Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle is a beautifully illustrated children’s book by Susan Jeffers. This publication spent more than nineteen weeks on the best-seller lists and was chosen by members of the American Booksellers Association as “the book we most enjoyed selling in 1992.” Here’s a passage from the text:

How can you buy the sky? . . .
How can you own the rain and wind?

My mother told me,
every part of this earth is sacred to our people.
Every pine needle. Every sandy shore.
Every mist in the dark woods.
Every meadow and humming insect.
All are holy in the memory of our people. . . .

It’s a great book with only one problem: it’s a fabrication. Brother Eagle, Sister Sky is pretty much made up from start to finish. Who wrote these pretty words? Not the Suquamish 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 in 1970 by a University of Texas instructor named Ted Perry. 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 Perry 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 started its long tenure at the top of the best-seller lists. The fact that this book was written by and for white environmentalists was awkward, but the publisher handled the matter expeditiously. The best-seller lists simply reclassified the book from nonfiction to another category: advice, how-to, and miscellaneous. (That’s where they put the cat books.) And they did more. The publisher brought out new advertisements featuring an endorsement from Jewell Praying Wolf James, said to be Seattle’s great-grandnephew, who offered congratulations and thanks to the publisher for “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 its beauty.” Brother Eagle, Sister Sky continued to sell and sell and sell. But one reason the book’s authenticity 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 Delacorte Press in 1976 with virtually no promotion, the book slowly found a mass audience. It was rereleased by the University of New Mexico Press and by the spring of 1991 had soared to the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. Reviewers and the public at large loved the story’s strong environmental message, and the book 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 that 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 a Ku Klux Klan fringe group. In those days he was living large as a speechwriter for Alabama governor George Wallace. It was Asa Carter who wrote the electrifying battle cry “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

When all this was revealed in devastating detail by Emory University professor Dan Carter (no relation) 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 Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which later became a Clint Eastwood movie about Comanches, shows a consistent worldview obsessed with the racial purity of family and kin. In all of Carter’s writing, including the speeches he wrote for George Wallace, it’s us against the world. Trust no one. So what happened? Little Tree was reclassified from nonfiction 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 best-seller list to another. . . .

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, [whose band, Nirvana, was] appropriately from the city that bears the name of the Suquamish leader who so captivated Ted Perry and Susan Jeffers, wrote a lyric that described pretty well our reaction: “I found it hard / it’s hard to find / Oh well, whatever, nevermind.”

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 had sold more than any serious book about Indians ever had.) And, of course, the mother of all Indian books, Dee Brown’s 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 so in 1973 he drew this analogy: Imagine it’s 1955, right after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling on desegregation, in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Martin Luther King Jr. holds a press conference, but it’s a disaster; all the reporters ask about are 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 the year 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.”. . .

The discourse on Indian art or politics or culture, even among people of goodwill, is consistently frustrated by the distinctive type of racism that confronts Indians today: romanticism. Simply put, romanticism is a highly developed, deeply ideological system of racism toward 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 significant, tribe instead of nation. (For a more recent example of this, note how press accounts often talk about ethnic troubles in Europe, but tribal conflicts in southern Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan.) Language became and remains a tool by which we are made the “Other”; the Lakota name Tatanka Iyotanka 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 is not one of multicultural understanding. The language exoticizes, 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. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Indian languages and ceremonies were discouraged and in many cases outlawed.

In the 1970s it was enough to denounce silly books and movies about Indians, but today that reaction almost misses the point. What’s different about our present situation is that it’s become clear that we as Indian people love these books and the images they present as much as anyone else. In fact, both Little Tree and Brother Eagle, Sister Sky will probably find their way under many Indian Christmas trees, and the fact of their authorship will not greatly affect their promising future with Indian readers any more than it will with non-Indian readers.

To me these new stereotypes show us that the myth-making machine has learned new and deadly tricks, much like the cyborg in Terminator 2. The ultimate result — the continued trivialization and appropriation of Indian culture, the absolute refusal to deal with us as just plain folks living in the present and not the past — is the same as ever.

That’s why challenging negative images and questioning who owns or produces these images are no substitute for a more all-sided oppositional effort. What’s needed is a popular movement that could bring about meaningful change in the daily lives of Indian people.

In the 1970s, for instance, the American Indian Movement and other organizations challenged racist stereotypes while at the same time engaging a host of structural issues directly relevant to Indian people. These groups pushed for better housing and education, treaty recognition, an end to police brutality, the ouster of dictatorial colonial elites on reserves, and an end to exploitative lease arrangements.

It was in the context of this multifaceted social-change effort that the fight for new imagery had a fuller meaning. Unfortunately the current prospects for building such a movement are gloomy. But though things are bleak, co-optation is not inevitable. What has made us one people is the common legacy of colonialism and diaspora. Central to that history are our necessary, political, and in this century often quite hazardous attempts to reclaim and understand our past, the real one, not the invented one.

Five hundred years ago we were Seneca and Cree and Hopi and Kiowa, as different from one another as Norwegians are from Italians, or Egyptians from Zulus. One example of just how different is the splintering of languages. Greek and English and Russian all have the same Indo-European root. As different as those languages are, at one point they were very similar. In North America there were more than 140 different language stocks. The Americas were a happening, cosmopolitan place, and when Europeans first showed up, one suspects the reaction was less the astonished genuflection the explorers reported than something more like, “So, what’s your story?” When we think of the old days, like it or not, we conjure up images that have little to do with real history. We never think of the great city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, which five centuries ago was bigger than London at that time. We never imagine sullen teenagers in some pre-Columbian Zona Rosa dive in that fabled Aztec metropolis, bad-mouthing the wretched war economy and the ridiculous human sacrifices that drove their empire. We don’t think of the settled Indian farming towns in North America (far more typical than nomads roaming the Plains). We never think about the Cherokee, who built a modern, independent nation, with roads and schools and universities and diplomatic recognition from European countries. After Sequoyah had invented the Cherokee alphabet, it took just over a year for the entire nation to become literate. The Cherokee were just as typical as the Sioux, but you don’t hear much about them. . . .

For centuries North America was perhaps the most intricate geopolitical puzzle on earth, with constantly shifting alliances between, with, and among Indians and Europeans. As Chuck Berry would say many years later, anything you want, we got it right here. Yet the amazing variety of human civilization that existed five centuries ago has been replaced in the popular imagination by one image above all: the Plains Indians of the mid-nineteenth century. Most Indians weren’t anything like the Sioux or the Comanche, either the real ones or the Hollywood invention. The true story is simply too messy and complicated. And too threatening. The myth of noble savages, completely unable to cope with modern times, goes down much more easily. No matter that Indian societies consistently valued technology and when useful made it their own. The glory days of the Comanches, for example, were built on the European imports of horses and guns. (We mastered both and delayed the settlement of Texas for 150 years, a public service we’re proud of to this day.)

I have avoided here the usual recitation of broken treaties, massacres, genocide, and other atrocities. It’s what we’re supposed to talk about, but business as usual has been a dismal failure as far as dialogue goes, and I find guilt trips incredibly boring and useless. So when I say, for example, that the Americas are built on the invasion and destruction of a populated land with hundreds of distinct, complex societies, and a centuries-long slave trade involving millions of Africans, I offer this as an observation that is the minimum requirement for making sense of the history of our countries. This unpleasant truth is why Indians have been erased from the master narrative of this country and replaced by the cartoon images that all of us know and most of us believe. At different times the narrative has said we didn’t exist and the land was empty; then it was mostly empty and populated by fearsome savages; then populated by noble savages who couldn’t get with the program; and on and on. Today the equation is: Indian equals spiritualism and environmentalism. In twenty years it will probably be something else.

I suggest that a powerful antidote to the manufactured past now being created for us is the secret history of Indians in the twentieth century. Geronimo really did have a Cadillac and used to drive it to church, where he’d sign autographs. Quanah Parker, the legendary leader of the Comanches, became a successful businessman after the war. He was part owner of a railroad, and endorsed farming and Jesus. At the same time he was a leader in the Native American Church and advocated the use of peyote. One of the most instructive lives is that of Black Elk, one of our greatest heroes and most revered spiritual leaders. His astonishing life included a stint in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and surviving the Wounded Knee Massacre. An impresario-anthropologist named John Neihardt wrote of his fantastic visions in Black Elk Speaks. It’s a book that has become quite literally a bible. Apprentice medicine men use it today as an instruction manual for establishing their own practices.

I should clarify here that I am not Lakota and not particularly spiritual. Of course, to justify my own lack of spiritualism, it is necessary for me to cite the relatively pedestrian cosmology of my people, the Comanches. It seems like we had enough magic to get by, but everyone agrees our religion was a rather basic affair compared to that of the Hopi or the Sioux or the Egyptians. We’re most famous for killing more settlers than any other Indian people, so I don’t know, maybe we just didn’t have the time. But anyway I was intrigued recently to come across a reference to Black Elk in which it was stated matter-of-factly that he was a Catholic most of his life. I found it fascinating that despite hearing about Black Elk for many years, I had no idea he spent most of his life as a Catholic. I learned that many believe Black Elk and white assistants sat down and practically invented a new religion, explicitly designed to blend the teachings of Christianity and Lakota spiritualism. At the time, he was working as a catechist for the Roman Catholic Church of Nebraska. Essentially he was a lay priest. I also learned he had a first name, and that it was Nick. The Who’s Who entry for Black Elk, then, probably would have described him as religious leader, entertainer, church bureaucrat, best-selling author. It would say he revolutionized Sioux religion with the help of anthropologists. Do any of these facts about Nick Black Elk invalidate his contribution to the Lakota people, or his spiritual teachings? I think that to say they do is to say the invented, impossibly wise sages are preferable to the people who actually lived. Nick Black Elk, an extra in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, a paid employee of the Catholic Church, becomes only more interesting, not less, and his accomplishments even more remarkable. Those who would have it otherwise cherish the myth more than the genuine struggles of real human beings.

I believe all of our lives are just as crazy as Nick’s. And when we refuse to acknowledge this, and pretend that it’s otherwise — pretend we are real Indians instead of real human beings, to please an antique notion of European romanticism — we may think we’re acting tough, but instead we’re selling out.

Some people, Indians as well as non-Indians, will always prefer Ted Perry’s version of Seattle’s speech to Seattle’s. And some will find the Black Elk of John Neihardt’s book preferable to the intriguing, complex Nick Black Elk. In other words, some will prefer white inventions of Indians to the real thing. There will always be a market for both nostalgia and fantasy. The cottage industry of Native Americana, formerly the province of hippies and enterprising opportunists, has become mainstream and professional. Today in the average chain bookstore in the United States, most of the Indian titles are in the new age section. Well-meaning feminists conduct Indian rituals, and the men’s movement has appropriated Indian drumming for its get-togethers. The myth-making machinery that in earlier days made us out to be primitive and simple now says we are spiritually advanced and environmentally perfect. Anything, it seems, but fully human. Over time these cartoon images have never worked to our advantage, and even though much in the new versions is flattering, I can’t see that in the long run such perspectives will help us at all.

“Geronimo’s Cadillac” is excerpted from the essay “On Romanticism,” from the book Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith. Copyright © 2009 by Paul Chaat Smith. Published by the University of Minnesota Press and reprinted by permission.