Grey Owl — an Englishman who lived and died as an “Indian”

Grey Owl was the most famous “Indigenous” Canadian of the 1930s — a beaver-saving conservationist, best-selling author and spellbinding lecturer who toured Britain and performed before King George VI — and he was an Englishman. Within days of his death in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, on 13 April 1938, the North Bay Nugget published the exposé it had held for roughly three years: “Grey Owl” was Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, born in Hastings, England, on 18 September 1888, with no Indigenous ancestry of any kind. The man who had presented himself to the world as the half-Apache, half-Scottish son of the frontier, raised among the Ojibwe, had constructed that identity wholesale.

Belaney’s appropriation was not a costume worn for a season; it was a life. He emigrated to Canada in 1906 at seventeen, learned trapping and bushcraft in northern Ontario, lived for years among Ojibwe people, married and partnered with Indigenous and other women, and gradually rebuilt himself as “Wa-sha-quon-asin,” the man whom others called Grey Owl. By the 1930s he had darkened his skin, braided his hair, and adopted buckskin and an invented Apache parentage. The persona gave his genuine and pioneering conservation message — above all the rescue of the beaver from near-extinction by trapping — the authority of a voice the public coded as authentically “of the land.”

That is the heart of the deception and of its harm. Belaney’s environmental warnings were real and ahead of their time, but he chose to amplify them by impersonating the very peoples whose lands and knowledge had been taken, claiming a heritage that was not his and speaking, with manufactured authority, in place of those who actually held it. He has since been described as one of Canada’s earliest cases of Indigenous-identity fraud — a “pretendian” — and the admiration his books still draw cannot be separated from the appropriation that made them sell.

The unmasking was posthumous and swift. Reporters who had long suspected the truth confirmed it once he could no longer deny it; his books were withdrawn or quietly dropped. Decades later his ecological message was rehabilitated and a 1999 feature film revived his fame, but the rehabilitation has always carried the unresolved question of an Englishman who built a public life on an Indigenous identity he had no right to claim.

Forrest Carter — a Klansman who wrote as a Cherokee orphan

“Forrest Carter,” the soft-spoken Cherokee storyteller whose 1976 book The Education of Little Tree was sold as the true memoir of an orphaned boy raised by his Indian grandparents in the Depression-era mountains, was Asa Earl Carter — a Ku Klux Klan organizer and segregationist speechwriter from Alabama. The connection was reported by The New York Times in August 1976, when Carter was still alive, and was documented conclusively by the historian Dan T. Carter in The New York Times on 4 October 1991, after the book became a paperback best-seller. The tender chronicle of Cherokee wisdom had been written by a man whose documented public life had been devoted to white supremacy.

Asa Carter’s record is a matter of plain historical fact. Born in Anniston, Alabama, on 4 September 1925, he ran a segregationist radio program in the 1950s, founded the paramilitary “Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy,” and was associated with extreme violence: members of his Klan group attacked the singer Nat King Cole on a Birmingham stage in 1956, and in 1957 six of his followers abducted and castrated a Black man, Edward Aaron. Carter wrote speeches for Governor George Wallace and is credited with Wallace’s 1963 line, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” After a failed 1970 run for governor — to Wallace’s right — he reinvented himself.

That reinvention was the imposture. Carter moved to Texas, took the name “Forrest” (after the Confederate general and early Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest), claimed Cherokee ancestry, and wrote Westerns and then a fake memoir. The Education of Little Tree appropriated a Cherokee identity and voice to tell a gentle story of Indigenous wisdom — written by a man whose career had been built on racial hatred, and whose “Cherokee” detail Cherokee readers later judged inaccurate and stereotyped.

The deception was exposed twice and survived the first exposure by years. The 1976 Times report did not stop the persona; Carter publicly denied being Asa, kept writing, and died in 1979 still claiming the invented life. Only in 1991, when Little Tree topped the paperback list and won a booksellers’ award as cherished nonfiction, did the full account land — after which the Times moved the book from its nonfiction list to its fiction list, registering that the memoir was an invention.