Thomas King is the award-winning author of more than 20 books, including The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America and the novel Indians on Vacation. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph.
When is an Indian not an Indian? Yeah, it’s a trick question.
Several years back, I became aware of a rumour that appeared on the literary landscape accusing me of not being Native American. Of not being Cherokee, to be exact.
Rumours are tricky things. In general, they have no authorship, no definitive origin. They are whispers that materialize out of nowhere, that float in shadows and bump about in dark corners.
I ignored them.
I knew who I was. Knew my family history. At the same time, I recognized that I wasn’t a good Indian. I hadn’t been raised on a reserve/reservation. I didn’t speak Cherokee.
Inconvenient Indian author Thomas King says he is not part Cherokee
Sure, I had travelled around Oklahoma recruiting students for the University of Utah, when I was the Counselor for Native Students at that school. I participated in history conferences and literary gatherings in places such as Norman, Muskogee, and Tahlequah.
I knew a decent amount of Cherokee history, had even followed the politics of the Nation from the mid-seventies when Ross Swimmer was Principal Chief through the eighties and nineties when Wilma Mankiller came to power.
Still, all things considered, it isn’t much of an ethnic résumé.
And if that was the heart of the rumour, the heart of the complaint – that I wasn’t a good enough Indian – then I had little defence. I’ve spent my entire adult life in Indigenous affairs as an activist, program administrator, university professor, and a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
Still, truth be told, in terms of a Native community, I don’t have one.
The only place that feels remotely familial is in and around Standoff, Alta. I was at the University of Lethbridge in the Native Studies department for some 10 years. I played in an all-Native basketball league, occasionally taught night courses on the reserve, hung out with the guys.
But, in the end, I was always more an Indian-at-Large, if there is such a thing. A floater. An outlier. An Indian at the edge.
The rumours disappeared as quickly as they had come, but they didn’t stay away. Every so often, I would hear of their return. Finally, this year, I made a concerted effort to find their origin.
I’ve not been as active in Indigenous Affairs as I once was. Age, health, and family responsibilities have slowed me down, and I didn’t know where to look. I finally asked a friend of mine who is more attuned to such matters, and he gave me the name of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, an American Cherokee organization.
And this, I discovered, was the organization that was responsible for the rumour.
So, I wrote them in October, asked to talk with someone there, so we could put the matter to rest. About a month later, I got a call from Lianna Costantino, the current director of TAAF. Yes, she said, we should talk, and in short order we arranged a video call to discuss the situation.
The meeting with Ms. Constantino was not a one-on-one. Daniel Heath Justice, a Cherokee scholar at the University of British Columbia, was on the call, as was a genealogist who consults for TAAF on a volunteer basis. She spent much of the time going over my family history.
But let’s back up for a moment.
I was raised in Roseville, a small town in central California. My mother, my younger brother and me, a maternal grandmother, a handful of aunts and uncles and a half-dozen cousins. Not a large family as families go.
My father, one Robert Elvin King, had come west out of Oklahoma during the Second World War and was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. My mother was in the city with her sister, the two of them training to be beauticians. My mother and father met at a USO dance, married, and in short order, produced me and my brother Christopher.
And then one fine spring day, my father took my mother to a park in West Sacramento. I had just turned three. My brother had barely arrived in the world. I was at my mother’s side. Chris was in her arms. We all stood there in the park, in the sunshine, and my father told my mother that he was leaving.
Which he did. And we never saw him again.
So, he wasn’t a part of my life. But he came back into focus, when I was about 11 or 12.
My brother and I didn’t look like the rest of the family. We were much darker. I have a family picture from the period, and the difference between the two of us and our cousins is marked. Secondly, I looked somewhat Asian.
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A family photo shows Thomas King, far left, and his brother Chris to his left, with their mother and cousins.Thomas King
The Second World War had ended in 1945, two years after I was born. The Korean War had wrapped up in 1953. So, imagine my amusement, when some of the kids in the neighbourhood decided that, given the times and my appearance, I must be “a Jap.”
I took the matter to my mother. No, she told me, you’re not Japanese. Your father is part Cherokee. That’s what the kids are seeing.
My mother never talked about my father. Why would she? The son of a bitch had deserted her. Still, I was curious about the man. So, I probed. And by the time I was in my late teens, I had compiled an intriguing if somewhat fractured story.
No Cherokee on the King side. No Cherokee on the Hunt side. No Indians anywhere to be found.
My father grew up in Oklahoma. When he was in his mid-to-late teens, he discovered that the man who was his father of record, William King, was not his biological father. According to oral family history, his biological father was a man named Elvin Hunt. From what my mother could gather, my father was not pleased with this turn of events. He liked King, disliked Hunt, and he was even less pleased because Hunt was part Cherokee. There was a nasty family fight. My father broke with his mother, took off, and so far as my mother knew, they never reconciled.
That’s the heart of the story that I grew up with. Slightly Shakespearian or Dickensian, depending on your reading habits.
Years later, when I was in my late 60s, my brother and I located our father’s oldest sister. We met up with her outside Spokane, Wash. She had old photographs of the family, stories of life in Oklahoma, stories of our father as a young boy. It was an awkward but pleasant visit.
And she told us the same story my mother had told me. Yes, Elvin Hunt was really our father’s father. Yes, he was part Cherokee. But the detail that most intrigued her, and that she touched on several times, as she arranged the photographs on the table, was that he “was very, very dark.” Knowing a little of the history of the Freemen among the Cherokee, I asked her if he could have been part Black as well. She just kept moving the pictures around and repeating that he “was very, very dark.”
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Childhood photo of Thomas King, the writer whose mistaken identity has left him shaken.Thomas King
Ms. Costantino told me that appearance has nothing to do with ethnicity. No offence, but she’s wrong. Appearance is what people see, the visual upon which they form a first opinion as to who you are. And how people see you and how they reflect that back – good and bad – helps to form and maintain an identity.
Don’t believe me? Talk to Black folks in North America. To Muslims. To Sikhs. To any person with brown skin.
But Ms. Constantino is also right. Appearance can have little to do with ancestry. In the early 1900s, Grey Owl was Canada’s Indian ambassador at large. He cut a fine figure. Walked the walk, talked the talk. Became an advocate for conservation. Spent his free time in the company of beavers. In reality, he was Archibald Belaney, an Englishman born in Hastings in East Sussex.
Iron Eyes Cody was just as convincing. His “crying Indian” public service commercial of the 1970s was a moving reminder of the problem of pollution in America. Only problem was that Iron Eyes wasn’t Indian. He was Espera Oscar de Corti, an Italian-American.
The basic difference between myself and Grey Owl and Iron Eyes Cody is that Belaney and de Corti knew they weren’t Indigenous. I knew I was.
Which is what made the information the genealogist brought to the table so very devastating, though devastating is too pedestrian a word. According to her research into the King family, there was no line back to the Cherokee. Well, no real surprise there. The link to the Cherokee was always on the Hunt side.
And here was the Gordian knot that I have had to live with all my life. In terms of acquiring Cherokee citizenship, there was no way I could make the leap from the Kings to the Hunts. My father’s father of record was William King, not Elvin Hunt and all the wishing in the world wasn’t going to change that.
Not that I hadn’t made the effort, though the effort really began with my mother. When Chris and I were little, mom wrote to the Cherokee Nation, to the railroad company in Illinois where my father was rumoured to have worked, and to the army in an effort to try to find some financial support for the family.
I think the army responded with some useless form for her to fill out. I don’t believe she ever heard back from the railroad. Or from the Cherokee Nation, for that matter.
Later in life, I tried to do my part. On one trip to Oklahoma, I picked up the two-volume set of Cherokee Roots and went through the rolls looking for possible relatives. There wasn’t much for the Eastern Band, but the Western rolls yielded some 18 Hunts and 81 Kings listed in the 1898-1914 Dawes/Quion Miller rolls.
On another trip, I made a concerted effort to find any remaining members of the Hunt side of the family. I kicked around in Northeastern Oklahoma, wound up in Tahlequah, and through an acquaintance, was introduced to a guy who had just retired from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Don’t remember the man’s name, but he was a keen fisherman, and we spent a couple of days talking and floating about on Lake Tenkiller in his aluminum boat.
He said he’d check out the Kings and the Hunts, but he repeated what I already knew. Even if I could find Hunt family members, because of the paternity question, there was no way to bridge the gap that separated the two families.
He never got back to me, by the way. He was retired, after all. And the fishing at Tenkiller was good.
However, the genealogist for TAAF had been able to do what neither my mother nor myself nor my fishing buddy had managed. She had been able to find the Hunts and trace that family line back.
And it didn’t lead to the Cherokee.
No Cherokee on the King side. No Cherokee on the Hunt side. No Indians anywhere to be found.
As you might expect, I didn’t want to believe her. I was sure she had made an error in her research, hadn’t gone back far enough, but as she talked about what she had found, as we matched the pieces of family history that I had with the pieces of family history that she uncovered, it became clear that the one piece missing was any connection to the Cherokee.
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Thomas King maintains the revelation about his ancestry is new information to him, and not a knowing lie he used to advance his career.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
It’s been a couple of weeks since that video call, and I’m still reeling. At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.
And now I have to deal with a series of inconvenient truths. While I have had my fair share of run-ins with smiling bigots and sympathetic racists, I have also benefitted from being considered Native American, and if I were a journalist covering this story, I would ask the following questions:
Mr. King, did you benefit from grants earmarked for Native scholars?
Did you benefit from being Native in the job market?
Do you think your Nativeness gave you unwarranted access to publishing, radio, television, and other artistic avenues that you would not have had as a non-Native?
Would the perception and reception of your writing have been different had you not identified as Native?
Do you think the publication of your work prevented the publication of similar work by a Native author?
And then there will be the harder question, the question that will be on many people’s lips as they read this: Did you know that you weren’t Cherokee all along and simply perpetrate and maintain a fraud throughout your professional life for fame and profit?
While the answers to the other questions are problematic, the answer to this last one is a simple, hard, no.
Not that this will keep people from believing what they will. Human nature loves blood in the water.
TAAF suggested that I might want to offer up an apology for my life, but an apology assumes a crime, an offence, a misdeed. And I don’t think that’s appropriate. Throughout my career – activist, academic, administrator, writer – I’ve conducted myself in the belief that I was mixed-blood Cherokee.
However, having seen the genealogical evidence, should I choose to continue on in that vein from this point forward, then an accusation of fraud would have merit.
Mind you, going forward is going to be difficult, if not impossible. Will I try to step sideways into the sphere of the Tony Hillermans, the Evan S. Connells, the William Eastlakes, non-Natives who wrote about Natives? The Helen Hunt Jacksons and the Dee Browns of the world?
Or will I just pack my tent and slip away?
First, I have to survive the firestorm that’s coming. The anger. The disbelief. The feelings of betrayal. The media that will reduce a painful and complex matter to a series of misleading chyrons and simplistic sound bites. Individuals who will retell the story ad nauseam until all the tones have been washed away.
My mother’s side of the family is Greek, and I’ll rest in that reality for the foreseeable future, try to survive the scorching, wait for the conflagration to burn itself out. And when it does, I’ll sort through rubble to see if there is anything left of my reputation, of my career.
I’d like to think that, at the very least, I will be able to find a way to continue to support Indigenous causes and Indigenous artists, though I’m not sure the causes and artists will want to stand too close to such a smouldering wreck.
Most likely I’ll do what I’ve always done. Tell stories. Write stories. I’ve always found sanctuary in the spoken word, safe haven in a well-turned paragraph. Or maybe I’ll heed my own counsel, try channelling the sign-off for the old Dead Dog Café radio show.
Stay calm, be brave, wait for the signs.
All things considered, it’s probably as good a piece of advice as I’m going to find.
