In 1928, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance published a memoir that caused a sensation in the literary world. It opened with his earliest memory: Barely a year old, he was riding in a moss baby carrier on his mother’s back, surrounded by women and horses. His mother’s hand was bleeding, and she was crying. Long Lance wrote that when he’d recounted this memory to his aunt years later, he’d been told that he was remembering the “exciting aftermath of an Indian fight” in which his uncle Iron Blanket had just been killed by the Blackfeet Tribe’s traditional enemies, the Crow. His mother’s hand was bleeding because she had amputated her own finger in mourning.
His next memory was of falling off a horse at age 4. “From this incident on,” he wrote, “I remember things distinctly. I remember moving about over the prairies from camp to camp.” Born to a Blackfeet warrior in the late 19th century, during the final days of the “free” Blackfeet in northern Montana and southern Alberta, Long Lance wrote that his father’s generation was facing “the mystery of the future in relation to the coming of the White Man.”
Long Lance attended the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, and received a presidential appointment to West Point. Eager to fight in the Great War even before America entered the conflict, he traveled to Montreal in 1916 to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, fought at Vimy Ridge, and was twice wounded. The second wound knocked him out of combat, but not—he would later boast—before he’d risen to the rank of captain and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
By the time his memoir came out, Long Lance had traveled a great distance—from the High Plains to New York high society. One night in the winter of 1928, he spotted Natacha Rambova, the ex-wife of the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino, in the Crystal Room of the Ritz-Carlton. According to his biographer, Donald B. Smith, Long Lance approached Rambova and asked her to dance. They began an affair, but she wasn’t the only woman in his life: Long Lance was also linked to the actor Mildred McCoy, the singer Vivian Hart, and Princess Alexandra Victoria of the House of Glücksburg.
Long Lance was shockingly handsome, broad-shouldered and wasp-waisted, with smooth, coppery skin and thick black hair. He did calisthenics and gymnastics every morning and wrestling when he could find partners. He had boxed with the world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and been a training partner for the legendary Olympian Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox and Potawatomi Nations.
When Long Lance’s memoir was published, the planned initial run of 3,000 copies was bumped to 10,000 on the strength of early reads and the endorsement of The Saturday Evening Post ’s Irvin S. Cobb, then one of the most influential journalists in the world. (Cobb also wrote the book’s foreword.) Reviews of the memoir were fulsome. The New Orleans Times-Picayune declared it “the most important Americana offered this year.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger averred that Long Lance had written “a gorgeous saga of the Indian Race.” In the New York Herald Tribune, an anthropologist called the book an “unusually faithful account” of a Native American’s childhood and early manhood. Across the Atlantic, The New Statesman declared that the memoir “rings true; no outsider could explain so clearly how the Indians felt.”
By 1930, Long Lance’s celebrity extended far beyond New York ballrooms and newspaper book reviews: He starred in a feature film, The Silent Enemy, about a famine that strikes a fictionalized version of the Ojibwe Tribe. The B. F. Goodrich Company planned to produce an experimental canvas running shoe modeled after a Plains Indian moccasin like those Long Lance had worn.
But just two years later, he would be found dead on a rich white woman’s estate in California, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. By this point he was nearly penniless, exiled from high society, and besieged by accusations that he wasn’t who he said he was—that he’d leveraged a bogus identity to rise in the world.
Before I left the Leech Lake Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, I didn’t really think or talk much about being Native. My “Indianness” wasn’t important to me. When I was growing up, my Ojibwe mother—and also my Austrian Jewish father—made sure that I harvested wild rice in the fall, hunted in the winter, tapped maple trees for sugar in the spring, and fished and picked berries in the summer. I hated all that stuff, which I experienced as opportunities for my parents to comment incessantly on my laziness, my poor work ethic, my dearth of skill when jigging rice or boiling down maple sap or sitting stand for deer.
Only after I moved away did questions about being Indian begin to preoccupy me. When I started at Princeton in 1988, I was surprised by how few people had heard of my tribe, let alone my reservation. And as a light-skinned nerd who loved Dungeons & Dragons, grew up middle-class, and didn’t “look” Indian, I failed to scan as Native to most people. I began to feel that a battle was being waged between how I was seen from the outside and what I felt myself to be on the inside—even as I wasn’t yet sure who I felt myself to be on the inside. It became clear to me that, as long as you look iconographically Native—copper skin, black hair, a thousand-yard stare aimed at the past—white people will invariably believe any damn thing you have to say.
So I tried to build a Native identity from the outside in. I got the belt buckle, wore the bolo tie, grew my hair long, listened to R. Carlos Nakai’s flute recordings and John Trudell’s spoken-word CDs. I began to cultivate “life on the rez” stories that I shared with anyone who would listen. I found myself becoming outspoken—and vicious—about what was Indian and what was not; who was “legit” and who was “fake”; what was “Ojibwe” and what was “not Ojibwe.” I realize now that all of this frenzy around identity was less a politics than a pathology.
But for Native Americans, race is not merely a social construct. It is a legal category from which rights and monetary benefits flow. Whether or not you are enrolled in a federally recognized tribe determines where and how you can hunt, whether you qualify for certain scholarships, where you can live (and whether you get housing subsidies), whether you get a share of tribal profits, and in some cases which academic or government jobs you’re given special consideration for. But to be an enrolled member of a tribe is almost entirely contingent on “blood quantum”—the percentage of one’s lineage that can be traced to tribal ancestors.
I don’t qualify for enrollment in my tribe. To be enrolled in the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, you need a quantum of one-quarter Minnesota Chippewa Tribe blood, as well as one parent who is an enrolled member. (Chippewa is a French corruption of the original Ojibwe.) Even though my mother grew up on Leech Lake and devoted her life to the tribe, first as a nurse and then as a lawyer and tribal-court judge, her official blood quantum is only one-quarter. Her grandmother was recorded as half Ojibwe, even though she was full, and her father was on the rolls as a quarter when he was really half. I should be enrolled. The fact that I should be but am not turned the idea of Native blood into an obsession for me, at least for a while, because it was a measure of my Indianness that I couldn’t change.
Within my lifetime, the question of what constitutes Native identity and qualifies one for enrollment has only grown more fraught. For much of U.S. history, being Indian was not a helpful thing; the opposite, in fact, was true. But in the 1970s, new federal laws changed the experience of Indianness for many Native people. So much so that by the time I was a teenager, having Indian identity was no longer necessarily something that would hold you back, but a material benefit. It might help you find a job, win an arts grant, or entitle you to substantial income from casino profits.
Inevitably, this led to outsiders—verifiably non-Indian folks—trying to claim Indian identity. Jobs, especially in academia, have gone to people feigning Native identity, such as Andrea Smith (who claims to be Cherokee despite no credible evidence that she is) at UC Riverside and Elizabeth Hoover (who claimed to be Mohawk and Mi’kmaq, and later apologized when she discovered she was not) at UC Berkeley. The same is true in publishing: Margaret Seltzer sold her memoir, Love and Consequences, on the basis of its details about her grisly childhood as a Native kid in foster care in Los Angeles—but Seltzer was not Native and grew up with a loving family in Sherman Oaks. Nativeness presented as trauma porn (but with the potential for a hopeful outcome!) can be lucrative.
For Natives, it is enraging that, now that being Indian finally has significant, remunerative opportunities attached to it, imposters have swooped in to take what is—by blood, history, and suffering—rightfully ours. By about 2010, these imposters had come to be known as Pretendians, and they sparked a countermovement of Pretendian-hunting. A coterie of self-styled guardians of Indian identity arose, largely on social media, to call out interlopers. I understood the impulse. I’d done my share of such policing as a young man before I realized that it was the product of insecurity about my own Indian identity, and grew out of it.
The Pretendian hunters were not always interested in a full accounting of the facts before pronouncing a person legitimately Native or a fraud. Many quite authentic Natives were targeted for banishment, and the ugly infighting their work inspired was covered widely—by the standards of Indian affairs—in the American media, which saw the battles as part of the larger identity wars raging across the nation in the new millennium.
For now, the Pretendian hunts have quieted a little, the hunters having lost credibility because of their overzealousness, and the country having grown weary of identity politics. But it’s not just the Pretendian hunters who have culled the rolls. Some small tribes, finding themselves suddenly rich from casino revenue, have been disenrolling members, so as to ensure more money for those who remain. Other tribes—typically large ones with substantial diasporas—have also been cleaning their enrollment records, less to hoard money than to mitigate tribal anxieties about acculturation. One way to feel more “Indian” is by performing a racial alchemy that effectively turns liminal folks into white people. All of this has given new urgency to old and confounding questions: Who gets to be Indian, and who decides?
For a long time, the federal government wasn’t much interested in defining who was and wasn’t Indian. From the country’s birth, Native people were largely outside its embrace. In 1787, the Founders explicitly excluded Native people from the U.S. Constitution. “Congress shall have Power,” Article I declares, to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” We were understood to belong to our own sovereign tribal nations (then numbering well over 750), many of which were geographically inside yet civically separate from the growing American republic. We had our own laws, systems of government, and criteria for citizenship.
The government began bearing down harder on who was or wasn’t Native after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which resulted in the Trail of Tears and the forced displacement of about 100,000 Indians from east of the Mississippi to the Indian territories from 1830 to 1850. By 1887, the U.S. government cared a great deal about who belonged to those tribal nations. That year, Congress passed the Dawes Act, otherwise known as the General Allotment Act. It was, even for that time, a remarkably cynical piece of legislation. To solve what the government persisted in calling “the Indian problem,” the president was given permission to break up communally held tribal land into smaller parcels that would be “allotted” to individual Indians and heads of households. The stated reason for the law was that private ownership and farming would induce Indians to give up the tribal cultures and practices that—in the legislators’ thinking—were holding back Native people and the country as a whole, keeping both Indian and white Americans from their full economic potential. In other words, the official rationale for the Dawes Act was economic salvation through assimilation.
But the true intent of the legislation was to allow the state to steal Indian land and escape treaty obligations. At the time, Native nations held roughly 150 million acres in aggregate, but the number of individuals who would receive allotments (generally set at 160 acres each) was so small that millions of acres of “surplus” land would be left open to white settlement. And once all of the Indians became farmers and stopped being Indian, the lawmakers’ thinking went, the tribes would disintegrate. The government would at last be free of its treaty obligations to sovereign Indian nations—because there would be no nations left.
[From the May 2021 issue: National parks should belong to Native Americans]
To figure out who got an allotment, the government had to determine who was actually Indian. So the government began enrolling Indians in tribes, using blood (gleaned via census data) as a metric.
In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, also known as the Snyder Act, which turned all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States into “citizens of the United States,” but without affecting “the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”
That final clause of the act was crucial and hard-won. It meant that even after having the mantle of American citizenship thrown over us, whether we wanted it or not, we didn’t have to fully give up being legally Indian. We effectively had dual citizenship: Indians were, finally, American en masse, and yet we remained members of our sovereign Indian nations.
The legislation was controversial among some Native nations. The Onondaga, members of the Iroquois Confederacy, wrote a letter to President Calvin Coolidge declaring that the Snyder Act was treasonous because it compelled their citizens to become American without their consent. For nearly 150 years, Indians had been barred from being part of the American franchise; now we were forced to be American.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon announced a new shift toward tribal self-determination. In theory, this policy meant that tribes could decide for themselves whom to enroll. In practice, this has only complicated matters: Although tribes now have more autonomy to tend to their own collective futures, they must do so in ways that don’t threaten federal recognition. Navigating between autonomy and nonexistence is not straightforward. In 1994, when the Blackfeet Nation in Montana toyed with ending blood quantum as a metric for enrollment, an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs warned that if the tribe “diluted” its membership, it might discover that it had “ ‘self-determined’ its sovereignty away.”
In November 1928, Long Lance arrived in Ontario to begin shooting The Silent Enemy, a part-talkie film that follows a band of Indians in Canada as they struggle against starvation. During filming, according to Donald Smith’s biography, Long Lance entertained the Ojibwe actors and crew with war dances and traditional storytelling, often accompanied by an assistant director—Ilya Tolstoy, the Russian novelist’s grandson.
One of his co-stars was Chauncey Yellow Robe. Yellow Robe had been born into the Sičháŋǧu Oyáte in 1867, and had been 9 years old at the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His maternal great-uncle was none other than Sitting Bull. In 1883, at age 15 or 16, he, too, had been taken to the Carlisle Indian boarding school. That’s where he was when roughly 300 of his relatives, mostly women and children, were gunned down at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. Now, as Yellow Robe watched Long Lance, he was disturbed: Something about the Blackfeet chief seemed off. Long Lance’s dancing didn’t look at all to him like the dancing of Plains tribes.
When Yellow Robe returned to New York, he contacted the Bureau of Indian Affairs and told them of his suspicions. It turned out that the office was already investigating questions about Long Lance’s origins.
When Long Lance’s memoir was published, the Cosmopolitan Book Corporation sent a copy to Charles Burke, the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs. “The emotional reaction of those who have read it is enthusiastically favorable,” the cover letter read. “It would interest us very much to know what you think of ‘Long Lance.’ ”
Intrigued by the book but skeptical about its author, Burke started writing letters. First, he contacted the U.S. Department of War, asking about Long Lance’s career at West Point. Two days later, he heard back that Long Lance had failed the West Point entrance exams, and never attended. Burke wrote more letters. From an Indigenous commissioner in Canada, Burke learned that Long Lance was a Blackfeet chief only in an “honorary capacity.”
Was he Blackfeet at all? Burke received a letter from Percy Little Dog, the interpreter for one of the tribes that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy. “We never saw or heard a thing about ‘Buffalo Child Long Lance’ until the winter of 1922,” Little Dog wrote. “He is not a Blood Indian, and has no tribal rights on the Reserve. We have heard he was a Cherokee Indian, but do not know definitely who he is or where he came from.” The former superintendent of the Carlisle Indian boarding school wrote as well, providing Long Lance’s real name, Sylvester Long, and saying that he had attended the school—but as a Cherokee, not a Blackfeet.
In November 1929, Long Lance gave a talk at the American Museum of Natural History titled “An Indian’s Story of His People.” Two months later, on January 28, 1930, he attended a banquet for the Poetry Society of America at the Biltmore Hotel. After dinner, he regaled America’s literary elite with a performance of Plains Indian sign language, and in front of hundreds, he recited his own Blackfeet death song, which went, in part: “The Outward Trail is no longer dark, / I see—I understand: / There is no life, there is no death; / I shall walk on a trail of stars.”
A week after that, he was at the Mutual Life Building at the corner of Broadway and Liberty, where he had been summoned to meet with William Chanler, a producer and the legal counsel for The Silent Enemy. When Long Lance opened the door to the office, Chanler greeted him by saying “Hello, Sylvester.” Long Lance looked at Chanler steadily. “Sylvester? Who’s Sylvester?” Chanler was enraged: “You’re Sylvester—Sylvester Long. You come from North Carolina, and you’re not a blood Indian.”
The charade was exposed. Long Lance was not Blackfeet. He was not even a full-blooded Indian. He had not grown up on the Plains. He had not hunted bison with his people. He had not been a captain in the Canadian army. He had not won the Croix de Guerre.
As Donald Smith recounts in Long Lance: The True Story of an Imposter, Sylvester Long was born on December 1, 1890, in Winston (today Winston-Salem), North Carolina. In the city registry, his family was listed as Black. His father, Joe Long, a janitor at the West End School, had been born into slavery in 1853. His mother, Sallie Long, had been born into slavery as well. His brother Abe Long was the manager of the all-Black balcony at the local theater. Beginning at age 6, Sylvester had walked two miles each way to the Depot Street School for Negroes. And although it was true that he had attended the Carlisle Indian boarding school, his application said that he was half Cherokee, not Blackfeet.
After that February day in 1930, Long Lance’s life fell apart, at first gradually and then suddenly. He was invited to fewer and fewer society functions and received a lot less attention from princesses and starlets; there would be no more lectures, no more movies, and no more books. Public reaction to his fraudulence was ferocious. When Irvin Cobb, the Saturday Evening Post writer who’d touted his book, got the news, he was incensed. “To think that we had him here in the house,” he said, ever the son of Paducah, Kentucky. “We’re so ashamed! We entertained a nigger.”
As he retreated from public life, Long Lance eked out a quiet existence in New York until the early spring of 1931, when Anita Baldwin, an eccentric millionaire heiress, offered him a job as her secretary and bodyguard on an extended trip to Europe in the fall. Baldwin would later say publicly that while in Europe, Long Lance showed himself to be “a man of estimable character and gentlemanly in all respects.”
But in her private journals and correspondence, she recorded that he drank heavily and made several suicide attempts. When the trip ended, Baldwin left him in New York and continued on to California, where she lived. He wrote pleading letters asking to be rehired. She promised that if he stopped drinking and chasing women, she would pay for flying lessons and give him a plane. He traveled to California, where he rented a hotel room in Glendale and visited Baldwin’s estate often, but he sensed that she was wary of him. He wasn’t wrong: According to Smith, she was having Long Lance followed by a private detective, because he was drinking and womanizing again, and spending time with an unsavory crowd.
On March 19, 1932, after going to a movie, Long Lance told a taxi driver to take him to Baldwin’s estate. He sat with Baldwin in the library. According to her, he seemed “abrupt, very depressed and non-communicative.” Not long after she retired to bed, she heard a gunshot. Baldwin’s watchman ran to the library, where according to Smith’s biography he found Long Lance “slumped on a leather settee,” his legs straight out in front of him, his head flung back, and a Colt .45 revolver in his right hand.
In May 2024, I traveled to East Glacier, Montana, on the western edge of the Blackfeet Nation, for lunch at the Two Medicine Grill. I was there to meet a Blackfeet named Robert Hall. When he arrived, it took him a few minutes to get from the door to where I was sitting because so many people in the restaurant seemed to be a friend or a relative—the server, the cook, a couple of diners.
I wanted to talk with Hall about the scourge of Pretendians. In 2020, Hall had waded into an online trolling battle with anti-Pretendians, concerned that in their zealotry for rooting out fake Indians, these crusaders had become “toxic.” Pretendian-hunting, in his view, “had become this thing where if you don’t agree with the hunters, you’re not Indian anymore.” All of which, in Hall’s view, just deepens Indian wounds regarding identity and tribal belonging.
When Hall got to my table and we started talking, I noted that he spoke in that clipped, laconic way I’d come to recognize as very Blackfeet. He has spent almost his whole life on the reservation. “I’ll die here, I hope,” he said. “My whole paradigm is ‘Blackfeet rez.’ ”
But he dislikes the anti-Pretendian crusading because it deepens the focus on blood quantum. And he has a number of objections to the blood quantum: It’s a colonial system whose purpose was to disappear us, it’s divisive and destructive for the Indian community, and its use erodes tribal sovereignty. Reliance on blood quantum forces us to fight one another, and count our fractions, when we should be fighting together for a healthier future. The issue is also deeply personal for Hall—his tribal council has granted and rescinded his own enrollment, all based on evolving interpretations of old documents about an ancestor. That ancestor, his great-great-grandmother Mary Ground, was originally put down in the rolls as full-blooded Blackfeet. But, according to Hall, the rolls burned in a fire, and when the tribe composed them again, Mary Ground was put down as quarter-blooded. So Hall was deemed unqualified. Not long after that, though, his family found additional documents, and he was finally enrolled.
And then, in January 2024—as it happened, the day after Lily Gladstone, the actor of mixed Blackfeet descent who won a Golden Globe for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon, publicly thanked Hall for the Blackfoot-language instruction he’d given her—the council rescinded his enrollment. After that, Hall obtained still more information and documentation, including an affidavit from his paternal grandfather, whose blood had never been accounted for. “We take that back to the council,” he recalled, “and it passed. And we’re back on.”
“I spent 37 years not enrolled,” Hall told me. “Man, being enrolled was like finally regaining a limb you’d never had. And then the council comes along and chops it off. And they say, ‘Oh, it’s nothing personal.’ But it’s all personal.”
The vagaries of blood quantum mean that it’s possible to be a “card carrying” Indian without ever having lived on a reservation or knowing any other Indians. It’s possible to be an enrolled Indian and have absolutely no knowledge of your culture. It’s possible to be 100 percent Native by blood and not be enrolled. And it’s possible to grow up Indian—steeped in your tribal ways, a speaker of your language, a keeper of cultural knowledge—and yet still be, in the eyes of the government, white.
Hall understands that Pretendianism isn’t some imaginary problem; it’s a real issue. “It’s like, to be in our special-hat club, you need this special hat. And then someone from fucking Pennsylvania finds a hat in their basement and puts it on and is like, ‘Oh, hey, look at me—I’m you!’ and you’re like, ‘Ummmm, are you?’ ” This is the trap we find ourselves in: “Blood matters, even as a spiritual connection to our ancestors.”
As we talked, I felt an old sadness well up in me. By 1900, only a precious few Blackfeet had made it through the gantlet of smallpox, warfare, starvation, and Christianization. Closer to home, my mother’s family survived the effects of Indian boarding schools, abuse, neglect, violence, and crushing poverty. We Natives, collectively, have survived a tremendous amount. Across the nation, many of us won the survival lottery, in some cases with our traditions and our kin in place, and here we are in the 2020s, wasting those winnings measuring one another’s blood quantum and fighting with one another in pointless internecine cultural battles.
After college, I moved back home to Leech Lake. I realized that I had missed harvesting wild rice, and fishing, and tapping maple trees. I learned how to trap beaver and pine marten. I had missed my family, my tribe, the land, all of which meant more to me than the thin regard of white people. My older brother, Anton, who had been a history professor in Wisconsin, moved home as well. He fell in love with, and was quickly dedicated to, our Ojibwe cultural practices, attending Big Drum ceremonies and medicine dances. Both of us started studying the Ojibwe language. Both of us realized, for different reasons and in different ways, that we liked our people, and that we liked being Indian as much as or more than we liked being anything else. And I discovered that the more immersed I felt in Indianness, as a way of life lived in community rather than an imagined construct, the less I worried about what other people thought of how I looked, or whether I was enrolled.
For some—like Robert Hall and my brother and me—the question of whether we are properly Indian or not, tribally enrolled or not, is principally a matter of identity and belonging, of being allowed to be who we really are by dint of our histories and our attachment to the community and our affinity for tribal folkways and culture, as well as our blood. Enrollment status doesn’t directly affect our ability to feed our families, or get medical care, or have a roof over our head in our own community. For others, however, being disenrolled has consequences more tangible than the loss of belonging.
Consider Sally Brownfield, who lived for years as a member of the Squaxin Island Tribe west of Tacoma, Washington, working as a teacher who specialized in Indigenous education. Her mother, Sally Selvidge, spent decades working to ensure access to good health care for the tribe; the tribe’s health clinic is named for Selvidge, who died in 1994. But Brownfield herself, who served on the tribe’s enrollment committee until last year, can no longer get subsidized care at her mother’s clinic, as The Seattle Times reported last spring, because she and dozens of other tribe members were recently disenrolled. In her case, the tribe says that, although she possesses Indigenous blood via her mother, they don’t descend from a select list of Squaxin ancestors, and so never should have been enrolled in the first place. Nor can Brownfield vote in Squaxin elections, or harvest clams on the Salish Sea beaches where her ancestors did so for generations. Others who were disenrolled alongside her lost their subsidized tribal housing.
Something similar unfolded not far away about a decade ago, in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, near the Canadian border, where the Nooksack Tribe disenrolled 306 members. Tribal officials say “the 306” (as they came to be called) were mostly descended from a different tribe, and didn’t meet the one-quarter blood quantum required for enrollment. All 306 lost their official Nooksack enrollment for want of sufficient documentation, even though many had lived in the community for decades, if not their whole life. At least 20 were evicted from their family homes on tribal property.
The irony is that we Natives—who can lay authentic claim to being the first Americans, and who were then deemed officially not American by the Constitution before being forced to be American by American law—are now at the mercy of our own tribal nations when it comes to whether we can be considered truly Indian, with all the psychological and practical benefits that identity confers. We’ve suffered enough over the centuries, at the hands of European powers and then the federal government of the United States. To now endure censure by overzealous anti-Pretendian crusaders, and banishment by bureaucratic tribal decrees and reactionary blood-quantum rules, feels particularly bitter.
I first wrote about Long Lance nearly 20 years ago. I ended that story by revealing his fraudulent Blackfeet identity. In my account, he was Black, not Native. Case closed.
But the case turned out not to be closed. He was Indian after all. The evidence was there, but I’d blinded myself to it because I still saw identity in black and white—or Black and Red.
As Smith detailed in Long Lance: The True Story of an Imposter, Long Lance’s mother, Sallie, had been born into slavery. Her grandfather Robert Carson was “a small-time slave owner.” Carson had been wild in his youth, but evidently “settled down after he bought a handsome Indian woman” at an auction.
Among the 20 children that Indian woman gave birth to was Long Lance’s grandmother Adeline, born in 1848. Long Lance’s maternal grandfather was a North Carolina state senator who visited Carson’s plantation often and fathered Sallie and another child with Adeline.
It turns out that Long Lance’s father, too, had Indian blood. He was born into slavery in 1853 and early on in life was separated from his mother. When Joe Long finally found his mother in Alabama, some 40 years later, she told him that his father was white—and that she herself was Cherokee. When Joe died, his obituary stated that he was “a member of the Catawba tribe of Indians.” In 1887, Joe and Sallie Long moved to Winston, North Carolina, where the racial codes were much more rigid: The only two categories for human beings were “white” and “colored.” The Longs fell squarely into the “colored” category. Were they Native? Yes. Were they Black? Also yes. Were they white? Yes again.
Long Lance elided the Black in favor of the Native. When he entered Carlisle, he was listed as half Cherokee and half Croatan. Over time, he slid away from his “mixed” identity; when he received a West Point appointment from President Woodrow Wilson, he claimed to be full-blooded Cherokee. After settling in Canada following World War I—he genuinely was wounded in battle—he began sliding away from his Cherokee-ness, too, eventually giving it up in favor of being Blackfeet.
I think I can understand the slide, and the lies it entailed. One identity, perhaps the most “authentic” one, is a story of enslavement and rape and subjugation, the details of which would relegate Long Lance to life as a second-class citizen. Another, almost entirely fictive identity would afford him freedom and adulation.
It’s no wonder that Long Lance wanted to be a kind of Indian that didn’t exist—except in dime-store novels and, later, movies—and probably never had; that he mined the mineral of racial nostalgia for a past that never was. He mined it until it was played out for him, and he died alone, unemployed, bereft, and heartbroken. Not as Cherokee or Blackfeet or Black or even white—but as perhaps one of the most American identities of all: self-made.
*Lead image: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Atlanta Journal-Constitution / AP; Hulton Archive / Getty; Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG / Getty.
1Second image: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: LMPC / Getty; Wikimedia; Maclean’s; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.
This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline “Who Gets to Be Indian—And Who Decides?”
