‘INDIAN’ CLAIM IS NOT ‘WURTH’ MUCH
‘Native’ author a ‘Pretendian’: journo
Colorado writer Erika Wurth has earned accolades from The New York Times and TV’s “Good Morning America” for her new novel based on her Native American heritage — but it’s a past that she has made up, her detractors say.
Wurth, who teaches creative writing at Regis University in Denver, claims Chickasaw, Apache and Cherokee heritage on her mother’s side. The background informs her latest novel, “White Horse,” which was released to capitalize on Native American Indian Heritage Month in November 2022.
But according to Native activists and researchers, Wurth, 47, is one of dozens of “Pretendians,” and featured on AncestorStealing, a blog that exposes white people who pose as Indians.
“Her story is completely unverifiable,” said Jacqueline Keeler, a Portland, Ore., journalist who consulted public records going back more than 100 years to investigate Wurth’s claims. “Her story just doesn’t add up. She has zero Native ancestry.”
Last year, Keeler, who is of Dine/ Dakota heritage, made international headlines when she unmasked Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American activist and actress who on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973 famously declined his Best Actor Oscar over Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. According to Keeler, Littlefeather, who died last year, was not Native. Keeler’s statement was backed up by Littlefeather family members, who have MexicanAmerican roots.
Keeler, who has been accused of conducting “witch hunts” to expose fake Native Americans, told The Post she met Wurth a few years ago when the novelist publicly accused Native American writer Sherman Alexie of sexually assaulting her when she was a 22-year-old aspiring writer. Alexie vigorously denied the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by Wurth and two other women.
Keeler said she began investigating Wurth’s background because the novelist’s family story seemed fanciful.
“My grandmother, Margarite Temple, came from a long line of urban Indians (of Apache, Chickasaw and Cherokee descent) and suffered much,” Wurth wrote in a 2022 essay for CrimeReads.com. “Without the finances to realize her dream of becoming a blues singer in New York, Annie James, the Chickasaw whorehouse owner grandmother who raised her, arranged a marriage with a much older man. Margarite was 14. He beat her, gave her syphilis, walked up the steps of their house drunk, and kicked her while she was pregnant.”
‘Exacting revenge’
According to Wurth, James exacted revenge by killing her own husband. “She had stripped a bullet, melted it, and poured it into his ear while he was sleeping, which killed him,” Wurth said in a 2017 blog post.
Keeler said a team of researchers and Native American genealogists were unable to verify Wurth’s indigenous roots or the story about the murder.
“Erika Wurth and her family are not of Cherokee descent,” according to the AncestorStealing blog post. “They were white settlers on stolen Native lands. By the time of the 1900 census, they were back in Kansas, the owners of a farm.”
The same census also offers clues about Wurth’s great-grandmother. “The 1900 census shows [Annie and Albert Coffin] as married and living together in San Antonio, Texas, [and] by the time of the 1910 census, Annie lists herself as a widow,” reads the AncestorStealing post about Wurth. “Except she isn’t a widow. While Albert Coffin disappeared from the censuses in 1910 and 1920, we know from his gravestone that he was alive until 1925. So the marriage seems to be troubled. But this story of Annie’s ‘much, much older husband’ getting a melted bullet poured into his ear, which she says caused his death, seems to be entirely made up.”
Wurth refused to comment Wednesday, but in a series of 2021 tweets, she attacked Keeler and her research.
“Somehow, no matter what, no matter if people are dying or being mocked no matter the issue it’s somehow about somebody who isn’t really Indian,” Wurth tweeted. “Because Jackie is THE ONLY INDIAN (Who somehow has never produced her tribal ID…).
“Doesn’t matter whether someone’s enrolled, if they’re successful, she & her white Indians bully, calling pretendinan to get attention from white people who find her to be nothing more than a minor annoyance,” Wurth continued.