I missed this post at Galleycat until this morning, but apparently LA Weekly has discovered that the Native American memorist Nasdijj is really a white guy who used to make a living writing gay S&M porn.

Pardon me while I freak out.

I read the original essay in Esquire several years ago that introduced Nasdijj and his young adopted son who died from fetal alcohol syndrome. The story blew me away and I was so impressed by the rawness of the emotions that Nasdijj wrote about that I very happily read the book that followed his magazine debut. The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams was really raw - it was horrible to read how much that little boy suffered and how hard Nasdijj tried to make his life worthwhile and how nobody understood what mattered to them - how poor they were, how tough life was for them and on and on. I thought it was great, I thought it was majestic, shit - I thought it was heroic.

I'm such an idiot.

Reading the LA Weekly article now I am shocked by a lot of things, but mostly that author Sherman Alexie saw through the book right away and tried very very hard to stop it, to make the publisher believe him when he said the book had several glaring inaccuracies (had even stolen some of Alexie's life apparently) but the publisher (Houghton Mifflin) felt that it was honest enough and - as quoted in the article - "they don't fact check".

Clearly emotional truth reared its ugly head yet again.

This is the part where I really freak out. Hell, even the editor agreed that Nasdijj was rough on things like his own parentage - hello! He was raised by these people not in an orphanage somewhere. Wouldn't you remember what clan you Navajo Indian mother belonged to? Wouldn't that ring a bell?

Anyway, the other thing that the article points out is that white people have been pretending to be Indians for a long time and happily getting away with it. The poster child for this of course is Forrest Carter who wrote Education of Little Tree which has been proven over and over to be nothing but a fairy tale. (Written by a KKK member of all things.) But it's still in print, and still published as a memoir. We used to carry it at the independent bookstore where I worked in AK and every time it came in there would be a discussion amongst the staff about where to shelve it. The booksellers didn't want to put it in the Native American section, we wanted it in fiction (actually we didn't want it in the store, but no luck there), managment always won by saying that the publisher labeled it as nonfic and that was what it was. (And if you look around the web you will see that pretty much every major bookseller is still carrying quotes that refer to it as a memoir, even Powells.)

As explained in the LA Weekly article, none of this would happen if there wasn't complicity in the business - if publishers, editors and agents weren't happy to let the lies keep going because sales were good. Isn't somebody responsible for this? The author is responsible for lying but for perpetuating that lie, for knowing that it isn't right and selling it anyway or for purposely not checking to prove it wrong - isn't that publisher responsible on some level?

WTF?

Sherman Alexie writes great fiction and poetry and there are a ton of other Native American writers who publish as well. Look for the established names I guess, or check them out on the internet to be certain that someone doesn't have some skeletons in their closet. (Five seconds will show you everything you needed to know about Carter.) Over and over it seems, when it comes to buying nonfiction books now we must insist on the truth every step of the way, because evidently no one else is going to do it. And in the meantime, read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It's a great collection and Sherman Alexie at least knows who his parents are, and can prove that he grew up on a reservation.

Such a simple thing, isn't it - asking a writer who they are? And yet no one bothered to ask Nasdijj, no one, not once, bothered to ask.