Truth and Fiction

In April I was rewriting a chapter of my new book and struggling with how to present James Walker, an early twentieth century physician for the Indian Service at Pine Ridge whose amateur ethnology of has become a key source of information for scholars of the Lakota. Walker matters to my novel in part because he replaced Charles Eastman, a Santee Dakota, when Eastman was forced out of his position as the physician for the Pine Ridge reservation. But Walker is also important in my book because he was a white man who insisted that he was the foremost authority regarding esoteric Lakota knowledge in cosmology and medicine. I had some feelings about this, but I really wanted to see how true my suspicions were. I repeatedly bump up against the limitations of my imagination. I keep discovering that the truth is much more amazing than anything I concoct.

My bullshit detector started jumping at James Walker's claim that he was "adopted" as a "Sioux medicine man" by a "secret society" of the last five traditional medicine men living and who spoke a private, hitherto unknown language. The meter jumped past ten with Walker's assertion that -- following the death of those informants -- he was now the last living Sioux medicine man. This is just the perfect white-boy fantasy. Not only can I, Mr. Caucasian, learn in a short time the knowledge that you spent a lifetime acquiring, but it is now my private and exclusive domain!

Walker's claims do not disprove themselves by their grandiosity. And the information he shared isn't necessarily false just because he overstates his authority to present it. I looked more closely in two places. One was the academic writing about Walker himself, especially by his recent editors the anthropologist Raymond DeMallie and the folklorist Elaine Jahner. The other was the lives of Walker's informants, the medicine men he says initiated him.

Of those medicine men, I was especially interested in George Sword. Walker acknowledged Sword as his most important source and as his liaison with the others. Sword asserted his credentials for this work as a traditional military and religious leader in materials he wrote for Walker. Sword wrote that he participated in many war parties and that he was a chief of war parties. He wrote that he pledged and danced the Sun Dance and that he was a counselor for Sun Dancers and for teens participating in the vision quest. He wrote that he was a recognized and sought-after practitioner of Bear Medicine. My problem with all this? Sword was a bodyguard for the Pine Ridge agent at the age of 19! He took the name "Sword" to demonstrate his allegiance to the white authorities. He was captain of the Pine Ridge police and a lay catechist for the Episcopal Church. The timeline is really suspect. Did he do all this traditional work, the work of a mature adult, before the age of 20? Or did the reservation agents somehow not realize that their police chief was out leading illegal war parties and religious ceremonies when it was his job to suppress both?


Nevertheless, DeMallie and Jahner -- along with most professionals with an interest in the field -- find both Walker's and Sword's claims credible. The only challenge they admit to the authority of Walker's books and notes is in the fieldwork of Ella Deloria. And that is why I was so interested to find the writings of Ella Deloria on Walker. Deloria was an early-twentieth century anthropologist who was herself Yankton Dakota and raised on the Standing Rock Lakota reservation. While studying at Columbia University Teacher's College, she met Professor Franz Boas, the founding father of American anthropology. Boas tasked her with authenticating Walker's notes. She was not able to. She couldn't find independent corroboration for the existence of a secret society or an esoteric language. Some of the cosmological stories Walker submitted were familiar to the people with whom she spoke, but others made them shake their heads and politely suggest that maybe they came from other tribes. Her reports convinced neither Boas nor the Walker scholars of today.

I get why they dissatisfied Boas back then and why he kept insisting that Deloria look harder. He needed good material and Walker's seemed like it. He really wanted Ella Deloria to corroborate Walker's writing, no to discredit it. I should note here that one white person's fantasy (in this case, Walker's) is more likely to look real to another white person (in this case, Boas). Those fantasies fit our presuppositions because we share our way of viewing the "other." This is probably a good place to remember that The Education of Little Tree  was widely (perhaps universally) accepted as the authentic memoir of a Cherokee raised in "the old ways" and that it was placed on multicultural reading lists for years. It was only when the author, "Forrest Carter," was outed as the white supremacist and KKK publicist Asa Carter, that white readers began to notice the fantastic elements of the forgery.

I was more puzzled by the apparent credulity of the scholars of today, who have the benefit of time and changed perceptions that should make it easier to detect the fraudulent elements in the work. That is why I followed up on Miami University Professor Sandra Garner's 2010 PhD dissertation on the Sun Dance. She wrote whole chapters on both Deloria and Sword. From my perspective, it looked as though Sword was hustling Walker, but I don't really have the standing to draw that conclusion (other than recognizing a con when I see one.) I was relieved that Professor Garner shared my skepticism. And her level of interest in Ella Deloria led me to still more interesting material. I was able to find Deloria's correspondence with Franz Boas. I was able to see how she was devalued as a scholar, precisely because of her familiarity with the language and culture of the people she was reporting on, devalued because they were her own kin.

At a certain point, though, I started to feel like I was already familiar with Deloria's story. Had I read it before? I am more than capable of completely forgetting that I have read a book or seen a movie, only to recognize each new development as the plot unfolds. But Deloria's life, as Professor Garner recounted it, seemed to track with somebody else's: student at Columbia, work for Franz Boas, field work in one's own community, trouble with professional acceptance, a novel that was not well-received during one's life. Oh My God! Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston lived the same life!

I knew the moment I had this epiphany that I could not have been the first to see it, so I immediately googled "Ella Deloria"+"Zora Neale Hurston." Up popped the book Native Speakers by University of Michigan Professor Maria Cotera. And Cotera's book ties Deloria and Hurston to a third woman contemporary of whom I had never heard, Jovita González. This was a real OMG moment for me. I got the e-book and read it the same day. Deloria was a Native woman, born 1889,  from the Dakotas who went to Teacher's College. Hurston was an African American woman, born 1891, from the South who went to Barnard. González was a Chicana, born 1904, from South Texas who went to the University of Texas. Both Deloria and Hurston studied with Franz Boas, the most important anthropologist of the time. González studied with J. Frank Dobie, one of the most important academic folklorists of the time. All three did significant fieldwork in their own communities and struggled to get that work taken seriously (González less so than the others.) All three turned their hands to writing novels. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston was published in 1937, but was poorly received and went out of print until it was re-released to great acclaim in 1978, largely due to the interest of Alice Walker. Ella Deloria wrote Waterlily around 1940. She could not find a publisher at all and it wasn't until 1988, long after her death, that it was recognized and put in print. González's Caballero, was also completed around 1940. It didn't see print until 1996, because of the interest of Professor Cotera.

All of this is too pronounced a pattern to be merely coincidence. It speaks to white supremacist and male supremacist habits of thought in the academic and literary worlds. It speaks to the parallel (though not the same!) experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. But there is more, and I owe Professor Cotera for pointing this out. She argues that academic anthropology and folklore are finally too constricting and therefore inadequate to bring to paper the lives that these three women sought to share, the lives of their families, friends and acquaintances. She argues that Deloria, Hurston, and González turned to fiction because it offers a more complete way of revealing truth.

When I began writing the short stories that make up the collection Stones from the Creek I wanted to share some parts of US history that are too often ignored. My conscious thought was that I had more chance of getting somebody to read them as fiction than as non-fiction. My challenge was to bring my characters to life, to avoid creating one-dimensional puppets saying social-studies speeches. I worked really hard at that. I think I was partly successful. Professor Cotera made me remember something that I realized way back in high school, that fiction can be more truthful because it allows us to see people's humanity. A historical article can reduce individuals to relevant facts and it always underreports everyday people who don't leave much impact in the written record. But a short story or a novel allows us to bring those everyday people to life. My work on my follow-up novel, Though An Army Come Against Us, has been painful. But Professor Cotera's work means that I can see the value in what it may become if I do it right. It can give life to the forgotten.

Before I post this I want to thank Professors Garner and Cotera for their work. And I want to thank each of them for their swift and gracious responses to my fan letters to them. I am so grateful.

Ghéé'ye hooghéń `iłdóͅ gólíͅná'a. nDéí doobáńgólaadaná'a.

I think it was 1987 when we made that big road trip.  The idea was to focus on the stops and not try to go too far in any one day, because that’s how you miss things that you should be looking at.  Maya, Jon and I were in Lincoln County, New Mexico, looking at all the Billy the Kid stuff.  In the late afternoon we went to Lincoln National Forest to find a tent site for the night.  It was not promising.  The sites were desolate and every steel garbage can had been violently smashed. It looked to me as though some veryaggressive bears were around, and – indeed -- we found out a few days later that because of a long drought, bears were coming out of the mountains and into the city of Albuquerque.  In any case, we drove back down into Ruidoso and set up our tent at an RV park where people were staying while they went to the horse races at Ruidoso Downs.

It was fine for a night, but not more.  Next day we went to the Mescalero Apache reservation to look into their campground. (Which is a story for another day!)  Registration was at the tribal cultural center, so we took time to visit the museum and then to chat with the lady at the desk.  She told us that two girls were having a sunrise ceremony that night.

I had been wanting to see an Apache na'ii'ees for years. I had always heard that they were done in association with the Fourth of July fair, and I knew that we were never going to make it to New Mexico or Arizona by July 4^th. The school year in New York City doesn’t even end until June 28^th, so I had long ago given up on ever seeing this.  But now this lady was telling us about a ceremony that very night.  I still wasn’t hopeful, though. It was early August and that told me this had to be a private affair, conducted by the girls’ families, not the tribe.

I asked if that was the case.  The lady smiled and said, yes, not at the tribal fairgrounds but in a corner of the reservation away from everything else. We could get there directly from the campground, she said, but it was ten miles, and over an unmarked mountain track.  She suggested we go the long way around, about 30 miles, still unpaved, but on marked roads.

I was still stuck on the idea that this was a private affair.  I asked whether we would be welcome, showing up uninvited.  Now she looked at me as if I was stupid.  “I am inviting you,” she said.

It was kind of a magical night.  People had backed their pickups into a wide circle around a bonfire.  Grandmas sat in rocking chairs in the beds of the trucks.   School had just started back (Arizona is apparently on a very different academic calendar) and the teenaged boys near us were talking a lot of shit about who they were going to fight and which girls they liked.  The masked crown dancers were illuminated by the firelight and that felt timeless, but the interactions between the crowd and the clown stopped it being so solemn.  And then when the two girls came out it felt exactly like a Bat Mitzvah to me: a specific connection between individual young people with their own lives and a long train of tradition that bound the grandmas in their rockers with their own grandmas… and their grandmas, too. There was no band playing Hava Nagila and the people didn’t start dancing horas, but the evening was familiar to me, nevertheless.

Do I need to say that this haunted me? I have never stopped thinking about it. It is the source of the scene in my story “The Giant Believed Her.” And I kept thinking about the lady who invited us. So I should not have been surprised to discover forty years later that she was not just some random tribal employee, that she was an elder with the authority to ask strangers to a private party, that she was essential to the persistence of Mescalero -- and Chiricahua -- culture.

Researching my new book I found myself looking into a work titled Women of the Apache Nation. And there she was.  Elbys Hugar, granddaughter of Naiche, great granddaughter of Cochise, was that host at the Mescalero Apache Cultural Center. She was the one who invited us to that family na'ii'ees. She was the guardian of language and story for several generations of Chiricahuas living at Mescalero, where they had finally been allowed to relocate after decades of imprisonment with Geronimo.

Elbys Naiche Hugar

I have the habit of keeping notes of my travels. That summer they were very terse and cryptic, in part because we did so much, in part because I forgot to bring a journal and was writing in tiny letters on a paper bag. But there it is: “Day 12) Mescalero museum. Discussed coming out w/ Elbys.”

It makes sense now that a hugely-important figure in the history of the Chiricahua Apache invited us to attend that ceremony. It also makes sense to me that her importance entirely eluded me, and that when we went, I stayed pretty much on the outside, watching, but not speaking to anybody there. I can be overly reticent sometimes, afraid of intruding.

Art by Naiche

When Mrs. Hugar’s grandfather, Naiche, was given art supplies and the opportunity to draw he returned again and again to the subject of the na'ii'ees ceremony. He clearly believed that the arrival of Isdzánádleeshé, or White Painted Woman, was essential to the survival of the Chiricahua people and that this arrival recurred in the passage of every young woman as she transitioned from girl to adult.

When I was in my twenties, we believed that survival and resistance are two separate, sometimes parallel, tracks for people suffering monopoly-capitalist oppression. One of the points of my writing is that survival can itself be a form of resistance. In my collection of short stories I used the metaphor of Goliath, trying to destroy David’s people. He picked up five smooth stones from the creek to use in his sling, because that is what he had to hand and that is why my title was Stones from the Creek. It should be clear who the Giant is.

I think one reason why I continue to be haunted by that ceremony and that night is because keeping it alive in the face of a Giant that would destroy the people – and especially its young women! -- represents both survival and resistance. In the Nde song, the Giant, Ghéé'ye,is trying to devour White Painted Woman’s child. She is the one who prevails.