Last week, The Third Ear teased the concept of cultural appropriation.
Substack and the podsphere were inadvertently abuzz with the topic recently—from Sherman Alexie opining on the phenomenon of the “pretendian;” to some examples of how early hip-hop sampled not just James Brown but (Dutch) Van Halen, (German) Kraftwerk and Steely Dan; to Afro-Iberian musicians who influenced the course of renaissance European music.
What all this “appropriation” amounts to is one of the The Third Ear’s pet concepts—mimesis. Copying. A ten-dollar word that eggheads from Aristotle to beat anthropologist Michael Taussig to the grand theorist of the concept, René Girard, have used to describe imitation and repetition.
When Alan Turing devised a test for machine intelligence (AI), he based it on the ability of a computer to imitate a human. (As it so happens, he derived it from a parlor game where a human of one gender imitates another, then substituted a computer for one of the humans to see if it could fool a flesh-and-blood observer—the “Imitation Game.”) In other words, the Turing Test. The hallmark of human intelligence, and now artificial intelligence, this suggests, is the capacity for imitation.
As I’ve written elsewhere, mimesis is the behavior behind sundry cultural rituals and quirks of human psychology. Desire, René Girard determined after looking at the plots of numerous novels and dramas, is mimetic. Mimetic desire—wanting what someone else wants—is the basis of advertising, the romantic love triangle, and that thing that happens when one kid sees another’s toy and immediately wants it for themselves. Art, magic, religion, scapegoating—all mimetic and substitutive practices. And the formation of in-groups and out-groups, tribes and subcultures, allies and enemies, revolves around mimesis and alterity, or sameness and difference.
We are what we are not—members of an in-group imitate each other by differentiating themselves from a common outlier, often a scapegoat.
Mimesis also occurs in nature—the octopus’ camouflage, for example, or flowers that resemble the insects they need to attract for pollination, or prey disguised as predators. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, an enthusiastic lepidopterist, thought mimesis in butterflies approached the realm of art and magic, something beyond survival of the fittest.
In some species, a beta male will imitate a female in order to sneak past an alpha male, to mate with the dominant male’s “harem.” (This is exactly what the protagonist of Lord Byron’s Don Juan does in Istanbul—disguises himself as a concubine to sleep with the sultan’s harem.)
Mimesis is behind what have, at first blush, historically, been considered some of the more bizarre, socially-upsetting, or politically-controversial practices across cultures—human sacrifice; blackface minstrelsy; gender-bending (think what an uproar a little long hair created in the 1960s), to name a few.
Even the first actors and poets, in Greek drama, were considered dangerous for creating or imitating a persona other than their own. Plato went so far as to ban them from society (then again, he was a writer himself).
Regardless of how one feels about any of these practices in particular, mimesis is virtually inseparable from human behavior. It’s how we learn, communicate, and organize.
With the advent of social media and the meme, the instant copying and repetition of ideas and identities is only accelerating. For this reason, in part, the ideas of René Girard have posthumously become a hobbyhorse of the Silicon Valley crowd (but don’t let that deter you).
Another form of mimesis is passing—imitating another race or ethnicity. Sadly, for years, many light-skinned “black” Americans (black due to absurd one-drop rules about miscegenation) were compelled to pass for white to escape violence and racism. This is the subject of tragic novels from Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). It’s possible to think of passing as a sort of social “camouflage” or cultural disguise akin to the owl butterfly above—imitating a dominant, even predatory culture to survive. Or simple pressure to conform, as seems to have been this case with Michael Jackson. But it has happened, though perhaps less often, in the other direction.
Last week I mentioned Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s producer, “Johnny Otis, the white man who ruled the Los Angeles R&B world while passing for black” (in Greil Marcus’ words), in the 1950s. Clearly, there was a professional or social incentive for Otis to pass for a marginalized group. More recently, beginning in 2015, it was revealed that the former head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, who was born with blue eyes and straight blond hair to parents of northern European descent, was actually white. She passed, or imitated an Afro-American woman, by cosmetically altering her appearance and behavior. In the process she became a spokeswoman for the NAACP, and taught Africana studies at Eastern Washington University. She also falsely claimed she was born in a teepee.
Which brings us to the subject of the “pretendian.”
I first heard this portmanteau in the winter of 2022, after the death of actress Sacheen Littlefeather, when her siblings revealed the Hollywood protest icon was actually Mexican American (more on her in a moment).
Aside from actors, entertainers, and more recently, academics passing for Native American, America has a long history of creating imaginary Indian personae in literature and film. One of the most popular literary series of the nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales (1827-1841), created the “last of the Mohicans,” the son of fictional frontiersman Natty Bumpo’s loyal Indian “brother,” Chingachgook. In a similar vein, Herman Melville’s Queequeg (though Polynesian instead of Native American) in Moby Dick (1851) was Ishmael’s friend and “bedmate.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855) combined stories the poet overheard from an Ojibwe chieftain with writings from the father of ethnography, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, to sing the tragic love affair of a fictional Ojibwe warrior from the Great Lakes, named Hiawatha. D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Ken Kesey and many others have used imaginary Indians in their meditations on America.
James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans resurfaced as a Hollywood blockbuster (in 1992) during what Sherman Alexie calls the second great wave of mainstream fascination with Indian culture in the 1990s, alongside films like Dances With Wolves (1990) and Geronimo (1993). (The first wave of Indian fascination occurred with the birth of the counterculture and environmental movements in the 1960s and 70s.)
Since at least 1773, during the revolutionary period in which Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales are set—beginning with the Boston Tea Party—real life Euro-Americans have found reason to dress up like Native Americans (in the case of the Tea Partiers, to disguise themselves from criminal culpability, as well as donning a cheeky otherness akin to the Halloween costumes of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau).
In the 1820s (as noted in the strange saga of Phil Collins and the Alamo), the first President of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, alongside the father of John Wilkes Booth, English actor Junius Brutus Booth:
traveled up and down the country together, wearing Indian warpaint and feathers, and enjoyed the perennial American masquerade. At wayside taverns—in this costume—they would match each other in another field of display, that of eloquence, reciting declamatory speeches of poetry through whole evenings to any audience that would listen . . .
—Contance Rourke, American Humor
Sam Houston lived among the Indians, and, also in the words of Constance Rourk, was once spotted, “on a river island among the Cherokees, reciting Pope’s translation of the Iliad.”
It hasn’t just been white Euro-Americans who’ve identified with or imitated Native Americans, in real life as well as fiction (the line is often blurry, as we’ll see). In Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison’s fictional character Paul D escapes captivity to find sanctuary among the inhabitants of a Cherokee camp, the way real fugitive slaves sought refuge among tribes of varying degrees of hospitality.
There’s also the story of Sylvester Long, a black actor born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1890, who claimed to have been raised on the Great Plains by Blackfoot Cherokee, as told by scholar Micah Treuer in A New Literary History of America.
Sylvester Long adopted the alias Buffalo Child Long Lance, and found success on the silent screen by passing for Cherokee in 1930, in a film called The Silent Enemy. Long Lance was feted by Manhattan socialites, who could not get enough of this “full-blooded” Indian, as one reporter called him, when he was profiled in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping. He even had his own brand of running shoe, fashioned after a moccasin, á la Air Jordan. After other, actual Native Americans from the cast of The Silent Enemy—a film about “REAL DANGER! REAL INDIANS! REAL ROMANCE!”—began to question Long Lance’s background, he was eventually revealed to be Afro-American. Buffalo Child Long Lance died a penniless alcoholic, after a period of immense fame and recognition.
In Micah Treuer’s telling, even after the producers of The Silent Enemy realized Buffalo Child Long Lance might not be who he said he was, they concluded that, if he was exposed as an imposter, in their words: “The only harm will be done to Long Lance himself. As far as we are concerned, he is an Indian… what tribe he belongs to is entirely secondary.”
As it turned out, Long belonged to no tribe. Ilia Tolstoy, grandson of the Russian novelist, a close friend of one Silent Enemy producer, traveled to Sylvester Long’s hometown to investigate. The other producers of The Silent Enemy, meanwhile, were more concerned about the authenticity of herd animals than humans—they were more upset they had to film reindeer for a scene depicting wild caribou (the only difference being that reindeer are domesticated), than they were about what tribe, if any, their star actor belonged to.
The motivations of Sylvester Long to pass for Native American in the 1930s are obvious enough, and basically amount to a desire for recognition and respect. Others have passed for, or created false Indian personas, for similar, if less sympathetic motives. Grey Owl, “the modern Hiawatha,” of whom it was said there “Never Came a Redder Red Indian,” a popular author and lecturer, turned out to be an Englishman named Archibald Belaney. “Iron Eyes Cody,” the “crying Indian” from the 1970s antilitter campaigns, was discovered to be Italian in 1996.
Chief Seattle, whence the Pacific Northwest city takes its name, was thought to have delivered a famous speech in 1855 about the ghosts of his people forever haunting the land. Chief Seattle’s “1855” speech,
considered so representative of Indian consciousness, included in American Indian anthologies and quoted on posters, postcards, and calendars, was written by a white screenwriter from Texas—”the single highlight of an obscure television script on pollution produced by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1972.”
—Michah Treuer, NLHA
Most egregious of all, The Education of Little Tree, praised as the poignant bildungsroman of an actual Cherokee boy in 1976, was actually written by a white man named Asa Earl Carter—the speech writer behind Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Segregation now, Segregation forever!” speech.
In 1973, Marlon Brando boycotted his Best Actor award for The Godfather and sent an actress named Sacheen Littlefeather to the Oscars to deliver a speech on Native Rights in his place (Brando was protesting the FBI standoff at Wounded Knee, and the depiction of Indians on film).
Dressed in Native garb, Littlefeather delivered a protestant defense of Indians in front of the Academy Awards crowd on national television, eliciting boos and cheers from a divided audience (John Wayne was livid). She went on to selflessly campaign and volunteer for indigenous rights for the rest of her life. In 2022, Navajo author Jaqueline Keeler reported that Sacheen Littlefeather had no tribal ties, after interviewing her biological sisters, who clarified that she was Mexican American.
A year later, CBC News in Canada reported that famed folk singer and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, who long claimed to have been forcibly removed from her First Nations tribe during the Canadian government program known as the Sixties Scoop, was actually born in Massachusetts. Her biological parents, by whom she claimed to have been forcibly adopted during the Scoop, were Italian and English.
While Sacheen Littlefeather and Buffy Sainte-Marie had no tribal ties, they did work tirelessly to spread awareness of Native rights and issues—even if they labored under false pretenses that benefitted their careers. Both found members of indigenous communities willing to adopt them—a ritual among some tribes that amounts to real tribal affiliation. However in both cases these same communities of Indians—as most Natives who grew up on a reservation prefer to be called, according to author Sherman Alexie—have expressed the need for figures like Littlefeather and Sainte-Marie to come clean about their fraudulent pasts, while also acknowledging their commitment to activism. This outlook has inspired yet another portmanteau, “defendian”—people willing to excuse pretendian fraudulence in favor of commitment to a cause.
Numerous academics, many of whom continue to enjoy professorships even after their lack of tribal affiliation has been exposed, have built their careers on this sort of pretendian activism. Which has only opened the door to more imposters, like this woman, who once took advantage of an artist’s residency at the University of Wisconsin as a supposed two-spirit Native woman.
Sherman Alexie has written and discussed this subject eloquently, here:
“The ‘I’ in BIPOC: Not all Native Americans are leftist political activists,” by Sherman Alexie.
As Micah Treuer asks, “Why? Why were the most famous Indians the most invented ones?” When Buffalo Child Long Lance’s starring role in The Silent Enemy premiered in 1930, audiences walked right by Iroquois steelworkers, “many of whom were just beginning to raise the Empire State Building in record time,” into a fantasy. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, when audiences wanted to escape the “contemporary world of the city, with its soup kitchens and newspapers,” that “contrasted sharply with the world of the film.”
To have a magical experience of the forest, one might think of being profoundly attuned to the world beyond man, a sense of ancientness, of a reality arching back through time, of wildness and mystery, of what might better be called the sublime. The way that Indians are imagined and written makes signals of what is real, the counterpoint to a fractured modernity.
What this amounts to is a romantic (“sublime”) psychological and spiritual need, filled by the supposed representative of nature, the Native American. In our own time, which doesn’t feel all that distant from the fractured modernity of the 1920s and 30s, when politics has in some ways supplanted spiritual belief, “the Indian” continues to serve a purpose distinct from reality, where ecology and ideology have merged with what is perceived as Indigenous spirituality. As Sherman Alexie points out, many Indians are secular. As Nancy Rommelmann mentioned in an interview with him, many of the tribes in Oklahoma’s “Indian territory” are conservative. Visit the Seminoles in Florida, Alexie says, and you’ll likely see some MAGA hats.
As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argued in a 1991 essay for the New York Times, “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” authenticity is a two-way street. Fictional portrayals of Native Americans, or any other culture, inform what a “real” representative of that culture is, as much if not more than the real thing informs art. Appropriating the words of studio head Samuel Goldwyn, Gates quipped, “authenticity remains essential; once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
As Micah Treuer concludes a great essay about Buffalo Child Long Lance, after quoting Gates:
Consciously or not…many…had been looking for art in life. As soon as one starts debating or wondering whether an Indian is an “authentic Indian,” authenticity is lost. And if we want and expect to feel a certain way in the presence of an Indian, we make the same mistake…
I suspect Sherman Alexie would agree.