A Knotty Question

I try to be a good citizen of the writing community. I’ve received help and encouragement from other authors, and I try to pass it on myself, teaching, mentoring, blurbing, reviewing, answering questions about writing and publishing, and generally trying to help boost other writers. Sometimes, though, I have to pull back from that stance when asked for help.

I’m a Cherokee poet and novelist who writes about a Cherokee protagonist and also reviews books, so people send me just about every novel written that has a major Indigenous character in it. A terrifying number of them are romances with generic spray-tanned hunks on the cover, love interests who are half-Cherokee, half-Navajo, half-Sioux, or just plain half-Indian (these authors don’t seem to know any other of the 500 tribes exist) and written without the least tiny bit of knowledge of any of these different cultures. Recently, I received a non-romance novel written by a non-Native author with a Cherokee female protagonist. The blurbs made me hopeful, but once I started reading, it became apparent that the writer had done a little haphazard research online about the Cherokee to give “flavor” to her work. She got many of the most basic things wrong, but oddly enough had a few unusual things right. I don’t suppose I have to state that I won’t be reading any more of her books.

I also get contacted repeatedly by people who want me to give them a crash course in being Cherokee (or even just Native) because they’ve decided to make the protagonists of their books, or even a whole series, Cherokee (or just Native). These are people who know nothing about the Cherokee, not even the most basic information, and apparently have no Cherokee friends or acquaintances. My attitude toward them, I’m afraid, is not much more sympathetic than toward the authors wanting reviews for their books with “Native” characters. Basically, these folks are saying to me, “I want an ‘exotic Indian’ protagonist and the Cherokee are the most famous tribe, so I’ll choose them, but I have no real interest in the culture or knowing anyone in it. I’m too lazy to do any research on the most documented tribe in American history (the Cherokee were over 90% literate in their own written language and had a bilingual newspaper long before the Removal in the 1830s), so please do my research for me—and maybe I’ll use it or maybe I’ll just do what I want to do, whether it’s true to the culture or not, while putting your name down as the ‘expert’ I consulted. Because I clearly don’t give a real damn.”

Indigenous cultures have been misrepresented by Anglo anthropologists and folklore collectors for centuries. An awful lot of books, especially novels, written by outsiders to a culture end up written from the viewpoint of caricatures rather than real people, and the culture is presented as a collection of stereotypes of that culture (often derived from those misrepresenting researchers). These books almost always, in one way or another, diminish or denigrate those cultures. This totally hilarious and tragically true poem by Sherman Alexie, "How To Write the Great American Indian Novel," speaks to that experience. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237270

Tony Hillerman is usually brought up by these people as an example of what they want to do. Hillerman wrote his novels the way a writer should write about another culture—with respect, extensive research, and the input of members of that culture. In fact, the Diné officially declared Hillerman a Special Friend of the Navajo Nation for his knowledgeable and sympathetic presentation of their culture and people in his books. But Hillerman grew up in Oklahoma and actually attended an Indian school, although he was white. He spent decades in New Mexico before he started his novels, studying the Diné because he admired their worldview and way of life and had friends among them. He didn’t just decide to write about them because he’d read a book or seen a movie and found them exotic. He knew the Diné and had friends among them long before he decided to write about them—and then he learned more.

I question whether someone who expects a stranger to offer an entrée into an entire culture will do the same. This is not the same as asking a police officer questions about police procedure. A culture is much more than a mere profession. And certain cultures in the United States, such as mine, have been relentlessly exploited, twisted, and even made illegal through the centuries by the mainstream European-American culture, which tried to wipe us out altogether not too long ago. Why should anyone from that culture expect that we would welcome their desire to exploit us one more time?

Do I not think that an Anglo writer can write a character or even protagonist from another culture, especially one of the Indigenous nations? No, I think s/he can and should, but if such a writer wants to write such a character, it should not be because they just want to make their character “something exotic.” If all of these writers who say they want to do what Hillerman did would actually do it the way Hillerman did, I would have no problem with that. But that seems to be too much work—and too much investment in actually getting to know Native people and learn about their cultures without having an ulterior, selfish motive. Too many writers today who write about other cultures in their novels are appropriating those cultures and propagating stereotypes. If your interests truly lie with other cultures, don’t be like those authors.