Telling Tales Read online

  He and his wife Angele and their children were living a Walden-like dream, but in 1914 his happy life was interrupted by the First World War. Grey Owl, as he was now called, enlisted in the Canadian Army and was shipped out to France to fight. So began a hiatus of several years during which time he was injured by shrapnel and mustard gas and sent to hospital in England to recuperate. Here, he rekindled an old love with a girl from Hastings and even made a brief bigamous marriage, but as soon as he was well enough he returned to Canada and his first love: not Angele, for he was to marry more than once again, but the life of the tepee-dwelling, beaver-trapping, fire-making brave.

  Then along came Pony. Her real name was Anahereo but everyone called her by her nickname. She was a charismatic, very beautiful Iroquoi woman who was destined to change him from a trapper to an animal-lover, and from a runaway to a celebrity. She was not yet twenty when she met the tall exotic Grey Owl (by now in his late thirties) but her passion for nurturing animals convinced him to move in with her and a pair of rescued baby beavers, give up trapping and start writing and lecturing about the precious and dying way of life of the Indians, whose lives were already becoming fatally tainted with the greedy unsustainable ways of white men.

  Perhaps because he had read so much as a child and an invalid, Grey Owl was able to write engagingly enough about his experiences of life on the reservation for editors to take notice. His first pieces were for magazines such as Country Life and the publication of the Canadian Forestry Association (CFA), Forests and Outdoors. His pieces were on such subjects (as enthralling to deskbound readers then as now) as ‘The Perils of Woods Travel’, ‘The King of the Beavers’ and ‘A Day in a Hidden Town’. The CFA took him up as something of a mascot and encouraged his burgeoning media career, even making a film about his life with Pony and their pet beavers. By the time he became the subject of the 1935 bestseller, Grey Owl and the Beaver (Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd), he had started the lecture tours that would make him famous all over the world. First in America then Europe, he would attend societies and educational institutes dressed in full Ojibwa regalia, promoting not only his writings but a general ethos of sustainability and respect for nature. By now an ardent critic of trapping, which had, he felt, become something done more for financial gain than necessary subsistence, he was beloved by women and children (as well as the usual adventure-minded males) as a kind and philosophical noble savage. It would be a long time, of course, until the Native American world would find a critical voice loud enough to speak out against this sort of objectification.

  Amazingly, on one of his lecture tours to England Grey Owl gave a talk at a hall in his hometown of Hastings, which was attended by the very aunts who had tolerated his boyish obsession with all things Indian several decades previously. They of course recognized the nephew they had raised from birth, but out of love and respect for a boy who finally seemed to have found happiness and success, kept his secret to themselves. How very English.

  When Grey Owl finally died in 1938, his lungs weakened from mustard gas and his constitution not up to the years of travelling and working outdoors, his true identity was quickly revealed to a disbelieving public. He had looked and acted – and, crucially, written – the part so completely, that it was hard to believe this tall, craggy-faced, wise old Indian was in fact no more than a fanciful lad from Hastings.

  The pattern of the hoaxer as a fatherless child who retreats into an imaginary world and ends up involving the public in his fantasies is becoming a familiar one. But there is a new significance, in terms of the way we think about authorship, in Grey Owl’s story. In a sense, the books and articles he wrote were not hoaxes at all, because although they were the work of Grey Owl and Grey Owl did not exist (in that that was the name given to the imagined Apache character he presented to the Indians he met in Canada), the content of the writings was absolutely true. The author’s knowledge of the environment he called home was profound. His passion for the traditional ways of life he advocated was real, and strong. And his radical message, that the whole world should join in protecting faraway wildernesses, was based on an understanding of the deleterious effects of global industrialization that was quite ahead of his time. So when a young Queen Elizabeth and her sister listened to this strange visitor speak his creed in Buckingham Palace in the 1930s, they were in the presence of an inspired man who, despite not having the origins he claimed, came with an important and undeniably true message.

  Although easy to see with hindsight, his unmasking in a series of newspaper articles after his death caused considerable problems for those institutions who had been involved with him. His publisher, Lovat Dickson, although initially sceptical of articles such as that in The Times which presented the evidence for Belaney and Grey Owl being one and the same, finally had to admit he had been fooled. He immediately halted publication of his work. The Canadian conservation organizations he had worked with were also tarnished by their association with the hoax, and it would be some decades before Canadian, Indian and British authorities would come to see Belaney’s project as one undertaken in good – if peculiarly eccentric – faith.

  CHIEF BUFFALO CHILD LONG LANCE

  AROUND THE SAME time as Grey Owl was passing himself off as an Apache son, the African-American son of a school janitor from North Carolina was playing a similar game. Long before he wrote his supposed autobiography, Sylvester Clark Long began to create fictions around his origins, telling the world – and the board of the Indian school he wanted to attend – that he was Cherokee. Looking like he might be, and able to speak a few words of the Cherokee language, he easily passed and joined the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in a class he shared with the soon to be legendary Geronimo. After graduating with excellent grades and an impressive sporting record, he went on to join a military academy at which he, as the only ‘Indian’ in his year, earned the nick-name of Chief. Although an unsuccessful West Point applicant, he joined up with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1914 and was sent to France, where he fought – still as a proud Indian – and was wounded.

  It was after the war, when he returned to Canada, that his career as a writer – and hoaxer – began in earnest. Claiming not only to be a West Point graduate but a decorated war hero, which he most certainly was not, he secured a job at the Calgary Herald reporting on Indian issues. A staunch campaigner for First Nation rights and the maintenance of traditional lifestyles, he touted his pretend Cherokee affiliations until he was blue in the face and eventually was officially welcomed into the nation of the Blackfoot Indians and given his ceremonial name, Buffalo Child.

  This was a gift to Long in more ways than one, as it gave him just the credibility he needed to set himself up as a fake memoirist amongst the buzzing literary salons of New York. He moved there in 1927 and spent a year writing The Autobiography of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance about a humble Indian boy born to Blackfoots in Montana and who went on to fight heroically in the Great War.

  Almost overnight he became desired and lauded in New York City: sought after as a party guest, after-dinner speaker, celebrity endorser of a brand of shoes and even a movie star, he was able to command $100 for a personal appearance, and enjoyed, for a while at least, about the best kind of life a handsome young man can have.

  It was on the set of the silent film in which he had a part that questions were raised about his true identity which led to his eventual undoing. Once it was reported that he could not properly describe his Cherokee lineage, a coterie of suspicious (and racist) minds set about ruining him. People who knew him when he was growing up were found, and testimonies about his true identity were collected. Shamed, Long took work as a bodyguard for a well-known actress. But he was unable to toe the line sufficiently in this submissive type of work, and was let go. Tragically, in 1932 he was found with a self-administered gunshot to the head, unable to bear any longer the real life he had tried so hard to write over.

  Considering the trappings of wealth and fame achieved by Long, it w
ould be easy to pass him off as one whose hoax was perpetrated simply for material gain. But aside from the fact that he, like Grey Owl, became a genuinely impassioned spokesman for Native American issues, the prize he sought ought not to be seen in terms of parties, clothes and girls: born into the bitterly segregated community of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the material wealth he wanted to gain was no more or less than freedom itself. This grandson of slaves capitalized on the traces of Anglo-Saxon and Indian blood in his veins which made him handsome in a way that would appeal to white people and used every resource he could – his charm, his strength and most of all his literary talent – to smart his way out of the South. Which is a good deal more heroic – if less psychologically complex – than a man like Grey Owl, who simply thought being English was boring.

  FORREST CARTER

  OF ALL THE First Nation writers in America, genuine or fake, there can be none so controversial as Forrest Carter, the bestselling author of The Education of Little Tree, a book of gentle back-country musings originally published in 1976 with the subtitle ‘A True Story’, but now sold as fiction. Carter’s real story is one of an audacious deception which tricked a generation of readers into believing they were reading the autobiography of a soulful, Cherokee-raised boy instead of the fantasies of Asa Carter, a former Ku Klux Klan member and professional white supremacist. You couldn’t make it up. Although many of Little Tree’s fans have tried to prove that Carter’s enemies did just that.

  That Asa Carter and Forrest Carter were one and the same man is beyond question, even though the man himself, once he had taken on his new persona, tried to deny it. When he appeared on television to promote his book, viewers from his old stomping ground called in to say they recognized this folksy, leather-hatted storyteller as the same man, albeit a thinner, browner version, who had worked for one of the South’s most violently racist politicians. The very man, indeed, who wrote the speech in which Governor George Wallace famously screamed: ‘Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’

  The intermingling of the two Carters and the life of the book itself presents a puzzle for critics and readers, because it is almost impossible to reconcile the hate-filled rhetoric of Asa Carter the Klansman with the down-home New Ageisms of Forrest Carter, who wrote about his life as an orphan raised in the ways of ‘Indian thinking’ by Cherokee grandparents. Asa was a man who hated African Americans so much that he found the Ku Klux Klan too soft and had to set up his own more hard-line White Citizen’s Council and then felt compelled to leave that too after a row over allowing pro-segregationist Jews to join. He even ran for governor of Alabama on the hard-line white supremacist ticket. Yet his famous book seems to preach tolerance and peaceful co-existence, and the twinkly, hippyish persona he assumed for it was a far cry from the slick, hate-filled former boxing champ he was in the Alabama days. It seems that he came round to supporting the Indians because he saw a link between his Confederate heroes (from one of whom he took the name Forrest) and the independent-minded Indians who sometimes supported them in their hatred of ‘guv’mint’ interference, but this is only half the story.

  The reason Asa became Forrest is not because he had a sudden change of political heart, or because he truly believed that the Cherokee wanted the same things as the white supremacists. It was because abysmal failure in his political career forced him out of Alabama to seek a new life, a new audience and a very different kind of writing career in a new state.

  Carter had been writing speeches for the segregationalist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, setting up the white racist magazine The Southerner and touting his views on local radio stations. He was the sort of man who never liked to be too far from his bottle of whisky or his gun. When war came, he joined the navy, saying he’d sooner fight the Japanese than the Germans, who he saw as his racial kin. But as Wallace’s career took off, Carter was seen as too extreme even for him, and he was let go from the gubernatorial staff. His own political ambitions had never got off the ground, and his heavy drinking and alleged violent tendencies were already getting him in trouble.

  In 1973 Carter and his wife left for Florida where he quickly started work on a Western novel called Gone to Texas. Soon after, he did just that, re-inventing himself again in the Lone Star State as a kindly Floridian, born of Cherokee parents, who was none other than an official storyteller for his Indian community. This new identity could only help his debut novel, a Dances-With-Wolves sort of story (and some say a progenitor of that famous film, as well as the actual film version made by Clint Eastwood with the title The Outlaw Josey Wales) in which a former Confederate soldier, Wales, goes native and flees into the hills, using Indian wisdom and folklore to survive. The book was a success, with critics praising it as a cut above mere genre fiction, so he set about writing the book that would finally make him famous.

  The Education of Little Tree: A True Story was published by Delacourt Press in 1976 and Carter set about promoting its sweetly simple philosophical message as conscientiously as he had his uncompromising political one a decade earlier. Although ostensibly very different from the blood-and-guts adventure story of Gone to Texas, critics soon pointed to a similar ethos of man living free of government control and the conventions of post-war social organization. But with its accessibility to readers of all ages, not to mention its appeal to the burgeoning 1970s back-to-nature movement, it became an instant success amongst readers and school librarians all over the United States.

  That same year, however, Carter’s cover would be blown, and an increasingly enlightened literary establishment would reject him as an author deserving of nothing but scorn. As well as this kindly old storyteller being recognized by people who had know him in Alabama, he was the subject of two damning articles in the New York Times, one of them by a distant cousin of his, Dan Carter. These pieces officially outed him as the man who only six years previously had said that the idea of a black man becoming a policeman was absurd because he would be ‘as uncivilized as the day his kind were found eating their kin in a jungle’.

  Some would say he got his comeuppance when he died, ignoble and drunk, in shady circumstances after a fight at his son’s house in Abilene, Texas. Certainly, the many friends he had made during his incarnation as Forrest were shocked to find, when his death was reported in the media later that week, that he was in fact Asa the Anglo-Saxon tub-thumper, not the eponymous hero of Little Tree.

  The story of the two Carters was not to end with their deaths, however. In 1985, with his most famous book still flying off the shelves, the rights were bought by the publishing arm of the University of New Mexico, but the classification of the book – which had already been unofficially changed from non-fiction to fiction by the compilers of the New York Times bestseller lists at the time of Dan Carter’s piece – was quietly altered. Although the introduction to the new edition mentioned nothing about the furore over Carter’s deception, the words ‘A True Story’ were taken off the front cover.

  In 2007 the book became the first hoax publication to be publicly de-recommended by Oprah Winfrey, after she found out that the cutesy spiritual memoir which she had recommended to viewers of her website was in fact the work of a duplicitous bigot. The book has its devotees, however, and not only amongst those for whom the unpalatable racism of the pre-Civil Rights era is still an ideological reality. Look up Little Tree on the most famous online encyclopaedia and you will find it touted generously as a ‘memoir-style fictional novel written under [a] pseudonym’. Go in to a school library in America and only the words ‘Young Adult Fiction’ on the book’s cover suggest that this literary artefact is anything less than a simple child’s memoir.

  NASDIJJ

  IN 1999, ESQUIRE magazine received a manuscript from a man calling himself Nasdijj, who claimed to be a Navajo writer, outraged that the magazine had never published a story by a Native American.

  * * *

  The story it accompanied was a stark, harrowing but stylishly wrought piece o
f autobiographical writing about the Navajo author’s attempts to help his terminally ill son, Tommy, enjoy his short life and die with dignity at home on the reservation. Esquire published the work and almost immediately Nasdijj was hailed as an extraordinary new voice in Native American writing, winning competitions, making personal appearances and giving interviews. He even received a six-figure sum to publish more of his candid autobiographical jottings.

  First there came a longer version of Blood Flows Like a River Through My Dreams, published by the extremely reputable Houghton Mifflin in 2000, then The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping in 2003 which told the story of another sick child, this time dying of AIDS, who Nasdijj had apparently adopted and cared for. It spoke not only of the love of an adopted parent for his son, but of the problem of disease and access to health-care in his community and the prejudice he, as a Navajo, typically came up against when dealing with ‘Anglo’ bureaucrats and doctors. Finally, in 2004, he published Geronimo’s Bones, whose focus is the traumatic upbringing of Nasdijj and his brother Tso. The boys were apparently born to a Navajo father and a white mother into an itinerant migrant-worker household where sexual abuse and alcoholism were the only certainties. Darkly witty as well as painfully sad, the love of two brothers with nothing to live for but each other was a hit with readers and critics alike, and seemed to confirm Nasdijj’s place at the heart of the new misery-memoir culture (subset: ethnic).

  As a successful author, Nasdijj was invited to appear on panels and speak at bookshops all over America. Some people noticed that he bore no physical traces of his supposed Navajo blood, looking, if anything, kind of Scandinavian. But when asked to define his racial identity at a PEN forum in 2002, he proclaimed: ‘I am Navajo and the European things you relate so closely to often simply seem alien and remote.’