High Stakes

ED AYERS: Hi, podcast listeners. Ed here. We’re hard at work here at BackStory on a new show for the 2016 Oscars, and we have a listener challenge. If you give us an historical event or person and a film genre, we’ll combine the two into a movie trailer. Maybe you’d like to pitch a romantic comedy about that adorable duo of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

MALE SPEAKER: This fall, life is about the journey and the family you make–

MALE SPEAKER: He treated me as his chief advisor.

MALE SPEAKER: –along the way.

MALE SPEAKER: The main thing was that I battled.

ED AYERS: Or maybe a mystery set in the 1920s about all the alcohol in America just disappearing. Have fun so we can have some fun. You can pitch your ideas on our website, backstoryradio.org, or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Or feel free to send suggestions on our Facebook page or Twitter. Our handle is at backstoryradio. We’ll produce a few of the trailers for our upcoming show about history in this year’s Oscar nominated movies.

BRIAN BALOGH: Earlier we heard about Clarence King, who lived as both a white and a black man in the late 19th century. That double identity was never uncovered in King’s lifetime, but what if it had been? What would have happened to his reputation, his career?

Now, we’re historians, so we don’t dabble in what ifs. But we can bring you this next story, which shows the dangers of getting caught.

ED AYERS: In 1928, a silent film actor named Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance published his autobiography to great fanfare. Americans clamored to read about this man who had been described in the movie magazines as–

EVA GARROUTTE: One of the last 100% real Americans.

ED AYERS: This is Eva Garroutte, a sociologist at Boston College. She says Long Lance’s autobiography included dramatic scenes from his Native American childhood.

EVA GARROUTTE: Where he had danced around the fire with his body bedobbed with red paint, and he remembered the men coming back from great Buffalo hunts with their gory trophies.

ED AYERS: Long Lance’s popularity was no doubt enhanced by his striking looks.

EVA GARROUTTE: He was a hottie, let me tell you.

[LAUGHTER]

But in his head shot he’s got short, well-styled, straight black hair, and this beautiful bronze complexion, dark eyes. And oh, he is Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome.

ED AYERS: But soon after he published his book, people in Hollywood started to question Long Lance’s a story and his racial identity.

EVA GARROUTTE: Is maybe his lower lip a little too full for an Indian? Is he a little too dusky for an Indian?

ED AYERS: Movie studios dispatched private investigators to his hometown in Winston, North Carolina. There they discovered the truth about Long Lance.

EVA GARROUTTE: In fact, his family name was not Long Lance, but it was the more pedestrian Long. And his given name was not Buffalo Child. His given name was Sylvester.

ED AYERS: Also, Long wasn’t the son of an Indian chief. His father was a school janitor. And the Longs, well, they were African American.

Now, Sylvester Long’s family did include some Native American ancestry, but that didn’t count in 1920s America. The one-drop rule trumped any Indian heritage. So rather than live as a black man in the Jim Crow South, Sylvester Long chose another path.

EVA GARROUTTE: He had to leave and reinvent himself, which he began to do when he was a young teenager. He ran away. He joined the Wild West show.

He was not alone in doing that among American Indian peoples. A lot of people like Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, too. So he was in company with a lot of other Indian people there. And while he was there, he learned to speak a few words of Cherokee and that gave him then a stepping stone to Carlisle Indian School.

ED AYERS: Oh.

EVA GARROUTTE: And, of course, the boarding school experience for American Indian peoples is one of the really egregious aspects of genocide that was perpetrated on American Indian peoples across the country. It was very much intended to wipe out aspects of native culture, including language, religion, everything, and replace them with alternatives that were more acceptable to the dominant society at that time. But–

ED AYERS: But he runs in reverse though, doesn’t he?

EVA GARROUTTE: Yes. For Long Lance, it’s an opportunity to be seized.

ED AYERS: Right.

EVA GARROUTTE: It’s the only chance that he’s going to have for a reasonable education. So he shares these experiences with other Indian people even though he really had to leave where he came from in order to have that for himself.

ED AYERS: Right. So how does he translate that educational experience into an entire adult identity, however, as an American Indian?

EVA GARROUTTE: Well, he goes on to travel around to American Indian reserves and writes journalistic stories that expose abuses of American Indian people there and argue for greater rights for American Indian people. And in recognition of those efforts, the Blood Reserve, which is in the Blackfoot Nation in Canada, goes on to honor him. And they invest him with a ceremonial name, which is Buffalo Child. And so that’s the name that he then goes on to use in his career. Gets himself into the movies and really becomes an important, significant celebrity on both coasts.

ED AYERS: So he plays offense on this. It’s not that he’s just trying to sneak in, he’s actually seizing identity in every way that was available to him, it seems.

EVA GARROUTTE: Yeah. He really is this tragic figure, because you can read his biography in both ways. You can read it as that he’s an imposter and a liar, or you can read him as somebody who really has some genuine feelings. When he dies, he leaves his estate to the Blood Reserve in Canada. So it seems like he comes to develop some personal commitment to this.

ED AYERS: So for him to be so successful, there has to be a hunger among the white majority for such a person. Why would people be so eager to find a full-blooded Indian chief who embodied a people who had been so much the victims of white American history?

EVA GARROUTTE: America has this very peculiar relationship, I think, to American Indian identity. Once you get to a time where Indian people are actually no longer a real threat to the colonial society, then they start to get cool. Then they start to get romantic. Then they start to get exotic. And America at this time is greedy for Indians, but only the right kind.

Well, Sylvester Long is really clear on what constitutes the right kind. He makes himself over into exactly what is asked for, which is a full-blood, the son of a great chief. He assembled pieces of ceremonial attire from various tribes where he had visited. And he has this fabulous photo of him– he’s got his feathers and he’s got his beadwork and everything, and he’s got the pants on backwards. He doesn’t even know how to dress himself, poor man, but neither did anybody else who was seeing those pictures.

ED AYERS: So what’s the response when the expose of his autobiography comes out?

EVA GARROUTTE: Yeah, his entire life implodes, basically. His career was over as of that moment, as were all of his social relationships. And then, eventually, he commits suicide.

ED AYERS: Oh, gosh.

EVA GARROUTTE: Because America did not care that he did have some native ancestry. If he had any black ancestry at all, it forced him into this category of being black. So whereas one drop of white blood does not make you white, one drop of Indian blood does not make you Indian. But by golly, one drop of African blood will make you black and it will force you into that category whether you want to be there or not. Whereas, for American Indians, the rule has often been that you need an awful lot of Indian ancestry to be able to claim that you are an Indian person.

ED AYERS: So what got you interested in this story?

EVA GARROUTTE: I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation myself. And I’m also a light-skinned person of mixed ancestry, and people are frequently asking me how much Indian are you, which makes me feel like a dog or a horse.

ED AYERS: Right.

EVA GARROUTTE: So I guess my own personal experience led me to really write this book in which I invite people to talk about all the different ways that people think about who’s Indian enough to be Indian.

ED AYERS: Eva Garroutte is a sociologist at Boston College. Her book is called “Real Indians– Identity and the Survival of Native America.”