Asa Earl Carter was a staunch segregationist, a Ku Klux Klan leader, and a speech writer for George Wallace. Forrest Carter was a half-white, half-Cherokee novelist lovingly raised by his native grandparents. What do these two men have in common? One is a fictitious creation of the other.

Many recognize Forrest Carter as the author of The Education of Little Tree, a long-beloved memoir eventually made into a movie. Most people who cherish this classic book have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that its author, rather than being an “official storyteller” for the Cherokee nation (as the biography on the back of his book originally claimed), was in fact a bigot who knew nothing about Cherokee culture. How did this happen? Let’s take a look at Carter’s situation around the time that the book was written.

Although George Wallace kept him at arm’s length so as to not associate himself too closely with such a radical, Asa Carter penned Wallace’s infamous phrase, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” In 1970, Wallace ran for governor of Alabama. He had decided that shooting for more political power meant cleaning up his act - and that meant cutting all ties with people like Carter, who would sully his new image. Carter didn’t take too kindly to this, and decided to run against Wallace. “In his TV commercials, Carter looked large, thick-set and barrel-chested, with dark, thick, Russian-like hair and eyebrows. He looked like George Wallace’s bigger, meaner brother. Positioned in front of a Confederate flag, he railed against ‘race-mixing,’ Communists in Hollywood and anything else he could tie to the ‘guv’mint’ in Washington. He finished last.” ¹

After his sound defeat in Alabama, Carter and his wife moved to Florida, where he re-named himself Forrest, after KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. (Although he had condemned the KKK years ago for being “too soft and compromised.”) They then moved again to Texas, where Carter told his new friends that he was Cherokee. He wrote and published a few pulp westerns, one of which - Gone to Texas - was adapted into a movie starring Clint Eastwood. That won him a considerable amount of fame. He also published an autobiography about his upbringing by his kindly Cherokee grandparents who taught him “the Indian way.” That made him a legend.

Needless to say, Asa Carter was not Cherokee. This fact was revealed in two different articles soon after Little Tree was published. But this had no effect on the book’s explosive popularity. At first, the fans vehemently denied that Forrest Carter and Asa Carter were the same person. But as the years went by and the evidence piled up, it became undeniable. Even the University of New Mexico Press subtly changed the book cover until it no longer included a biography of Carter, and re-classified it under “Fiction/Young Adult.” But strangely enough, even as people knew that Carter was not Cherokee, they still read it, and loved it, and recommended it to friends. Stranger and more damaging still, schools kept the book in their curriculum, simply adding some information on Carter’s real history. Fans correctly assert that a work of literature should be judged apart from its author. To them, this frees The Education of Little Tree and allows it to be appreciated as a sentimental, inspiring work of art. To anyone who knows anything about Cherokee culture, judging the book on its own merits just makes it look worse.

I’m currently working on a young adult novel about Christian fundamentalists. I am not, and never have been, a Christian fundamentalist. But I’ve done considerable research and I hope that when the book comes out, people will judge it by its inherent quality instead of my personal history. But the key phrase here is, “I’ve done considerable research.” Cherokees didn’t need The New York Times to tell them that Carter wasn’t one of their own: the briefest review of The Education of Little Tree showed them that he was not raised Cherokee, in all likelihood had never met a Cherokee, and had not even gone to the trouble of doing much research on the Cherokee. (You’d think a man so intent on covering up his tracks would be more careful about this sort of thing.)

What did Carter get wrong? Well, for starters… everything. Except for one word (”awi usdi,” meaning “little deer,” which he may have gotten from the 1964 book Friends of Thunder), all of the supposed Cherokee words that Carter throws at his readers once, and never uses again, are made up. This is evident from the similarities between the English words and Carter’s “Cherokee” translations. His word for “bee” is “ti-bi.” His word for “panther” is “pa-koh.” His word for “hawk” is “tal-con.” (Apparently a combination of “falcon” and “talon.”) His word for “turkey” is “tel-qui.” And so on, and so forth. For future reference, here is the complete list of Carter-ese words, along with the actual Cherokee words:²

Richard L. Allen of the Cherokee Nation discussed Carter’s misrepresentation of Cherokee culture in his speech, Creating a Fraudulent Identity in The Education of Little Tree: Cherokee or Wannabe?. Some of the distortions Allen revealed are as follows:

1. Although the Cherokee have a rich oral tradition, full of legends and myths that are passed down from generation to generation, Granma does not tell any of them to Little Tree. Rather, she reads him Shakespeare.
2. Although Cherokee names are considered sacred, and told only to trusted friends, Little Tree is known as such to pretty much everyone he meets.
3. Although the Cherokee usually live in tight-knit communities, Little Tree, Granma, Granpa, and Willow John live in isolation. They meet only on Sundays, at a white church. And while some Cherokees have practiced both their traditional religion and attended Christian churches, the Cherokees depicted in The Education of Little Tree don’t practice their traditional faiths at all.
4. On page 51, Pine Billy spits into a fire. Cherokees hold the fire to be sacred and forbid any desecration of it - through urination or saliva. Cherokee children are warned sternly not to play with fire. Yet not only does Pine Billy spit onto a fire, but the other Cherokees in the room don’t react in any way.
5. The Education of Little Tree describes Granma and Granpa as engaging in public displays of affection, which real Cherokees are not prone to do - especially those from the 1930s.
6. The book also describes numerous mentions of sex and even prostitution. Most Cherokees - and most Americans in general during that time period - would not consider it appropriate to discuss such things in front of five-year-old boys.
7. Carter describes a tradition of giving a newlywed couple a hickory marriage stick, which they hang above their bed. Their names are carved into this stick, as is a notch every time something of mention happens to them. (If they have an argument and make up, or if they bring their grandchild into their home.) While it’s admittedly a nice thought, there is no such tradition among the Cherokee - and, likely, no such tradition anywhere.
8. Screech owls are mentioned twice in the book. Not once is it mentioned that in Cherokee tradition, an owl is viewed as a bad omen or a harbinger of death. To Little Tree and his grandparents, owls are simply a nuisance that occasionally keep them awake with their screeching.
9. Granma explains to Little Tree the Cherokee belief in reincarnation. She also describes a Cherokee listening and talking to trees, and protecting them from the lumber company that wants to cut them down. Needless to say, Cherokee don’t talk to trees, nor do they believe in reincarnation. (Though they do believe in an afterlife.)
10. When Little Tree is sent to an orphanage, he telepathically communicates with his grandparents and Willow John through Sirius, the Dog Star. Richard L Allen says of this: “This is so new agey that there is no need to discuss this any further.”

Indeed, most of the “Cherokee” beliefs Carter describes just screams of New Ageism. It’s obviously designed to take advantage of the American public’s rosy and totally misinformed view of Native American spirituality. It wouldn’t be the first time. Chief Seattle’s famous speech, taught in public schools across America, that begins, “The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth,” was not actually written by Chief Seattle.³ It was written in 1971 by screenwriter Ted Perry for an environmental documentary. But the Seattle speech was an honest mistake - the film’s credits didn’t mention that the speech was fiction. Not so for Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under.⁴ 30 years after The Education of Little Tree was published, Morgan came up with a similar tall tale, this one set among the Australian Aboriginese. In a repeat of history, Morgan first published the story as an autobiography, then was shown to be a liar, and re-published her story as a novel. As with Little Tree, Morgan’s fans continue to defend her lies.

But Marlo Morgan seemed to really believe what she was writing, or at least she really believed in the New Age quackery she was sticking in the mouths of the Aboriginese. Why did Asa Carter do it? Was The Education of Little Tree written solely as a cynical money-making scheme? Did Carter just want to take advantage of liberal naïveté? Or was there something more insidious?

Fans are quick to allege that Carter was “reformed” and changed his mind about white supremacy before writing Little Tree. But if he was truly reformed, why did he feel the need to lie about who he was? Furthermore, how do you explain his drunken arrival at a book-and-author luncheon, upon which he made a number of anti-Semitic comments?⁵ A great deal of evidence suggests that Carter remained racist while writing The Education of Little Tree and for years afterward. Inevitably, this racism showed up in his writing.

Throughout the entire book, natives are depicted as childishly innocent, naive, having a mystical connection to nature, etc. While this “Noble Savage” stereotype has, as of late, been used to deify Native Americans, it was originally created to justify colonialism. It depicted the civilized as loving, caring parents to the primitives, who couldn’t take care of themselves. Aside from being noble, Carter’s Cherokee are often just plain savage, as demonstrated by the following passage (p.44):

The fever for combat, that marked his breed, was running high. There was no fear, only exhultation, as the horse moved fast and light over the ground, as the wind whipped a storm in his face. Exhultation that brought the rebel Indian yell rumbling from his chest and out his throat, screaming, savage.

Even when Carter isn’t trying to be racist, his prejudices manage to sneak in. There’s Pine Billy, the stupid, lazy alcoholic Indian; Willow John, the stoic Indian with a single tear running down his cheek at the sight of litter; and let’s not forget Carter’s entire defense of a Jewish character, namely, “He’s not stingy - he’s just thrifty and knows how to use his money!” The man seems entirely oblivious to the notion that people may be a little more than cardboard cutouts.

Other hints of his radical right-wing politics are scattered throughout the book. Carter hates the “guv’mint” - as do all his characters. Native Americans are portrayed as allied with the Confederate soldiers, and still sympathetic to the ideals of the Confederacy decades after the Civil War ends. Additionally, when Carter talks about how much better off the Cherokee would be without white men, the implication might be that all races should be segregated for the greater good.

Amazingly, fans write off even the racism inherent in the book. None of it matters, because The Education of Little Tree has a good message. It says we should live in harmony with the earth, rather than trying to conquer it. It says that humans are capable of doing this, using the Native Americans as an example. This is, in my mind, a perfectly good message to want to spread. But how well does a work of fiction do the job? Lord of the Flies is an excellent example of how humans are inherently evil. In fiction. If you have an important argument to make about human nature, you’ll only hurt your cause by holding up a fictional account as an example. You’ll make yourself look ignorant and stupid for believing the lies and stereotypes in Little Tree, and you’ll make your cause look naïve and unrealistic by giving off the impression that the only earth-friendly natives are fictional ones. There are tons of examples of indigenous people living in harmony with the land. Why attach your cause to fictional ones?

Michael Marker⁶ offers up a possible answer:

The Education of Little Tree has been so popular generally and so frequently used in classrooms because it makes people feel good. If deeper social analysis and cultural exploration are too troubling for the schools, then this sort of escapist literature is the answer. For those who want to believe that Indian people are pretty much just like middle-class white people, except more quaint and wholesome in their simple, romantic lives, this book serves well. It also works well for those who want to promote the American cult of the “individual” making his (or, less frequently, her) own way in the great melting-pot society. Vine Deloria points out that one of the most universal and unifying aspects of Indian culture today is the general feeling of betrayal by and resentment toward white America, an avowedly Christian nation. This central aspect of current Indian culture is unacceptable as a focus for study in the public school setting because it requires non-Native society to engage in a deep self-examination - and that it is wholly unwilling to do.

I don’t see the necessity of a book like The Education of Little Tree. The same laudable morals can be found in books such as Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a book which has always advertised itself as fictional and which draws upon the examples of multiple - real-life - indigenous peoples. The key is, Daniel Quinn specifically says that indigenous people are imperfect. His theory is that tribalism itself creates a relatively peaceful and less environmentally damaging society - not that tribal people are somehow morally superior to civilized people. People looking for racist Noble Savage stereotypes and deification of people they don’t understand must look elsewhere.

In the end, The Education of Little Tree is a shallow book for shallow people. It is damaging to both the Native Rights movement and the anarcho-primitivist movement. But I have no doubt that no argument I could put up would change anyone’s mind about it. There are just too many shallow people in search of easy answers.

Footnotes:

^1. Barra, Allen. The Education of Little Fraud [ Back ]
^2. Allen, Richard L. Creating a Fraudulent Identity in The Education of Little Tree: Cherokee or Wannabe? [ Back ]
^3. Small, Frederick Emerson. F is for Fake [ Back ]
^4. Sitka, Chris. Morgan’s Mutant Fantasy [ Back ]
^5. Bollman, Amy Kallio. The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter: What is Known? What is Knowable? [ Back ]
^6. Marker, Michael. The Education of Little Tree:What It Really Reveals About the Public Schools [ Back ]