Earlier this month, a young adult novel called Stealing Indians was nominated for a PEN Literary Award. The author of the book, John Smelcer, isn’t well-known. But some writers and academics say he is a grifter with dubious ties to the Alaskan Native heritage he claims.
“John Smelcer has been held in great suspicion and contempt in the Native world for twenty-five years,” said novelist Sherman Alexie. “I saw through [Smelcer’s] facade long ago” and haven’t seen him “be part of any Native literature gathering, formal or informal, terrestrial or online, in many years.”
The Native scholar and writer Debbie Reese, who has written extensively about Smelcer on her blog American Indians in Children’s Literature, finds “his claims to Native identity troubling,” because “Smelcer is not a Native person by birth,” because “he did not grow up on a reservation or with Native people,” and because “students often do author studies.” She went on, “In schools, we teach children to be honest. It seems that, if we herald an author who has not been honest with his identity, we are saying one thing (be honest) and doing another (by assigning his books, we say his deceit does not matter).”
Her statements are corroborated by a 1994 article in the Anchorage Daily News, which wrote that Smelcer said he “considered himself a Native even though his parents were not.” However, he said then and continues to maintain that he grew up with Native people and has a strong relationship with them.
The novelist Marlon James, who won the Booker Prize in 2015, responded to the news of the PEN nomination on Facebook by calling Smelcer a “living con job.”
