Did you know that the History of “Native Americans” or “Indians” is fabricated? A deliberate hoax that most people still believe?
There’s an entry on Wikipedia about a Masonic Organization called “The Improved Order of Redmen“, a group of half a million white men who dressed and painted themselves like “red indians”. The article says:
The Improved Order of Red Men is a fraternal organization established in North America in 1834. It claims direct descent from the colonial era Sons of Liberty. Their rituals and regalia are modeled after those assumed by men of the era to be used by Native Americans. Despite the name, the order was formed solely by, and for, white men.
If you think these are only an obscure group of role-playing cross-dressers, you’d be wrong. They used their “indian” disguise to force political change.
On December 16, 1773, a group of male colonists who were members of the Sons of Liberty met in Boston to protest the Tea Act. When their protest went unheeded, they disguised themselves as Mohawks, proceeded to Boston harbor, and dumped overboard 342 chests of tea in what became known as the Boston Tea Party.
…during the build up to the West Virginia coal wars, “the Improved Order of Red Men [was] … the most comfortable lodge for Socialist miners and other radical workers…
…After the Civil war in West Virginia, the Improved Order of Red Men became a fraternal organization of some notoriety for vigilante activity.
White Europeans posing as “natives” was so common that the famous “Indians” of the time were really actors. Let’s look at the most famous ones.
Grey Owl (see article here)
Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (September 18, 1888 – April 13, 1938), commonly known as Grey Owl, was a popular Canadian writer, public speaker and conservationist. Born an Englishman, he immigrated to Canada and, in the latter years of his life, passed as half-Indigenous, falsely claiming he was the son of…an Apache woman. With books, articles and public appearances promoting wilderness conservation, he achieved fame in the 1930s. Shortly after his death in 1938, his real identity as the Englishman Archie Belaney was exposed. He has been called one of the first persons to engage in Indigenous identity fraud in Canada.
Grey Owl (image above) was a famous native American who never was. He featured prominently in a popular book titled Indians of Today which was intended to portray the “progress of the Indian race”. He was said to be the son of a well-known Apache scout for a man named William Cody, who would later become a fake Cowboy called Buffalo Bill.
Iron Eyes Cody (see article here)
Iron Eyes Cody kept his Italian heritage secret and claimed to be a Cherokee. He was hired by Hollywood and TV to appear in hundreds of films and shows as an “authentic” representation of his people. He appeared in ads warning of pollution and climate disasters, for which he became known as “The Crying Indian”.
Finally, in 1996, investigators revealed that this man was never an “Indian”:
…In 1996, however, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans reported that he was a second-generation Italian-American from Louisiana and that his Native American identity was self-created. The report was based on an interview with Cody’s half-sister and on various documents, including a baptismal record.
Hundreds of millions saw the movies, very few saw the investigative piece.
Chief Red Fox (see article here)
Chief Red Fox (c. 1884–1976), born William Humes to European-American parents in Baltimore, Maryland, was an American performer and literary figure who impersonated an Oglala Lakota Sioux chief, fabricating a Native American identity that included claims of birth on the Pine Ridge Reservation to a mother named White Swan, purported sister of Crazy Horse. His 1971 memoirs, recounting personal involvement in the Battle of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee Massacre, were exposed as largely plagiarized from earlier works and challenged by scholars and Oglala Sioux for factual inaccuracies, constituting a notable literary hoax amid publisher McGraw-Hill’s separate scandals. Despite the deceptions—unverified by reservation records or Crazy Horse biographies—Red Fox toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, appeared in silent films and vaudeville, and leveraged his persona for television interviews and advocacy on Sioux rights, exploiting public fascination with the vanishing “wild” West. He died in Corpus Christi, Texas, at a claimed age of 105, though records indicate he was approximately 92.
White Elk (see article here)
…Prior to his arrest, he went to Europe where he acted in a film titled La caravane vers l’Ouest under the pseudonym Chief White Elk. In 1924, he went to Italy and presented himself as a delegation member of the League of Nations. His traditional dress made him famous in Italy, and earned him honour from the fascist rulers of Italy. Later in 1926, he was convicted by a court in Turin for his involvement in fraud. According to apocryphal claims he tried to justify his actions with the argument that “I’m an actor, I just did what people expected me to do”…
This is a much longer story, made-short to cater to modern attention-deficiencies. There is much more to learn on the machinations of Hollywood and secret societies fabricating the “Indian” narrative.