The Truth About Stories by Thomas King

exact words but the gist of it was that North Americans had shot Native
     men and bred Native women until they were White.
    In a perverse way, I’ve always liked people like Lee. They are, by
     and large, easy to deal with. Their racism is honest and straightforward. You
     don’t have to go looking for it in a phrase or a gesture. And you don’t have
     to wonder if you’re being too sensitive. Best of all, they remind me how the past
     continues to inform the present.
    One Monday, Lee stopped by my desk with a presentfor
     me. It was a cartoon that he had gotten one of the guys in the art department to work
     up. It showed a stereotypical Indian in feathers and leathers with a bull’s eye on
     his crotch and flies buzzing around him. “Office of Chief Screaching
     [
sic
] Eagle Goldstein,” the caption read. “Payola and bribes
     acceptable in the form of checks or money orders. No silver please.” Just above
     the Indian was “Happy Barmizvah Keemosaby” and just below was “only
     living Cherokee Jew.”
    Lee stood at my desk, waiting for me to smile. I told him it was funny as
     hell, and he said, yeah, everyone he had showed it to thought it was a scream. I had the
     cartoon mounted on a board and stuck it on my desk.
    I still have it. Just in case I forget.
    So it was unanimous. Everyone knew who Indians were. Everyone knew what
     we looked like. Even Indians. But standing in that parking lot in Oklahoma with my
     brother, looking at the statue of Will Rogers, I realized, for perhaps the first time,
     that I didn’t know. Or more accurately, I didn’t know how I wanted to
     represent Indians. My brother was right. Will Rogers did not look like an Indian. Worse,
     as I cast my mind across the list of Native artists I had come west to photograph, many
     of them friends, I realized that a good number of them didn’t look Indian,
     either.
    Yet how can something that has never existed — the Indian —
     have form and power while something that is alive and kicking — Indians —
     are invisible?
    Edward Sheriff Curtis.
    James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, Paul Kane,
     Charles Bird King, Karl May, the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, the Chicago
     Blackhawks, Pontiac (the car, not the Indian), Land O’Lakes butter, Calumet baking
     soda, Crazy Horse Malt Liquor,
A Man Called Horse
, Iron Eyes Cody,
Dances
     with Wolve
s,
The Searchers
, the Indian Motorcycle Company, American
     Spirit tobacco, Native American Barbie, Chippewa Springs Golf Course, John Augustus
     Stone, the Cleveland Indians, Disney’s Pocahontas, Geronimo shoes, the Calgary
     Stampede, Cherokee brand underwear, the Improved Order of Red Men, Ralph Hubbard and his
     Boy Scout troop, Mutual of Omaha, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Boston Tea
     Party, Frank Hamilton Cushing, William Wadsworth Longfellow, the Bank of Montreal,
     Chief’s Trucking, Grey Owl,
The Sioux Spaceman
, Red Man chewing tobacco,
     Grateful Dead concerts, Dreamcatcher perfume.
    In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian
     simply has to exist in our imaginations.
    But for those of us who are Indians, this disjunction between reality and
     imagination is akin to life and death. For to be seen as “real,” for people
     to “imagine” us as Indians, we must be “authentic.”
    In the past, authenticity was simply in the eye of the beholder. Indians
     who looked Indian were authentic. Authenticity only became a problem for Native people
     in the twentieth century. While it is true that mixed-blood and full-blood rivalries
     predate this period, the question of who was an Indian and who was not was easier to
     settle. What made it easy was that most Indians lived onreserves of
     one sort or another (out of sight of Europeans) and had strong ties to a particular
     community, and the majority of those people who “looked Indian” and