American (Indian) Dirt

Non-Native authored books about Natives have been taking up space for a very long day

Illustration by Carmen Johns

You are seated at a mass signing as part of a midwestern book festival. A celebrated author sits at the table adjacent to you. His most famous book is about a white man’s journey of self-discovery guided by a Lakota elder on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

You can’t help noticing that the “action” at your table is significantly less compared to the author’s, not that you’re keeping count. His many fans stream to him, queue up to his table carrying armloads of books for him to sign. You overhear them asking things like, “What are Native Americans like?” And “how are your books being received by the Lakota?” Clearly, you are invisible, and you think that maybe you’d attract more attention if you wore a jingle dress.

You resolve to write an essay about this experience. But not because it is unfamiliar to you — white writers co-opting Native stories and profiting off of Native culture is as commonplace as the sun setting in the evening — but moreover because you are amid this particular intersection at this particular place and time. The irony is both unsettling and hysterical.

You are a little-known Lakota writer situated in your people’s traditional homelands, a spiritual “epicenter,”…