Home of the Brave 

 It's a great book with only one problem, that being that it's a fabrication. Brother Eagle, Sister Sky is pretty much made up from start to finish. Who wrote these pretty words? Not the Suquomish leader Seattle. Not even Susan Jeffers, though she did some rewriting..  

This speech, by now probably the most famous single piece of Indian oratory was actually written by a University of Texas professor named Ted Perry in 1970. Perry was hired by the Southern Baptist Convention to write a documentary film on the environment. He came across a disputed (and probably fraudulent) version of a speech Seattle may or may not have given and rewrote it to express 1970s environmental ideas. At most he used a few lines of what Seattle may have said. At Expo 74 in Spokane, Washington, portions of the Perry/Seattle speech were plastered across the wall at the U.S. pavilion. This worked out well, since Expo 74's theme was the environment. The rest, as they say, is history.  

The controversy concerning the origins of the speech began just as Brother Eagle, Sister Sky began its long repose at the top of the best-seller lists. The fact that this book of Seattle's was written by and for white environmentalists was awkward matter but one the publishers handled expeditiously. The bestseller lists simply reclassified it from non-fiction to another category: advice, how-to and m miscellaneous. (That's where they put the cat books.) And they did more. They brought out new ads featuring an endorsement from a certain Jewell Praying Wolf James, said to be Seattle's great grand-nephew, who offered congratulations and thanks to the publisher for quote "taking our famous chief's words and transforming them into an experience all can use to stimulate an awareness of a natural world that is rapidly losing it's beauty." Brother Eagle, Sister Sky continued to sell and sell and sell. But one reason the authenticity of Brother Eagle/ Sister Sky became a point of challenge can be found in another story. This one concerns The Education of Little Tree: A True Story, by Forrest Carter, the autobiography of a Cherokee Indian's boyhood in Tennessee. Published by the University of New Mexico Press with virtually no promotion, it slowly found a mass audience and by the spring of 1991 it soared to the top of the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Reviewers and the public at large loved its strong environmental message and it proved especially popular with younger readers.  

So now you're thinking, ha, Ted Perry again, right? Well, not this time. The Education of Little Tree was in fact written by Forrest Carter. The problem was Forrest Carter turned out to be Asa Carter. And Asa Carter turned out number one not to be Cherokee, and , number two, to have been a legendary white supremacist. In the 1960s he led both a Ku Klux Klan fringe group. In those days he was living large as a speech writer for Alabama Governor George Wallace. It was Asa Carter who wrote the electrifying battle cry: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever."  

When all this was revealed in devastating detail by Dan Carter, a professor at Emory University in October, 1991, there was mumbling about how Forrest must have mellowed over the years. That when he wrote Little Tree he was a different guy altogether. Yet a close reading of Little Tree, and his novel The Outlaw Josey Wales, which later became a Clint Eastwood movie about Comanches, shows a consistent world view obsessed with racial purity, of family and kin. In all of his writing, including the speeches he wrote for George Wallace, it's us against the world. Trust no one. So what happened? The book was reclassified from non-fiction to fiction, and, like Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, continues to sell. Finally, it didn't really matter that the first Indian autobiography to win a mass audience of young people in the United States was both fake and written by a committed racist. It seems the penalty for fraudulent Indian books these days is getting moved from one bestseller list to another. The next editions of Little Tree will include a new introduction by an Osage Indian academic that will discuss the controversy, agree that Asa Carter is the author, but still endorse the book as an accurate portrait of Cherokee life.  

I've written about these two books at some length because to me they're perfect examples of the ideological swamp Indian people find ourselves in these days. We are witnessing a new age in the objectification of American Indian history and culture, one that doesn't even need Indians except as endorsers. Our past is turning into pieces of clever screenplay. And even the exposure of an Indian book as a total fake turns out to be little more than a slight embarrassment, easily remedied. The Indian intellectual community responded to this scandal with a deafening silence. Kurt Cobain, the late prince of grunge, appropriately from the city that bears the name of the Suquamish leader that so captivated Ted Perry and Susan Jeffers, wrote a lyric that described pretty well our reaction: "I find it ha In the context of these publications and their checkered past I can't help thinking of Vine Deloria Jr., a Lakota and one of our best intellectuals. In 1969 he wrote Custer Died For Your Sins, a tough, funny book with the subtitle "An Indian Manifesto." Fortunate timing helped make it a best-seller. It was at the crest of the original Red Power movement of the 1960s: there were hunt-ins, fish-ins and the occupation of Alcatraz Island. The Unjust Society, by Harold Cardinal, a Canadian Indian, and Stan Steiner's The New Indians seemed certain to be the first of a new wave of books about our current situation. But something else happened. Americans became fascinated with Indians all right, but not the ones still here. Instead, Americans turned to Touch the Earth, a sepia-toned volume of famous chiefs greatest rhetorical hits. They read The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox, by a living Sioux chief no living Sioux had ever heard of. Chief Red Fox claimed to have personally witnessed the Battle of Little Big Horn. (This book was quickly revealed to be fake, but only after it sold more than any serious book about Indians ever had.) And, of course, the mother of all Indian books, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an entirely reasonable history of Indians that ends in 1890, without even a hint that some of us survived.  

Well, all of this blew Deloria's mind, and in 1973 he drew this analogy. Imagine it's 1955, right after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling on desegregation, in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott. Martin Luther King holds a press conference, but it's a disaster; all the reporters ask about are about the old days on the plantation and the origin of Negro spirituals. The freedom struggle pushes on, undaunted. Americans are transfixed by these dramatic events, and rush out to buy new books on the cultural achievements of Africa in 1300. Two new Black writers, James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones publish important books, but they're ignored in favor of a new history called Bury My Heart at Jamestown. People are terribly moved. Deloria continues, "People reading the book vow never again to buy or sell slaves." Considering that we have just lived through over twenty years of the most significant Indian political movement in a century, including much new sensitivity and education, we might have thought things had improved. But the familiarity of the situation around these recent publications leaves me feeling things haven't gotten any better, only more subtle. The discourse on Indian art or politics or culture, even among people of good will, is consistently frustrated by the distinctive type of racism that confronts Indians today. This romanticism. Simply put, romanticism is a highly developed, deeply ideological system of racism towards Indians that encompasses language, culture, and history. From the beginning of this history the specialized vocabulary created by Europeans for "Indians" ensured our status as strange and primitive. Our political leaders might have been called kings or lords, instead they were chiefs. Indian religious leaders could have just as accurately been called bishop or minister, instead they were medicine men. Instead of soldier or fighter, warrior. And, perhaps, most significantly, tribe instead of nation. (For a more recent example of this, note how most press accounts often talk about ethnic troubles in Europe, but tribal conflicts in Southern Africa.) Mao Tse Tung and Beethoven are not translated from Chinese and French, language became and remains a tool by which we are made the "Other;" the Lakota name Tatonka Iotanka becomes Sitting Bull.  

This is not to say that bishop was necessarily more accurate than medicine man, or that we have not made a term like warrior our own, or that translated Indian names aren't beautiful. It is to recognize that there are political implications to those decisions, and it was not one of multicultural understanding. The language exoticises and this exoticization has encompassed and permitted a range of historical responses from destruction to idealization.  

Because our numbers are so few, the battle for a more realistic and positive treatment in the mass media has always been a necessary component of our struggle. The new traditionalism that does exist in Indian Country was won at great expense and effort. It was only fifty years ago that Indian languages and ceremonies were discouraged and in many cases outlawed.