[John Isbell]

Hi Erik,

Yes, that's why I suggested upthread that the Wikipedia entry (at least) "could be edited." It is crowd-sourced and open to the millions who refer to it. This is equally true of the Harjo and the Smith entries. It is perhaps time for that editing to take place. Ahem.
As Jim also writes upthread, "Blown announcement aside, this is good news ..." Harjo's good news is literally qualified by the prefatory blown announcement. But Harjo's standing is independent of Smith's and deserves celebration in its own terms - which seem now to include a belated and parallel adjustment of the historical record, some fifty years late, but occasioned by her appointment. It won't put Smith in my standard Native American anthology, barring a new edition, but it will increase awareness.

Cheers,
John

[Julie Steiner]

After finding the following paragraphs in the autobiographical essay that William Jay Smith submitted to Something About the Author, I think his claims of Native American heritage should be taken with a grain of salt at least as large as Elizabeth Warren's.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/childre...lliam-jay-1918

At the time of my anxiety about our bootlegging, I began to have a special concern, exaggerated no doubt by Mrs. Bradbury's thrusting me constantly before the public, about my appearance. I realized that I had only the faintest of eyebrows and that my eyelids folded up rather than back over my eyeballs as they did for everyone else. My eyes, I became convinced, gave me the Oriental look that prompted some of the toughs on the school playground to call me "Chink" or "China-boy." The normal pimply face of the adolescent is hard enough to cope with, but I found that I not only had pimples but virtually no beard. Bits of fuzz grew only on my chin and my upper lip, with no sign that my beard would ever grow on the sides of my face. There was no one to turn to for help because I was not even sure what kind of help I needed: I became more and more withdrawn and found true friends only in books. It was in books also that I found what I felt was the answer to my problem. I read that American Indians of all tribes had very light beards and hairless bodies. What hair grew on their faces they extracted with clam shells. I thought of the only real Indians that I had seen—Big Ike and Little Ike, both of whom served with my father in the Barracks Band and came frequently to our house. They both had light beards, and although their complexions were darker than mine, still I looked more like them than like the other people around me. I decided that I was an Indian.

Throughout my boyhood I had identified with the Indians, not the Plains Indians of the films, who very early on seemed to me absolutely phony, but the Indians of the woods and of the settled villages who greeted the early explorers; not the Indians of the wild war whoops and the tomahawks, but the Indians of the stealthy movement through the forest. I had discovered their arrowheads in the caves on the post, and I identified with them on my walks through the woods when I constructed my lean-tos of sassafras beside the muddy creeks, or when I moved on the balls of my feet over the underbrush, listening carefully for the slightest sound, the darting movement of a snake or the sudden thundering of a covey of quail:

Early on, Jefferson Barracks had become the focal point for forays against the Indians. Lt. Jefferson Davis had escorted Black Hawk, the famous Sac (Sauk) and Fox Chief, together with his son Naopope (the Prophet), to Jefferson Barracks after his defeat and capture in 1832 near Bad Axe River. Black Hawk praised the courtesy shown them by Davis, whom he described as "a good and young chief in whose conduct I am much pleased." When George Catlin came to the Barracks to paint portraits of Black Hawk and his son, Naopope raised his ball and chains above his head and exclaimed, "Paint me thus and show 'the Great Father.'" When Catlin painted Black Hawk, he was dressed, in Catlin's words, "in a plain suit of buckskin, with strings of wampum in his ears and on his neck." In his hand he held his medicine bag "which was the skin of a black hawk, from which he had taken his name, and the tail of which made him a fan, which he was almost constantly using." The limestone ordnance depot where Black Hawk had been imprisoned was near our house at the Barracks north gate and I visited it often.

About this time my cousin Clara Louise came to live with us for a year. She looked exactly like my Aunt Lucinda; although not quite so plump, she had the same high cheekbones, black eyes, and straight black hair. I became convinced that it was in them, and in my mother's brother who had similar features, as it was in me, that the traits of our Indian ancestors, whoever they may have been, showed themselves.

It was not until much later that I discovered that we did indeed have Choctaw blood. My cousin William Carroll Tabor, a member of the House of Representatives in the First Oklahoma legislature of 1903, put in a claim to the Dawes Commission stating that his great-grandmother Rebecca Tubbs Williams was the daughter of Chief Moshulatubbee, the head of the Choctaw nation at the time of the removal from Mississippi to Oklahoma. That claim was denied but it was always understood in my mother's family that her grandmother Catherine Williams, about whom she had often spoken to me, was definitely a Mississippi Choctaw.

I have been asked what influence, if any, this modest measure of Choctaw blood may have had on my work. I like to think that the still center from which I believe my poetry springs has much in common with the reverential attitude of the Native American towards the elements, the sensory and spiritual connection between earth and sky that makes for that magical instinctive balance that permits the Mohawk to walk with perfect equilibrium on the edges of skyscrapers at great heights. And I would like to think that the visual element in my work may owe something to my Choctaw heritage. When I started to do my typewriter poems—concrete poems composed on the typewriter—someone pointed out that these typewritten patterns and inscriptions resembled the petroglyphs that Native Americans left on the stone walls of caverns throughout the country as a record of the world with which they were in close touch and to which they paid constant tribute.

Whatever heritage it may have brought me, the discovery at the time gave me new strength to face the limited—and limiting—aspects of military life: I found it reassuring that while I had been brought up on an Army garrison founded as an outpost in the Indian Wars, I had forebears on the outside and in the enemy's camp.

[John Isbell]

Thanks Julie. That certainly adds to the narrative.

Cheers,
John

[Mark McDonnell]

Throughout my boyhood I had identified with the Indians, not the Plains Indians of the films, who very early on seemed to me absolutely phony, but the Indians of the woods and of the settled villages who greeted the early explorers...It was not until much later that I discovered that we did indeed have Choctaw blood...I have been asked what influence, if any, this modest measure of Choctaw blood may have had on my work.

I suppose one could argue that if he genuinely believed himself to be of Native American heritage and, to use the current terminology, 'identified as' Native American, then he was. In the same way that we accept gender identity as something completely distinct from biological sex, mightn't we do the same for racial or cultural identity, irrespective of the actual 'blood quantum' (I think that's the Native American phrase)? You are what you feel you are, aren't you?

I'm not sure I would actually make this argument about Smith, but it's interesting to think about. There was that woman in the NAACP wasn't there?

[John Isbell]

For what it's worth, I too, like many, am part Native American, according to family tradition, and the DNA seems to support that. But I'd find it weird, and a little cheesy, if people started describing me as a Native American author. In fact, I once had a chair who asked to list me as such for EOE/AA statistics. So that happens.

Cheers,
John

Edit: as James notes below - a person can sincerely identify with a group. But it is a different thing to grow up with that experience, particularly if the group faces systemic oppression. That is kind of the point of my anecdote.

[James Brancheau]

What Mark said. To risk adding to that, what if Warren were found to be half Native American? Would it really make a difference if, growing up, her culture and experience were completely alien to that? And the opposite could obviously be true. Race can be, unfortunately, a big factor in the way you are treated by others. Especially in some places in the world. So, as much as I might identify with, for example, African Americans, as a white guy I can't say I'm black because I don't experience someone clutching her purse as I walk by or being told at the grocery store, without saying anything, that they don't accept food stamps. However, it's a mistake, grossly inaccurate, to confuse race with culture. And to underestimate the ability to sincerely, if incompletely, identify with others.

[Mark Blaeuer]

It sounds to me as if Smith was a good man as well as a good poet. On the other hand, the proper authority for whether one is a member of a particular tribe should be the tribe itself. It doesn’t matter which tribe you claim to be a member of; it matters which tribe claims you as a member. One could ask his sons, if they’re still around, or the three federally recognized Choctaw tribes, but a lengthy debate could tarnish Smith’s reputation if it’s perceived—mistakenly, of course—as an attempt to diminish Harjo’s achievement. Even if genealogical research were to reveal that Smith had distant Choctaw ancestry, it wouldn’t justify a statement like “I decided that I was an Indian.”

By the way, I’m glad Harjo was appointed. She’s been an important figure in American poetry for a long time.

[James Brancheau]

Never mind.

[Matt Q]

In the interview Julie quotes, I don't see Smith necessarily claiming anything more than "a modest measure of Choctaw blood", which seems a reasonable enough claim. According to this article, "He didn’t make much of his Native American ancestry". That same article calls him a "Native American Poet", mind, but I wonder if that's a claim he'd make for himself? Is there any reason to believe he'd have wanted to contest Harjo's status as first Native American poet laureate?

[Erik Olson]

Originally Posted by Mark Blaeuer

It sounds to me as if Smith was a good man as well as a good poet.

So he does, and yet he appears to have given himself up to fanciful credulity. If he would confine his conceits in his own mind, he might persist in delusions with inconvenience only to himself; but to fill the world with an assertion of his ancestry based on such capricious grounds and absent a shred of objective support leads countless astray.

Those grounds are: First he felt his appearance was different from his peers—because he noticed he had ‘only the faintest of eyebrows and that my eyelids folded up rather than back over my eyeballs as they did for everyone else.’ And, second, because he lacked body hair relative to his peers. After those observations, he needed nothing more than to read American Indians of all tribes have very light beards and hairless bodies to conclude, in his words: I decided that I was an Indian. As if it were something he could decide at will. Before I had that improbable piece of intelligence that Julie dropped, it was unreasonable to disbelieve his avowed heritage; but post-bombshell is a different story.