No One Ever Sees Arapahos (Full Essay)

No One Ever Sees Arapahos

Margaret Coel’s Representation of the Northern Arapaho in her “Wind River Mysteries”

By Ernest M Whiteman III (Northern Arapaho)

When I first viewed Orson Welles’ last completed film, “F For Fake” I was struck at one specific portion of the film, the ending, and the issues it raises on the presentation of the unreal as real. More specifically, how Welles presented information and relied heavily on his audiences’ reliance on the information as truth. Thus, setting up the viewer’s ego as the intellectual fall guy in a filmic magic trick I had never seen before or since.

This concept runs accord of my own line of thoughts on Native American depiction in media and Native self-representation and first-voice. The film, a self-described “essay film”, touches on a theory of my own concerning the “authorship of expertise” not only in art, but in Native American art, cultural information, tribal histories, as well as Native American self-representation and first-voice in media. I made the connection of this authorship in the representation of Native American cultures, perfectly reflected in the Wind River Mystery Series written by Margaret Coel.

This writing began as a review of Coel’s book Eye of the Wolf; it has since expanded as I found that I had much more to write about the series as a whole and the misrepresentations it contains. Also, of how that authorship of expertise almost allows for no other representation to be taken as true as Coel’s books, thus it expanded beyond mere review. I must also contend with the notion that her expertise and success has rendered this series “critique-proof” in the eyes of her readers.

I will admit right here that I had stopped reading Coel’s Wind River Mysteries after her The Shadow Dancer. Mainly, because I felt that more and more she was beginning to write less and less about the people and communities of the Wind River and Eye of the Wolf showed me that this has continued though at the beginning of the series I had more than a passing interest in the novels since they are set on the Wind River Indian Reservation in west central Wyoming.

I am a Northern Arapaho born and raised on the Wind River Reservation and spent most of my adult life there, leaving in 1999 to pursue a filmmaking career. So, my experience in reading Eye of the Wolf, while specific to me, seems to best illustrate the complex problem of Native self-representation in the media.

I will begin with a review of the book Eye of the Wolf (2005) before delving into the representations (Or rather, misrepresentations) of the Northern Arapaho people within the series and how it connects to the growing problem of commodification of Native American imagery and culture and how it lends to usurping Native American first-voice through the taking Native identity. Also, how the Authorship of Expertise allows this misrepresentation to be accepted as cultural truth.

The reviewer on the website titled Dancing Badger, which reviews several Indian Reservation mysteries and the growing genre, remarked that the Coel mysteries are more an intellectual exercise of the author rather than a well-crafted genre piece.[i] After reading Eye of the Wolf, I am inclined to agree. Margaret Coel herself is an anthropologist having published a book on the Southern Arapaho leader Left Hand. But for me, being a learned anthropologist does not equate a good mystery writer and certainly does not make one the spokesperson for a tribe of Indians. So, let us take a look at the book Eye of the Wolf itself before connecting it to the larger theme of Native self-representation.

An Older Review of Eye of the Wolf

The mystery is the eleventh book of her “Wind River Mystery” series and concerns the discovery of three slain Indian men at the site of the Bates Battle[ii], which has significance in Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshoni tribal history on the Wind River Indian Reservation. The battle took place on July 4, 1874 in which the US Calvary and Shoshoni scouts found an Arapaho encampment and attacked it. This was in retaliation for earlier violence and attacks on white settlements in the area prior. Later evidence suggested that this specific camp of Arapahos had nothing to do with that earlier violence. In Coel’s story, the battle is still a sore point for the two tribes after so many years and this is the driving thrust of the mystery.

Coel’s literary hero, Father John O’Malley discovers the three bodies frozen in poses at the battle site after a cryptic phone message for “the Indian Priest” sends him out there to look, rather than calling the police. He almost preternaturally realizes that the bodies are arranged to look like old photographs from the Bates Battle aftermath and knows instantly that this will somehow touch off an intertribal war on the reservation. This sends him on the trail of the murderer of the three men, identified as Shoshoni tribal members, the Arapaho’s “traditional” enemies, according to several characters in Eye of the Wolf and the tribe they share the Wind River Reservation with.

Coel’s other literary creation, Arapaho lawyer, Vicky Holden makes an unsteady entrance into the story defending a young Arapaho man named Frankie Montana, who, in a striking coincidence, is accused of beating the same three Shoshoni men prior to the start of the story. Thus, he becomes the story’s one and only prime suspect in the murders after the body of a forth Shoshoni man, once again discovered by O’Malley following another cryptic phone message, is found at the battle site.

The two story threads lie together uneasily and are only connected to each other by the character of Frankie Montana, an obvious red herring; the young man is so devious, callow and rude that you just know that he is not the killer. The fact that every other character in the book thinks he is, only added to my suspicion that he was really innocent of the crimes.

What I like about a good mystery, think Christie’s work, is how there is more than one prime suspect to confuse things. There are several characters in the story that have the motive and opportunity to kill the victim. Coel’s “Eye of the Wolf” and even after eleven novels does not have that type of experienced layering to bring that type of storytelling off. She seems to be getting by on her knowledge of Arapaho history. It seems lazy to me. Almost every Arapaho character had something historical to say about the murders.

One other thing that bothered me is that for some reason, every character in the book, in addition to saying Frankie Montana is guilty, thinks the murders will incite some sort of “war” between the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshoni and it is referenced to often (As often as Frankie Montana’s guilt.). This serves as the means to propel events forward. O’Malley, determined to prevent “war” then begins to investigate and get answers that propel his story arc forward.

Vicky Holden does nothing. She sits in a holding pattern for most of the novel up until the anti-climactic ending when the suspect needs a hostage, an ending that seems more a reiteration than a revelation. Of late, the series is becoming more and more about Father John O’Malley and his trials and triumphs in and among the people of the Wind River Reservation overshadow the life and loves of Vicky Holden, who along with the people and communities of the Wind River serve only to elevate Father John to savior status.

The emotional hurtles they both have to jump through seem unresolved after eleven novels. O’Malley is a recovering alcoholic who feels the need to drink whenever the pressure is on. Yet, he still faces the unpaid bills and unreturned phone calls and meetings he never seems to attend and a provincial assistant who will last only the duration of the novel.

Holden has now been relegated to an “Indian Princess” role, the naïve Native woman who needs the firm guidance of the white man. She also comes from a broken marriage to an Arapaho man and is untrusting of Indian men, untrusting even the man she is in a relationship with in Eye of the Wolf but seems to trust the white O’Malley implicitly. While their unspoken attraction to each other seems to be behind them yet they never seem to move on from their starting points in resolving their own personal issues that stem from the very first novel The Eagle Catcher. And as if to prove that the story, and O’Malley, does not need her, the two main characters of this series, a series promoted as featuring them as team, do not meet until more than half way through the book.

Holden, for most of the book, does nothing in service of the mystery plot and only questions her tribal loyalties throughout. Does she continue to support her tribe in defending Frankie Montana or does she take on “more important cases” with her new Lakota law partner? She also questions her relationship with that same law partner, the ubiquitously named Adam Lone Eagle. She does not bring any new information to O’Malley’s investigation of the crimes and serves only to point the glaring spotlight of guilt at Frankie Montana. Otherwise, she seems distracted by her relationship with Lone Eagle, like any successful Native American women would be, I suppose, or so the readers, who know nothing of Native peoples, would.

This lacking narrative left me uninterested in the killer’s identity. First and foremost, because of the characterization of the lead suspect Frankie Montana, the actual murderer is telegraphed in the scenes of its’ introduction. There is also a white supremacist thread, which gives the story a sense of currency at the time of the book’s release due to the fact that a major church of white supremacy had moved to Wyoming then, is introduced and basically goes nowhere. They are not even the killers. Father O’Malley’s interaction with an ex-girlfriend of one of the supremacists seems to come from an entirely different book, which is a waste of story as so much time is devoted to a thread that adds nothing to the mystery. This leads to the two biggest weaknesses of the book, the final act and the motive of the killer.

In the later chapters, Holden eventually discovers relevant information “off-screen”, as it were, as Coel does not even bother to follow Holden within the narrative as she does her own investigation and uncovers new information pertaining to the killer’s identity. Holden just shows up at the end when O’Malley needs her to fill in any missing pieces, which gives him the excuse to go into action. Holden has become the feminine Tonto, who did all the dirty work, to O’Malley’s Lone Ranger, who did nothing but peep in windows. Then, together they race off toward the face off with the killers. When the plot is revealed and the reason for the killings is brought to light, the information is so wrapped up in Whiplashian histrionics that all that was missing was the moustache twirling.

Besides a very weak reason for the murders (So weak that a single sentence summation by O’Malley near the end sounded just plain silly.), the killers acted so out of character at that point from what was established for much of the book. One actually begins to monologue like a comic book villain that thinks he has the hero trapped and stupidly reveals all before ineptly trying to kill the hero. Speaking of comic book troupes, the fact that a character is suddenly “bat-shit insane” is too easy a narrative convention overused in turning heroes into villains that it smacks of creative laziness and a lack of originality on the author’s part.

While Coel lays these threads together awkwardly, it is her characterization of Father John O’Malley that is the strongest point of the series. It is also the biggest hurtle in representing the Northern Arapaho people. Her writing for O’Malley has gotten stronger mainly because Coel writes him the most. I have noticed that a slew of secondary Arapaho characters in Eye of the Wolf, such as Chief of BIA Police Art Banner, and the Saint Francis housekeeper have all but vanished from the series at this point in favor of O’Malley’s turmoil. Now, in Eye of the Wolf the housekeeper only leaves notes for O’Malley at dinnertime, the only indication she is ever there and a perfect example of how Coel represent the Arapaho people. She makes them an invisible presence lost in the glare of O’Malley’s white savior heroics.

Though one has to admit, Coel does write Father O’Malley well. A scene in Eye of the Wolf where O’Malley connects with his new assistant (Who may stick around another novel) over their shared need to seek failure which gives them an excuse to return to alcohol is the strongest of the book and possibly the series. But as Spokane author Sherman Alexie points out in his review of Ian Frazier’s On the Rez, a non-fiction book about the author’s interactions with the Lakota, “He almost convinces us that he’s writing about the ...Sioux, about their rez, when, in reality, he’s mostly writing about himself, about his feelings, about his real and imagined pain.”[iii]

I find that here in Coel’s fiction about the Northern Arapaho. She is first and foremost, not writing about the Northern Arapaho people, but is writing about O’Malley’s experiences among the Northern Arapaho.

A weak narrative and motive reminded me once again of why I had stopped reading the series, though I should have a great interest in it. The series is mostly inaccurate representations of my people, the problems they face, the lives they live, and of the land we live on. Worse yet, the exploitation of those problems for the entertainment of her mostly-white audiences borders on grief porn. It also served to remind me of the problems this series has in perpetuating these misrepresentations while serving an uninteresting plot. An uninteresting plot is almost always forgotten in favor of the book’s fans remembering the more “interesting”, if inaccurate and garish, representations of the Northern Arapaho people, my people.

It was with trepidation that I picked up Coel’s Eye of the Wolf. First of all, I feared that because of my past experience reading the tedious plots based on the reservation I grew up and lived several years of my adult life on now seem wildly inaccurate. Secondly, because of my experience as a Northern Arapaho man who has since been awakened to non-Native representations of Native Americas in media, I feel that more and more, the Native American perspective is being taken away from Native Americans who are just as capable, if not better, in creating genuine representations than the establishment.

On the Wind River Mystery Series

As mentioned before, I had stopped reading this series after The Shadow Dancer mostly because the stories were beginning to be repetitive, not only in structure, but also characterizations. This may be fine for the standard tea-cozy mystery but for the burgeoning genre of Indian Reservation mysteries, it was becoming boring. There was nothing fresh. I will come back to The Shadow Dancer later in this writing when I discuss the series’ depiction of the Northern Arapaho man. Her characterizations of the Arapaho males have become especially repetitive and problematic up to this point.

First of all, the primary problem with Coel’s books are that they are not evocative of anything familiar to me, being a Northern Arapaho man who grew on the Wind River Reservation, where she sets her books. I find nothing familiar in the books. I know of the names of the places she inserts here and there, but nothing aligns with anything that is actually there. This is a gratuitous misrepresentation coming from a noted anthropologist. Even Tony Hillerman’s Navajo fans know that he is accurate in his descriptions of the landscape.

Yet, this seems forgiven here because “it’s fiction”. In Coel’s books, Ethete Road seems to be the only road in Wyoming that goes everywhere O’Malley needs to go. Saint Francis Mission is actually based on the mission, church, and school I attended from kindergarten through high school, Saint Stephen’s. I know this from the depictions of the place on her book covers. But her description of the grounds evokes Saint Michael’s, an Episcopal mission in Ethete, Wyoming nearly 40 miles west of St. Stephen’s, with its circular driveway that has been established in the first novels. She actually moves one location to another for the sake of the story, yet this is not the last time she will do that to suit her fiction, fold acreage like a map to suit her stories. Now, readers of this may say that my experience is specific to me and can be dismissed as overly critical to the details of the region and too laden with an emotional attachment to the area and people to give a clear and unbiased opinion.

And it will be dismissed. This is a work of fiction after all. And the irony is that my criticisms, as stated above, will be the very things Coel’s fiction will be praised for because “it’s fiction” and she has been given a sort of tacit authority as the expert over my experience as an Arapaho.

But easy dismissal of a Northern Arapaho’s experience in favor of a non-Native mystery writer’s fiction adds to the larger issues of Native first-voice and self-representation. Also, how non-Native authors, film makers, museum curators, and historians continue to take away the voice of and speak for Native Americans in an era when the sound is fading on the Native voice in the chorus of modern American society.

Why is my factual experience as Native American, in general, and as a Northern Arapaho, specifically, dismissed in favor of a generic, all-encompassing representation? Why is this the preferred representation of the Wind River Northern Arapaho over my own, or any Northern Arapaho tribal member’s own experiences? It is fiction after all and that seems to be the easy excuse for invalidating our experiences. As Prats writes in his book Invisible Natives, about the film “Northwest Passage” about a young artist going West to paint the Indian, “the artist who would have painted the Indians has rendered instead, the white hero; the story that would have shown the artist painting the Indian shows us, instead, his sketch of the hero while denying us a look at the Indian…” (Prats, 2002, p.20)

Which then raises the question, what about those representations?

On Representation – The “Romantic” View of Natives

The ability and opportunity to represent our selves has become a hot-button issue for Native Americans across the country at the beginning of the new millennium. At the table of policy-making, the Native voice has been so long absent. For so long the power over the voice and control of Native imagery and symbolism has been in the hands of non-Natives. For centuries, Native American culture, imagery, history, and representation has been the providence of white men.

You can see the best representations of this in the media, especially film, and it crosses over to books and music, even the cultural knickknacks on the tourist shop, trading post shelves. Since the beginning of the film medium, Natives have been depicted in some form, yet, are hardly ever in control of the image portrayed and are deeply criticized for asking for an accurate representation, or worse, to be able to control such representations for ourselves.

Early American media depictions portrayed Native Americans as savages worth their extermination for Westward Expansion, as early national newspapers told the stories of pioneers massacred by the Indian. The earliest films showed Native American dancers and scenes of “everyday living” though many where staged scenes for the public to view for a nickel. Many remark, and rightly so, that if it was not for those non-Native people recording these “early” lifestyles of long ago, they could have been lost forever. But this assume that Native Americans then did not have their own way of passing on this information, and that assumption carries over to today, that Natives cannot grasp the technology, or cannot understand media literacy. Which is a throwback to those paternalistic attitudes that Natives are still in the “Old Times” and must be spoken for. Forgetting also that some parts of Native culture are meant to decay and disappear (An idea museums cannot seem to grasp.).

Taking a look at how Coel represents the Northern Arapaho in her book, we can see the connection to that same attitude. We can also see how she misrepresents history. In Eye of the Wolf, the very first misrepresentation occurs within the Author’s Notes, even before the story even begins; “The Bates Battlefield is located in Hot Springs County, Wyoming, three miles from the border of Fremont County. For the purposes of this story, I have placed the site of the battlefield in Fremont County.”[iv] [Emphasis mine]

This, to me, seems unheard of, especially since Coel is an anthropologist and no doubt accurate facts are essential to her vocation. It may seem a small thing but this makes her writing suspect in the accurate representation of the Wind River Reservation in general. It seems she has been granted, through the success of her series, a freehand in re-writing the very Arapaho history she studies, to suit her fiction. If she changes actual historical information to fit the story, can we even trust her representations of the Northern Arapaho if they could be just as changed to suit the story as well? Sadly, her credentials will make these misrepresentations fact. Indeed, this sort of historical/cultural shorthand is how media works.

Coel is maybe allowed this luxury because she has stated her authoritarian credentials by writing a non-fiction book on Chief Left Hand, a Southern Arapaho leader. Somehow, her research has made her an ad-hoc Native Expert in the non-Native academic world of fiction and that lends to this idea that she is now excluded from the exploitation of the Northern Arapahos in her books, because as the “Expert”, she is simply telling our story. She has authored her own expertise on the Northern Arapaho by writing a book about a Southern Arapaho leader.

Then it is much easier to dismiss the voice of Native Americans because Native Americans are still placed in that romantic view of history – the roaming bands, the teepee, the horses, feathers, the nature-bound spirituality, the beads and buckskin, and the long hair and prominent cheekbones; or worse yet, the idea that they are too lazy or freeloading to do something as constructive as writing a novel when there are casinos to build. Indeed, my critique of her series will be seen as the enemy to defeat. Her authority will make her the defender of my culture rather than the exploiter of it.

Orson Welles played on our need to be an authority in his excellent essay film F for Fake. He played on our need to be viewed by others as the final word, that our views and ideas are somehow, magically, different from another’s. In a twist that is the second half of the film he turns the tables on we the viewer and tricks us because he states his authorship of expertise on Picasso. And in a way, Coel is also duping us because, well, it is fiction after all, not a representation. That is her excuse. That is her trick.

Even now, not only do Native Americans continue to struggle with the same day-to-day issues we as Americans face, but also must combat the paternalistic attitudes that seek to keep us in the wigwams, the casinos, and bars and out of American Society’s contemporary mind set. It is because of that paternalistic, romanticized view that makes it easy for non-Natives to dismiss Native American first-voice in media, and easy for Coel’s non-Native readers to dismiss my Northern Arapaho voice.

The most recognized way to do this is though iconography and stereotypes that bind Native Americans to that historical past as if it is somehow a saving grace for Native people today. Mentions of the “Old Times” abound in Coel’s mysteries. Almost every chapter makes some allusion to these “Old Times” as if the Northern Arapaho could somehow recapture it, and live in the teepee again, they, and the rest of America, would be better off. This, “enlightened” ideology conveniently forgets however, the terrible toll taken by forced assimilation and forgets the historical fact that when Northern Arapahos, and indeed all Native Americans, lived the “Old Times” culture of a hundred and twenty or so years ago, they were the target of extermination by white culture.

The stereotypes do not stop there as the novel also abounds with constant Native-nature analogies; “like an eagle” or “as the wolf” become descriptions for normal, everyday Native activity, like simply talking. Suddenly, the elders’ voices boom “Like a chief from the Old Times addressing the village” (Like anyone could know that.), always making that romantic connection to a past that no longer exists. There is a tendency to keep Native Americans in that sepia-toned past precisely because it makes it easier to dismiss them, their voices, and their points of view.

Armando Prats makes the point several times in Invisible Natives, of the western movie’s continually need to make the Indian present so as to make them absent in the face of American Progress and that mentality extends to these mysteries in that the Arapahos in the books are continually longing for these “Old Times” which places them in the past and only Father O’Malley can show them the way to it somehow. We see this every time O’Malley returns to the mission in Eye of the Wolf to find another note from his Arapaho housekeeper, once again made invisible; it is her absence in the space of the story that ensures the reader that she is indeed apart of the “Vanishing Race”.

Native Americans today must also continually battle to overcome the images of the savages in paint and feathers that must be confronted, or revered, as some New Age icon before trying to make a place in contemporary society. These assumptions continue in Eye of the Wolf as many speak of the outbreak of a “Tribal War” as if both the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes in the novel do not know any better reaction to murders on the reservation. The reaction is indeed a tribal, savage reaction. Why assume that the Arapaho and Shoshoni would revert to tribal divisions when they have worked hard to maintain a good, intertribal, relationship for decades? As Prats once again points out so well, it is this mark of savagery, that the tribes cannot do anything else but “go to war” that marks them for extinction, as their savage ways have no place in our modern society.

In the book, the Northern Arapaho also speak about the idea of banishment which seemed to be in vogue at the time the novel came out and is yet another throwback to the “Old Times”. Even though Coel knows that the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes have a judicial court system and law enforcement, Frankie Montana is threatened with banishment every time he talks with Holden. Though, according to Jeffery Anderson, a Professor of Anthropology at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, NY, a former instructor of mine, a friend, and another expert on Northern Arapaho society, having spent many years living with the Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation, informed me that while there are historical accounts of banishment in Arapaho culture, even then, it was very rare and never permanent. I use Anderson’s points here as a demonstration of non-Native authority because you will never accept my own statements on banishment.

Anderson also stated banishment was used more among the Northwest Coast tribes as recent as 20 years ago when two Tlingit teens were banished to an island for a robbery they committed[v]. So, now this concept, once again can be attributed to Coel’s creative license. She can now pull cultural punishments from other tribes to suit her fiction. Yet all it is a form of reductionism, it reduces the Arapaho and Tlingit into a Pan-Indian, tribal singularity, which makes all tribes, the same tribe. It is fiction after all. That is her trick.

What about a non-fictional representation? Jeff Anderson is also the author of One Hundred Years of Old Man Sage, a biography of a Northern Arapaho elder Sherman Sage living on the Wind River Reservation through the mid 1940's. “I really tried to foreground Sage’s voice and soften my own,” states Anderson[vi], who complied all available published and unpublished materials and manuscripts. Anderson also interviewed Sage’s living descendants and other elders who knew Sage. “So the purpose was to try to ‘repatriate’ scattered archival and published evidence from and about Sage... into one volume.”

Anderson is well aware that he is not speaking for the Arapaho when presenting his biography, and he is keenly aware of his audience, whom are fellow academics. Still we know that while this is a balanced portrayal of a Northern Arapaho man, it is not a first-voice representation. How do we know this? Simple, who is the author and who holds the label of “expert” in either writing? Presenting an accurate view of a Northern Arapaho life seems unheard of. So how does Coel represent a Northern Arapaho life and what does it add to a contemporary view of Northern Arapahos?

Pratts discusses the gaze in Invisible Natives and how it represents Natives in western movies. That concept can be applied to all media with a point of view. Who holds the gaze, the view, the perspective in looking at the world, more specifically, when looking at Native American culture? Looking at Andersons’ and Coel’s works side by side, even though one is a work of non-fiction and the other is fiction, even though both purport to be a balanced, “positive” view on Northern Arapahos, both views, the perspectives are still of the non-Native gaze.

Because the gaze is non-Native, it informs how the Northern Arapaho are represented, especially in Coel’s fiction, more so, because both the author and the hero are white. As Prats writes, “The gaze that falls upon the land and its people is defined by the perspective of the white hero who is using it.”

Again while both representations are deemed “positive” ones, you must consider one simple truth in who holds the gaze over the Northern Arapaho culture in their works; that both Coel and Anderson also share the same attribute: neither are Northern Arapaho.

The Arapaho Male in “Eye of the Wolf” and the Wind River Series

The primary misrepresentation that inhabits the Coel Wind River Reservation is the “Angry Indian Man”. All of the Indian men on this reservation seem mad about something. From not living they way they used to in “The Old Times”, to how they have been treated by whites for years, to having Father O’Malley confront or talk to them, to whatever, they are mad.

In The Shadow Dancer, which was the novel that compelled me to stop reading the series, the Arapaho men were all easily-led sheep to a “prophet” promising to bring back “the Old Times”. For an author to depict an entire race of people in such a repetitive manner, it seemed lazy to me. Of course they all described the same way, as the men in her books appear to wear nothing else but plaid shirts and jeans with boots, or so at least in all of the novels I had read. Maybe now she has changed them to baggy pants wearing gangbangers. They also all have “prominent noses” and long black hair, and high cheek bones “indicative of” their people. The descriptions of every Indian male in her books are simply variations on this theme. All are “modern Indian warriors” and they all seem angry about something. From the angry Frankie Montana to the angry Shoshoni men in Eye of the Wolf whom actually run Father O’Malley off the road and promptly get their asses handed to them by the sudden Action Hero antics of Father John.

Frankie Montana is one of these stock caricatures, Coel’s idea of the Northern Arapaho male. Montana is a petty criminal not beyond constantly abusing his lawyer Vicky Holden verbally, and later physically. He is not beyond using his own mother to lie for him as an alibi. As the novel reaches its end and he is eventually revealed not to be the killer, his story thread is simply dropped and ends, going nowhere. Frankie Montana is an alcoholic, drug-using crook and he is simply left abandoned, drunk, and tied to a chair, in a house he broke into. Frankie Montana serving no other use than to depict another Northern Arapaho man as a lying criminal. He is thus abandoned, his task complete.

The biggest stereotype in the series prior was the character of Ben Holden, Vicky’s ex-husband. He seems to be the sobered, yet no less volatile, version of Frankie Montana. Because we need constant reminders that the woman Holden seeks these types of men out. She needs them in her life. What relegates her to the “Indian Princess” role is the need to have cruel men in her life, it lets readers off the hook in expecting her to be a strong female character, and it also renders her helpless, in need of Father O’Malley’s constant saving grace.

Ben Holden was written as an alcoholic and abusive, abusive even after being divorced from Vicky and sober for years. Indeed, Father O’Malley counsels many women on the reservation whose husbands’ behavior are the same as Ben Holden’s. O’Malley is constantly meeting with abused women or hosting a “talking circle’ of abused women. In every novel, until his obligatory death, Ben Holden’s temper always flared. He mostly expressed this by “gripping the table until his knuckles popped white”. He gripped the table whenever he tried to convince Vicky to re-marry him. Every time they met, in every novel, he was the same – a drunken, womanizer, promising better, gripping the tabletop until it is time for him to be killed.

So it seems with all the Arapaho men in the series. Temporarily excluding Vicky’s latest love interest in Eye of the Wolf, Adam Lone Eagle. But Adam Lone Eagle is Lakota, which could possibly help him escape the tedious portrayal rendered to the other Native men. Yet, Lone Eagle is also then described as a striking man, “a modern Indian warrior” whom turns many women’s heads. We have seen in the series that Arapaho men cannot be kind to their women, with Ben Holden and Frankie Montana representing the idea that Arapaho men in the series as drunken abusers. Here we finally do reach a point of separation of the Northern Arapaho man from the men of other tribes. Consider that all other Native men, the Shoshone and Lakota in the story are very sexy men, “modern Indian warriors”, all with long hair. Where Arapaho men are sexist abusers, the Shoshones and Lakota always take care of their women.

Moving back to the female, we can see that Vicky Holden, the last of the Northern Arapaho characters in the series, mainly due to the fact that she is supposed to be the “co-star”, is relegated to “Indian princess” role in Eye of the Wolf. In that, after all that she has gone through, she still only serves the plot in giving the male characters someone to save. One can almost also say that she has purged her Native-ness with her life experiences – she has chosen her live with the whites, has learned from their law schools, worked at their law firms, and has broken through to see that the Arapaho men around her now are not up to the standard that is Father John O’Malley.

Soon, not even Adam Lone Eagle, the only Native man in her life, can measure up to O’Malley. At the conclusion of Eye of the Wolf, when O’Malley and Lone Eagle go in search of the kidnapped princess Vicky, suddenly Lone Eagle is simply called “the Lakota”, as if to remove his singular identity and vanish him into a generalized tribal identity, when he wants apologize to O’Malley. Lone Eagle’s crude Indian-ness is laid bare in his misjudgment of O’Malley. Only a crude Indian man could make the mistake of misjudging the priest, only an Indian man, only “the Lakota” and not the person, the human Adam Lone Eagle. Because a person makes mistakes, but what about when an entire people does?  Now, the Lakota are culpable in the misjudgment of O’Malley, not just Lone Eagle, who suddenly now personifies his whole tribe in that generalized label. He once again becomes the lone Native voice in deference to the “Indian Priest” O’Malley.

This goes to show that there needs to be something, or someone, better for Vicky and, indeed, the Northern Arapaho people. But who can it be? Whoever it is, for Vicky, it cannot be a Northern Arapaho man, or simply no man at all, and for the Arapaho people, it cannot be a Native person at all. Maybe it can only be Father John O’Malley, the so-called “Indian Priest”?

The “Indian” Priest: On Stealing a Native American Identity

We see it over and over in film and books. The white man discovering the tribe, the white man being taken in by the tribe because he is suddenly unlike all the others they have encountered, the white man “learning their ways”, and then, the white man becoming a better Indian than the Indians. In films like Dances with Wolves and books as old as The Last of the Mohicans, we have been served a steady media diet of how a white man can magically become an Indian simply by being in proximity of them. Suddenly, they are imbued with some sort of secret tribal knowledge meant only for them because they are magically different than all the other white men, imbued with the clothing, long hair, the beads and chokers, and in some cases, like the French film Brotherhood of the Wolf, some smash-bang kung-fu moves. The white man can then accomplish what the Natives could not; like defeating the white man, in the case of Dances with Wolves, or, solving a murder on an Indian reservation, like Father O’Malley in Eye of the Wolf.

In Eye of the Wolf, Father O’Malley is suddenly saddled with an unearned Native identity. He is called “the Indian Priest” no less that twenty times by other whites throughout the entire novel and in one chapter alone is called so three times in less than two pages. He also references himself as one constantly, with thoughts like “My god, I sound like one of the elders”, as if that declaration makes it so.

“Indian by Proximity” as some of my Native colleagues call it. O’Malley is made so Indian by Coel that he can now even give an “Indian name” to the stray dog that loafs around the mission, giving it “a name of honor, in the Arapaho Way for his courage” (Yes, that is an actual line from novel.), to a dog, a dog, but not to another Arapaho, who it now seems are not as courageous as this one dog.

Name giving is usually a task reserved for the Arapaho elders who have lived a long life with respect earned by respect given to those around them, and only then, are names given in someone’s life to commemorate a special occasion. But the “Indian Priest” O’Malley can name the dog regardless of all this. For he is not bound by the traditions and ritual of the Northern Arapaho whom he claims to respect, “sounds like one of,” or is a part of. He can ignore the tradition and ritual that have existed for centuries and because he is more Indian than the Indian, and suddenly, even the dog is a better Indian than the Indian to have somehow earned an Arapaho name.

So, why is it that Father O’Malley cannot give an Indian name to an Arapaho? The answer is simple. He simply cannot, because, he is not Arapaho. Coel is very careful in making the distinction of calling O’Malley the “Indian Priest” because she knows that deeply, as we all know, what sets Arapahos apart from an Irish priest. Why not make O’Malley the “Black Priest” or the “Jewish Priest”? Even the white supremacist character in Eye of the Wolf, who is barely used in the story, is only used here to also call O’Malley “the Indian Priest” as if using the ugliest form of being a white person to reject O’Malley’s “whiteness” and allows O’Malley to easier slip on the identity of “the Indian Priest”. But to what end? Why do all non-Natives want that connection to Native Americans, or to be associated with them as a partner, knowledge keeper, or adoptee?

Why is Coel allowed to make her white priest an “Indian”? Is it because in the story, the tribe accepts him? As I understand it and experienced it, being adopted into a tribe does not peel your old ethnic identity from you, it does not make you an automatic member of the tribe. You are suddenly no longer German or Italian or Swedish when a tribal member adopts you. O’Malley is not suddenly no longer Irish because he is accepted by some tribal members. It should only speak of how highly a Native person or family holds you in regard. If anything, adoption in the “Indian Way” is more a testament to the generosity of Native peoples and not an excuse to trade one ethnic identity for another.

But it is never taken this way. Instead, it comes to mean something else: authority. Suddenly, the O’Malleys, the John Dubars, the Jack Crabbs, or the Natty Bumpos are the spokesperson for their newly found tribe, stealing the voice of self-representation from those who need it most because they want to be accepted as Indian. Much like O’Malley does, and to an extent, maybe Coel herself. Which is why O’Malley is suddenly able to declare that he “sounds like one of the elders” and the reader will grant him that status by his unearned authority.

Armando José Pratts once again provides context for this. Prat calls the white hero turned Indian, the Double Other because he “others” himself by accepting the Indian’s ways, separating him from his white own. Yet, he remains separated from the Indians too, despite learning their ways (if only to defeat them in most cases) and being accepted by them because he will never let go of his whiteness. In doing so, he can become the authority over the tribe and at the same time, while the tribe’s destruction is assured, O’Malley can accept no blame for it, even though he represents the church that has done quite a lot of damage to Native societies. Because, also in the tradition of the American Western, the Native American, or the Northern Arapaho, needs to be made present in these depictions so that the non-Native authority can then render them absent. As you remember in movie westerns, no one ever sees Indians.

Prats’ example of this is John Ford’s Stagecoach, wherein the small bastion of civilization represented by the white people inside the stagecoach, where much of the action takes place, that is under the constant threat of attack by Geronimo, who is never seen. But Geronimo’s absence is his presence, disconnecting the Chiricahua Apache tribe he is a part of and vanishing him into the faceless savagery represented by the nameless Indians who are gunned down by hero John Wayne. Think of Coel’s mission and priests as the stagecoach, and the Arapaho always on the edges of the space, ever the threatening enemy whose destruction is assured. This, as Prats writes, “makes clear the tendency of the Myth of Conquest to locate its Indian at the periphery of the contested terrain, out where he is least visible, less discernibly human – always as if the Indian, not the white hero, were the trespasser, an unwelcome interloper disrupting the smooth course of empire.” (Prats, 2002, p.74)

In this way, the white hero must take the identity of the Native more so to exclude him from the dissipation of Native American civilization. Since O’Malley is now the “Indian Priest” he is no longer connected to his race’s destruction of Native society. Yet, if you know anything of the history of Catholicism in the context of forced assimilation of Native people, we can clearly see why Father O’Malley needs to be the “Indian Priest”: to absolve his Catholic priesthood from the continued (yes, continued) destruction of the Northern Arapaho culture and to exclude O’Malley, indeed, Coel herself, in their race’s role in that destruction.

But there is also another, more subtle, possibly more sinister reason – O’Malley, and Coel, then become the experts on this vanishing Northern Arapaho culture. Indeed, in Eye of the Wolf, when the crime is solved and the murderers are arrested, we then see the tribe become O’Malley’s, as members of the tribe surround him, reach out to him, asking for his return to the mission and thus their own salvation, looking up to him like he is some newly formed “Arapaho Christ” because finally, the Northern Arapaho people have found their savior, and he can only be a white man.

Yet, this is a false equivalence, because O’Malley can never be an Arapaho man. He will never experience the world around him as an Arapaho man. He will never grow up as an Arapaho person. He may find commonality, even acceptance, but he will never have the experience of being a Northern Arapaho man. Indeed, the world will never treat him as a Northern Arapaho man. He will always be treated as a white Catholic priest living among the Arapaho, which is why he then called the “Indian Priest”, to place generic, fake label of exclusion on him to allow the readers to buy into his expertise of the Northern Arapaho people and that is more damaging to the Arapaho because it steals their voice in their search for equal treatment in a modern society, it makes the interloper the authority of a cultural experience he has never lived.

“The Experts are the greatest fakers.” The Authorship of Expertise

Welles’ F for Fake makes a great point about how people are willing to believe in the fake because it somehow justifies their own expertise. His “essay film” is about how an art forger named Elmyr de Hory made his living selling forged Picassos to galleries all over the world. The point Welles made, and which seems to have take root here in Coel’s series as well, is that many of those same galleries who bought de Hory’s paintings, insisted they were genuine. Their expertise made them genuine. Even putting on exhibitions of the works because of their confidence of their expertise, which was justified by the Picasso exhibit they would put on.

Yet, when the paintings were found to be fakes, the egoism of the galleries extended to the points of stating that they knew they were fakes. Or, to simply deny they were fakes, because the truth would damage their credibility as experts. So, their artistic expertise is once again justified in confirming the forgeries; which becomes the justification of expertise. The authorship of expertise; is this why non-Natives crave association with Native peoples? Is it all simply a question of ego? While Elmyr had used their expertise to mock the system of the art market, Coel uses expertise to render her stories genuine, but it also renders the Arapaho mute in the telling of their own stories. Coel can state that she wants the Northern Arapaho to speak for themselves, but her expertise is too strong of a need, otherwise, she would have simply stopped writing them by now. Thus, Coel’s renderings of my Arapaho people become her own forgeries.

O’Malley and Coel inhabit a space of expertise about the Northern Arapaho culture. It is a space that, according to Prats, they own by simply their looking upon it, each carrying and enforcing their perspective of the Northern Arapaho. As Prats writes, “Perspective becomes an essential instrument of representation. Perspective enforces the Indian’s absence and defines the limits of Indian identity. …the Western’s Indian always appears before us as a projection of a perspective over which the Myth of Conquest exercises virtually total control.” (Prats, 2002, p.72)

It is through their gaze that renders the Northern Arapaho people an invisible presence in their own story. O’Malley takes on the false identifier of the “Indian Priest” to deny his race’s and church’s role in the destruction of the Northern Arapaho people while never letting go of his white identity, secure in his perspective as this tribe’s savior, that the tribe is now his, simply for being there and solving its murders. As Prats put it “The hero looks upon the land adoringly and hopefully, and, looking, he already possesses it – at least enough to tell himself that he is defending it, rather than invading it.” (Prats, 2002, p.75)

It is this tacit authority over Northern Arapaho culture that gives the reader their expert in both O’Malley and in Coel. Thus, giving them both expertise and confirms O’Malley’s “Indian Priest” label within the narrative. But this authority takes us into the dangerous and murky waters of Native identity fraud such as Ward Churchill, where my cohorts say I should fear to tread, but which Welles says best about these experts “…We bow down before them. They're God's own gift to the faker.” (Welles, 1974)

To Try Conclusions…

While in the middle of the writing the review portion of Eye of the Wolf years ago, I had happened to see The Drowning Man on the bookshelves. Coel’s next novel in the series is about someone stealing the side of a mountain because it has a hieroglyph on it. She has since released many more since then, with such Old Times-attached titles as Killing Custer and Night of the White Buffalo. White Buffalo prophecy is primarily a Lakota cultural tradition, and though I have no idea how Coel plays it out in her eighteenth “Wind River” novel, I know, due to her “expertise” that she will get away with shoving it into a Northern Arapaho cultural context, once again reducing all tribes into a single tribe. I also know that looking over the series now with a sense of accurate representations of Native peoples in media, that I will not be picking up any more of Coel’s mysteries.

I am guessing, in the continuing story, that Father O’Malley, at some point will be asked, by an elder, to take part in Northern Arapaho ritual, like a sweat lodge. Then, that same elder will praise him for making through a sweat ceremony because “our young people are turning away from our Old Ways”. Maybe O’Malley will have a vision and because of that vision, he will earn an Arapaho name. I am sure it will happen at some point, or maybe it already has, all in service to make O’Malley more Indian, and therefore the righteous voice to speak for the Northern Arapaho, the true expert that only takes from the culture, owns it, only to assure that the Northern Arapaho of Coel’s writings are made invisible in the shining expertise of O’Malley’s, and maybe Coel’s, “Indian-ness”.

But let us never forget that this is a false claim. That O’Malley only sees the Arapaho only as Coel wants them to be seen. As Alexie writes about Ian Frazier’s experience, "Frazier claims ownership of the tribe based on his superficial admiration of certain aspects of their culture. …He admires the Oglalas because of who he believes them to be, not because of who the Oglalas believe themselves to be."

I am aware that these same points can be made about the late Tony Hillerman’s works. So, why not “attack” him? Simple, I am not a Navajo and will trust the Navajo people to speak up on such things, but they have better things to worry about, like mine leaks and uranium poisoning. Besides, all of Hillerman’s heroes are Navajo. I am a Northern Arapaho man, which is also why I tried to be less critical of the Vicky Holden character beyond the tired Native tropes that are forced upon her. Still, I must add as an aside, going into spoiler territory, the murderer in Eye of the Wolf turns out to be a woman who becomes suddenly insane over fame and fortune, in service to her husband’s writing career. Vicky Holden is also beaten and victimized in the story. O’Malley counsels many women who are victimized. What could this say about Coel’s own views of women?

Native peoples must fight constantly to figuratively rebury their dead. They must continually fight to have their voices heard when other are so eager to speak for them just to satisfy their egos. In the many classes I speak to on the topic of Native Americans in media, I find myself having to say what many non-Natives, and Natives, do not want to hear: the Native cultures from the Old Times that everyone seems to think Natives want to get back to, are gone. We can never get back to them no matter how much non-Natives wish it for us, or us for ourselves. We can never get back to that as Coel would have her readers think. We have been and continue to assimilate into American society, just as planned.

Look at myself – I am a Northern Arapaho man, yet I have short hair, I speak English, and I went to non-Native schools. Yet, I am still a Northern Arapaho despite it, because of something O’Malley and Coel can never get. I am a filmmaker, a writer, and an artist. I can use the tools and technology necessary to create art that speaks with my own voice, gaze, and perspective. The Native peoples alive today are the descendents of those tribes that were targeted for assimilation and extermination long ago. Yet, we have survived, we are still present, yet the representations out there only serve to keep us tied to the Old Times, which in turn make us invisible. We continue to fight hard to be a part of contemporary society while at the same time, create new connections to our past. That is our duty and choice to do so. And it is for no one else.

According to Armando José Prats, the Battle for the Western Frontier is never over, that for many, it has never really ended. We as a people, and as a democratic nation, are fed a steady media diet which still portrays Native Americans as an enemy to be defeated; such as how the news showed the protesters at Elsiboqtoq, or the members of the Ramapough Mountain Indians in the film Out of the Furnace. Yet, nothing is made of their struggles like the Oak Flat sale approved by the US Congress when they passed the National Defense Authorization Act[vii], or the high rate of Natives killed by police[viii]. We never really see an honest depiction of Native peoples because some still feel the threat of the invisible enemy. Which is why they fight for their mascots and logos, and because that steady media diet never tells them otherwise.

It tells them that Native Americans are still the silent, ancient, invisible enemy that this country still has to defeat over and over. Which, ultimately, leads to their “prize” for winning the West: the right to present those mascots and logos, those mystery stories, as genuine representations.

That fight continues because, when all is said and done, we do want the trauma. We want Indians to exist only so much that we can defeat them or feel sorry for them. My words written here will be taken as an “attack” on a woman author due to my savagery, or a plaintive cry for pity due to my “defeat”. For Natives depicted in media, there is no middle ground. In truth, all I ask for is simple consideration when confronting media depictions, not a happy, positive depiction, nor an evil, negative one, nor historical, but as a contemporary member of society. We want to be seen as humans too. But the steady diet of media misrepresentations of our culture and people has had its affect. As Elmyr de Hory remarks on his forgeries that have hanged in some of the world’s greatest museums, “If they hang there long enough, they become real.” (Welles, 1974)

Coel’s misrepresentations have been around a long time. Here, now, we come to the separation of literature and art. Now days, anything can be labeled “art”, which goes to show you how tenuous and tedious the definition of art can be. Literature was how we passed our most important cultural information for centuries. The printed word reigned for centuries as the dominant force of media for the passing of information. Our most important information was printed in books made to last forever so that future generations could look up facts and know they were true, simply by the very nature that it was printed. Fiction writing was not considered as important as academic writing because the purpose of the fictional form was to entertain and was therefore seen as a lark, and the other was/is how we looked at the world and wrote down what we learned.

“A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past.” Neil Postman writes in his excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business in the chapter dealing with the power of the printed word and how it is lost in today’s media spectrum. Look at the public reaction to Joseph Marshall III’s The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History, his biography of the Lakota chief, culled from the various oral histories handed down from Crazy Horse’s own contemporaries. Yet, looking at the many negative reviews on public commentary sites, the consensus is that Marshall relied too heavily on “Lakota mouth of mouth”; completely ignoring the fact that this was how the Lakota passed on histories for centuries before the establishment of the country. But that attitude of having to be against the Native perspective runs accord with Prats’ point. Easy entertainment is too often the reason we give ourselves in overlooking the representations of Native peoples.

Perhaps Coel writes these mysteries knowing that this connection to the Northern Arapaho will exclude her from that fight and the continued assimilation of the tribe today. She can point to her books and say that she is the defender of the culture and not its corruptor. She needs Father O’Malley’s acceptance as the “Indian Priest” just as she hopes, maybe, to be labeled the Arapaho Mystery Writer. It is that acceptance that will exclude her fiction from both the constant misrepresentations of the Northern Arapaho, of all tribes, and the usurpation of their voices in trying to be included in today’s society in favor of the “experts” who want them tied to the “Old Times” where it is easier to ignore them.

Maybe, she writes these knowing they will have its defenders, both Native and non-Native, because it is fiction after all. They will defend the fiction as a way to justify their own need for that connection to Native cultures, which they seek to assume that “Indian Whatever” role that excludes them from the continued assimilation and misrepresentations everywhere; their “enlightenment” simply becomes a “morality pass” to the Native American’s cultural destruction and the commodification of our culture that goes on even today.

As we draw this to a close, I must state that I have no magic trick here, no unexpected twist to drive home the point. All I have is my Northern Arapaho heritage and my tribe. I only have my own experience in representing myself to you. But if you look through this series with my gaze, my perspective, you will see that my experience is my expertise, my heritage is my authority, and whether you choose my expertise over Coel’s is what it all comes down to. I have no magic trick to perform, as Coel’s work has already made me invisible.

But this is where Coel pulls her greatest trick, her greatest forgery; she is in fact not an anthropologist, as I assumed when I started this writing. She is a journalist.[ix] But her Northern Arapaho cultural expertise is now endorsed by the very fiction she writes. This mistake is on me, but what about her readers who do not know? Also, I cannot understand the contradiction – as a journalist, should she not be devoted to an exacting truth? My mistake, while an honest one, may be seen as a blatant misrepresentation of Coel herself; yet, no one will raise the question of how she presents a misrepresentation of my tribe as truth in her stories. Are not her misrepresentations on purpose? They remain her own forgeries, her trick to retain an authorship of expertise over my voice.

I myself have no such magic trick here, nor an easy answer, save one. I hope when people pick up a Margaret Coel Wind River Mystery, they should give consideration to the Northern Arapaho people, their culture and struggles presented within the pages. When they do, they should not be asking, “Why can’t a non-Native write this?” but should ask, “Why can’t a Native American write it?” Then, they should simply place the books back on the shelf.

The Northern Arapaho people are not vanishing, but our voice is fading due in part to non-Native representations that seek to make us absent, if only to become the experts on that vanishing culture, that only make us visible to render us invisible because, in Coel’s fiction, no one ever sees Arapahos. Maybe, in writing this, I do perform a magic trick: I make myself visible once again.

Respectfully Submitted,

Ernest M Whiteman III

Book/Film Reference                       

Coel, Margaret, Eye of the Wolf, 2005, Berkely Publishing

Marshall, Joseph M. III, The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History, 2005, Penguin Books

Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985, Penguin Books

Prats, Armando José, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, 2002, Cornell University Press

Welles, Orson, F for Fake, essay film, 1974

End notes:

---

[i] American Indian Mysteries: A Crossover Genre Not Quite There” – www.dancingbadger.com/indmyst01.htm

[ii] The Bates Battle – www.windriverhistory.org/exhibits/jkmoore/batesbattle.htm

[iii] “Some of My Best Friends: A review of Ian Frazier’s On the Rez”, Sherman Alexie, L.A. Times, January 23, 2000: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/23/books/bk-56600

[iv] Margaret Coel, Eye of the Wolf, Author’s Note

[v] Two Alaska Indian Youths Banished to Islands for Robbery, John Balzar, L.A. Times, July 15, 1994: http://articles.latimes.com/1994-07-15/news/mn-15840_1_alaska-indians

[vi] Discussion with Jeffrey Anderson, personal correspondence, Mar-Oct, 2005

[vii] Selling Off Apache Holy Land, Lydia Millet, New York Times, May 29, 2015: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opinion/selling-off-apache-holy-land.html?_r=0

[viii] 5 Thing That May Surprise You about Native American’s Police Encounters, Joie Chen and Nicole Grether, Al Jazeera America, January 27, 2015: http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2015/1/27/things-that-may-surprise-you-about-native-americans-police-encounters.html

[ix] Author’s website: http://www.margaretcoel.com/about_interviews4.php - the only biographical information found is in this interview.