In the Native Art World we’ve all met someone who isn't what they say they are, who suddenly discovered an "Indian" ancestor, or who claims to have a mother or father who's "part Indian". Indian impostors have always been a part of our Canadian heritage with the most impressive being GreyOwl.
We expect our heroes to be flawed, but Archie Belaney, aka Grey Owl, was more flawed than most. The guise under which he did his considerable good works was a lie. Yet, in his heyday he was the most famous Canadian alive. When he came to Canada in 1906 Archie Belaney headed for the wilderness around Lake Temiskaming, astride the border of Ontario and Quebec. There he set about creating his own family myth, in which he was born part Apache in the southwestern United States. He married an Ojibwa named Angele and began weaving snippets of language and culture into his personal narrative. He dyed his hair black, darkened his skin with henna and stared in a mirror for hours to practice a stoical "Indian" expression. He left Angele and presented his new persona to a young Iroquois girl named Gertrude Bernard. Archie loved and respected Gertrude, whom he named Anahareo, but he could never tell her the truth about his origins. To try to support himself Archie wrote his first article for the English magazine Country Life. He declared himself an "Indian writer" and for the first time he used the name "Grey Owl." He worked furiously on a manuscript that would appear in 1931 as The Men of the Last Frontier.
In 1936 Grey Owl made a triumphant return to England as the Hiawatha character he had imagined as a boy. He spoke to sold-out houses repeating the same theme "Remember you belong to Nature, not it to you." As his success grew, so did his anxiety of being discovered. At least one journalist, Ed Bunyan of the North Bay Nugget knew that Grey Owl was a fake, but he chose not to run the story. In 1937 Grey Owl made an even more successful tour of Britain, meeting the King and Queen. He followed with a hectic speaking tour of Canada and the US but his health was broken by alcohol and exhaustion. He died April 7, 1938.
Once the Nugget got the story of Grey Owl's death, it finally ran its three-year old article, quoting Angele's statement that he was a "full blooded white man." Newspapers around the world picked up the story but they hesitated to condemn Grey Owl. Anahareo reacted with disbelief. "I had the awful feeling for all those years I had been married to a ghost," she wrote.
Many of the native people whom Grey Owl met knew instantly that he was a counterfeit. The central core question remaining “How could anyone ever mistake him for an Indian?” Certainly the Indians never did.
