Colorado author Erika Wurth has earned accolades from the Recent York Times and Good Morning America for her latest novel based on her native American heritage — but it surely’s a past, her detractors say, that she has made up.
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 in line with Native activists and researchers, Wurth, 47, is considered one of dozens of “Pretendians,” and featured on AncestorStealing, a blog that exposes white individuals who pose as “fake Indians.”
“Her story is totally unverifiable,” said Jacqueline Keeler, a Portland, Oregon, journalist who consulted public records going back greater than 100 years to analyze Wurth’s claims. “Her story just doesn’t add up. She has zero Native ancestry.”
Last 12 months, Keeler, who’s of Dine/Dakota heritage, made international headlines when she unmasked Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American activist and actor who famously declined Marlon Brando’s best actor Oscar in 1973 over Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. In response to Keeler, Sacheen Littlefeather, who died last 12 months, was not Native. Keeler’s statement was backed up by Littlefeather’s family, who has Mexican-American roots.
Keeler, who has been accused of conducting “witch hunts” to show fake Native Americans, told The Post she met Wurth a couple of years ago when the novelist publicly accused Native American author Sherman Alexie of sexually assaulting her when she was a 22-year-old aspiring author. 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 since the novelist’s family story seemed fanciful.
“My grandmother, Margarite Temple, got here from an extended line of urban Indians (of Apache, Chickasaw, and Cherokee descent) and suffered much,” Wurth wrote in a 2022 essay for CrimeReads.com. “Without the funds to appreciate her dream of becoming a blues singer in Recent York, Annie James, the Chickasaw whorehouse owner grandmother who raised her, arranged a wedding 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.”
In response 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 geneologists were unable to confirm Wurth’s indigenous roots or the story in regards to the murder.
“Erika Wurth and her family aren’t of Cherokee descent,” in line with the AncestorStealing blog post. “They were white settlers on stolen Native lands. By the point of the 1900 census, they were back in Kansas, the owners of a farm.”
The identical 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 point 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 all know from his gravestone that he was alive until 1925. So the wedding appears 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, appears to be entirely made up.”
Wurth refused comment Wednesday, but in a series of 2021 tweets she attacked Keeler and her research.
“By some means, irrespective of what, irrespective of if individuals are dying or being mocked irrespective of the difficulty it’s in some way about anyone who isn’t really Indian,” Wurth tweeted. “Because Jackie is THE ONLY INDIAN (Who in some way has never produced her tribal ID…).
“Doesn’t matter whether someone’s enrolled, in the event that they’re successful, she & her white Indians bully, calling pretendinan to get attention from white individuals who find her to be nothing greater than a minor annoyance,” Wurth continued.
London-based Chickasaw author Tony Perry has also disputed Wurth’s claims, particularly regarding her Chickasaw roots. The Chickasaw tribe’s lands were positioned within the southeastern US.
“Erika has a PhD to look and examine and analyze her past, but none of that has happened on the subject of her identity,” said Perry. “It’s one thing to have family lore about what you think that happened prior to now. It’s quite one other once you start to construct your profession around it.”
Wurth has lectured widely and has mined Native American traditions and folk tales in her seven books. In “White Horse,” which was a Book of the Month Club pick in November and featured on an inventory of Good Housekeeping’s best books by Native writers, Wurth draws on the Chickasaw legend of Lofa, a boogeyman. The novel tells the story of Native American Kari James, who “must face her family’s dark past after discovering a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit.” The copper bracelet conjures visions of her missing mother in addition to the Lofa.
“I’m not the one Native person I do know with an obsession with horror,” wrote Wurth on CrimeReads. “And no wonder. A legacy of genocide and cultural genocide with day and boarding schools, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women issue—and the final PTSD that comes from that, to maneuver back as much as the therapeutic facets of horror.”
Keeler and other researchers have reached out to Wurth’s publishers and editors to allow them to learn about their research into Wurth’s past. But to date they’ve been met with silence, Keeler told The Post.
“What gets me is the individuals who enable this sort of behavior, and say nothing,” said Keeler. “Look, I’m 1/32 part German but I’m not here speaking for the German people. But every time there’s money to be gained, there they’re.”