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The closest this book gets to touching nature is the sweet sappiness of the story. Though the author put the story forward as true, he was not actually a Native, but a who fought to keep segregation and was a member of the KKK.

But this revelation shouldn't be that surprising, since the book is hardly insightful or sensitive in its views. Carter's characters are old, romanticized cliches of the colonial --poor Indians beset by the white man's greed trying to eke a peaceful and natural existence out in the wild of nature. It should remind us all that an overly rosy view can be just as racist and condescending as a negative one.

Carter is just another in a long line of people who tried to make themselves more mysterious and interesting by making up a distant Native ancestor and then claiming it gives them some kind of spiritual and moral superiority. I guess I should mention here that it's overtly racist to imagine that a fully-formed culture can be propagated through blood, as if Native peoples were magic elves.

But people like to individualize themselves, and if that means they have to create a culture from whole cloth to belong to, that isn't going to stop them, whether it's someone bringing up their '1/16th Cherokee blood' or a Wiccan who doesn't realize they're following , , and some stuff that was made up by delusionals and con-men.

And if that wasn't enough to tip us off, there's also a lengthy sambo slapstick scene almost as insulting to blacks as Martin Lawrence in a fatsuit. It just goes to show that it's easy to fool people with over-the-top cliches and over-romanticized characters. Even Oprah was taken in, featuring this book in her reading club--but perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that one purveyor of ill-informed saccharine melodrama should be taken in by another.

In the end, we get a sort of literary version of the blackface minstrel show, depicting Native life with a quaint nostalgia that has nothing to do with the real experience of Natives or their history. Instead, everything is boiled down into a simple little story--almost a fable--of how the colonial mindset would prefer to see Natives: as fundamentally separate in vague, mystical ways.

They are so oversimplified (as heroes or villains) that they no longer resemble real people; instead, they are reduced to a subspecies of man defined by a set of universally shared traits. Their identity is primarily communal, primarily traditional, incapable of change, learning, or individuality.

It's hard for me to think of a more pointed definition or racism than 'assuming that a group of people, similar in appearance and ancestry, all share a series of invariable traits which make them fundamentally and inescapably different from every other individual and people group'.

Like 'The Kite Runner', this is just another book that assuages white guilt by making white readers feel that, in just picking up a book, they have become worldly, understanding, and compassionate--despite the fact that neither book really reveals the culture it set out to depict, and could not provide any real insight to anyone who was in the least familiar with how those cultures actually work.