Book no longer up for PEN Center USA prize
John Smelcer’s young adult book “Stealing Indians” has been withdrawn from contention for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. Smelcer’s status as one of four finalists in the young adult category, announced Aug. 10, revived questions about the author.
For more than 20 years, the Native literary world wondered about Smelcer’s bona fides. Numerous controversies have sprouted up around him, including one about a teaching appointment, a literary prize that was rescinded, questions about the authenticity of quotes praising Smelcer and accusations that he misrepresented himself as Alaska Native.
Smelcer’s detailed online biography notes that he is a member of the Ahtna Tribe of Alaska, a voting shareholder in the Ahtna Native Corp. and one-fourth Native blood.
A representative said that Ahtna Inc. is not a tribe but an Alaska Native Regional Corporation with shareholder-owners. The shareholder records coordinator for Ahtna Inc., Dorothy Shinn, whose signature appears on a document Smelcer has posted on his website as evidence that “his Blood Quantum is 1⁄4 Alaska Native,” tells The Times she never signed it.
Repeated attempts to reach Smelcer for comment for this story were unsuccessful.
Smelcer’s disputed lineage would not matter if it did not play a part in his career successes writing fiction and poetry about Native experiences.
In 1994, Smelcer’s heritage made the local papers when it was learned that the University of Alaska Anchorage, trying to diversify its faculty, had appointed him to a full-time teaching position.
“We believed John Smelcer to be an Alaska Native at the time of the hire,” a university spokesman told the Anchorage Daily News, which reported that Smelcer was “not an Alaska Native” and “is the adopted son of an Indian.” Later that year, Smelcer resigned.
Charlie Smelcer, the writer’s adoptive father, told the paper, “He’s a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian,” adding, “If he’s used my Native heritage for his personal or professional gain, then that’s wrong.”
On his website, Smelcer disputes his father’s assertions and accuses his father of trying to “publicly destroy his son.”
In 2004, Smelcer won both the James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship (later rescinded) and the Milt Kessler Award for poetry at Wilkes, a low-residency MFA program in creative writing. Bonnie Culver, the former director of the Wilkes program, gave Smelcer a two-term tryout to join the small teaching staff. “In all ways, he did not fit,” she says. He was not asked to return.
Smelcer’s books and website feature citations from well-known writers, including Nobel Prize winners. The Times found a few to be authentic. Others were not.
The Dalai Lama’s office confirms that he did not write the introduction attributed to him in Smelcer’s book “Alutiiq Noun Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide.”
More than 20 well-known writers who had died three or more years before his books’ publication were cited praising Smelcer’s works. Chinua Achebe hailed Smelcer’s YA novel “Stealing Indians” as “a masterpiece.” The book was published in 2016; Achebe died in 2013.
Lisa Graziano, the managing editor of publisher Leapfrog Press, told The Times that Smelcer got the Achebe blurb himself.
Native writers, including Joy Harjo, Joan Naviyuk Kane and Sherman Alexie, have raised concerns about Smelcer’s successful history of portraying Native narratives to the publishing industry. It raises questions about how palatable that work is to an audience unfamiliar with indigenous cultures.
“Because Smelcer is a language speaker, fishes, has lived in his tribal community and writes nature poems and stories where animals unironically talk,” Alexie says, “he presents as being Indian in a way that non-Natives and Natives agree is the ‘most authentic’ way of being Indian.”