HOAX HUNTING IS A HOAX

HOAX HUNTING is the ultimate hoax.  A few Christmases back, I ran a little test.  In the inevitable computer page of summarizing the year, I told how I had fallen in love with a Samoan man half my age and twice my weight.  He was penniless and came to Glacier Park to find work but found me instead.  Now we were going to be married and go live in Samoa.  His mother approved and it would cost us almost nothing to live an idyllic life where it never snowed.  About half the people on my Christmas list believed me.

So many hoaxes riddle the Internet, esp. the social media platforms, that other platforms such as Snopes.com justify themselves by finding and reporting the truth.  When I looked just now, it had investigated a clip that purported to be Nancy Pelosi slurring her words, but turned out to be a legitimate clip that been altered by slowing it.  We’ve become accustomed to the amazing Photoshop feats that put someone's head on another person or make them say something surprising.  One ingenious political vid simply edited what Donald Trump Jr. said about Biden so that he seemed to make every accusation be about his own father.  Entirely believable.

If I had claimed that I had fallen in love with a Blackfeet man, that we were going to get married and live in his homeland which is right here anyway, I would not have been believed.  I did marry a white man from here, twice my age, and friends and family came to the wedding so they know that is true, though society might object.  What was the difference?

Racial assumptions go deeper than just prejudice.  Even people who have come here and met “real Indians” cannot get it out of their heads that this is not the prairie 19th century that was slightly distorted to make movies.  Oddly, they accept that tribes near Neah Bay in Washington State can be vampires and shape-shift into wolves.  At least kids do.

In so many minds, the indigenous people of this continent are invisible, which is part of them projecting a complex and intensely emotional mental picture.  It is so powerful that enrolled and rez-dwelling people themselves believe it.  One of Sherman Alexie’s best stories is about that mythical image that cannot be killed.  Few “real Indians” even know what he’s talking about.  They don’t do abstract metaphors.  To them the story is about a prizefighter and not exactly a nice one.  There are no horses — just fish.

The most cynical promoters of the idea that any one demographic can be considered different, even exalted and taboo, are book publishers.  Quick to assume that anyone who looks like Hollywood’s version is authentic, they will relentlessly promote them that way.  The same thing happens with the romance of crime, particularly if drugs are involved.  The readers never realize they’re not being hoaxed so much as punked.

In reality the best literature on the rez is still oral, the stories told to each other — often ghost stories.  The women who become writers are the girls who got A’s in school by pleasing their teachers, probably white or at least assimilated, so they have proficiency in standardized writing.  But they also have grandmothers — well, these days more likely great-grandmothers — who told them those oral stories they use.  To justify themselves, they make the claim that no white person is allowed to write about indigenous people or even say anything about them.  Just ask their white male coastal-culture publishers who secretly think books by anthropologists are not about real people.  Except Ishi, of course, who was no hoax, endorsed by important white people.

It’s exasperating but almost amusing that the people who scold white people for ever reading books about “Indians” that were written by white people are imitating the missionaries who scolded them constantly, dictating every little thing.  Few old people that I have known were so bossy.  Other younger people love to be the only “ones who know.”  Having fought the struggle to understand who they are, they conclude they are Native Americans and therefore all Native Americans are like them. 

A few years ago, in complement to the mythology of the Original People, a sequence of tell-all books about beloved cowboy writers were published.  Zane Grey went ocean fishing with his mistress while his wife wrote his books.  Ernest Haycox wrote in an office 9 to 5 as though he were running an insurance company.  Charlie Russell hung out in whorehouses.  Their lives were dumbed down and sanitized by publishers to avoid censors.  Some people think cowboys and Indians are for children.

This afternoon neighbors came by, excellent people who grew up in Montana.  When asked, I tried to explain why James Willard Schultz is not an “Indian” writer and that his stories were not meant to be anthro facts but rather exciting adventures.  I failed.  The argument was too abstract and depended on categories they didn’t know, even living here for decades.  They had no place in their brains to put what I was telling them.

I began to feel like an alien.  Darrell Robes Kipp used to say the book that described most accurately what it was like to be a full-blood Blackfeet was “Stranger in a Strange Land.”  How can a Martian explain his planet?  I tried to talk about how the land speaks and how we can read the horizon.  Their eyes went blank.  I think they thought I was teasing them.  Or just being a smart aleck.  Overeducated.

Most articles about rez folks by white people are either anthropological or pitying or history.  Or politics.  Rarely are there accounts of ordinary folks accepting whatever the conditions are and making the best of them.  I guess it’s up to me to summon up some memories, even though I’m white.  Half this enrolled tribe is living someplace else, usually the city, and most of them are “passing” as white.  Not purposefully, but because people just assume they’re Italian or something.

So I just go ahead and write my little stories about what I know and let the chips fall wherever.  Most of the markers I knew decades ago have disappeared anyway, so I’ll just explore.  Oh, and the hoax thing?  You’re talking about the President of the USA, right?  He punked us.  The publishers have loved it as they counted their profits.