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Subject: another (white) queer writer pretends to be injun to get published
Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature's most celebrated memoirists -- by passing himself off as Native American?
By MATTHEW FLEISCHER
Thursday, January 26, 2006 -- 10:48 pm
"So achingly honest it takes your breath away."
-Miami Herald on The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
In June of 1999 a writer calling himself Nasdijj emerged from obscurity to publish an ode to his adopted son in Esquire. "My son is dead," he began. "I didn't say my adopted son is dead. He was my son. My son was a Navajo. He lived six years. They were the best six years of my life."
The boy's name was Tommy Nothing Fancy and Nasdijj wrote that he and his wife adopted Tommy as an infant and raised him in their home on the Navajo reservation. At first, Tommy seemed like a healthy baby, albeit one who consistently cried throughout the night. "The doctor at the Indian Health Service said it was nothing. Probably gas."
[...]
The Esquire piece, as successful as it was heartbreaking, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and helped establish Nasdijj as a prominent new voice in the world of nonfiction. "Esquire's Cinderella story," as Salon's Sean Elder called it, "arrived over the transom, addressed to no one in particular. 'The cover letter was this screed about how Esquire had never published the work of an American-Indian writer and never would because it's such a racist publication,' recalls editor in chief David Granger. 'And under it was... one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I'd ever read.' By the time the piece was published in the June issue, the writer (who lives on an Indian reservation) had a book contract."
 
The contract was for a full-length memoir, The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2000 to great acclaim. It was followed by two more memoirs, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping (Ballantine, 2003), and Geronimo's Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me (Ballantine, 2004). As if losing a son was not enough, the memoirs portray a lifetime of suffering.
Nasdijj was born on the Navajo reservation in a hogan in 1950, he claims, the son of an abusive white cowboy "who broke, bred, and bootlegged horses” and a Navajo mother. "My mother," he writes, "was a hopeless drunk. I would use the word 'alcoholic' but it's too polite. It's a white people word... There is nothing polite about cleaning up your mother in her vomit and dragging her unconscious carcass back to the migrant housing trailer you lived in."
Nasdijj says his father would sometimes pimp his mother to other migrant workers for "five bucks" and that she died of alcoholism when he was 7. Though their time together was short and turbulent, Nasdijj says his mother instilled in him the Navajo traditions that now inform his work.
His father, he says, was a sexual predator who raped him the night his mother died. Because his father was white, Nasdijj says he was treated like an "outcast bastard" on the reservation. Like Tommy Nothing Fancy, Nasdijj claims to have fetal alcohol syndrome and to have been raised, with his brother, in migrant camps all over the country.
Nasdijj knows how to pull heartstrings. Both The Blood and The Boy revolve around the lives and deaths of his adopted Navajo sons. "Death, to the Navajo, is like the cold wind that blows across the mesa from the north," Nasdijj writes in The Blood. "We do not speak of it." But Nasdijj does speak of it. In fact, he speaks of it almost exclusively. Death and suffering are his staples.
"My son comes back to me when I least expect to see his ghostly vision," he writes. "He lives in my bones and scars."
But Nasdijj hasn't built his career purely through the tragic and sensational nature of his stories. His style is an artful blending of poetry and prose, and his work has met with nearly universal critical praise.  The Blood "reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society," wrote Ted Conover in The New York Times Book Review. Rick Bass called it "mesmerizing, apocalyptic, achingly beautiful and redemptive... a powerful American classic," while Howard Frank Mosher said it was "the best memoir I have read about family love, particularly a father's love for his son, since A River Runs Through It."The Blood was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and winner of the Salon Book Award.
The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping was published to more glowing reviews -- "vivid and immediate, crackling with anger, humor, and love" (The Washington Post) and "riveting... lyrical... a ragged wail of a song, an ancient song, where we learn what it is to truly be a parent and love a child" (USA Today). [...]
On many issues, preachy whites simply lack the political and cultural cachet of someone perceived to be Native American.
"My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you're Indian," says Sherman Alexie. "For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I'm so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow."
Indeed, the world has had an Indian fetish since the days of P.T. Barnum. Certain steps have been taken to protect cultural integrity — the Native American Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, for instance, makes it a federal crime for anyone not enrolled in or associated with a federally recognized tribe to sell their art as "Indian." Yet literature, strangely enough, is not covered under the Arts and Craft Act, leaving it vulnerable to exploitation.
"The backbone of multicultural literature," says Alexie, "is the empathy of its audience -- their curiosity for the condition of a group other than themselves. Nasdijj is taking advantage of that empathy."
If Nasdijj is not Native American, he's not only misinforming his audience, he's making it harder for genuine work to come forward. The PEN/Beyond Margins Award is given annually to a Native American writer to help spread "racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities." When Nasdijj accepted the award in 2004, he accepted money and prestige specifically earmarked to help Native Americans share their story.
Here.
Ed. Note: If you don't think the media are controlled by jews who hate Whites and celebrate incompetent minorities to mock them - you're an idiot. Personal responsibility for whites; extenuations for negroes, indians, high colorics & sedimentaries of a thousand admixtures. A very similar hoax was carried out by an Australian White man a few years ago. Upon his true geneaology being revealed, the quality of his book dropped precipitously, according to reviewer-bigots who loved him as Aboriginal. But, again, there's nothing wrong here that can't be cleared up by exterminating jews. What you have to do to understand what's going on here is use your imagination. Salon, ESPN, Esquire, New York Review of Books, USA Today -- these are the same thing. The reality construct they create and subscribe to and sustain involves very few, infinitely repeated stereotypes. The White abusive rapist father is stock figure. The noble injun is common. Cunts like John Grisham portray whites as nigger rapists, and niggers as heroic and honorable. Queers hoping to get published furbish their work to fit the judeo-ideostructure. The publishing world, like the academy, is essentially a bunch of jews and some white liberals babbling among themselves, affecting to discover in nasty, incompetent muds stained versions of themselves. This would be a silly and ridiculous game except that ordinary White pay for it, both directly, via "money for education," and indirectly, through the opportunity cost of White art unwritten, unpublished because, according to the jew gatekeepers, undesirable. Whites can never be depicted as victims, even when they are. Thus, civil rights, the current political structure, the tyranny of the jew-coloreds -- none of this can be gotten between covers and on shelves in the airport bookstores, the campus bookstore, or in the local library. This makes the world both more boring and more dangerous. The minority that sees what is going on, made up almost exclusively of White males, must take matters publishing and political into its own hands. John Cunt Grisham can write fifteen novels about whites raping blacks, but the reality his kind have produced is that niggers rape whites. That reality will not change because it is writ in bone. "When The Niggers Came to Town," a story about the sordid reality behind integration of the public schools, with a side order of reality-truthing about 'fair' housing," will never make print. Never happen in the land of the free, you can believe that. The only way Whites get access to the mass public these days is by celebrating their inner freak, fag or 'fro - see Frey. No one wants to be proud and White, there's no percentage in it. It's hate, according the shithardim who run our world...today.
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