The Indian Who Wasn’t

When I was about forty-two years of age, my Dad dropped over to my house one winter Saturday morning, looking rather troubled.

“What’s up, Pop?” I asked.

“We need to talk” was his answer. So, I put on a pot of coffee and we took our seats at the kitchen table, Dad looking like a man who would rather be anywhere else.

I was pretty sure he wasn’t about to announce he was coming out, reasonably sure that a divorce wasn’t in the offing, and vaguely wondered if maybe I was going to learn about a heretofore unknown sibling. Or maybe a serious illness, although he didn’t give off that vibe.

He studied my face for a moment or two, took a deep breath, and blurted out, “Your Grandad wasn’t your grandfather.”

Now that I wasn’t ready for.

Watching carefully for my reaction, he went on to fill in the story of how his actual father, a brilliant but not particularly pleasant man, had died when my Dad was a five year-old. “I watched them carry my Daddy out,” he said, looking out the window.

Dad filled in the story of how he had later, as a schoolboy, befriended a carpenter who was building a house near the school, a craftsman who wondered where the boy got such a lovely sweater. “My Mum knitted it for me”, said the young boy, proudly, to which the carpenter responded, “Do you suppose she’d knit one for me?”

You can connect the dots: schoolboy introduces carpenter to mother, offer was made to knit a sweater if he supplied the wool, one thing led to another, my grandmother ended up with a new husband, and Normand Trinder Bowley adopted three young boys. A lovely enough family story, but to me, a gut punch. My namesake, my hero and model, wasn’t who I believed he was. And at that moment, I knew I wasn’t who I had believed I was, either. I’m not even sure yet I’ve settled that.

It was therefore especially poignant for me to read of Thomas King, noted Indigenous studies scholar and author of Inconvenient Indian, who very recently learned that contrary to the family legend, his father had zero Cherokee ancestry. After a lifetime of writing, speaking, and teaching from the perspective of his native ancestry, it turned out his own fundamental element was a myth. The famed native author and expert had no First Nations ancestry. To King, devastating in every sense of the word.

As he wrote in November, 2025, “At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.” My heart broke for Thomas King.

We all have self-legends of one sort or another, stories we’ve told ourselves from the earliest times, sometimes stories we thought we were told although the precise details of who and when have gone fuzzy, sometimes even memories which really aren’t memories but innocent fabrications created from bits of what we’ve been told, or what we thought we’ve been told. These self-stories are central to our deep identities. Occasionally, but only very rarely, they are outrageous lies, mostly they’re “close enough” to the actual truth, or heroic shadings of a more pedestrian reality.

When such myths are blown up for us, it’s devastating, but the experience can teach us to show grace when someone else’s real backstory spills out inconveniently.

Because this stuff happens.