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.
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