel to the village should the tribe reappear. "How should we act in the first moment we approach them? Would they accept vaccine? Would they let us inspect their mouths? Listen to their hearts? Would they allow a doctor to treat the women? How would they physically react to treatment? Some vaccines have side effects -- how would they interpret a fever? And how would they react if we had to take someone away, even if it was for their own good?"
After the tribe left the village, Iole -- still in Colider -- began to notice that some other people around town were asking different questions:
Why couldn't anyone get a picture? Why was no one except the Kayapo allowed into the village? How could a group of people remain uncontacted in the 21st century? Could someone be making this whole story up for some sort of personal or political gain?
"I don't believe it -- this is an area with lots of loggers and farmers who are always going out into the forest, making studies," said Albeni de Souza, 22, a university student who works in a hotel in Colider. "Even the Indians from the tribes on reservations walk around the forest all the time. Someone would have seen them before."
That kind of doubt spreads easily in towns such as Colider, where logging companies and farmers have cleared most of the surrounding area and small planes regularly fly overhead. From the air here, the land looks much like the American Midwest -- a patchwork of farms. The picture is much different less than 250 miles away in Kapot -- unreachable by car and boat -- on the edge of an Amazon forest that is almost as big as the continental United States.
But even some officials have expressed doubt. In Peru, the representatives of Perupetro have questioned the timing of the appearance, which came weeks before the country plans to auction 19 oil and gas exploration licenses. Some of the concessions are located near the border with Brazil, where some nongovernmental organizations argue that uncontacted tribes reside.
Last month, the Peruvian government rejected oil exploration plans by Barrett Resources, a U.S. company, and by Spain's Repsol YPF, in part over concern about uncontacted tribes.
While not denying the existence of some isolated groups, Quiroz -- Perupetro's legal counsel -- was skeptical about the recent appearance of the Kayapo tribe.
"In this age of globalization," Quiroz said, "you have to wonder why now and why there."
Vanishing Without a Word
Several years ago, Brazil's government changed its policy regarding isolated tribes: Instead of taking the initiative to try to contact them, it now aims only to protect them. Contact is made only if the Indians themselves initiate it or the tribe is in imminent danger.
Funai officials plan to fly over the forest in the coming weeks to try to locate the area where the tribe is based, Megaron said. The plan after that is to build a small field station in the forest -- not to contact them but to protect the area and make sure loggers and farmers do not come near them.
That plan, of course, would be unnecessary if the Indians chose to make contact again -- a possibility that many of the local Kayapo hope happens.
"Everybody wants to see them, because we love to compare them with ourselves," said Bepko, 26, a Kayapo who lives in the village of Kubenkokre in a nearby reserve. "We just want to hear their stories and learn about what their lives have been like."
According to the stealth tape recording made by the brothers, there is evidence that at least some in the tribe would like to return.
Megaron said he was able to decipher the language sufficiently enough to determine that a young member of the tribe was trying to convince his elders that the contact was a good thing.
"The son told his father not to be afraid, that they would protect each other," Megaron recounted. "He then talked to his mother and tried to tell her that everything was okay and that the other group of Kayapo was their relatives."
It was later, Funai said, that a tribal leader emerged from the forest and persuaded everyone to leave the village.
"They might have been scared of the sound of airplanes," said Luis Sampaio, a biologist who for 12 years has worked with the Kayapo in the reserve, which features a small landing strip. "Or they could have been scared by the clothes they saw people wearing -- we are not sure."
Megaron said they left without explanation or warning.
"Uncontacted Indians," he said, "don't say goodbye when they leave."
Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Indigenous Mexican Seri versus National Tourism
Ancient Tribe at a Crossroads
Mexico's Reclusive Seri Confront the Inevitable March of Development
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A18
PUNTA CHUECA, Mexico -- Gloria Sesma clamps tough stems of desert limberbush between her front teeth, shredding the plant into the floppy strands she needs to weave graceful baskets.
Sesma's lifelong work has worn her top teeth down to tiny stubs, much like the teeth of other women in this remote Gulf of California village, home to Mexico's most reclusive indigenous people, the Seri Indians. She and her daughters adhere to traditional techniques, so it can take 10 months of shredding and weaving to make a single basket.
But Sesma's family also reflects new realities for the Seri, a tribe at a crossroads. While eight of her children married within the tribe, a ninth -- her son, Ezekiel -- piqued the family by breaking with tradition and moving away last year to marry a non-Seri woman.
Now, the Seri desire for insularity is being tested on a larger scale. The inevitable march of development is forcing the Seri to confront fundamental questions about their future, questions that will help determine whether one of the last truly autonomous tribes in Mexico melds into the greater society or stays walled off from the world.
"The community is really at this huge crux point," said Jay Roberts, a professor at Earlham College in Indiana who studies the Seri. "They're a case study for what's happening to indigenous people around the world."
The tribe's two villages -- Punta Chueca and Desemboque -- lie directly in the path of the largest Mexican tourist development in a quarter-century. Under a still-evolving plan, hotels and condominiums will sprout along the coastline in much the same way that another generation of Mexicans transformed Cancun and Acapulco from sleepy outposts to resort havens. Change seems inevitable here, whether the development pierces the Seri's land or merely spreads up to its borders.
The Seri hold dominion over more than 450 square miles of heavenly coastline, where for centuries they have scooped crabs, prowled the desert for medicinal plants and fought to keep away outsiders. They once lived nomadically, moving between fishing encampments on the mainland and their main settlement on Isla Tiburon, Mexico's largest island, which is separated from Punta Chueca by a narrow but treacherous waterway known as Little Hell Channel.
In the 1960s, the Mexican government declared Isla Tiburon a nature preserve and forced the Seri off the island, resettling the tribe in squat cinder-block homes in Punta Chueca and Desemboque. The tribe, which now numbers less than 1,000, lives in harsh desert conditions -- fresh water has to be trucked in, and there is very little modern plumbing.
The Seri make money off the scallops and crabs they take from Little Hell Channel, as well as their baskets and ironwood carvings. Under an agreement with the government, the tribe also receives income from the sale of permits to U.S. hunters, who pay $50,000 or more annually for the right to kill bighorn sheep on Isla Tiburon. The money doesn't go far, though, leaving the Seri in garbage-strewn villages.
Punta Chueca, a four-hour drive from Tucson, is a place of unexplained contradictions. Shiny new cars -- some allegedly stolen -- sit in front of ramshackle homes where the occupants sleep on dirt floors. Stray dogs roam about, while children with dirt-smudged faces go days without soap or water for bathing. Some youngsters return to homes outfitted with satellite television dishes and watch Mexican soap operas.
Though their territory is in Mexico, the Seri don't consider themselves Mexicans -- Mexicans, they say, are people who live outside Seri lands. There have been occasional gunfights between the tribe and authorities from the state of Sonora entering Seri territory to investigate crimes. Sonora's governor, Eduardo Bours Castelo, has complained about "the backwardness of the Seris."
"We're hardheaded," Sesma's husband, Ernesto Molina, 58, said one recent afternoon. "We don't even want visitors. We don't have much contact with the people of Mexico. Mexicans are not welcome here."
Molina, who ekes out a living from fishing and guiding the few tourists who can find his village, shuffles between Spanish, which he learned from Mexican fishermen, and the obscure Seri dialect, which Roberts estimates is understood by as few as five non-Seris. The dialect is said to be at its most lyrical when a leatherback turtle beaches and the Seri sing ancient melodies to coax it back to the sea.
Molina considers such traditions sacrosanct and is bothered by the intrusions of outsiders and their ideas. That's why it was so hard for him to swallow what happened a few years ago during another Seri rite, the New Year's celebration on June 30, the end of the tribe's calendar year. A young Mexican visitor caught the eye of his son, Ezekiel, during the festivities.
A romance flowered, and not long afterward, Ezekiel announced he wanted to wed. A few other Seri had married outside the tribe, but Molina never thought it would happen in his own family.
"I was sad," he said.
Ezekiel, though, could not be dissuaded.
"For me, she was a person, even if she wasn't Seri," Ezekiel Molina, now 33, recalled recently. "I don't think that way -- I'm not racist. I reject discrimination."
He left Punta Chueca, crossing the 20 miles of rutted desert path that connects the village to the small beach town of Bahia de Kino. But life outside the village has unfolded badly. He can't adapt to regular work schedules and struggles to raise his daughter with the few pesos he earns from occasional work as a tattoo artist. He says he feels uncomfortable in a society where drug use is common, though in the years since he left his home village, illegal drug use has become a major problem among the Seri.
He has thought about moving back, but he isn't sure. Outside the village, he and his family use modern medicine when they get sick. When he returns to the village, he sees his father at the medicine woman's hut, picking up remedies derived from desert plants. His daughter doesn't understand his brothers and sisters -- she speaks only Spanish.
Ezekiel's departure from this village is part of a trickle of Seri, most of whom migrate between Punta Chueca and Bahia de Kino so that their children can attend better schools. Pedro Torres, 41, the only Seri to earn a doctorate, relocates his family at the beginning of each school year to Bahia de Kino. There, his children discovered Power Rangers cartoons and have become fluent in Spanish.
His wife, Blanca Lidia Monroy -- Seri women do not take their husband's last name -- sat in a side yard of her home one recent afternoon weaving baskets while one of her sons flipped through a recently published Seri-Spanish dictionary, the first of its kind. Monroy smiled, flashing the dentures she got to cover the damage done to her teeth by stripping limberbush stems.
At the end of each school year, when she returns to Punta Chueca, her neighbors give her funny looks, she said. Some shun her.
"Things never change there," she said. "They don't understand why I would leave Punta Chueca for my children's education. They don't understand that I want something more for my children."
Torres, who works an hour's drive away in the city of Hermosillo as a state indigenous education specialist, calls the retirement developments sprouting north of Seri territory a "red alarm" for his people. He shivers when he hears the village elders urging his people to insulate themselves further.
"We have to face reality," Torres said. "Sooner or later, we're going to have this conflict with all this development. They're going to come down here and want to build hotels and we're not going to be prepared to stop them."
The only way to save Seri culture, Torres said, is for young people to leave the villages, get an education, then return empowered by new ideas. Other indigenous peoples in Mexico have done the same, he said, salting local governments and businesses with young professionals while retaining their sense of tribal identity.
But the Seri, he said, are mostly content to wall themselves off. Even the road into their village seems unwelcoming, he said. One recent afternoon, an SUV full of non-Seris rolled toward Punta Chueca. Three young boys waited at the entrance. When they saw the vehicle, they launched a hail of rocks.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Cherokee Nation votes to expel 'freedmen'
Cherokee Nation votes to expel 'freedmen'
Tribe revokes membership of an estimated 2,800 descendants of slaves
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 8:09 p.m. PT March 3, 2007
OKLAHOMA CITY - Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.
With a majority of districts reporting, 76 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of “by blood” tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission’s rolls from more than 100 years ago.
The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians’ collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood.
Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.
Tribal officials said the vote was a matter of self-determination.
The petition drive for the ballot measure followed a March 2006 ruling by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court that said an 1866 treaty assured freedmen descendants of tribal citizenship. Since then, more than 2,000 freedmen descendants have enrolled as citizens of the tribe.
Big money at stake
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.
"Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION."
The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color.
"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves.
Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.
Court challenges by freedmen descendants seeking to stop the election were denied, but a federal judge left open the possibility that the case could be refiled if Cherokees voted to lift their membership rights.
© 2007 MSNBC InteractiveThe Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17442676/
Tribe revokes membership of an estimated 2,800 descendants of slaves
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 8:09 p.m. PT March 3, 2007
OKLAHOMA CITY - Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.
With a majority of districts reporting, 76 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of “by blood” tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission’s rolls from more than 100 years ago.
The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians’ collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood.
Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.
Tribal officials said the vote was a matter of self-determination.
The petition drive for the ballot measure followed a March 2006 ruling by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court that said an 1866 treaty assured freedmen descendants of tribal citizenship. Since then, more than 2,000 freedmen descendants have enrolled as citizens of the tribe.
Big money at stake
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.
"Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION."
The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color.
"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves.
Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.
Court challenges by freedmen descendants seeking to stop the election were denied, but a federal judge left open the possibility that the case could be refiled if Cherokees voted to lift their membership rights.
© 2007 MSNBC InteractiveThe Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17442676/
Cherokee Nation To Vote on Expelling Slaves' Descendants [UPDATED]
J.D. Baldridge, whose ancestors include Cherokees and their former slaves, may lose tribal membership. (By Ellen Knickmeyer -- The Washington Post)
WaPo
Cherokee Nation To Vote on Expelling Slaves' Descendants
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; A01
VINITA, Okla. -- J.D. Baldridge, 73, has official government documents showing him to be a descendant of a full-blood Cherokee. He has memories of a youth spent among Cherokee neighbors and kin, at tribal stomp dances and hog fries. He holds on to a fair amount of Cherokee vocabulary. " Salali," Baldridge says, his face creasing into a smile at the word. "Squirrel stew. Oh, that was good."
What Baldridge, a retired Oklahoma county sheriff, also has is at least one black ancestor, a former slave of a Cherokee family. That could get Baldridge cast out of the tribe, along with thousands of others.
The 250,000-member Cherokee Nation will vote in a special election today whether to override a 141-year-old treaty and change the tribal constitution to bar "freedmen," the descendants of former tribal slaves, from being members of the sovereign nation.
"It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in Oklahoma City.
But the Cherokee freedmen see the vote as less about self-determination than about discrimination and historical blinders. They see in the referendum hints of racism and a desire by some Cherokees to deny the tribe's slave-owning past.
"They know these people exist. And they're trying to push them aside, as though they were never with them," said Andra Shelton, one of Baldridge's family members. Shelton, 59, can recall her mother gossiping in fluent Cherokee when Cherokee friends and relatives visited.
People on both sides of the issue say the fight is also about tribal politics -- the freedmen at times have been at odds with the tribal leadership -- and about money.
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.
"Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION."
The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color.
"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves.
Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.
Many of the Cherokees' slaves accompanied the tribe when it was expelled from its traditional lands in North Carolina and Georgia and forced to migrate in 1838 and 1839 to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokees died during the trip, which became known as the "Trail of Tears." It is not known how many of their slaves also perished.
The tribe fought for the Confederacy. In defeat, it signed a federal treaty in 1866 committing that its slaves, who had been freed by tribal decree during the war, would be absorbed as citizens of the Cherokee Nation.
By the late 1880s, Washington started opening up tribal lands in Oklahoma to white settlers, breaking previous pledges to the tribes. As a step toward ending tribal ownership of Indian Territory, Congress initiated a new census of the "Five Civilized Tribes" -- a census known as the Dawes Commission. It is that head count that the Cherokee Nation would use to determine the eligibility of freedmen.
Past censuses of the tribes had noted both the Indian and the African ancestry of freedmen, counting those of mixed heritage as Native Americans. The Dawes Commission took a different approach.
Setting up tents in fields and at crossroads, the census takers eyeballed and interviewed those who came before them, separating them into different categories. If someone seemed to be Indian or white with Indian blood, the commission listed that person as whole or part Indian, historians say. People who the officials thought looked black were listed as freedmen, and no Indian lineage was noted, according to freedmen and historians.
"In cases of mixed freedmen and Indian parents," Kent Carter wrote in his book "The Dawes Commission," applicants were "not given credit for having any Indian blood."
Baldridge's ancestors are recorded as freedmen in the Dawes rolls. Roy Baldridge, J.D.'s son, said that for the Dawes Commission, "if you had a drop of black blood, you were black."
"That's false," said Smith, the Cherokee chief. "I think there was not a fixed policy that if you were dark, you were put on the freedmen roll."
Still, whether people were listed as Indians or freedmen, they were, under the 1866 treaty, considered citizens of the Cherokee Nation. Today's vote could revoke that designation for freedmen.
The census recorded about 20,000 freedmen for the five tribes, said Angela Y. Walton-Raji, a genealogist whose research has been seminal for freedmen tracing their roots.
Descendants of those freed tribal slaves would number in the hundreds of thousands today, Walton-Raji said.
But segregation and the civil rights movement separated native members of the tribes from freedmen. Today, no more than a few thousand descendants of the slaves are officially members of the five tribes, leaving their prospects of defeating the Cherokee referendum slim. By late last month, about 2,800 had re-registered in time to vote.
"A lot of Cherokees don't know who the freedmen are," Smith said. Did he, growing up? "No."
The Cherokee Nation expelled many descendants of slaves in 1983 by requiring them to show a degree of Indian blood through the Dawes rolls. A tribal court reinstated them in March 2006. That spurred today's special election, which received a go-ahead Feb. 21 when a federal judge in Washington denied the freedmen's request for an injunction to halt the balloting.
Seated around a kitchen table recently at a family home in Vinita, one of Oklahoma's first settlements founded in part by Cherokee freedmen, the Baldridges spoke with bitterness about the dispute.
"It should have been a nonissue," Roy Baldridge, 51, said of the controversy in the Cherokee Nation. Stacks of photocopied U.S. government tribal censuses, genealogies and family photos lay spread out on the table. A portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. hung in the next room.
"It makes me sad that a few have brought this out and we're in this situation," he said.
And the fight over heritage is moving beyond the Cherokee Nation. The other tribes that owned slaves, and black descendants in those tribes, are watching the vote.
In 2000, the Seminole Nation expelled freedmen but was compelled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and federal courts to take them back. The Creek Nation has battled its freedmen in court.
Over the winter, Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen formed their own association.
At his home in Fort Coffee, a hamlet founded by Choctaw freedmen, Triplett said he is not trying to immerse himself in his Indian heritage. "Oh, no!" he said. "I'm black!"
But a few days later he stood at Fort Coffee's Choctaw cemetery, where because of renovation a chain-link fence separates the Indian and freedman sides of the graveyard. Triplett pointed out ancestors.
Leaving, he shouted a warning to the Choctaw side: "Guess who's coming to dinner!"Cherokee Nation To Vote on Expelling Slaves' Descendants
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; A01
VINITA, Okla. -- J.D. Baldridge, 73, has official government documents showing him to be a descendant of a full-blood Cherokee. He has memories of a youth spent among Cherokee neighbors and kin, at tribal stomp dances and hog fries. He holds on to a fair amount of Cherokee vocabulary. " Salali," Baldridge says, his face creasing into a smile at the word. "Squirrel stew. Oh, that was good."
What Baldridge, a retired Oklahoma county sheriff, also has is at least one black ancestor, a former slave of a Cherokee family. That could get Baldridge cast out of the tribe, along with thousands of others.
The 250,000-member Cherokee Nation will vote in a special election today whether to override a 141-year-old treaty and change the tribal constitution to bar "freedmen," the descendants of former tribal slaves, from being members of the sovereign nation.
"It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in Oklahoma City.
But the Cherokee freedmen see the vote as less about self-determination than about discrimination and historical blinders. They see in the referendum hints of racism and a desire by some Cherokees to deny the tribe's slave-owning past.
"They know these people exist. And they're trying to push them aside, as though they were never with them," said Andra Shelton, one of Baldridge's family members. Shelton, 59, can recall her mother gossiping in fluent Cherokee when Cherokee friends and relatives visited.
People on both sides of the issue say the fight is also about tribal politics -- the freedmen at times have been at odds with the tribal leadership -- and about money.
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.
"Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION."
The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color.
"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves.
Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.
Many of the Cherokees' slaves accompanied the tribe when it was expelled from its traditional lands in North Carolina and Georgia and forced to migrate in 1838 and 1839 to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokees died during the trip, which became known as the "Trail of Tears." It is not known how many of their slaves also perished.
The tribe fought for the Confederacy. In defeat, it signed a federal treaty in 1866 committing that its slaves, who had been freed by tribal decree during the war, would be absorbed as citizens of the Cherokee Nation.
By the late 1880s, Washington started opening up tribal lands in Oklahoma to white settlers, breaking previous pledges to the tribes. As a step toward ending tribal ownership of Indian Territory, Congress initiated a new census of the "Five Civilized Tribes" -- a census known as the Dawes Commission. It is that head count that the Cherokee Nation would use to determine the eligibility of freedmen.
Past censuses of the tribes had noted both the Indian and the African ancestry of freedmen, counting those of mixed heritage as Native Americans. The Dawes Commission took a different approach.
Setting up tents in fields and at crossroads, the census takers eyeballed and interviewed those who came before them, separating them into different categories. If someone seemed to be Indian or white with Indian blood, the commission listed that person as whole or part Indian, historians say. People who the officials thought looked black were listed as freedmen, and no Indian lineage was noted, according to freedmen and historians.
"In cases of mixed freedmen and Indian parents," Kent Carter wrote in his book "The Dawes Commission," applicants were "not given credit for having any Indian blood."
Baldridge's ancestors are recorded as freedmen in the Dawes rolls. Roy Baldridge, J.D.'s son, said that for the Dawes Commission, "if you had a drop of black blood, you were black."
"That's false," said Smith, the Cherokee chief. "I think there was not a fixed policy that if you were dark, you were put on the freedmen roll."
Still, whether people were listed as Indians or freedmen, they were, under the 1866 treaty, considered citizens of the Cherokee Nation. Today's vote could revoke that designation for freedmen.
The census recorded about 20,000 freedmen for the five tribes, said Angela Y. Walton-Raji, a genealogist whose research has been seminal for freedmen tracing their roots.
Descendants of those freed tribal slaves would number in the hundreds of thousands today, Walton-Raji said.
But segregation and the civil rights movement separated native members of the tribes from freedmen. Today, no more than a few thousand descendants of the slaves are officially members of the five tribes, leaving their prospects of defeating the Cherokee referendum slim. By late last month, about 2,800 had re-registered in time to vote.
"A lot of Cherokees don't know who the freedmen are," Smith said. Did he, growing up? "No."
The Cherokee Nation expelled many descendants of slaves in 1983 by requiring them to show a degree of Indian blood through the Dawes rolls. A tribal court reinstated them in March 2006. That spurred today's special election, which received a go-ahead Feb. 21 when a federal judge in Washington denied the freedmen's request for an injunction to halt the balloting.
Seated around a kitchen table recently at a family home in Vinita, one of Oklahoma's first settlements founded in part by Cherokee freedmen, the Baldridges spoke with bitterness about the dispute.
"It should have been a nonissue," Roy Baldridge, 51, said of the controversy in the Cherokee Nation. Stacks of photocopied U.S. government tribal censuses, genealogies and family photos lay spread out on the table. A portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. hung in the next room.
"It makes me sad that a few have brought this out and we're in this situation," he said.
And the fight over heritage is moving beyond the Cherokee Nation. The other tribes that owned slaves, and black descendants in those tribes, are watching the vote.
In 2000, the Seminole Nation expelled freedmen but was compelled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and federal courts to take them back. The Creek Nation has battled its freedmen in court.
Over the winter, Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen formed their own association.
At his home in Fort Coffee, a hamlet founded by Choctaw freedmen, Triplett said he is not trying to immerse himself in his Indian heritage. "Oh, no!" he said. "I'm black!"
But a few days later he stood at Fort Coffee's Choctaw cemetery, where because of renovation a chain-link fence separates the Indian and freedman sides of the graveyard. Triplett pointed out ancestors.
Leaving, he shouted a warning to the Choctaw side: "Guess who's coming to dinner!"
UPDATED: 3-3-07
Cherokees: No membership for slaves' kin
By MURRAY EVANS, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 7 minutes ago
Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of the descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.
With a majority of districts reporting, 76 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of "by blood" tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission's rolls from more than 100 years ago.
An estimated 2,800 descendants of freed slaves now are tribal members.
Friday, February 16, 2007
U of I: Mascot will no longer perform
AP
U of I: Mascot will no longer perform
By DAVID MERCER, Associated Press Writer 4 minutes ago
The University of Illinois will retire its 81-year-old American Indian mascot, Chief Illiniwek, following the last men's home basketball game of the season on Wednesday.
The NCAA in 2005 deemed the buckskin-clad Illiniwek an offensive use of American Indian imagery and barred the university from hosting postseason events.
American Indian groups and others complained for years that the mascot, used since 1926, is demeaning. Supporters of the mascot say it honors the contributions of American Indians to Illinois.
Illinois still will be able to use the name Illini because it's short for Illinois and the school can use the term Fighting Illini, because it's considered a reference to the team's competitive spirit, school officials said. It is unclear if the school will get a new mascot.
"This is an extremely emotional day for people on both sides of the issue, but the decision announced today ends a two-decade-long struggle surrounding Chief Illiniwek on this campus," said athletic director Ron Guenther.
"Personally, as an alumnus and former athlete, I am disappointed. However, as an administrator, I understand the decision that had to be made."
School officials said they received a letter from the NCAA on Thursday that said the school will no longer be banned from hosting postseason events if it drops the mascot and related American Indian imagery. The NCAA's sanctions thus far have prevented Illinois from hosting postseason events in two low-profile sports.
"The Chief Illiniwek tradition inspired and thrilled members of the University of Illinois community for 80 years," board of trustees chairman Lawrence Eppley said Friday. "It was created, carried on and enjoyed by people with great respect for tradition, and we appreciate their dedication and commitment. It will be important now to ensure the accurate recounting and safekeeping of the tradition as an integral part of the history of the university."
On Thursday, two students who portray Illiniwek filed suit seeking to bar the university from "capitulating to the NCAA by announcing the retirement of Chief Illiniwek." A hearing on the lawsuit was under way Friday morning.
Friday, December 29, 2006
FSU Mascot Issue
NYTimes
December 29, 2006
Bonding Over a Mascot
By JOE LAPOINTE
A few new statues of a Seminole family in 19th-century clothing stand outside the football stadium at Florida State University. The father holds a long gun, the son a bow and arrow, and the mother an infant in her arms as she looks warily to her right.
The statues represent the era when the Seminoles and the United States were at war. The public art is part of a complex relationship between Seminole culture and sports at Florida State. This bond has strengthened since a crackdown by the National Collegiate Athletic Association last year against American Indian mascots, nicknames and imagery among sports teams.
Not every university enjoys a harmonious relationship with Indians. But a sense of cooperation seems to permeate the Florida State campus in Tallahassee, Fla., where Toni Sanchez was among 21 students to complete a new course this month called History of the Seminoles and Southeastern Tribes.
Sanchez, a senior majoring in English, called the N.C.A.A. edict “beyond idiotic” and offensive. She described the new statues as beautiful.
“I know what a real Seminole is,” she said. “This Anglo guilt and regret don’t affect me.”
Sanchez is from a family with Seminole and Hispanic ancestry. Her father, once a farm worker, is now a casino operator. Her mother is a teacher. Sanchez also plays trumpet at football games in a marching band that wears arrowheads on the back of its uniforms.
Of the tribal flag near the new statues, another recent addition, she said, “Every time I look at it, I get really giddy inside.” Of the use of the Seminole imagery for the university’s sports, she said, “I’m so proud of it.”
Florida State was one of 18 institutions cited by the N.C.A.A. in August 2005 for “mascots, nicknames or images deemed hostile or abusive in terms of race, ethnicity or national origin.” The institutions were forbidden to use the symbols in postseason events controlled by the N.C.A.A., like the national championship basketball tournament that begins in March.
Five programs have since received permission to continue using their imagery because they received approval from specific Indian groups, in Florida State’s case the 3,200-member Seminole Tribe of Florida. Five others have changed or are in the process of changing, said Bob Williams, an N.C.A.A. spokesman. The other eight, he said, remain on the list and are subject to the policy, including the Illinois Fighting Illini and the North Dakota Fighting Sioux.
Myles Brand, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in a telephone interview last week that his organization made the right decision but witnessed more negative reaction to the ruling than expected.
“What we’ve accomplished in part is to raise the level of awareness nationally about how we treat Native Americans,” Brand said. “If we don’t stand by our values, we lose our integrity.”
At times, Indians are reduced to casual caricature that would not be tolerated by other groups, he said, adding that the N.C.A.A. had been honored for its stance by Indian groups in Oklahoma and Indiana.
Less complimentary is T. K. Wetherell, the president of Florida State, who said the N.C.A.A. was “more interested in being politically correct” and did not consult the Seminole tribe before making its decision.
“The way they weaseled out was to say, ‘O.K., as long as the tribe continues to support it,’ ” he said.
Wetherell, a former Florida State football player who also teaches history, wore a hunting outfit when interviewed recently in his office. He pointed to a team logo of an Indian’s face that he said had elements of caricature. “That’s not really a Seminole-looking deal,” Wetherell said. “This is a marketing tool.” He said the university might “gradually let certain things fade.”
He said he told the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s council, “If you don’t want Florida State to be the Seminoles, we ain’t Seminoles anymore.” Wetherell said the tribe approved the use partly because the campus is in the capital and tribal leaders “are not only good businessmen, they are great politicians.”
He said the new history course was proposed before the N.C.A.A. edict.
But Neil Jumonville, the chairman of the history department, said the N.C.A.A. resolution accelerated the creation of the class and that his staff received advice from local Seminole leaders.
“These are people who are savvy about their place in the American myth,” Jumonville said. “And they are smart enough to manipulate the myth for their own good.”
The first class was taught by Christopher R. Versen, who recently earned his doctorate in American history.
“I wanted to challenge students to think about identity,” Versen said. “What is it inside us that makes us identify ourselves one way or another? What external factors play into identity?”
The Seminoles are an amalgam of several tribes, predominantly Creek, that included escaped slaves. They migrated south to the Everglades in retreat from the United States Army. Some were driven out during the Trail of Tears period under President Andrew Jackson.
Those descendants live as the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. The Seminoles in Florida once had a commercial hunting economy. Since 1979, their economic status has improved because of casino gambling.
Earlier this month, the Seminoles acquired Hard Rock International — the music-themed chain of restaurants, hotels and casinos — for $965 million.
Versen said he did not discuss sports identity with his students because he was afraid it would become a distraction. But a guest speaker who raised the mascot issue was Max Osceola, one of three councilmen for the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
“If I had a child and named it after you, would you consider it an honor?” Osceola said he asked the students. He also reflected on a former mascot, Sammy Seminole, who was retired in 1972.
“He had a big nose and he lived in a teepee,” Osceola said. “He looked like a buffoon.”
The current mascot is named, coincidentally, Osceola, after a 19th-century warrior. A student dressed as Osceola rides a horse named Renegade onto the football field and throws a flaming spear. This mascot’s clothing was designed by the tribe.
Tina Osceola, who is the executive director of the tribe’s historical resources department and is a cousin of Max Osceola’s, said, “We’ve given them license to be theatrical.”
A statue of the warrior riding atop Renegade stands outside the stadium above the word “Unconquered,” because the Seminoles never surrendered to the United States.
When the Seminoles announced in New York the purchase of Hard Rock, Max Osceola joked that Indians once sold Manhattan for trinkets but were now “going to buy Manhattan back, one burger at a time.”
Not everyone outside the tribe approves of all of the Indian trappings at sporting events, including the tomahawk chop hand gesture and a droning cheer that sounds like background music heard in old western movies.
Joe Quetone, the executive director of the nonprofit Florida Governor’s Council on Indian Affairs Inc., said, “Things fans do are outrageous and ridiculous.”
Bobby Bowden, the head football coach, did not respond to four recent requests for comment on the issue placed with the university’s sports information department.
From a student’s perspective, Sanchez said that people who were genuinely concerned with the circumstances of Indians should concentrate less on sports iconography and more on alcoholism, suicide, teen pregnancy and high school dropout rates.
“After all those years of diseases, occupation and war, we’re still here,” she said. “I refuse to believe that a silly mascot will take us down.”
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Displaying Native American Culture
Displaying Native American Culture
New York Times
December 21, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
CHICAGO - Museums always make use of the past for the sake of the present. They collect it, shape it, insist on its significance. When that past is also prehistoric, when its objects come to the present without written history and with jumbled oral traditions, a museum can even become the past's primary voice.
But what if that prehistoric past is also claimed by some as a living heritage? Then disagreements about interpretation develop into battles over the museum's very function.
That was the result, for example, at the Smithsonian Institution's $219 million National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in September in Washington and calls itself a "museum different." George Gustav Heye's extraordinary collection of 800,000 tribal American objects is put in service of contemporary Indian cultures with tribal guest curators determining how their heritage is to be presented. The result is homogenized pap in which the collection is used not to reveal the past's complexities, but to serve the present's simplicities.
There are, however, other ways in which the prehistoric past can be revealed, as two exhibitions in Chicago suggest. At the Field Museum, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas," is remarkable not just for its careful exploration of the famed archeological site high in the Peruvian Andes, but also for demonstrating an almost devotional care to exhuming a lost past. At the Art Institute of Chicago, "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South" is no less remarkable in its display of objects created by ancient American cultures, but it is subject to many of the same forces that molded the National Museum of the American Indian. Here though, rather than overturning the museum's enterprise, they merely distract from it.
First, the Machu Picchu exhibition. Created by the Peabody Museum at Yale, it offers the largest collection of Incan artifacts ever shown in the United States, including robust three-foot-high jugs for corn beer (which was fermented by the saliva of women who chewed the maize before brewing it); samples of bright, geometrically ornamented 500-year-old fabrics; and a corded "quipu," a linked collection of knotted strings used to record events and numerical accounts. The curators are Richard L. Burger, a Yale anthropologist, and Lucy C. Salazar, a Peruvian archaeologist.
The major question about Machu Picchu has not been who speaks for its past, but what that past actually was. The site, with its terraced, mountainous landscape and stone structures, was known to only a few local inhabitants when it was discovered by Hiram Bingham III, who led Yale's Peruvian Expedition in 1911. As Mr. Berger and Ms. Salazar explain various hypotheses by Bingham, including one that the site was a sacred nunnery for Incan "Virgins of the Sun," have been conclusively disproved. The curators established, instead, that it was a summer retreat for a ruling Incan family, built between 1450 and 1470 and used only for about 80 years before being abandoned in the face of the Incas' defeat by Pizarro's Spanish armies.
The exhibition also makes it clear what an extraordinary site Machu Picchu is. Nestled in the cloud-decked mountains of the Andes, its architecture serves as a kind of cosmic clock, the sun and constellations appearing in certain stone windows at specific times of the year. The exhibition shows how scientists have used bone fragments to analyze the Incan diet (60 percent maize), and demonstrates how Incan skulls were deliberately elongated by molds placed on infants' heads, presumably for aesthetic effect. One emerges astonished by this lost world.
Still, there are subtle traces of contemporary claims evident in the portrayal of this prehistoric culture. After all, Machu Picchu is now a national symbol in Peru; in 2001, it was used for the inauguration of the president, Alejandro Toledo. It is also the object of almost mystical devotion. Hundreds of thousands of tourists climb its ruins every year.
In response, perhaps, there are hints of overly tactful delicacy in the exhibition's descriptions of Incan society. Incan aesthetic and cosmological preoccupations become clear, but other aspects do not, including a rigid social structure that involved forms of slavery, a religious culture that incorporated human sacrifice, and a military organization powerful enough to conquer 2,500 miles of the South American coastline and build 25,000 miles of roads. Mr. Berger, in an e-mail message, said that for the Peruvians, the Incans looked good compared to the Spaniards. The exhibition wants us to admire, and we do. But we know less about what we might admire less.
At the Art Institute of Chicago more explicit pressures are at work, and they nearly derail the considerable achievements of "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand." The exhibition is devoted to products of societies that thrived along the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers as early as 5,000 B.C. Their remnants can still be seen in landscapes near Newark, Ohio, or St. Clair County, Ill., in enormous earthen mounds and geometric shapes outlined by raised ground.
These structures testify to a highly organized society barely glimpsed by European settlers. Some sites had already been abandoned by the time the Europeans arrived. Others were devastated by diseases brought by the settlers, which wiped out as much as 90 percent of their Indian populations.
But as Richard F. Townsend, the curator of the department of African and Amerindian art at the Art Institute, shows, these cultures' mastery can be sensed in the objects produced: a haunting 2,000-year-old elongated face smoothed out of stone found in Kentucky; a graceful, elegant hand cut out of mica from about the same era in Ohio; a 500-year-old wooden figure - half human, half feline - found in Florida.
Such a display, along with historical commentary, would once have been sufficient. But contemporary Indian tribes, supported by some scholars, have argued that they have an ancestral connection to these cultures. And since museums have not traditionally displayed much sensitivity toward living cultures, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act now obliges them to consult with tribes about their holdings. In preparation for the exhibition, four years were spent consulting with tribal leaders. But to what end?
Joyce Bear, the cultural preservation officer of the Muscogee Nation, has the exhibition's first word, declaring on the wall leading to the galleries, that it will "make our tribal people realize that we are descendants of a wonderful and great culture." In the catalog, she proudly announces that the exhibition proves that "I come from kings and queens." The exhibition ends with a statement about a "new, sweeping movement of cultural preservation" among Indians, including a film showing their renewal of traditions.
But all this has little to do with the objects on display and makes it seem as if the exhibition's purpose were to boost tribal pride. Also, while there may indeed be ancient traditions that have found their way into contemporary practices, the nature of these connections, at the very least, demands closer scrutiny.
One anthropologist's assertion that contemporary Indian beliefs are "analogous" to those of these ancient cultures is challenged by others in the catalog. Mr. Townsend writes that these earthworks were "built by peoples whose achievements and ancestral connections to present day tribes are at best only vaguely surmised." Robert L. Hall, an anthropologist, points out that Cahokia, an imposing culture on the Mississippi that was already in decline in the 14th century, "left no written records and no native peoples possess oral traditions that specifically identify Cahokia or even recognize its existence." In the 18th century, another writer says, Indians encountered by settlers "did not construct mounds, nor did any of them have oral traditions relating to these earthworks."
Even the exhibition's explanations of these societies' workings seem idealized, skewed by contemporary sensitivities. In the catalog, for example, an anthropologist, David H. Dye, explores warfare among the Mississippi Indians, but it is barely alluded to in the exhibition, despite the presence of objects like a pipe (1200-1500 A.D.) sculpted as a bound captive and a vase whose decorations are "trophy scalps stretched in a starlike pattern." The exhibition gives so refined a picture of these societies that there is no way of knowing how important such images were, or where historical evidence of slavery and human sacrifice fits in.
This is also, of course, what happened in the Smithsonian's Indian museum. Since almost no tribes had a written culture and oral traditions were disrupted by disease, massacre, government policy and assimilation, the tribal curators often seem to know less about their history than do scholars. Yet scholars' assessments are ignored in favor of self-promotional platitudes.
All this is a form of guilty overcompensation for past museum sins that themselves need re-examination and assessment. In the meantime, exhibitions like the one on Machu Picchu serve as reminders of what is possible. And the objects at the Art Institute can still be heard straining to speak for themselves, despite the layers of promotional and political gauze in which they are wrapped.
New York Times
December 21, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
CHICAGO - Museums always make use of the past for the sake of the present. They collect it, shape it, insist on its significance. When that past is also prehistoric, when its objects come to the present without written history and with jumbled oral traditions, a museum can even become the past's primary voice.
But what if that prehistoric past is also claimed by some as a living heritage? Then disagreements about interpretation develop into battles over the museum's very function.
That was the result, for example, at the Smithsonian Institution's $219 million National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in September in Washington and calls itself a "museum different." George Gustav Heye's extraordinary collection of 800,000 tribal American objects is put in service of contemporary Indian cultures with tribal guest curators determining how their heritage is to be presented. The result is homogenized pap in which the collection is used not to reveal the past's complexities, but to serve the present's simplicities.
There are, however, other ways in which the prehistoric past can be revealed, as two exhibitions in Chicago suggest. At the Field Museum, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas," is remarkable not just for its careful exploration of the famed archeological site high in the Peruvian Andes, but also for demonstrating an almost devotional care to exhuming a lost past. At the Art Institute of Chicago, "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South" is no less remarkable in its display of objects created by ancient American cultures, but it is subject to many of the same forces that molded the National Museum of the American Indian. Here though, rather than overturning the museum's enterprise, they merely distract from it.
First, the Machu Picchu exhibition. Created by the Peabody Museum at Yale, it offers the largest collection of Incan artifacts ever shown in the United States, including robust three-foot-high jugs for corn beer (which was fermented by the saliva of women who chewed the maize before brewing it); samples of bright, geometrically ornamented 500-year-old fabrics; and a corded "quipu," a linked collection of knotted strings used to record events and numerical accounts. The curators are Richard L. Burger, a Yale anthropologist, and Lucy C. Salazar, a Peruvian archaeologist.
The major question about Machu Picchu has not been who speaks for its past, but what that past actually was. The site, with its terraced, mountainous landscape and stone structures, was known to only a few local inhabitants when it was discovered by Hiram Bingham III, who led Yale's Peruvian Expedition in 1911. As Mr. Berger and Ms. Salazar explain various hypotheses by Bingham, including one that the site was a sacred nunnery for Incan "Virgins of the Sun," have been conclusively disproved. The curators established, instead, that it was a summer retreat for a ruling Incan family, built between 1450 and 1470 and used only for about 80 years before being abandoned in the face of the Incas' defeat by Pizarro's Spanish armies.
The exhibition also makes it clear what an extraordinary site Machu Picchu is. Nestled in the cloud-decked mountains of the Andes, its architecture serves as a kind of cosmic clock, the sun and constellations appearing in certain stone windows at specific times of the year. The exhibition shows how scientists have used bone fragments to analyze the Incan diet (60 percent maize), and demonstrates how Incan skulls were deliberately elongated by molds placed on infants' heads, presumably for aesthetic effect. One emerges astonished by this lost world.
Still, there are subtle traces of contemporary claims evident in the portrayal of this prehistoric culture. After all, Machu Picchu is now a national symbol in Peru; in 2001, it was used for the inauguration of the president, Alejandro Toledo. It is also the object of almost mystical devotion. Hundreds of thousands of tourists climb its ruins every year.
In response, perhaps, there are hints of overly tactful delicacy in the exhibition's descriptions of Incan society. Incan aesthetic and cosmological preoccupations become clear, but other aspects do not, including a rigid social structure that involved forms of slavery, a religious culture that incorporated human sacrifice, and a military organization powerful enough to conquer 2,500 miles of the South American coastline and build 25,000 miles of roads. Mr. Berger, in an e-mail message, said that for the Peruvians, the Incans looked good compared to the Spaniards. The exhibition wants us to admire, and we do. But we know less about what we might admire less.
At the Art Institute of Chicago more explicit pressures are at work, and they nearly derail the considerable achievements of "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand." The exhibition is devoted to products of societies that thrived along the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers as early as 5,000 B.C. Their remnants can still be seen in landscapes near Newark, Ohio, or St. Clair County, Ill., in enormous earthen mounds and geometric shapes outlined by raised ground.
These structures testify to a highly organized society barely glimpsed by European settlers. Some sites had already been abandoned by the time the Europeans arrived. Others were devastated by diseases brought by the settlers, which wiped out as much as 90 percent of their Indian populations.
But as Richard F. Townsend, the curator of the department of African and Amerindian art at the Art Institute, shows, these cultures' mastery can be sensed in the objects produced: a haunting 2,000-year-old elongated face smoothed out of stone found in Kentucky; a graceful, elegant hand cut out of mica from about the same era in Ohio; a 500-year-old wooden figure - half human, half feline - found in Florida.
Such a display, along with historical commentary, would once have been sufficient. But contemporary Indian tribes, supported by some scholars, have argued that they have an ancestral connection to these cultures. And since museums have not traditionally displayed much sensitivity toward living cultures, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act now obliges them to consult with tribes about their holdings. In preparation for the exhibition, four years were spent consulting with tribal leaders. But to what end?
Joyce Bear, the cultural preservation officer of the Muscogee Nation, has the exhibition's first word, declaring on the wall leading to the galleries, that it will "make our tribal people realize that we are descendants of a wonderful and great culture." In the catalog, she proudly announces that the exhibition proves that "I come from kings and queens." The exhibition ends with a statement about a "new, sweeping movement of cultural preservation" among Indians, including a film showing their renewal of traditions.
But all this has little to do with the objects on display and makes it seem as if the exhibition's purpose were to boost tribal pride. Also, while there may indeed be ancient traditions that have found their way into contemporary practices, the nature of these connections, at the very least, demands closer scrutiny.
One anthropologist's assertion that contemporary Indian beliefs are "analogous" to those of these ancient cultures is challenged by others in the catalog. Mr. Townsend writes that these earthworks were "built by peoples whose achievements and ancestral connections to present day tribes are at best only vaguely surmised." Robert L. Hall, an anthropologist, points out that Cahokia, an imposing culture on the Mississippi that was already in decline in the 14th century, "left no written records and no native peoples possess oral traditions that specifically identify Cahokia or even recognize its existence." In the 18th century, another writer says, Indians encountered by settlers "did not construct mounds, nor did any of them have oral traditions relating to these earthworks."
Even the exhibition's explanations of these societies' workings seem idealized, skewed by contemporary sensitivities. In the catalog, for example, an anthropologist, David H. Dye, explores warfare among the Mississippi Indians, but it is barely alluded to in the exhibition, despite the presence of objects like a pipe (1200-1500 A.D.) sculpted as a bound captive and a vase whose decorations are "trophy scalps stretched in a starlike pattern." The exhibition gives so refined a picture of these societies that there is no way of knowing how important such images were, or where historical evidence of slavery and human sacrifice fits in.
This is also, of course, what happened in the Smithsonian's Indian museum. Since almost no tribes had a written culture and oral traditions were disrupted by disease, massacre, government policy and assimilation, the tribal curators often seem to know less about their history than do scholars. Yet scholars' assessments are ignored in favor of self-promotional platitudes.
All this is a form of guilty overcompensation for past museum sins that themselves need re-examination and assessment. In the meantime, exhibitions like the one on Machu Picchu serve as reminders of what is possible. And the objects at the Art Institute can still be heard straining to speak for themselves, despite the layers of promotional and political gauze in which they are wrapped.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Navahoax: a huge author scandal
Navahoax
Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated memoirists — by passing himself off as Native American?
By MATTHEW FLEISCHER
LA WEEKLY
Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - 3:31 am
Illustrations by Ronald Kurniawan
“So achingly honest it takes your breath away.”
—Miami Herald on The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
In June of 1999 a writer calling himself Nasdijj emerged from obscurity to publish an ode to his adopted son in Esquire. “My son is dead,” he began. “I didn’t say my adopted son is dead. He was my son. My son was a Navajo. He lived six years. They were the best six years of my life.”
The boy’s name was Tommy Nothing Fancy and Nasdijj wrote that he and his wife adopted Tommy as an infant and raised him in their home on the Navajo reservation. At first, Tommy seemed like a healthy baby, albeit one who consistently cried throughout the night. “The doctor at the Indian Health Service said it was nothing. Probably gas.”
But it wasn’t gas. Tommy suffered from a severe case of fetal alcohol syndrome, or FAS. Though Tommy looked normal, his crying continued and as he grew older he began to suffer massive seizures. “I thought I could see him getting duller with every seizure. He knew he was slowly dying.”
Nasdijj knew too, and he tried to give his son as full a life as time would allow. Fishing was Tommy’s favorite thing to do and they went often — sometimes at the expense of his medical care. “For my son hospitals were analogous to torture. Tommy Nothing Fancy wanted to die with his dad and his dog while fishing.”
Nasdijj’s wife wanted Tommy in the hospital receiving modern medical treatment. “She was a modern Indian... She begged. She pleaded. She screamed. She pounded the walls. But the hospitals and doctors never made it better.”
Though the conflict tore his marriage apart, Nasdijj continued to take his son fishing and, true to his last wish, Tommy died of a seizure while on an expedition.
“I was catching brown trout,” Nasdijj wrote. “I was thinking about cooking them for dinner over our campfire when Tommy Nothing Fancy fell. All that shaking. It was as if a bolt of lighting surged uncontrolled through the damaged brain of my son. It wasn’t fair. He was just a little boy who liked to fish... I was holding him when he died... The fish escaped.”
The Esquire piece, as successful as it was heartbreaking, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and helped establish Nasdijj as a prominent new voice in the world of nonfiction. “Esquire’s Cinderella story,” as Salon’s Sean Elder called it, “arrived over the transom, addressed to no one in particular. ‘The cover letter was this screed about how Esquire had never published the work of an American-Indian writer and never would because it’s such a racist publication,’ recalls editor in chief David Granger. ‘And under it was... one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’d ever read.’ By the time the piece was published in the June issue, the writer (who lives on an Indian reservation) had a book contract.”
The contract was for a full-length memoir, The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2000 to great acclaim. It was followed by two more memoirs, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping (Ballantine, 2003), and Geronimo’s Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me (Ballantine, 2004). As if losing a son was not enough, the memoirs portray a lifetime of suffering.
Nasdijj was born on the Navajo reservation in a hogan in 1950, he claims, the son of an abusive white cowboy “who broke, bred, and bootlegged horses” and a Navajo mother. “My mother,” he writes, “was a hopeless drunk. I would use the word ‘alcoholic’ but it’s too polite. It’s a white people word... There is nothing polite about cleaning up your mother in her vomit and dragging her unconscious carcass back to the migrant housing trailer you lived in.”
Nasdijj says his father would sometimes pimp his mother to other migrant workers for “five bucks” and that she died of alcoholism when he was 7. Though their time together was short and turbulent, Nasdijj says his mother instilled in him the Navajo traditions that now inform his work.
His father, he says, was a sexual predator who raped him the night his mother died. Because his father was white, Nasdijj says he was treated like an “outcast bastard” on the reservation. Like Tommy Nothing Fancy, Nasdijj claims to have fetal alcohol syndrome and to have been raised, with his brother, in migrant camps all over the country.
Nasdijj knows how to pull heartstrings. Both The Blood and The Boy revolve around the lives and deaths of his adopted Navajo sons. “Death, to the Navajo, is like the cold wind that blows across the mesa from the north,” Nasdijj writes in The Blood. “We do not speak of it.” But Nasdijj does speak of it. In fact, he speaks of it almost exclusively. Death and suffering are his staples.
“My son comes back to me when I least expect to see his ghostly vision,” he writes. “He lives in my bones and scars.”
But Nasdijj hasn’t built his career purely through the tragic and sensational nature of his stories. His style is an artful blending of poetry and prose, and his work has met with nearly universal critical praise. The Blood “reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society,” wrote Ted Conover in The New York Times Book Review. Rick Bass called it “mesmerizing, apocalyptic, achingly beautiful and redemptive... a powerful American classic,” while Howard Frank Mosher said it was “the best memoir I have read about family love, particularly a father’s love for his son, since A River Runs Through It.”The Blood was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and winner of the Salon Book Award.
The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping was published to more glowing reviews — “vivid and immediate, crackling with anger, humor, and love” (The Washington Post) and “riveting... lyrical... a ragged wail of a song, an ancient song, where we learn what it is to truly be a parent and love a child” (USA Today).
Shortly after The Blood came out, Nasdijj writes, he moved back to the Navajo reservation, where word of his book and his compassion spread. One day while fishing, a Navajo man and his 10-year-old son approached him. The man took Nasdijj aside and explained that he, his wife and their son, Awee, had AIDS. “They were not terrific parents,” Nasdijj wrote “but they wanted this child to have a chance at life.” Nasdijj was that chance. For the next two years Nasdijj cared for Awee until his death from AIDS-related illness.
The Boy won a 2004 PEN/Beyond Margins Award and helped solidify Nasdijj’s place as one of the most celebrated multicultural writers in American literature. But as his successes and literary credentials grew in number so did his skeptics — particularly from within the Native American community. Sherman Alexie first heard of Nasdijj in 1999 after his former editor sent him a galley proof of The Blood for comment. At the time, Alexie, who is Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, was one of the hottest authors in America and was widely considered the most prominent voice in Native American literature. His novel Indian Killer was a New York Times notable book, and his cinematic feature Smoke Signals was the previous year’s Sundance darling, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and winner of the Audience Award. Alexie’s seal of approval would have provided The Blood with a virtual rubber stamp of native authenticity. But it took Alexie only a few pages before he realized he couldn’t vouch for the work. It wasn’t just that similar writing style and cadence that bothered Alexie.
“The whole time I was reading I was thinking, this doesn’t just sound like me, this is me,” he says.
Alexie was born hydrocephalic, a life-threatening condition characterized by water on the brain. At the age of 6 months he underwent brain surgery that saved his life but left him, much like Tommy Nothing Fancy, prone to chronic seizures throughout his childhood. Instead of identifying with Nasdijj’s story, however, Alexie became suspicious.
“At first I was flattered but as I kept reading I noticed he was borrowing from other Native writers too. I thought, this can’t be real.”
Indeed, Nasdijj’s stories also bear uncanny resemblance to the works of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko and especially Michael Dorris, whose memoir The Broken Cord depicts his struggle to care for his adopted FAS-stricken Native Alaskan children. Although there was never more than a similar phrase here and there, Alexie was convinced that the work was fabricated. He wasn’t alone.
Shortly after his review of The Blood came out in The New York Times Book Review, Ted Conover received an Internet greeting card from Nasdijj chastising him for his piece. Conover, an award-winning journalist whose 2003 book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was taken aback. Not only is it highly unusual for an author to attack a reviewer, but it is especially unusual when the review in question was overwhelmingly positive — Conover’s flattering words would grace the paperback cover.
Conover’s main critique was that Nasdijj was “stingy with self-revelation.” He questioned certain inconsistencies in the author’s background, noting that Nasdijj sometimes said his mother was “with the Navajo,” sometimes she was “Navajo, or so she claimed,” and other times she was just “Navajo.” Conover never accused Nasdijj of lying, he merely suggested that the writer be more forthcoming. Nasdijj, however, rejected this suggestion and sent the angry letter, which Conover characterizes as a sprawling diatribe.
“The whole thing was just really bizarre,” Conover says.
Conover sent a copy of the card to Anton Mueller, Nasdijj’s editor at Houghton Mifflin and an acquaintance. “I wondered if he might shed a little light on this,” he says. Mueller, however, never responded and the incident left Conover wondering whether he should have been more thorough in investigating Nasdijj before writing his review. It didn’t take him long to find an answer. Several weeks later, Conover was contacted by an expert in fetal alcohol syndrome who had read his review. She informed him that while she sympathized with the plight of Nasdijj and his son, the symptoms described in The Blood are not actually those of FAS.
Says Conover, “I immediately thought, ‘Oh no, I’ve been duped.’”
Back Then: Tim Barrus in his 1969 Lansing, Michigan high school yearbook photo, right, and with his Key West compatriot, Bill Bowers, circa 1984. Bowers on Barrus: ''He was really a master of publicity.''
This work is a memoir and represents, to the best of my ability and my memory, an accurate reporting of facts and events as I know them and as they have been told to me. I have attempted to protect the privacy of people through the editorial decision to frequently change names, appearances, and locations, as these are not relevant to the focus of the work or the issues the work strives to deal with.
No, these are not the words of James Frey, author of the exaggerated A Million Little Pieces, but of Nasdijj in the author’s note for The Blood. But why? Was this just standard legalese or was Houghton Mifflin concerned about the veracity of this book? Had Sherman Alexie actually gotten through to them? Is the “author’s note” a cynical attempt to protect a piece of fiction passed off as memoir?
Anton Mueller, editor of The Blood, says no. “Nasdijj’s life is hazy and complex, and we both felt it would be a good idea.”
Indeed, getting to the bottom of Nasdijj’s story is no easy task. He alleges a nomadic existence that is virtually free of specific names or places, rendering it difficult to substantiate his claims. A Google search brings up first and foremost his blog — www.nasdijj.typepad.com. (Shortly after Nasdijj was contacted for this story, his blog was taken offline.) A sampling of his almost daily blogs over several months suggests that one (and perhaps only one) thing is clear: Nasdijj is a very angry man. If in the books his passion and fierceness are modulated and concentrated, his blog posts are full of rants and denunciations. Targets include the American health care system, government treatment of Indians, middle-class values and, especially, the publishing industry.
He has recently made a routine of calling ReganBooks über-publisher Judith Regan a “cunt,” a designation that in Nasdijj’s estimation she shares with Gina Centrello of Random House among countless others. “Like the naked Jew who covers his penis before he turns the shower on, there is no fucking hope for you,” he admonishes them.
Non-metaphorical Jews alike are not immune from Nasdijj’s wrath. “Jews [in publishing] would sell the gas chamber shower heads if they thought it might make a buck.” In his acceptance speech for the prestigious PEN/Beyond Margins Award, an edited version of which was delivered in absentia, he took the opportunity to call New York literary agent Binky Urban a “white bitch.” (It’s available online at www.literaryrevolution.com/mr-nasdijj-62804.html.)
Nasdijj’s blog is typical of a recent shift in his work. Though his first book was thoughtful, even tender, as his career has progressed Nasdijj has increasingly taken the role of an artist whose willingness to push boundaries often borders on disturbing. His most recent book, Geronimo’s Bones, brought Nasdijj’s tales of suffering to startling heights, or lows depending on your perspective. Surrealistic accounts of forcible incest by his father read less like rape and more like lukewarm trysts. “His lips to mine. His tongue in my mouth. His words: ‘Nasdijj, please, please love me.’ ...He was a lousy lover with his tongue in my mouth. The same tongue that had just been inside my bowels.”
Though incestuous rape may be difficult to trump, perhaps even more disturbing is Nasdijj’s tendency to sexualize teenage boys. A recent post on his Web site featured a nude photograph of the open anus and testicles of a supposedly cancer-ridden teenager. Nasdijj claims this was done in an effort to humanize the disease, but such pictures are often posted alongside graphic accounts of adolescent sexuality. Indeed, they are sometimes posted alongside naked sadomasochistic pictures of Nasdijj himself.
But Nasdijj’s explicit Web site isn’t the only curiosity a Google search of his name reveals — it also brings up a rather caustic reader review of The Boyand the Dog are Sleeping on BookBrowse (www.bookbrowse.com). “I find this book full of the author’s misinformation regarding his family,” it begins. “I take exception with his opinion of his ‘Anglo father’ and his ‘Navajo Mother.’ I happen to be related to this author and his family is tracable [sic] back through the American Revolution on his father’s side and to Holland on his mother’s side. I resent the fact that he seems to be ashamed of his notable ancestor’s (i.e., Cyrus McCormick, a great grandfather that pioneered nerve block dentistry, couragous mem [sic] that lost their lives at Valley Forge). This kind of dribble [sic] should have been investigated prior to printing or should have been labeled as purely fiction.”
While such a review could easily be dismissed on its own, a Yahoo search of the name attached to it offers up a comprehensive genealogical site. And when the reviewer’s name is searched in conjunction with the name of Nasdijj’s daughter, Kree, one name comes up: Timothy Patrick Barrus.
Barrus, the site says, was born in 1950 (the same year as Nasdijj), is married to Tina Giovanni (also the name of Nasdijj’s wife), and has a daughter named Kree. The site then charts his family lineage back several generations to the 1700s, and, indeed, as the review states, to the McCormick family.
Evidence compiled from other searches seems to corroborate the site.
Just like Nasdijj, Tina Giovanni also hosts a blog — www.autism911.blogspot.com. (It also was taken offline in the past week but has returned minus its archives.) A post from Giovanni in July 2005 shows a picture of Nasdijj’s daughter, Kree, and Kree’s husband, Steve, both of whom, Giovanni says, are teachers in La Paz, Bolivia. A follow-up Internet search reveals the December 13, 2004, meeting minutes of the American Educational Association of La Paz, announcing the hiring of Kree Barrus and Steve Poole as teachers at the American Cooperative School in La Paz. (A photograph of Steve Poole on the American Cooperative School’s Web site confirms that he is the same Steve pictured in Giovanni’s blog.) As for Giovanni, a records search reveals her legal name to be Tina Giovanni Barrus, with addresses in and around Taos, New Mexico. This obviously begs the question — who exactly is Timothy Patrick Barrus?
Yet another Google search, this time for Tim Barrus, brings up the heading “Sadomasochistic Literature” and the following: “Some of the best pornographic fiction to come out of the leatherman tradition is by Tim Barrus whose Mineshaft (1984) describes the sexual exploits of the infamous New York S/M palace of the same name.” The site is GLBTQ: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and queer culture. The section in which Barrus’ name appears is titled “Gay Male Writers Since the 70’s.”
Could the heart-wrenching Navajo memoirist actually have been the gay leather novelist in a previous life?
Fiction? Barrus’ Vietnam novel, above, and Nasdijj’s memoirs. Says his former editor, ''We don’t fact-check books.''
The streets of downtown Lansing, Michigan, are crowded on a Friday night, but not with people; with squirrels. They congregate in the middle of Washington Street, staring with incredulity as a lone car approaches. Despite an impending collision, they don’t bother to move out of the way, apparently shocked to see anyone out at this time of night. The oncoming car doesn’t slow down and crushes one of them into the red brick street. No one is around to notice. It wasn’t always like this.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when Tim Barrus was growing up here, Lansing was a prosperous middle-class community. Washington Street wasn’t a sight of squirrel manslaughter, but the heart of a thriving theater district. Oldsmobile, Fisher Auto Parts and General Motors all had factories nearby.
No cowboy, Maynard Barrus worked as a shift foreman at the Lansing Board of Water and Light. In 1948 he married Barrus’ mother, Jean Anne Steginga, a local Lansing girl of Scandinavian descent. Two years later, Timothy Patrick was born.
Tim Barrus was raised with his younger sister, Suzanne, in a modest three-bedroom home off of Aurelius Road close to the Michigan State University campus. His mother was in fact around throughout his childhood and is still alive today. He has no younger brother.
Barrus attended Eastern High School in Lansing, where he was far from a slayer of suburban values. He was a member of the student council, the forensics team, the forum club as well as a homeroom officer. He was also an actor, playing several minor roles in the 1968 class production of Moliere’s The Physician in Spite of Himself.
“He was a good, good actor — very passionate,” says one former castmate of Barrus’ who wishes not to be named. “He was able to completely absorb himself into the mind of a character in a way that most people are never able to.”
“He was a thinker — very pensive,” the castmate continues. “But he was a warm person, very friendly.”
Beneath his generally pleasant veneer, however, a simmering temper would occasionally boil over.
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“You didn’t know what you were going to say to the guy to make him angry,” recalls Rosemary Taylor, who was also in the cast alongside Barrus, “so you were extremely careful with him because you wanted to stay in his orbit. He was one of those guys that was a little ahead of his time.”
Barrus graduated from high school in 1969 and a year later married Jan Abbott, a local girl from neighboring Okemos. According to a source close to the family, the couple took in foster children to make ends meet. In 1971 Barrus and his wife moved to Largo, Florida, where his sister, Suzanne, lived with her husband, Steve Cheetham. Barrus attended community college while Abbott worked at Winn-Dixie to support him, according to Cheetham. Although Barrus wasn’t publishing his work at the time, he wrote constantly. “He wrote most of his life in one way or another,” says Cheetham by phone from Lansing. “He’s a storyteller. You never knew if he was telling you something true, or part of his imagination or what.” In 1973 the couple moved again before finally winding up back in Lansing. Cheetham never saw Barrus again.
In 1974, Barrus’ only daughter, Kree, was born and, according to sources, the couple also adopted a mildly autistic boy around this time. The boy could have inspired Tommy Nothing Fancy, although several discrepancies exist between his story and Tommy’s.
Nasdijj claims that he adopted Tommy as an infant and that he died at age 6. A Kree Barrus resumé posted online, however, indicates that as a girl she helped care for a mildly autistic 7-year-old. Likewise, an article written by Barrus in 1996 asserts that he adopted his son at age 4 and that he was alive and well as of the ’90s, having survived adolescence and grown “almost as big as I am.”
Cheetham, who was still married to Barrus’ sister at the time, tells a slightly different story. According to him, Barrus and his wife did indeed adopt an autistic boy, but that the boy’s “emotional problems” proved too much for the couple to handle. After less than a year they were forced to give the boy up, and to Cheetham’s best recollection he returned to being a ward of the state.
Address records indicate that the young family lived in an apartment on Cooper Avenue near downtown Lansing until 1975. It is unclear where they moved immediately after that. At some point, Barrus and his wife divorced, and he moved to San Francisco where he began to write — primarily for the gay leather magazine Drummer. Barrus was widely praised for coining the term “leather lit,” and for being one of the founders of the newly formed genre.
In 1984 he moved to Key West and, according to his friend Bill Bowers, took residence with his partner Adolfo. (Barrus would later deny being gay.) There he published his first book, The Mineshaft, a sloppy attempt at erotica, but one that nonetheless garnered him some attention. He soon became a regular contributor to The Weekly News, the local gay newspaper, writing fictional stories reminiscent of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
It was in Key West where Barrus met Bowers, a local artist and photographer, and the two began work on a number of projects together.
“He was a crazy queen. He did things other people just didn’t do,” says Bowers fondly of Barrus. “He was really a master of publicity.”
Bowers remembers collaborating with Barrus on an erotic photo exhibit called Sadomasochism: True Confessions. After the opening night of the show drew lukewarm interest, Barrus assumed the fake name John Hammond and wrote an open letter to The Weekly News attacking the exhibit.
“Sadomasochism is a disease,” the letter read “and gay men who are into that scene are wrong.” He then had Bowers write a response to their mythical antagonist Hammond, inviting him to “take a Valium, take a douche,” and published it in The Weekly News. “The next time Mr. Hammond wants to show his ignorance he should do some heavy research before he rejects his very own brothers.” The ensuing controversy rallied the gay community around the artists and propelled the exhibit to a successful run.
“He would do anything to shock people,” said Bowers. “It works every time if you want a reaction, be it good or bad. Bad is good too, sometimes better.”
Not all of Barrus’ acquaintances found his antics quite so charming however. Lars Eighner grew quite tired of his routine. “If you look up dilettante in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Tim Barrus,” says Eighner.
Best known for his 1993 book Travels With Lizbeth (which The Blood would partially parrot), Eighner first became acquainted with Barrus around 1984 after he received a random letter from Barrus expressing his most frequent theme — “publishers are scum.” Eighner was just breaking into writing at the time and found Barrus’ angry candor instructive. The two soon began a three-way correspondence with another gay writer, T.R. Witomski, which lasted for several years.
Though he never met Barrus in person, Eighner came to know him quite well through his letters and phone conversations. Barrus would routinely harangue Eighner with long soliloquies about the evils of publishing. “There was always some great injustice that had been done him — he had been slighted by everyone, betrayed; there was treachery everywhere.” Eighner is quick to point out that he didn’t think Barrus was crazy — just irrationally angry.
“He didn’t think windmills were monsters, he just hated windmills.”
According to Eighner, Barrus and the established gay writer John Preston had a one-sided literary rivalry — and Barrus was the perennial loser. While Barrus’ books were well reviewed in the gay press (The Advocate called his 1987 book Anywhere, Anywhere “a rewarding encounter with compelling characters,”) he was never able to achieve the mainstream success that Preston, Witomski and eventually Eighner were able to. This made him, according to Eighner, “insanely jealous.”
That Barrus might have adopted a Native American persona to facilitate his career strikes Eighner as completely in character. Similar behavior was routine when Eighner knew him. Barrus’ third book, Anywhere, Anywhere is supposedly a novelized account of his service in the Vietnam War, which, Eighner says, “some serious publications thought was really a memoir of a gay soldier.” The book is a love story between wheelchair-bound Chris and his commanding officer in Vietnam, Boss. The pair fell in love fighting alongside each other and upon their return to America they used their feelings for each other to battle the physical and emotional scars inflicted on them by the war. Anywhere, Anywhere was praised in the gay press for revealing the previously untold gay experience in Vietnam. “Of course Barrus had never been near Vietnam or military service,” says Eighner. (When asked if his brother-in-law served in Vietnam, Cheetham replies, “Absolutely not.”)
In a 1994 article he wrote for the Lambda Book Report, however, Barrus claims to be a Vietnam vet, or so it seems: “I knew lots of gay men in Vietnam. Not that I had sex with them. No one was telling their story.”
Barrus, a natural mimic, would routinely take stories that had happened to Preston or Witomski, and tell them as if they had happened to him. Eventually, word got back to the other two that this was going on and they both fell out with him. “As you may have guessed, Barrus doesn’t wear well,” said Eighner. “Whether it’s the first or 15th time you catch someone telling your anecdotes as if they were his own, eventually, almost everyone has a limit.”
Witomski took special umbrage and in a 1992 article published in The Advocate shortly before his death, he labeled Barrus one of “five gay writers we could do without.” Other writers followed suit in their condemnation and Barrus’ delusions of censure became reality. In 1993, with his bridges burning in gay publishing, Barrus met and married his current wife, Tina Giovanni, in San Francisco and disappeared. Eighner never heard from him again. And neither did the Internet until 1996 when something (and someone) curious emerged. In an article now available only through the archives of an obscure Australian company called Infant Massage Australia, a kinder, gentler Barrus appeared in a service article on how to be a loving father. Though the piece is trite and filled with gooey, ’90s parenting clichés (“It takes a real man to nurture”), it appears to be his first experimentation with the caring father persona.
Sometime between then and the Esquire article that launched his career, Nasdijj was born.
Peering out from behind a pair of silver-framed glasses, Irvin Morris sits at his office desk thumbing thoughtfully through a weathered copy of The Blood. A quiet man with sad dark eyes and a closely trimmed head of raven black hair, Morris is focused as he reads, occasionally sighing in dismay when something he sees disturbs him. A giant fake plant hovers over him, draping plastic leaves onto a sizable portion of his cluttered desk. He looks up briefly from the text in time to catch me eyeing the plant strangely. “I don’t know where that thing came from,” he says with a smile, “but I really should do something about it.” But first thing’s first — another possible impostor needs to be dealt with.
Morris has suspected for years that Nasdijj is not who he says he is. A full-blooded Navajo and a professor of literature and Navajo studies at Dine College in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, Morris is among the world’s foremost authorities on Navajo culture. Shortly after The Blood was published, he saw Nasdijj’s name listed on the national index of Native writers. Under the author’s bio, it said Nasdijj claimed his name meant “to become again” in Navajo Athabaskan. This came as news to Morris, who is fluent in Athabaskan. “There is no word ‘Nasdijj’ in the Navajo language,” he explains. “It’s gibberish.”
Not long thereafter, Morris got a call from Sherman Alexie asking if he would take a look at The Blood. After reading the book, Morris felt certain Nasdijj was not Navajo. “He seems to know some facts aboutthe culture, but he has no sensibility of it.”
“Every Navajo he meets seems to live in a hogan,” Morris jokes. “No one has really lived in hogans since HUD housing started being built on the reservation in the ’60s. Only people who are extremely traditional live in hogans.” Traditional people who would not make the kind of cultural errors that Nasdijj depicts them making. Navajo Rose for instance.
Navajo Rose is a character in The Blood who, Nasdijj writes, lives in a hogan near his on the reservation. Navajo Rose is illiterate and, though Nasdijj says she graduated from high school, she somehow has never seen the inside of a library.
Barrus meets Nasdijj? A Google image search brings up this photo of ''Nasdijj by Rosen.''
“You have to be really traditional to have never even seen inside a library,” says Morris.
Nasdijj takes it upon himself to teach Navajo Rose how to read and drives her off the reservation to “White People Town” to see her first library. “She was impressed with all the books,” Nasdijj writes.
Morris bristles at the condescending tone. “We do have libraries here.”
But the error that really made Morris crazy was a culinary one. To thank Nasdijj for his lessons, Navajo Rose routinely brings him Navajo tacos made of mutton. “Now that’s just disgusting,” says Morris of the tacos, which are traditionally made with beef. “We love our mutton but no one would use it in a Navajo taco; the spices just don’t mix.” (Indeed, in my experience on the reservation, the suggestion of a Navajo taco with mutton induces a nearly universal crinkling of noses in distaste.)
While a non-Navajo may see these gaffes as minor, Morris asserts they add up to a character that doesn’t exist. Like a rabbi eating pork or a Hindu beating his cow, they are culturally incriminating; and the book is littered with them, he says. Nasdijj writes that as a boy his mother used to have sings (a religious ceremony) for him to familiarize him with his culture. “That’s a communal activity,” Morris says. “To have a sing by yourself is highly aberrant behavior. Like holding a church service for yourself.”
Most startling and offensive to Morris is Nasdijj’s depiction of Navajo clanship, which plays a vital role in tribal identity. In Geronimo’s Bones, Nasdijj claims his mother was a member of the Water Flowing clan; no such clan exists however. “There’s a Water Flowing Together clan,” explains Morris, “but the difference isn’t insignificant. If I was going to claim my mother’s clanship I would at least make sure to get the name right.”
Nasdijj also writes that because his father was white and without a clan, Nasdijj had no clan and was therefore treated as an “outcast bastard” by other Navajo. This, says Morris, is misrepresentative in that it wrongly portrays the Navajo clan structure as an authoritarian caste system. It is also factually incorrect. “Our lineage is passed on through our mother. If his mother had a clan, he has a clan.”
Immediately after reading the book Morris contacted the Native author registry and asked them to take Nasdijj’s name off the list. Without specific information about Nasdijj’s true identity, however, the registry refused, and Morris let the subject drop.
“I have always been bothered by the false claim to the Dine identity by Nasdijj,” Morris says, “but if I spent my time tracking down every white writer pretending to be Navajo, I’d have no time left to do anything else.”
Indeed, in the long history of Indian appropriation by whites, the Navajo have become the primary target. Of particular ire to the Navajo is mystery writer Tony Hillerman. For the past several decades Hillerman has written detective stories from the perspective of his Navajo protagonists, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Though not actually claiming Navajo ancestry, Hillerman infuses healthy doses of Navajo spirituality into the story through his characters — sometimes accurately, sometimes not. Hillerman’s appropriation is well known and disliked across tribal lines and was the subject of parody in Sherman Alexie’s book Indian Killer. But despite the criticism from Alexie and other Native writers, Hillerman’s success has sparked imitators. So much so that Morris claims the existence of at least 14 white authors living in nearby Gallup, New Mexico, writing Navajo murder mysteries.
Of course, white appropriation of native identity far predates Tony Hillerman. Arguably the most infamous Indian appropriator is rabid segregationist and Ku Klux Klansman Asa Earl Carter, the former speechwriter for George Wallace who penned the notorious “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” speech. After Wallace’s failed presidential bid and the collapse of segregation in the South, Carter assumed the identity of a Cherokee orphan and began publishing memoirs under the name Forrest Carter, allegedly in honor of KKK founder Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. His 1976 book Education of Little Tree was a critically acclaimed best-seller, and despite being outed as fraudulent decades ago, it is, remarkably, still in print.
Though Carter’s is perhaps the most unusual case of Indian impersonation, there are many others, most of whom romanticize Native spirituality and culture, even though they often misrepresent the culture to suit their spiritual or literary aims. What’s interesting about Nasdijj is that, on the surface, anyway, he doesn’t. The Nasdijj persona lacks the spiritual ambitions that Indian appropriators have historically tried to capitalize on. He mentions Navajo spirituality as if only to prove he is familiar with its conventions. Instead, his preoccupation is the social world: the world of men and especially boys.
His Indians are often both spiritually and monetarily poor, sometimes gay, and have AIDS and FAS; mainly they are powerless and sometimes homeless little boys. There are no parents in their lives, other than the author, and an absence of embracing and strengthening culture. He uses these impoverished characters, including his own persona, as a springboard to attack the dominant white culture, which has, apparently, spurned him. In the pantheon of self-appointed Native spokesmen, this puts him more in the company of contemporary gadfly Ward Churchill, who uses his dubious heritage as a soapbox for an airing of his political ideology and personal grievances.
The question that remains is how these frauds are perpetrated in such abundance. A writer, seemingly white in appearance and lacking anything resembling a verifiable personal history, turns in a manuscript filled with sage-like wisdom from an ancient and secretive people and no one bothers to check the facts? Houghton Mifflin’s Anton Mueller, presumably speaking for the publishing industry at large, has an answer: “As you know, we don’t fact-check books.”
There is a Chinese proverb: How is it that a toad this large comes to stand in front of me?
James Dowaliby can tell you. A former vice president of Paramount International Television Group, he decided to pick up a copy of The Boy after reading a review and noting it was about fatherhood, a topic Dowaliby considers too rare in publishing. A single father himself, Dowaliby was astonished by what he read: “I’d never seen a book that so articulated a father’s love for his son.” Dowaliby knew immediately that this was a film he wanted to make and after securing the rights to the book from Nasdijj he was able to bring FilmFour (the filmmaking arm of Channel 4 in the U.K.) into the project. By the end of 2004, a feature-length adaptation of The Boy was greenlighted for development.
After securing the film rights to The Boyand the Dog are Sleeping and negotiating the deal with FilmFour, in early 2004 Dowaliby was finally ready to get down to the business of making a movie with Nasdijj. What Dowaliby didn’t know at the time was the controversy that nearly derailed his new partner’s burgeoning career four years earlier.
When he received his galley copy of The Blood and determined the book was fraudulent, Sherman Alexie not only refused to blurb the book but openly accused Nasdijj of both manufacturing his identity and plagiarism at a private lunch with Nasdijj’s editor, Anton Mueller. Alexie says he begged Mueller to reconsider releasing the book.
“I said, you’re going to pay for this later — this is not real,” Alexie says.
According to Alexie, however, Mueller was unmoved by their conversation. “Basically his attitude was that it’s a great book and the art is more important than the truth.”
“I know I may sound like Tipper Gore here,” says Alexie, “but we have to hold our art to higher standards.”
Mueller acknowledges he spoke with Alexie but says that he found the allegation of plagiarism to be an “odd claim” and unjustified. Regarding Nasdijj’s supposed Native heritage, he says, “I think even Nasdijj would tell you his own biography or parentage is something he has never been entirely sure of.”
After his unsuccessful meeting with Mueller, Alexie sent a letter to Houghton Mifflin, asserting that the author was a fake who had borrowed heavily from several Native writers, including himself. His accusations were dismissed, however, and the publication went forward. “And every time I bring it up, I’m ignored,” says Alexie.
Alexie’s allegations, however, did have some apparent effect. After The Blood came out, Nasdijj’s then-agent, Heather Schroeder, dropped him and Houghton Mifflin declined to publish his next book. Mueller credits Nasdijj’s erratic behavior as the reason: “To be honest, Nasdijj is simply not the most stable person in the world. It showed up in the editing process. His instability wore me down. Sending inappropriate e-mails to people like Ted Conover. His blog. I couldn’t deal with it.”
Did this unstable behavior lead him to suspect the veracity of Nasdijj’s story? “Well, I didn’t publish a second book with him, so that indicates something. But I would say that it was mainly because of his instability.” Yet Mueller still regards Nasdijj as “one of the most, if not the most talented writer I have ever worked with.”
Nasdijj found a new agent, Andrew Stuart, and eventually secured a multibook deal with Ballantine. The Boy was published with the specter of The Blood hanging over the proceedings.
By the time Dowaliby began trying to make a film version of The Boy, he was stuck with a giant toad standing in the road in front of him. Following a few weeks of discussions, FilmFour and Dowaliby agreed to solicit a prominent British screenwriter, who had previously scripted a film about Navajo code talkers, to adapt the book. The writer had spent significant time on the Navajo Nation researching his film and had acquired a great deal of knowledge and respect for the Navajo culture. Immediately after reading The Boy, however, he called Dowaliby with his concerns.
The writer pointed out several inconsistencies in Nasdijj’s story that he found suspicious, particularly Nasdijj’s mischaracterization of Navajo clanship. “What did I know about clanship?” says Dowaliby. “I had taken Nasdijj for his word.”
For both creative and liability purposes, Dowaliby was already fact-checking the book and he promised the writer he would look into the matter further. Dowaliby then began the almost daily routine of trying to draw honest information from Nasdijj about his past. He had little success. Dowaliby needed specifics; Nasdijj gave him none.
“He just kept recycling the same story about sheep camps and migrant work,” Dowaliby says.
The producer intensified his background check of Nasdijj and found out about the Alexie incident. His doubts grew, and Nasdijj’s responses to his queries only raised more questions. As the deadline for hiring the writer neared, Dowaliby concluded that Nasdijj was either unable or unwilling to confirm the details necessary to back up the truth of his story. He briefly considered simply billing the project as “inspired by true events” or the weaker “based on the book by Nasdijj” and not offering it as true in any fashion. “But admitting it was fiction would have ruined the emotional truth — the core of the book.”
Dowaliby refused to go forward with the film until he got answers. Nasdijj refused to speak with him, claiming that he had moved back to the Navajo reservation. Dowaliby did, however, get a response from Nasdijj’s wife, Tina. Though Dowaliby will not repeat what they discussed in confidence, he admits that she came clean about a number of things. Shortly thereafter it became apparent to him “that this wasn’t just a fraud against the intellectual community, but against the entire Navajo nation, and that Nasdijj needed to apologize.”
Dowaliby then contacted FilmFour and told them the project needed to be dropped. “People like Nasdijj,” he says, “can’t exist without some sort of complicity.”
In the Woods: A recent publicity photo of Nasdijj. Photo by Tina Giovanni
What can you do when the truth isn’t enough?
For as long as white writers have been impersonating Indians, Indians have been exposing them as frauds. Yet despite remarkable investigative successes in uncovering the truth, their efforts have been largely ignored.
“For some reason people lose their sense of discernment when it comes to Indians,” says activist and Indian Country Today columnist Suzan Shown-Harjo.
Harjo, who is Muscogee Creek and Cheyenne, has had her own battles outing those she believes to be Native American impostors. She challenged University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who gained notoriety last year when he referred to the victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns,” and who claims to be of Cherokee and Creek descent. Though he has no specialized training in the field, he rose through the university ranks to become chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, largely on the basis of his claimed heritage. Yet as Harjo and other journalists have pointed out, he is not an enrolled member of any federally recognized tribe. Likewise, genealogical research carried out by the Rocky Mountain News and several Native journalists could find no trace of Indian blood in Churchill’s family. Despite the insistence of both the Cherokee and Creek nations that Churchill is not one of them, Churchill maintains his position as a professor of ethnic studies and is frequently paid to lecture on Native and political issues around the country. In response to those who question his identity, he simply denies everything and calls his accusers “blood police.”
“Indian identity has nothing to do with blood quantum,” counters Harjo. “You hear that from the phony baloneys trying to attach themselves to some 1,000th particle of Indian blood.”
For Harjo and many Native Americans, the issue of identity extends well beyond the existential or racial question of “Who am I?” It is a legal issue of citizenship. As sovereign entities, tribes have laws that govern who is and isn’t Native. “Someone who’s Italian doesn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain way,” Harjo explains. “They are Italian by virtue of being an Italian citizen. The same is true in Indian country.
“If I go to Italy and say, ‘I think the world of you people. I speak a little Italian, I love spaghetti, so I’m going to be voting in your next election. Give me preference as an Italian citizen as opposed to non-citizens. Give me a job. Give me grant money. And maybe I’m going to carry on your diplomatic relations with other nations,’ people would lock me up. But that’s what happens. The people that step into our world don’t do so in a respectful way. They rush right in and say ‘I’m your leader, I’m the articulator of your culture.’”
But given the response of many, including prominent publishers and Oprah Winfrey, to the James Frey affair — that his message of redemption is true and so who cares about literal untruths — is it possible that Tim Barrus is using the Nasdijj persona as a vehicle for social justice? After all, AIDS and FAS on the reservation have been themes of his for more than six years. Though his methods are misguided, could his intentions be genuine, and if so, what is the problem with that?
“It’s crazy,” says Harjo, “that’s the problem with it. Why can’t you be who you are, a non-Native person, supporting the same things Indians care about? Why do you have to be one of us to support us? That’s a little loopy, isn’t it? So you have to stand back and say why is that person lying about that? And the answer is because people like that don’t do it for altruistic reasons. It’s about profit. They think pretending to be Indian will help them sell more books.”
And provided the complicity of a publisher, they may be right. On many issues, preachy whites simply lack the political and cultural cachet of someone perceived to be Native American.
“My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian,” says Sherman Alexie. “For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I’m so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow.”
Indeed, the world has had an Indian fetish since the days of P.T. Barnum. Certain steps have been taken to protect cultural integrity — the Native American Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, for instance, makes it a federal crime for anyone not enrolled in or associated with a federally recognized tribe to sell their art as “Indian.” Yet literature, strangely enough, is not covered under the Arts and Craft Act, leaving it vulnerable to exploitation.
“The backbone of multicultural literature,” says Alexie, “is the empathy of its audience — their curiosity for the condition of a group other than themselves. Nasdijj is taking advantage of that empathy.”
If Nasdijj is not Native American, he’s not only misinforming his audience, he’s making it harder for genuine work to come forward. The PEN/Beyond Margins Award is given annually to a Native American writer to help spread “racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.” When Nasdijj accepted the award in 2004, he accepted money and prestige specifically earmarked to help Native Americans share their story.
“The last act of colonialism is for the dominant culture to completely supplant the Native one,” says Alexie. “Nasdijj is disappearing people. With every book he writes he makes Indians disappear.”
In the end it is, ironically, Nasdijj who sums up appropriation most eloquently. In an essay on Louis L’Amour titled “The Saddest Book I Ever Read,” Nasdijj writes, “The accumulated weight of fictions (like L’Amour’s), when added up, form a place that never was and a time that never happened. Fictions like this are murderous. They pass off illusion as fact, stereotype as portraiture... Counterfeit comes to be seen as the genuine article. It kills people. It kills culture. It kills even the shadow of truth.”
Epilogue: When I approached Nasdijj last week, via e-mail after many attempts to find a working phone number, I received a quick reply from someone called Mike Willis, who identified himself as Nasdijj’s assistant. He told me that Nasdijj was high in the Sierra Madres of Mexico without access to phones or the Internet. He offered no sense of when Nasdijj might return, adding that it was “quite sad” that the author couldn’t “defend himself.” When asked for a phone number for either himself or Tina Giovanni, Willis did not reply. Shortly thereafter, Nasdijj’s Web site was taken offline and all mention of his daughter Kree Barrus was removed from the archives of Giovanni’s blog. The next day, that blog was also shut down and queries sent to Nasdijj’s e-mail address went unanswered. But on Monday, the following post appeared on Nasdijj’s blog: “For those seeking Refuge consult the Hyena. Follow those directions to the Old Hotel. To find N, take the stairs to the roof. Bring your medication. The view is magnificent. And safe. You know who you are. Do not answer questions. Sealed. They do not care about you. You know that. Do not be fooled. Someone will. You will connect. Follow the Hyena’s path. Mike.”
Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated memoirists — by passing himself off as Native American?
By MATTHEW FLEISCHER
LA WEEKLY
Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - 3:31 am
Illustrations by Ronald Kurniawan
“So achingly honest it takes your breath away.”
—Miami Herald on The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
In June of 1999 a writer calling himself Nasdijj emerged from obscurity to publish an ode to his adopted son in Esquire. “My son is dead,” he began. “I didn’t say my adopted son is dead. He was my son. My son was a Navajo. He lived six years. They were the best six years of my life.”
The boy’s name was Tommy Nothing Fancy and Nasdijj wrote that he and his wife adopted Tommy as an infant and raised him in their home on the Navajo reservation. At first, Tommy seemed like a healthy baby, albeit one who consistently cried throughout the night. “The doctor at the Indian Health Service said it was nothing. Probably gas.”
But it wasn’t gas. Tommy suffered from a severe case of fetal alcohol syndrome, or FAS. Though Tommy looked normal, his crying continued and as he grew older he began to suffer massive seizures. “I thought I could see him getting duller with every seizure. He knew he was slowly dying.”
Nasdijj knew too, and he tried to give his son as full a life as time would allow. Fishing was Tommy’s favorite thing to do and they went often — sometimes at the expense of his medical care. “For my son hospitals were analogous to torture. Tommy Nothing Fancy wanted to die with his dad and his dog while fishing.”
Nasdijj’s wife wanted Tommy in the hospital receiving modern medical treatment. “She was a modern Indian... She begged. She pleaded. She screamed. She pounded the walls. But the hospitals and doctors never made it better.”
Though the conflict tore his marriage apart, Nasdijj continued to take his son fishing and, true to his last wish, Tommy died of a seizure while on an expedition.
“I was catching brown trout,” Nasdijj wrote. “I was thinking about cooking them for dinner over our campfire when Tommy Nothing Fancy fell. All that shaking. It was as if a bolt of lighting surged uncontrolled through the damaged brain of my son. It wasn’t fair. He was just a little boy who liked to fish... I was holding him when he died... The fish escaped.”
The Esquire piece, as successful as it was heartbreaking, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and helped establish Nasdijj as a prominent new voice in the world of nonfiction. “Esquire’s Cinderella story,” as Salon’s Sean Elder called it, “arrived over the transom, addressed to no one in particular. ‘The cover letter was this screed about how Esquire had never published the work of an American-Indian writer and never would because it’s such a racist publication,’ recalls editor in chief David Granger. ‘And under it was... one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’d ever read.’ By the time the piece was published in the June issue, the writer (who lives on an Indian reservation) had a book contract.”
The contract was for a full-length memoir, The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2000 to great acclaim. It was followed by two more memoirs, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping (Ballantine, 2003), and Geronimo’s Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me (Ballantine, 2004). As if losing a son was not enough, the memoirs portray a lifetime of suffering.
Nasdijj was born on the Navajo reservation in a hogan in 1950, he claims, the son of an abusive white cowboy “who broke, bred, and bootlegged horses” and a Navajo mother. “My mother,” he writes, “was a hopeless drunk. I would use the word ‘alcoholic’ but it’s too polite. It’s a white people word... There is nothing polite about cleaning up your mother in her vomit and dragging her unconscious carcass back to the migrant housing trailer you lived in.”
Nasdijj says his father would sometimes pimp his mother to other migrant workers for “five bucks” and that she died of alcoholism when he was 7. Though their time together was short and turbulent, Nasdijj says his mother instilled in him the Navajo traditions that now inform his work.
His father, he says, was a sexual predator who raped him the night his mother died. Because his father was white, Nasdijj says he was treated like an “outcast bastard” on the reservation. Like Tommy Nothing Fancy, Nasdijj claims to have fetal alcohol syndrome and to have been raised, with his brother, in migrant camps all over the country.
Nasdijj knows how to pull heartstrings. Both The Blood and The Boy revolve around the lives and deaths of his adopted Navajo sons. “Death, to the Navajo, is like the cold wind that blows across the mesa from the north,” Nasdijj writes in The Blood. “We do not speak of it.” But Nasdijj does speak of it. In fact, he speaks of it almost exclusively. Death and suffering are his staples.
“My son comes back to me when I least expect to see his ghostly vision,” he writes. “He lives in my bones and scars.”
But Nasdijj hasn’t built his career purely through the tragic and sensational nature of his stories. His style is an artful blending of poetry and prose, and his work has met with nearly universal critical praise. The Blood “reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society,” wrote Ted Conover in The New York Times Book Review. Rick Bass called it “mesmerizing, apocalyptic, achingly beautiful and redemptive... a powerful American classic,” while Howard Frank Mosher said it was “the best memoir I have read about family love, particularly a father’s love for his son, since A River Runs Through It.”The Blood was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and winner of the Salon Book Award.
The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping was published to more glowing reviews — “vivid and immediate, crackling with anger, humor, and love” (The Washington Post) and “riveting... lyrical... a ragged wail of a song, an ancient song, where we learn what it is to truly be a parent and love a child” (USA Today).
Shortly after The Blood came out, Nasdijj writes, he moved back to the Navajo reservation, where word of his book and his compassion spread. One day while fishing, a Navajo man and his 10-year-old son approached him. The man took Nasdijj aside and explained that he, his wife and their son, Awee, had AIDS. “They were not terrific parents,” Nasdijj wrote “but they wanted this child to have a chance at life.” Nasdijj was that chance. For the next two years Nasdijj cared for Awee until his death from AIDS-related illness.
The Boy won a 2004 PEN/Beyond Margins Award and helped solidify Nasdijj’s place as one of the most celebrated multicultural writers in American literature. But as his successes and literary credentials grew in number so did his skeptics — particularly from within the Native American community. Sherman Alexie first heard of Nasdijj in 1999 after his former editor sent him a galley proof of The Blood for comment. At the time, Alexie, who is Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, was one of the hottest authors in America and was widely considered the most prominent voice in Native American literature. His novel Indian Killer was a New York Times notable book, and his cinematic feature Smoke Signals was the previous year’s Sundance darling, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and winner of the Audience Award. Alexie’s seal of approval would have provided The Blood with a virtual rubber stamp of native authenticity. But it took Alexie only a few pages before he realized he couldn’t vouch for the work. It wasn’t just that similar writing style and cadence that bothered Alexie.
“The whole time I was reading I was thinking, this doesn’t just sound like me, this is me,” he says.
Alexie was born hydrocephalic, a life-threatening condition characterized by water on the brain. At the age of 6 months he underwent brain surgery that saved his life but left him, much like Tommy Nothing Fancy, prone to chronic seizures throughout his childhood. Instead of identifying with Nasdijj’s story, however, Alexie became suspicious.
“At first I was flattered but as I kept reading I noticed he was borrowing from other Native writers too. I thought, this can’t be real.”
Indeed, Nasdijj’s stories also bear uncanny resemblance to the works of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko and especially Michael Dorris, whose memoir The Broken Cord depicts his struggle to care for his adopted FAS-stricken Native Alaskan children. Although there was never more than a similar phrase here and there, Alexie was convinced that the work was fabricated. He wasn’t alone.
Shortly after his review of The Blood came out in The New York Times Book Review, Ted Conover received an Internet greeting card from Nasdijj chastising him for his piece. Conover, an award-winning journalist whose 2003 book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was taken aback. Not only is it highly unusual for an author to attack a reviewer, but it is especially unusual when the review in question was overwhelmingly positive — Conover’s flattering words would grace the paperback cover.
Conover’s main critique was that Nasdijj was “stingy with self-revelation.” He questioned certain inconsistencies in the author’s background, noting that Nasdijj sometimes said his mother was “with the Navajo,” sometimes she was “Navajo, or so she claimed,” and other times she was just “Navajo.” Conover never accused Nasdijj of lying, he merely suggested that the writer be more forthcoming. Nasdijj, however, rejected this suggestion and sent the angry letter, which Conover characterizes as a sprawling diatribe.
“The whole thing was just really bizarre,” Conover says.
Conover sent a copy of the card to Anton Mueller, Nasdijj’s editor at Houghton Mifflin and an acquaintance. “I wondered if he might shed a little light on this,” he says. Mueller, however, never responded and the incident left Conover wondering whether he should have been more thorough in investigating Nasdijj before writing his review. It didn’t take him long to find an answer. Several weeks later, Conover was contacted by an expert in fetal alcohol syndrome who had read his review. She informed him that while she sympathized with the plight of Nasdijj and his son, the symptoms described in The Blood are not actually those of FAS.
Says Conover, “I immediately thought, ‘Oh no, I’ve been duped.’”
Back Then: Tim Barrus in his 1969 Lansing, Michigan high school yearbook photo, right, and with his Key West compatriot, Bill Bowers, circa 1984. Bowers on Barrus: ''He was really a master of publicity.''
This work is a memoir and represents, to the best of my ability and my memory, an accurate reporting of facts and events as I know them and as they have been told to me. I have attempted to protect the privacy of people through the editorial decision to frequently change names, appearances, and locations, as these are not relevant to the focus of the work or the issues the work strives to deal with.
No, these are not the words of James Frey, author of the exaggerated A Million Little Pieces, but of Nasdijj in the author’s note for The Blood. But why? Was this just standard legalese or was Houghton Mifflin concerned about the veracity of this book? Had Sherman Alexie actually gotten through to them? Is the “author’s note” a cynical attempt to protect a piece of fiction passed off as memoir?
Anton Mueller, editor of The Blood, says no. “Nasdijj’s life is hazy and complex, and we both felt it would be a good idea.”
Indeed, getting to the bottom of Nasdijj’s story is no easy task. He alleges a nomadic existence that is virtually free of specific names or places, rendering it difficult to substantiate his claims. A Google search brings up first and foremost his blog — www.nasdijj.typepad.com. (Shortly after Nasdijj was contacted for this story, his blog was taken offline.) A sampling of his almost daily blogs over several months suggests that one (and perhaps only one) thing is clear: Nasdijj is a very angry man. If in the books his passion and fierceness are modulated and concentrated, his blog posts are full of rants and denunciations. Targets include the American health care system, government treatment of Indians, middle-class values and, especially, the publishing industry.
He has recently made a routine of calling ReganBooks über-publisher Judith Regan a “cunt,” a designation that in Nasdijj’s estimation she shares with Gina Centrello of Random House among countless others. “Like the naked Jew who covers his penis before he turns the shower on, there is no fucking hope for you,” he admonishes them.
Non-metaphorical Jews alike are not immune from Nasdijj’s wrath. “Jews [in publishing] would sell the gas chamber shower heads if they thought it might make a buck.” In his acceptance speech for the prestigious PEN/Beyond Margins Award, an edited version of which was delivered in absentia, he took the opportunity to call New York literary agent Binky Urban a “white bitch.” (It’s available online at www.literaryrevolution.com/mr-nasdijj-62804.html.)
Nasdijj’s blog is typical of a recent shift in his work. Though his first book was thoughtful, even tender, as his career has progressed Nasdijj has increasingly taken the role of an artist whose willingness to push boundaries often borders on disturbing. His most recent book, Geronimo’s Bones, brought Nasdijj’s tales of suffering to startling heights, or lows depending on your perspective. Surrealistic accounts of forcible incest by his father read less like rape and more like lukewarm trysts. “His lips to mine. His tongue in my mouth. His words: ‘Nasdijj, please, please love me.’ ...He was a lousy lover with his tongue in my mouth. The same tongue that had just been inside my bowels.”
Though incestuous rape may be difficult to trump, perhaps even more disturbing is Nasdijj’s tendency to sexualize teenage boys. A recent post on his Web site featured a nude photograph of the open anus and testicles of a supposedly cancer-ridden teenager. Nasdijj claims this was done in an effort to humanize the disease, but such pictures are often posted alongside graphic accounts of adolescent sexuality. Indeed, they are sometimes posted alongside naked sadomasochistic pictures of Nasdijj himself.
But Nasdijj’s explicit Web site isn’t the only curiosity a Google search of his name reveals — it also brings up a rather caustic reader review of The Boyand the Dog are Sleeping on BookBrowse (www.bookbrowse.com). “I find this book full of the author’s misinformation regarding his family,” it begins. “I take exception with his opinion of his ‘Anglo father’ and his ‘Navajo Mother.’ I happen to be related to this author and his family is tracable [sic] back through the American Revolution on his father’s side and to Holland on his mother’s side. I resent the fact that he seems to be ashamed of his notable ancestor’s (i.e., Cyrus McCormick, a great grandfather that pioneered nerve block dentistry, couragous mem [sic] that lost their lives at Valley Forge). This kind of dribble [sic] should have been investigated prior to printing or should have been labeled as purely fiction.”
While such a review could easily be dismissed on its own, a Yahoo search of the name attached to it offers up a comprehensive genealogical site. And when the reviewer’s name is searched in conjunction with the name of Nasdijj’s daughter, Kree, one name comes up: Timothy Patrick Barrus.
Barrus, the site says, was born in 1950 (the same year as Nasdijj), is married to Tina Giovanni (also the name of Nasdijj’s wife), and has a daughter named Kree. The site then charts his family lineage back several generations to the 1700s, and, indeed, as the review states, to the McCormick family.
Evidence compiled from other searches seems to corroborate the site.
Just like Nasdijj, Tina Giovanni also hosts a blog — www.autism911.blogspot.com. (It also was taken offline in the past week but has returned minus its archives.) A post from Giovanni in July 2005 shows a picture of Nasdijj’s daughter, Kree, and Kree’s husband, Steve, both of whom, Giovanni says, are teachers in La Paz, Bolivia. A follow-up Internet search reveals the December 13, 2004, meeting minutes of the American Educational Association of La Paz, announcing the hiring of Kree Barrus and Steve Poole as teachers at the American Cooperative School in La Paz. (A photograph of Steve Poole on the American Cooperative School’s Web site confirms that he is the same Steve pictured in Giovanni’s blog.) As for Giovanni, a records search reveals her legal name to be Tina Giovanni Barrus, with addresses in and around Taos, New Mexico. This obviously begs the question — who exactly is Timothy Patrick Barrus?
Yet another Google search, this time for Tim Barrus, brings up the heading “Sadomasochistic Literature” and the following: “Some of the best pornographic fiction to come out of the leatherman tradition is by Tim Barrus whose Mineshaft (1984) describes the sexual exploits of the infamous New York S/M palace of the same name.” The site is GLBTQ: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and queer culture. The section in which Barrus’ name appears is titled “Gay Male Writers Since the 70’s.”
Could the heart-wrenching Navajo memoirist actually have been the gay leather novelist in a previous life?
Fiction? Barrus’ Vietnam novel, above, and Nasdijj’s memoirs. Says his former editor, ''We don’t fact-check books.''
The streets of downtown Lansing, Michigan, are crowded on a Friday night, but not with people; with squirrels. They congregate in the middle of Washington Street, staring with incredulity as a lone car approaches. Despite an impending collision, they don’t bother to move out of the way, apparently shocked to see anyone out at this time of night. The oncoming car doesn’t slow down and crushes one of them into the red brick street. No one is around to notice. It wasn’t always like this.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when Tim Barrus was growing up here, Lansing was a prosperous middle-class community. Washington Street wasn’t a sight of squirrel manslaughter, but the heart of a thriving theater district. Oldsmobile, Fisher Auto Parts and General Motors all had factories nearby.
No cowboy, Maynard Barrus worked as a shift foreman at the Lansing Board of Water and Light. In 1948 he married Barrus’ mother, Jean Anne Steginga, a local Lansing girl of Scandinavian descent. Two years later, Timothy Patrick was born.
Tim Barrus was raised with his younger sister, Suzanne, in a modest three-bedroom home off of Aurelius Road close to the Michigan State University campus. His mother was in fact around throughout his childhood and is still alive today. He has no younger brother.
Barrus attended Eastern High School in Lansing, where he was far from a slayer of suburban values. He was a member of the student council, the forensics team, the forum club as well as a homeroom officer. He was also an actor, playing several minor roles in the 1968 class production of Moliere’s The Physician in Spite of Himself.
“He was a good, good actor — very passionate,” says one former castmate of Barrus’ who wishes not to be named. “He was able to completely absorb himself into the mind of a character in a way that most people are never able to.”
“He was a thinker — very pensive,” the castmate continues. “But he was a warm person, very friendly.”
Beneath his generally pleasant veneer, however, a simmering temper would occasionally boil over.
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“You didn’t know what you were going to say to the guy to make him angry,” recalls Rosemary Taylor, who was also in the cast alongside Barrus, “so you were extremely careful with him because you wanted to stay in his orbit. He was one of those guys that was a little ahead of his time.”
Barrus graduated from high school in 1969 and a year later married Jan Abbott, a local girl from neighboring Okemos. According to a source close to the family, the couple took in foster children to make ends meet. In 1971 Barrus and his wife moved to Largo, Florida, where his sister, Suzanne, lived with her husband, Steve Cheetham. Barrus attended community college while Abbott worked at Winn-Dixie to support him, according to Cheetham. Although Barrus wasn’t publishing his work at the time, he wrote constantly. “He wrote most of his life in one way or another,” says Cheetham by phone from Lansing. “He’s a storyteller. You never knew if he was telling you something true, or part of his imagination or what.” In 1973 the couple moved again before finally winding up back in Lansing. Cheetham never saw Barrus again.
In 1974, Barrus’ only daughter, Kree, was born and, according to sources, the couple also adopted a mildly autistic boy around this time. The boy could have inspired Tommy Nothing Fancy, although several discrepancies exist between his story and Tommy’s.
Nasdijj claims that he adopted Tommy as an infant and that he died at age 6. A Kree Barrus resumé posted online, however, indicates that as a girl she helped care for a mildly autistic 7-year-old. Likewise, an article written by Barrus in 1996 asserts that he adopted his son at age 4 and that he was alive and well as of the ’90s, having survived adolescence and grown “almost as big as I am.”
Cheetham, who was still married to Barrus’ sister at the time, tells a slightly different story. According to him, Barrus and his wife did indeed adopt an autistic boy, but that the boy’s “emotional problems” proved too much for the couple to handle. After less than a year they were forced to give the boy up, and to Cheetham’s best recollection he returned to being a ward of the state.
Address records indicate that the young family lived in an apartment on Cooper Avenue near downtown Lansing until 1975. It is unclear where they moved immediately after that. At some point, Barrus and his wife divorced, and he moved to San Francisco where he began to write — primarily for the gay leather magazine Drummer. Barrus was widely praised for coining the term “leather lit,” and for being one of the founders of the newly formed genre.
In 1984 he moved to Key West and, according to his friend Bill Bowers, took residence with his partner Adolfo. (Barrus would later deny being gay.) There he published his first book, The Mineshaft, a sloppy attempt at erotica, but one that nonetheless garnered him some attention. He soon became a regular contributor to The Weekly News, the local gay newspaper, writing fictional stories reminiscent of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
It was in Key West where Barrus met Bowers, a local artist and photographer, and the two began work on a number of projects together.
“He was a crazy queen. He did things other people just didn’t do,” says Bowers fondly of Barrus. “He was really a master of publicity.”
Bowers remembers collaborating with Barrus on an erotic photo exhibit called Sadomasochism: True Confessions. After the opening night of the show drew lukewarm interest, Barrus assumed the fake name John Hammond and wrote an open letter to The Weekly News attacking the exhibit.
“Sadomasochism is a disease,” the letter read “and gay men who are into that scene are wrong.” He then had Bowers write a response to their mythical antagonist Hammond, inviting him to “take a Valium, take a douche,” and published it in The Weekly News. “The next time Mr. Hammond wants to show his ignorance he should do some heavy research before he rejects his very own brothers.” The ensuing controversy rallied the gay community around the artists and propelled the exhibit to a successful run.
“He would do anything to shock people,” said Bowers. “It works every time if you want a reaction, be it good or bad. Bad is good too, sometimes better.”
Not all of Barrus’ acquaintances found his antics quite so charming however. Lars Eighner grew quite tired of his routine. “If you look up dilettante in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Tim Barrus,” says Eighner.
Best known for his 1993 book Travels With Lizbeth (which The Blood would partially parrot), Eighner first became acquainted with Barrus around 1984 after he received a random letter from Barrus expressing his most frequent theme — “publishers are scum.” Eighner was just breaking into writing at the time and found Barrus’ angry candor instructive. The two soon began a three-way correspondence with another gay writer, T.R. Witomski, which lasted for several years.
Though he never met Barrus in person, Eighner came to know him quite well through his letters and phone conversations. Barrus would routinely harangue Eighner with long soliloquies about the evils of publishing. “There was always some great injustice that had been done him — he had been slighted by everyone, betrayed; there was treachery everywhere.” Eighner is quick to point out that he didn’t think Barrus was crazy — just irrationally angry.
“He didn’t think windmills were monsters, he just hated windmills.”
According to Eighner, Barrus and the established gay writer John Preston had a one-sided literary rivalry — and Barrus was the perennial loser. While Barrus’ books were well reviewed in the gay press (The Advocate called his 1987 book Anywhere, Anywhere “a rewarding encounter with compelling characters,”) he was never able to achieve the mainstream success that Preston, Witomski and eventually Eighner were able to. This made him, according to Eighner, “insanely jealous.”
That Barrus might have adopted a Native American persona to facilitate his career strikes Eighner as completely in character. Similar behavior was routine when Eighner knew him. Barrus’ third book, Anywhere, Anywhere is supposedly a novelized account of his service in the Vietnam War, which, Eighner says, “some serious publications thought was really a memoir of a gay soldier.” The book is a love story between wheelchair-bound Chris and his commanding officer in Vietnam, Boss. The pair fell in love fighting alongside each other and upon their return to America they used their feelings for each other to battle the physical and emotional scars inflicted on them by the war. Anywhere, Anywhere was praised in the gay press for revealing the previously untold gay experience in Vietnam. “Of course Barrus had never been near Vietnam or military service,” says Eighner. (When asked if his brother-in-law served in Vietnam, Cheetham replies, “Absolutely not.”)
In a 1994 article he wrote for the Lambda Book Report, however, Barrus claims to be a Vietnam vet, or so it seems: “I knew lots of gay men in Vietnam. Not that I had sex with them. No one was telling their story.”
Barrus, a natural mimic, would routinely take stories that had happened to Preston or Witomski, and tell them as if they had happened to him. Eventually, word got back to the other two that this was going on and they both fell out with him. “As you may have guessed, Barrus doesn’t wear well,” said Eighner. “Whether it’s the first or 15th time you catch someone telling your anecdotes as if they were his own, eventually, almost everyone has a limit.”
Witomski took special umbrage and in a 1992 article published in The Advocate shortly before his death, he labeled Barrus one of “five gay writers we could do without.” Other writers followed suit in their condemnation and Barrus’ delusions of censure became reality. In 1993, with his bridges burning in gay publishing, Barrus met and married his current wife, Tina Giovanni, in San Francisco and disappeared. Eighner never heard from him again. And neither did the Internet until 1996 when something (and someone) curious emerged. In an article now available only through the archives of an obscure Australian company called Infant Massage Australia, a kinder, gentler Barrus appeared in a service article on how to be a loving father. Though the piece is trite and filled with gooey, ’90s parenting clichés (“It takes a real man to nurture”), it appears to be his first experimentation with the caring father persona.
Sometime between then and the Esquire article that launched his career, Nasdijj was born.
Peering out from behind a pair of silver-framed glasses, Irvin Morris sits at his office desk thumbing thoughtfully through a weathered copy of The Blood. A quiet man with sad dark eyes and a closely trimmed head of raven black hair, Morris is focused as he reads, occasionally sighing in dismay when something he sees disturbs him. A giant fake plant hovers over him, draping plastic leaves onto a sizable portion of his cluttered desk. He looks up briefly from the text in time to catch me eyeing the plant strangely. “I don’t know where that thing came from,” he says with a smile, “but I really should do something about it.” But first thing’s first — another possible impostor needs to be dealt with.
Morris has suspected for years that Nasdijj is not who he says he is. A full-blooded Navajo and a professor of literature and Navajo studies at Dine College in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, Morris is among the world’s foremost authorities on Navajo culture. Shortly after The Blood was published, he saw Nasdijj’s name listed on the national index of Native writers. Under the author’s bio, it said Nasdijj claimed his name meant “to become again” in Navajo Athabaskan. This came as news to Morris, who is fluent in Athabaskan. “There is no word ‘Nasdijj’ in the Navajo language,” he explains. “It’s gibberish.”
Not long thereafter, Morris got a call from Sherman Alexie asking if he would take a look at The Blood. After reading the book, Morris felt certain Nasdijj was not Navajo. “He seems to know some facts aboutthe culture, but he has no sensibility of it.”
“Every Navajo he meets seems to live in a hogan,” Morris jokes. “No one has really lived in hogans since HUD housing started being built on the reservation in the ’60s. Only people who are extremely traditional live in hogans.” Traditional people who would not make the kind of cultural errors that Nasdijj depicts them making. Navajo Rose for instance.
Navajo Rose is a character in The Blood who, Nasdijj writes, lives in a hogan near his on the reservation. Navajo Rose is illiterate and, though Nasdijj says she graduated from high school, she somehow has never seen the inside of a library.
Barrus meets Nasdijj? A Google image search brings up this photo of ''Nasdijj by Rosen.''
“You have to be really traditional to have never even seen inside a library,” says Morris.
Nasdijj takes it upon himself to teach Navajo Rose how to read and drives her off the reservation to “White People Town” to see her first library. “She was impressed with all the books,” Nasdijj writes.
Morris bristles at the condescending tone. “We do have libraries here.”
But the error that really made Morris crazy was a culinary one. To thank Nasdijj for his lessons, Navajo Rose routinely brings him Navajo tacos made of mutton. “Now that’s just disgusting,” says Morris of the tacos, which are traditionally made with beef. “We love our mutton but no one would use it in a Navajo taco; the spices just don’t mix.” (Indeed, in my experience on the reservation, the suggestion of a Navajo taco with mutton induces a nearly universal crinkling of noses in distaste.)
While a non-Navajo may see these gaffes as minor, Morris asserts they add up to a character that doesn’t exist. Like a rabbi eating pork or a Hindu beating his cow, they are culturally incriminating; and the book is littered with them, he says. Nasdijj writes that as a boy his mother used to have sings (a religious ceremony) for him to familiarize him with his culture. “That’s a communal activity,” Morris says. “To have a sing by yourself is highly aberrant behavior. Like holding a church service for yourself.”
Most startling and offensive to Morris is Nasdijj’s depiction of Navajo clanship, which plays a vital role in tribal identity. In Geronimo’s Bones, Nasdijj claims his mother was a member of the Water Flowing clan; no such clan exists however. “There’s a Water Flowing Together clan,” explains Morris, “but the difference isn’t insignificant. If I was going to claim my mother’s clanship I would at least make sure to get the name right.”
Nasdijj also writes that because his father was white and without a clan, Nasdijj had no clan and was therefore treated as an “outcast bastard” by other Navajo. This, says Morris, is misrepresentative in that it wrongly portrays the Navajo clan structure as an authoritarian caste system. It is also factually incorrect. “Our lineage is passed on through our mother. If his mother had a clan, he has a clan.”
Immediately after reading the book Morris contacted the Native author registry and asked them to take Nasdijj’s name off the list. Without specific information about Nasdijj’s true identity, however, the registry refused, and Morris let the subject drop.
“I have always been bothered by the false claim to the Dine identity by Nasdijj,” Morris says, “but if I spent my time tracking down every white writer pretending to be Navajo, I’d have no time left to do anything else.”
Indeed, in the long history of Indian appropriation by whites, the Navajo have become the primary target. Of particular ire to the Navajo is mystery writer Tony Hillerman. For the past several decades Hillerman has written detective stories from the perspective of his Navajo protagonists, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Though not actually claiming Navajo ancestry, Hillerman infuses healthy doses of Navajo spirituality into the story through his characters — sometimes accurately, sometimes not. Hillerman’s appropriation is well known and disliked across tribal lines and was the subject of parody in Sherman Alexie’s book Indian Killer. But despite the criticism from Alexie and other Native writers, Hillerman’s success has sparked imitators. So much so that Morris claims the existence of at least 14 white authors living in nearby Gallup, New Mexico, writing Navajo murder mysteries.
Of course, white appropriation of native identity far predates Tony Hillerman. Arguably the most infamous Indian appropriator is rabid segregationist and Ku Klux Klansman Asa Earl Carter, the former speechwriter for George Wallace who penned the notorious “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” speech. After Wallace’s failed presidential bid and the collapse of segregation in the South, Carter assumed the identity of a Cherokee orphan and began publishing memoirs under the name Forrest Carter, allegedly in honor of KKK founder Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. His 1976 book Education of Little Tree was a critically acclaimed best-seller, and despite being outed as fraudulent decades ago, it is, remarkably, still in print.
Though Carter’s is perhaps the most unusual case of Indian impersonation, there are many others, most of whom romanticize Native spirituality and culture, even though they often misrepresent the culture to suit their spiritual or literary aims. What’s interesting about Nasdijj is that, on the surface, anyway, he doesn’t. The Nasdijj persona lacks the spiritual ambitions that Indian appropriators have historically tried to capitalize on. He mentions Navajo spirituality as if only to prove he is familiar with its conventions. Instead, his preoccupation is the social world: the world of men and especially boys.
His Indians are often both spiritually and monetarily poor, sometimes gay, and have AIDS and FAS; mainly they are powerless and sometimes homeless little boys. There are no parents in their lives, other than the author, and an absence of embracing and strengthening culture. He uses these impoverished characters, including his own persona, as a springboard to attack the dominant white culture, which has, apparently, spurned him. In the pantheon of self-appointed Native spokesmen, this puts him more in the company of contemporary gadfly Ward Churchill, who uses his dubious heritage as a soapbox for an airing of his political ideology and personal grievances.
The question that remains is how these frauds are perpetrated in such abundance. A writer, seemingly white in appearance and lacking anything resembling a verifiable personal history, turns in a manuscript filled with sage-like wisdom from an ancient and secretive people and no one bothers to check the facts? Houghton Mifflin’s Anton Mueller, presumably speaking for the publishing industry at large, has an answer: “As you know, we don’t fact-check books.”
There is a Chinese proverb: How is it that a toad this large comes to stand in front of me?
James Dowaliby can tell you. A former vice president of Paramount International Television Group, he decided to pick up a copy of The Boy after reading a review and noting it was about fatherhood, a topic Dowaliby considers too rare in publishing. A single father himself, Dowaliby was astonished by what he read: “I’d never seen a book that so articulated a father’s love for his son.” Dowaliby knew immediately that this was a film he wanted to make and after securing the rights to the book from Nasdijj he was able to bring FilmFour (the filmmaking arm of Channel 4 in the U.K.) into the project. By the end of 2004, a feature-length adaptation of The Boy was greenlighted for development.
After securing the film rights to The Boyand the Dog are Sleeping and negotiating the deal with FilmFour, in early 2004 Dowaliby was finally ready to get down to the business of making a movie with Nasdijj. What Dowaliby didn’t know at the time was the controversy that nearly derailed his new partner’s burgeoning career four years earlier.
When he received his galley copy of The Blood and determined the book was fraudulent, Sherman Alexie not only refused to blurb the book but openly accused Nasdijj of both manufacturing his identity and plagiarism at a private lunch with Nasdijj’s editor, Anton Mueller. Alexie says he begged Mueller to reconsider releasing the book.
“I said, you’re going to pay for this later — this is not real,” Alexie says.
According to Alexie, however, Mueller was unmoved by their conversation. “Basically his attitude was that it’s a great book and the art is more important than the truth.”
“I know I may sound like Tipper Gore here,” says Alexie, “but we have to hold our art to higher standards.”
Mueller acknowledges he spoke with Alexie but says that he found the allegation of plagiarism to be an “odd claim” and unjustified. Regarding Nasdijj’s supposed Native heritage, he says, “I think even Nasdijj would tell you his own biography or parentage is something he has never been entirely sure of.”
After his unsuccessful meeting with Mueller, Alexie sent a letter to Houghton Mifflin, asserting that the author was a fake who had borrowed heavily from several Native writers, including himself. His accusations were dismissed, however, and the publication went forward. “And every time I bring it up, I’m ignored,” says Alexie.
Alexie’s allegations, however, did have some apparent effect. After The Blood came out, Nasdijj’s then-agent, Heather Schroeder, dropped him and Houghton Mifflin declined to publish his next book. Mueller credits Nasdijj’s erratic behavior as the reason: “To be honest, Nasdijj is simply not the most stable person in the world. It showed up in the editing process. His instability wore me down. Sending inappropriate e-mails to people like Ted Conover. His blog. I couldn’t deal with it.”
Did this unstable behavior lead him to suspect the veracity of Nasdijj’s story? “Well, I didn’t publish a second book with him, so that indicates something. But I would say that it was mainly because of his instability.” Yet Mueller still regards Nasdijj as “one of the most, if not the most talented writer I have ever worked with.”
Nasdijj found a new agent, Andrew Stuart, and eventually secured a multibook deal with Ballantine. The Boy was published with the specter of The Blood hanging over the proceedings.
By the time Dowaliby began trying to make a film version of The Boy, he was stuck with a giant toad standing in the road in front of him. Following a few weeks of discussions, FilmFour and Dowaliby agreed to solicit a prominent British screenwriter, who had previously scripted a film about Navajo code talkers, to adapt the book. The writer had spent significant time on the Navajo Nation researching his film and had acquired a great deal of knowledge and respect for the Navajo culture. Immediately after reading The Boy, however, he called Dowaliby with his concerns.
The writer pointed out several inconsistencies in Nasdijj’s story that he found suspicious, particularly Nasdijj’s mischaracterization of Navajo clanship. “What did I know about clanship?” says Dowaliby. “I had taken Nasdijj for his word.”
For both creative and liability purposes, Dowaliby was already fact-checking the book and he promised the writer he would look into the matter further. Dowaliby then began the almost daily routine of trying to draw honest information from Nasdijj about his past. He had little success. Dowaliby needed specifics; Nasdijj gave him none.
“He just kept recycling the same story about sheep camps and migrant work,” Dowaliby says.
The producer intensified his background check of Nasdijj and found out about the Alexie incident. His doubts grew, and Nasdijj’s responses to his queries only raised more questions. As the deadline for hiring the writer neared, Dowaliby concluded that Nasdijj was either unable or unwilling to confirm the details necessary to back up the truth of his story. He briefly considered simply billing the project as “inspired by true events” or the weaker “based on the book by Nasdijj” and not offering it as true in any fashion. “But admitting it was fiction would have ruined the emotional truth — the core of the book.”
Dowaliby refused to go forward with the film until he got answers. Nasdijj refused to speak with him, claiming that he had moved back to the Navajo reservation. Dowaliby did, however, get a response from Nasdijj’s wife, Tina. Though Dowaliby will not repeat what they discussed in confidence, he admits that she came clean about a number of things. Shortly thereafter it became apparent to him “that this wasn’t just a fraud against the intellectual community, but against the entire Navajo nation, and that Nasdijj needed to apologize.”
Dowaliby then contacted FilmFour and told them the project needed to be dropped. “People like Nasdijj,” he says, “can’t exist without some sort of complicity.”
In the Woods: A recent publicity photo of Nasdijj. Photo by Tina Giovanni
What can you do when the truth isn’t enough?
For as long as white writers have been impersonating Indians, Indians have been exposing them as frauds. Yet despite remarkable investigative successes in uncovering the truth, their efforts have been largely ignored.
“For some reason people lose their sense of discernment when it comes to Indians,” says activist and Indian Country Today columnist Suzan Shown-Harjo.
Harjo, who is Muscogee Creek and Cheyenne, has had her own battles outing those she believes to be Native American impostors. She challenged University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who gained notoriety last year when he referred to the victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns,” and who claims to be of Cherokee and Creek descent. Though he has no specialized training in the field, he rose through the university ranks to become chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, largely on the basis of his claimed heritage. Yet as Harjo and other journalists have pointed out, he is not an enrolled member of any federally recognized tribe. Likewise, genealogical research carried out by the Rocky Mountain News and several Native journalists could find no trace of Indian blood in Churchill’s family. Despite the insistence of both the Cherokee and Creek nations that Churchill is not one of them, Churchill maintains his position as a professor of ethnic studies and is frequently paid to lecture on Native and political issues around the country. In response to those who question his identity, he simply denies everything and calls his accusers “blood police.”
“Indian identity has nothing to do with blood quantum,” counters Harjo. “You hear that from the phony baloneys trying to attach themselves to some 1,000th particle of Indian blood.”
For Harjo and many Native Americans, the issue of identity extends well beyond the existential or racial question of “Who am I?” It is a legal issue of citizenship. As sovereign entities, tribes have laws that govern who is and isn’t Native. “Someone who’s Italian doesn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain way,” Harjo explains. “They are Italian by virtue of being an Italian citizen. The same is true in Indian country.
“If I go to Italy and say, ‘I think the world of you people. I speak a little Italian, I love spaghetti, so I’m going to be voting in your next election. Give me preference as an Italian citizen as opposed to non-citizens. Give me a job. Give me grant money. And maybe I’m going to carry on your diplomatic relations with other nations,’ people would lock me up. But that’s what happens. The people that step into our world don’t do so in a respectful way. They rush right in and say ‘I’m your leader, I’m the articulator of your culture.’”
But given the response of many, including prominent publishers and Oprah Winfrey, to the James Frey affair — that his message of redemption is true and so who cares about literal untruths — is it possible that Tim Barrus is using the Nasdijj persona as a vehicle for social justice? After all, AIDS and FAS on the reservation have been themes of his for more than six years. Though his methods are misguided, could his intentions be genuine, and if so, what is the problem with that?
“It’s crazy,” says Harjo, “that’s the problem with it. Why can’t you be who you are, a non-Native person, supporting the same things Indians care about? Why do you have to be one of us to support us? That’s a little loopy, isn’t it? So you have to stand back and say why is that person lying about that? And the answer is because people like that don’t do it for altruistic reasons. It’s about profit. They think pretending to be Indian will help them sell more books.”
And provided the complicity of a publisher, they may be right. On many issues, preachy whites simply lack the political and cultural cachet of someone perceived to be Native American.
“My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian,” says Sherman Alexie. “For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I’m so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow.”
Indeed, the world has had an Indian fetish since the days of P.T. Barnum. Certain steps have been taken to protect cultural integrity — the Native American Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, for instance, makes it a federal crime for anyone not enrolled in or associated with a federally recognized tribe to sell their art as “Indian.” Yet literature, strangely enough, is not covered under the Arts and Craft Act, leaving it vulnerable to exploitation.
“The backbone of multicultural literature,” says Alexie, “is the empathy of its audience — their curiosity for the condition of a group other than themselves. Nasdijj is taking advantage of that empathy.”
If Nasdijj is not Native American, he’s not only misinforming his audience, he’s making it harder for genuine work to come forward. The PEN/Beyond Margins Award is given annually to a Native American writer to help spread “racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.” When Nasdijj accepted the award in 2004, he accepted money and prestige specifically earmarked to help Native Americans share their story.
“The last act of colonialism is for the dominant culture to completely supplant the Native one,” says Alexie. “Nasdijj is disappearing people. With every book he writes he makes Indians disappear.”
In the end it is, ironically, Nasdijj who sums up appropriation most eloquently. In an essay on Louis L’Amour titled “The Saddest Book I Ever Read,” Nasdijj writes, “The accumulated weight of fictions (like L’Amour’s), when added up, form a place that never was and a time that never happened. Fictions like this are murderous. They pass off illusion as fact, stereotype as portraiture... Counterfeit comes to be seen as the genuine article. It kills people. It kills culture. It kills even the shadow of truth.”
Epilogue: When I approached Nasdijj last week, via e-mail after many attempts to find a working phone number, I received a quick reply from someone called Mike Willis, who identified himself as Nasdijj’s assistant. He told me that Nasdijj was high in the Sierra Madres of Mexico without access to phones or the Internet. He offered no sense of when Nasdijj might return, adding that it was “quite sad” that the author couldn’t “defend himself.” When asked for a phone number for either himself or Tina Giovanni, Willis did not reply. Shortly thereafter, Nasdijj’s Web site was taken offline and all mention of his daughter Kree Barrus was removed from the archives of Giovanni’s blog. The next day, that blog was also shut down and queries sent to Nasdijj’s e-mail address went unanswered. But on Monday, the following post appeared on Nasdijj’s blog: “For those seeking Refuge consult the Hyena. Follow those directions to the Old Hotel. To find N, take the stairs to the roof. Bring your medication. The view is magnificent. And safe. You know who you are. Do not answer questions. Sealed. They do not care about you. You know that. Do not be fooled. Someone will. You will connect. Follow the Hyena’s path. Mike.”
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