Jamake Highwater (born Jackie Marks, also known as Jay or J Marks; 14 February 1931 – June 3, 2001) was an American writer and journalist of
Eastern European Jewish ancestry who mispresented himself as
Cherokee
The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...
.
In the late 1960s, Marks assumed a
pretendian
A pretendian (portmanteau of ''pretend'' and ''Indian'') is a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by claiming to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native ancestors. T ...
identity, claiming to be Cherokee, and used the name "Jamake Highwater" for his writings. As Highwater, he wrote and published more than 30 fiction and non-fiction books of music, art, poetry and history. His children's novel ''Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey'' (1973) received a
Newbery Honor
Newbery is a surname.
People
*Chantelle Newbery (born 1977), Australian Olympic diver
*David Newbery (born 1943), British economist
*Eduardo Newbery (1878–1908), Argentine odontologist and aerostat pilot
*Francis Newbery (disambiguation), seve ...
. His book ''The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America'' (1981) was the basis of a
PBS
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...
film documentary about
Native American culture
Native American cultures across the United States are notable for their wide variety and diversity of lifestyles, regalia, art forms and beliefs. The culture of indigenous North America is usually defined by the concept of the Pre-Columbian ...
.
Marks was exposed as an
imposter
An impostor (also spelled imposter) is a person who pretends to be somebody else, often through means of disguise. Their objective is usually to try to gain financial or social advantages through social engineering, but also often for purposes ...
in 1984 by activist
Hank Adams
Henry Lyle Adams (May 16, 1943 – December 21, 2020, Assiniboine-Sioux) was an American Native rights activist known as a successful strategist, tactician, and negotiator. He was instrumental in resolving several key conflicts between Native Am ...
(
Assiniboine
The Assiniboine or Assiniboin people ( when singular, Assiniboines / Assiniboins when plural; Ojibwe: ''Asiniibwaan'', "stone Sioux"; also in plural Assiniboine or Assiniboin), also known as the Hohe and known by the endonym Nakota (or Nakoda ...
) and reporter
Jack Anderson in separate publications.
[ Despite this, Marks continued to be widely perceived by the general public as Native American.][
]
Early life, education and career
Jackie Marks was born on 13 February 1931 in Los Angeles to parents Martha (Turetz) Marks, then 27, and Alexander Marks, then 49; they were born in Philadelphia and New York City respectively. His parents each had immigrant grandparents of Eastern European Jewish ancestry; his father's family had likely anglicized
Anglicisation is the process by which a place or person becomes influenced by English culture or British culture, or a process of cultural and/or linguistic change in which something non-English becomes English. It can also refer to the influen ...
their name to Marks. His father's Jewish identification was affirmed by his family requesting a Star of David for his military gravestone. Alexander Marks was a veteran of World War I.
While living in San Francisco, Marks started a small dance company, the San Francisco Contemporary Dancers. He was the principal director and choreographer from 1954 to 1967. Marks moved to New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
around 1969 and started publishing professionally as J. Marks. In New York, he started using the name Jamake Highwater and claiming to be Cherokee. At various times he said his father was Eastern Cherokee and his mother, whom he called Marcia Highwater, was Blackfoot
The Blackfoot Confederacy, ''Niitsitapi'' or ''Siksikaitsitapi'' (ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ, meaning "the people" or " Blackfoot-speaking real people"), is a historic collective name for linguistically related groups that make up the Blackfoot or Bla ...
/French.
Career
As Jamake Highwater, Marks wrote and published more than 30 fiction and non-fiction books, including children's books, and works about music, art, poetry and history. His pseudonym "Jamake Highwater" appeared on ''Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey'' (1973), a children's book; and ''The Sun, He Dies: A Novel About the End of the Aztec World'' (1980).[Associated Press, "Jamake Highwater, American Indian Author"]
''The New York Times'', 16 June 2001
In 1981, Marks (as Highwater) published a non-fiction book, ''The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America.''[ By this time, he had made many connections in the media world. PBS adapted this book as the basis of a documentary about Native American culture, ''The Primal Mind'' (1984). Marks served as the host of the documentary.][
Marks "gained wide public exposure"][ as Jamake Highwater through making several documentaries on Native American culture for ]PBS
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...
television, and serving as host.[ In the 1980s, he was known nationally as a Native American figure. In 1993, Marks was a consultant on the TV series '' Star Trek: Voyager'' for the character ]Chakotay
Chakotay is a fictional character who appears in each of the seven seasons of the American science fiction television series '' Star Trek: Voyager''. Portrayed by Robert Beltran, he was First Officer aboard the Starfleet starship USS ''Voyage ...
.
Marks also wrote for the '' New Grove Dictionary of American Music'' and the ''Los Angeles Free Press
The ''Los Angeles Free Press'', also called the "''Freep''", is often cited as the first, and certainly was the largest, of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. The ''Freep'' was founded in 1964 by Art Kunkin, who served as its publisher unti ...
'' under the Highwater name.[
]
False ancestry claims
Following his move to New York in 1969, Marks claimed his new identity as Jamake Highwater. He said that he had been adopted as an Indian child from Montana by a Greek-American family and raised in Los Angeles (a variation he told was that the family was Armenian). Another time he said that the Marks family had adopted him as a child.[ In yet another version he said both his parents were Cherokee.] He reportedly graduated from North Hollywood High School
North Hollywood High School (NHHS) is a public high school in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. It is located in the San Fernando Valley and enrolls approximately 2,500 students. Several neighborhoods, inc ...
, attended college in Los Angeles, and gained a PhD degree by the age of 20; this information was never documented.
Marks gave conflicting accounts of his purported Native American background.[ He never said that he was enrolled in a Cherokee tribe, but that he had "recovered" his Native identity.]
Marks's false claims to American Indian ancestry were explored and documented by Hank Adams
Henry Lyle Adams (May 16, 1943 – December 21, 2020, Assiniboine-Sioux) was an American Native rights activist known as a successful strategist, tactician, and negotiator. He was instrumental in resolving several key conflicts between Native Am ...
(Assiniboine
The Assiniboine or Assiniboin people ( when singular, Assiniboines / Assiniboins when plural; Ojibwe: ''Asiniibwaan'', "stone Sioux"; also in plural Assiniboine or Assiniboin), also known as the Hohe and known by the endonym Nakota (or Nakoda ...
) in a 1984 '' Akwesasne Notes'' article. He identified Marks's inconsistencies about birthplace and date, parents, college, and other biographical details.[ Between 1982 and 1983, Marks and his Primal Mind Foundation had received more than $825,000 in federal grant money from the ]Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American publicly funded non-profit corporation, created in 1967 to promote and help support public broadcasting. The corporation's mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, ...
(CPB), based on his claimed identification as Native American.[ His claims of Native ancestry were strongly disputed by American Indian activists and intellectuals,][ who argued that his works were inauthentic and stereotypical. They said that he had illegally received the grant money by misrepresenting material facts about his life.][
Investigative journalist Jack Anderson followed up on Marks in 1984, revealing the inconsistencies in the writer's biography and ultimately, his pose. His column, "A Fabricated Indian?", was published in '']The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
''. Following the major exposé by Anderson, Marks stopped claiming Cherokee heritage in his promotional literature; however, he continued to take advantage of having become publicly established as an "Indian" figure.[ When questioned by Anderson about why he had assumed a Cherokee identity, Marks said that he had thought he could not break into the writing world otherwise.]
Two years after Anderson's exposé, Marks published ''Shadow Show: An Autobiographical Insinuation'' (1986), in which he wrote: "the greatest mystery of my life is my own identity." Vizenor commented on this that the "impostor" was an artist, and his "insinuations are clever simulations, but surely not a great mystery".
Death and aftermath
Marks died of a heart attack at home on June 3, 2001. Mainstream press such as the ''New York Times'' and ''Los Angeles Times'' carried obituaries that repeated his false claims about his alleged Native American background.[ Through his attorney, Marks had blocked access to his papers for at least 50 years.]
In response to the published mainstream obituaries, Hank Adams published an open letter that detailed Marks's many falsehoods:
Native American intellectual Gerald Vizenor
Gerald is a male Germanic given name meaning "rule of the spear" from the prefix ''ger-'' ("spear") and suffix ''-wald'' ("rule"). Variants include the English given name Jerrold, the feminine nickname Jeri and the Welsh language Gerallt and Iri ...
(Anishinaabe
The Anishinaabeg (adjectival: Anishinaabe) are a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples present in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States. They include the Ojibwe (including Saulteaux and Oji-Cree), Odawa, Potawatomi, ...
) described individuals such as Marks, who take on false Native American identities, as "varionatives" in his 2000 book ''Fugitive Poses.''[Gerald Robert Vizenor, ''Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence''](_blank)
University of Nebraska Press, 2000, pp. 67-69
In 2015, ''Indian Country Today
''ICT News'' (formerly known as ''Indian Country Today'') is a daily digital news platform that covers the Indigenous world, including American Indians, Alaska Natives and First Nations.
It was founded in 1981 as a weekly print newspaper, ''The ...
'' reported additional findings about Marks's elaborate ruse. It published a copy of his 1931 birth certificate from Los Angeles, and a photograph of his father's military gravestone, marked with the Jewish symbol, a Star of David.
Honors and legacy
*Marks's children's novel, ''Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey'' (1973), received a Newbery Honor
Newbery is a surname.
People
*Chantelle Newbery (born 1977), Australian Olympic diver
*David Newbery (born 1943), British economist
*Eduardo Newbery (1878–1908), Argentine odontologist and aerostat pilot
*Francis Newbery (disambiguation), seve ...
.[
*Marks's children's books received "a half-dozen Best Book for Young Adults awards from the American Library Association and ''School Library Journal''."][
*Marks's book ''The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America'' (1981) was the basis of a PBS documentary, ''The Primal Mind'' (1984).][
]
Representations in other media
According to Alex Jacobs, Gerald Vizenor
Gerald is a male Germanic given name meaning "rule of the spear" from the prefix ''ger-'' ("spear") and suffix ''-wald'' ("rule"). Variants include the English given name Jerrold, the feminine nickname Jeri and the Welsh language Gerallt and Iri ...
(Anishinaabe) in his 1988 novel, ''The Trickster of Liberty'', based his character Homer Yellow Snow on Jamake Highwater. Jacobs notes that Yellow Snow says to his Native audience:
If you knew who you were, why did you find it so easy to believe in me? … because you want to be white, and no matter what you say in public, you trust whites more than you trust Indians, which is to say, you trust pretend Indians more than real ones.
See also
* Plastic shaman
References
Further reading
*Hoxie, Frederick E
''Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life From Paleo-Indians to the Present''
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006: 191–2. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009)
*Kratzert, M. "Native American Literature: Expanding the Canon," ''Collection Building'', Vol. 17, 1, 1998, p. 4.
*Nagel, Joane
''American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture''
Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1996: 238. .
*Weaver, Jace
''Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture''
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001: 138. (retrieved through Google Books, July 26, 2009)
External links
*
June 2001.
* ttp://dancingbadger.com/jamake_highwater.htm Mick McAllister, "Jack Marks Is Dead, Oh Well" Dancing Badger.com blog, June 2001
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Highwater, Jamake
1931 births
2001 deaths
Cultural appropriation
American children's writers
Newbery Honor winners
Writers from Los Angeles
Jewish American writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
Impostors
North Hollywood High School alumni
Transracial people
20th-century American Jews