by Dish Staff
Iron Eyes, the “Crying Indian” in the famous 1970s anti-pollution PSA above, had no actual Cherokee heritage, though he claimed he was “born and raised on a ranch in Oklahoma to family of Creek and Cherokee farmers.” Miley Cyrus, Johnny Cash, and Elizabeth Warren, too, have made dubious claims to Cherokee heritage, as Russell Cobb notes. But Cobb understands the allure. He describes how a college encounter with British exchange students marked his entry into the “tribe of the Wannabes: non-Native Americans who insist on claiming Indian heritage”:
The British exchange students really seemed interested. They clearly wanted to know an Indian. “I think I’m part Choctaw,” I said. “But only, like, one-sixteenth, so I’m not on any tribal rolls or anything.”
Now that I’d said it, it had to be true. After all, my mother’s family came from rural eastern Oklahoma, right on the dividing line between the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations. The family’s cemetery plot in Checotah was right next to the Indian section. And, like Liz Warren’s Papaw, we had high cheekbones.
So I would belong to the tribe of the Wannabes for a while, especially during my early 20s, when I actually didn’t know what the hell I was.
The tribe gave me a sense of identity and it carried some instant prestige when traveling abroad. Europeans love Indians, I discovered. I never fully bought in, however. I knew plenty of people who tried to cash-in on some supposed Indian great-grandfather to qualify for a tuition break or minority status. That wasn’t me.
There was one small problem: The only Indians I knew in Tulsa were a lot like me. They grew up on the same ‘80s pop music and TV shows, followed the same sports teams (even the Oklahoma Sooners, who got their name illegally stealing Native land in the late 19th century). They didn’t ride horses and they didn’t even have cool names, like Iron Eyes. Most of them weren’t any darker than I was. So I didn’t want to be them. I wanted to be like that Indian in that commercial, stoically paddling his canoe through the American landscape, offering a rebuke to the crass commercialism of mainstream America. Oh, wait…
The Dish 