The Desire to Believe and Belong: Wannabes and Their Audience in a North American Cultural Context

Abstract

The chapter discusses two cases of ethnic impersonation, that of Asa/Forrest Carter, a white supremacist from Alabama who pretended to be Cherokee, and that of Archibald Belaney, an Englishman who in Canada took on the identity of the half-blood Indian Grey Owl. The focus lies on an analysis of the respective cultural context and the motivations of the audiences to believe in those acts of imposture out of a desire to belong nationally and culturally. For Canadians, Grey Owl transformed the no-man's land of Canada into a "true" North and gave the young nation a way to imagine itself apart from the British motherland. Audiences in America bought Asa Carter’s act because he appealed to populism and the anti-intellectualism of the common man. Carter reached his audience because he identified their deepest racial stereotypes, resentments, and fears. The exposure of both men, then, reveals the dark underside of North American national myths.