Where does this “When you were born” quote come from?
- Story Storage
- Nov 30, 2024
- 23 min read
Updated: Nov 30, 2024
Content Warning: this essay discusses nonfiction death, dying and mourning practices. It also discusses colonialist racism against Native American people and Indian people. In this essay, “Native American” refers to indigenous peoples from the land currently designated as the United States, not from the American continents more broadly. Reader discretion is advised.
There are also specific real people referenced in this essay. Do not contact or otherwise bother them.
I remember getting this greeting card during a visit to the Grand Canyon. It says,
"When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice."
A nice sentiment. Make strong connections with your friends/family/community so they miss you when you die, and you will repay them for taking care of you when you were young. At first glance, this looks like it fits in with environmental stewardship tropes that non-Native people like myself associate with Native Americans.
The card attributes this quote to a "Native American proverb". I thought that was a little strange. There are actual tribes who live in the Grand Canyon area, across multiple states. The card didn’t suggest this quote came from any particular one of them. It doesn't mention any literature or speech from a specific Native author. It doesn't mention any ethnography or other research a non-Native author might have done to record the quote. I wouldn’t really expect it to, but I don’t have anything to go off of from the card alone. I didn’t find any clear matching results when I reverse image-searched the illustrations on the card to see if they were based on a petroglyph site or other type of art.
So it’s a pretty card with original artwork and a quote that I can't pin down.
I was able to find the artist that sells this card and sent her store a message asking if they knew a more precise origin for the quote. I'm not linking that store here because I don't want anyone to bug her. As of posting, I haven’t gotten a response.
This made me curious for my own sake. What Native American source did this proverb come from?
I assumed that I could probably track down who said this or wrote it down and be on my way.
This turned into a months-long rabbit hole of disaster.
It seems like this quote makes its regular rounds on the motivational speaker sides of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and personal blogs with little or no actual citation. I will try to stay polite, given that it's a quote about death, and people share this quote most often after their loved ones pass away. But tracking this down was not as easy as it first appeared.
I am not including multiple instances of the quote that attribute it to Anonymous or don't cite a source at all, which doesn't help me. We'll get back to that.
To find where this quote came from, I have sorted the most common results into candidates for you. I am sparing you a sense of shock - the organic search I did brought all of these and their variations in an intersecting cascade. To give the Internet its fair credit, I'll take a look at the most likely candidates for where this quote comes from.
Candidate 1: This is a Bible quote.
There are one or two claims that this quote originated in the Book of Proverbs from the Torah or Old Testament. The closest I could find was Proverbs 10:7 in the KJV: "The memory of the righteous is blessed, but the name of the wicked will rot."
That's just not the quote I’m looking for. If only there were a way to check if a quote comes from one of the most popular books ever written.
This claim is the most wrong – and it doesn't sound like a Native American proverb to me. I mention it for the sake of completion.
Status: Not what I’m looking for. Next.
Candidate 2: This is a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote.
From Emerson Central
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nineteenth-century American poet. I found a few sources linking this saying to Emerson: an assortment of Reddit posts in one of its most popular subreddits, along with appearances on other blogs.
A collection of Emerson's work online, Emerson Central, lists the line's source as an essay for The Dial magazine in 1842. But Emerson Central doesn't specify where their introduction stops and the essay text starts. They also admit that Emerson claims to quote a Native American Shawnee chief named Tecumseh, but "the exact origins of the poem are unclear, and it may not be a direct quote from Tecumseh himself".
I could not find any references to a specific speech or written work from Tecumseh that resembles the quote. I also could not find this quote in either the spring edition or the fall edition of The Dial from 1842.
Emerson was born in 1803 and spent most of his life in Boston. Tecumseh died in 1813 in what is now Ohio. Tecumseh had already become a pop culture figure in the United States by the time Emerson was born.
I don't think that Emerson listened to a speech and transcribed this quote first-hand before he was ten years old out of a pure, ethnographic curiosity. But it could have happened. If I had to pick from all of my candidates, I do like this one. As an origin story, it makes some sense and cites two specific historical people - one of which was actually Native American and one of which is a famous writer. This might be the way the quote got into the meme form it is now.
Except this gets complicated. An authoritative voice about a writer is not citing its sources. And Emerson is also a frequent victim of misattributed quotations: ideas that other people actually say but later end up credited to a famous writer who is not alive enough to call you out on Twitter. Sounds like the same type of mistake Emerson supposedly made about Tecumseh.
So please forgive me if I’m already a little worried.
Status: Plausible, but not likely. Next.
Candidate 3: This is some form of Native American proverb.
A pained "maybe".
The most common attribution I found for the quote, by far, is a "'Cherokee proverb", a tribe native to the southeastern United States. An astounding number of Facebook pages, tweets and blogs repeat this claim. Pinterest pictures especially cite it this way. If I had stopped at my card and the first Native American attribution I found, I would have stopped here. I can't stress enough: this is how the quote was originally presented to me.
I don't know why a Cherokee greeting card would show up in a gift shop at the Grand Canyon when there are other closer Native American communities...
Oh no.
Some of these "it's a Cherokee proverb" social media pages are dedicated to Native American culture or ecotourism. Some are just quote farms. Many are motivational speakers who pack their speeches with pop wisdom like this.
That Cherokee proverb attribution is common but not consistent enough to pin it down:
The quote could come from one "White Elk" of the Otoe tribe in the plains. Even a presentation from the Indian Health Service cites the quote this way. But that White Elk guy may not have even been Native American.
Others claim the quote is from a different Native American tribe. Navajo from the southwest? Shoshone from the west? Maybe it’s Lakota from the Midwest. I guess. None of these seem likely, at least to me. Again, these groups did not have much in the way of cultural exchange before European settlers started taking over the continent. And the quoted tribes crisscross the country in territory.
I could imagine that this quote got shared between a lot of tribes and represents a type of pan-indigenous wisdom. But I don't see a reason to think that's what happened with something this specific. A quote in this form is an item, not a trope that might have variations and reinterpretations or even an archaeological technique that follows a common logic behind its creation.
The quote doesn't have a reason to show up all over the place like this. Why would this of all things get copied with such precision?
Or lack of precision. More than a few instances just say it's a "Native American proverb" and don't go into any more detail, which takes me right back to where I started. This attribution dates at least back to speeches in the 1990s.
I can’t find anything definitive that makes me confident about a Native American attribution. This is the most common attribution. I think it’s the most wrong. A lot of sources that are wrong is worse than just a few that are wrong.
Status: Sorry. Next.
Candidate 4: This is a Kabir or ancient Sanskrit quote.
Kabir is a 15th century (or possibly 13th century) mystic from India. Some sense of New Age spiritualism may have revived interest in Kabir's writing on social media, because I don't think most of the people reposting this quote are south Asian studies scholars. Kabir is also a mythical figure, so this is kind of like attributing a specific quote to Homer's Iliad.
We're not off to a confident start again.
A common source that could have led to a resurgence in the popularity of this quote in recent years is Robin Sharma's 1999 self-help book "Who Will Cry When You Die?: Life Lessons From The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari". He's a Canadian-Indian public speaker and former lawyer, apparently. He's written quite a bit about selling his Ferrari. Google tends to push this to the top of its search results because it's a book, an item that users can buy and for which businesspeople can pay for advertising space.
More than one blog cites the quote the same way Sharma does. One writer Deb Reese mentions on her blog that she found a 2015 novel "Mosquitoland" by the writer David Arnold, who cites the quote as an old Cherokee proverb. Reese later finds that Robin Sharma book and updates her blog accordingly.
A singer, Jody Healy, at first claims that the words are a "Navajo Chant"', but a video of her song posted on YouTube by Barbara McAfee in 2010 later changes the attribution back to Kabir. As of 2017, McAfee still attributed it to Kabir and says she has heard a Sanskrit version of this line put to music.
This public speaking blog from 2011 (possibly the same one that posted that "Navajo Chant" video) and a few other social media posts refer back to Kabir. Wikiquote currently lists a source: the 2012 book "The Argumentative Hindu", which cites a book by Kabir from 1917, but I could not find something resembling this quote in that 1917 book.
A 1985 book, which looks like it is some form of academic journal published by a university in Bangladesh, claims to include the line with an attribution, but I couldn't actually find a readable version of the book online.
This 1987 book says it’s a "traditional Indian saying".
This 1991 book of Kabir couplets includes the line. I had also seen a reference to a poet named Rabindranath Tagore, who is an accomplished poet in his own right as well as a translator of Kabir poetry.
Bernie Sanders knew this was a Hindu saying back in 1994.
There are a few claims that the quote has a Buddhist origin. I could not find any verifiable sources for that, either.
I also found a claim from 1910 and another from 1967 that the quote is Persian, as well as a book from 1955 that cites the quote as a "Mohammadean [sic] motto" from another book that I was not able to find.
So there are a lot of odd outliers here, too. I believe one major point of confusion is some ambiguity between the word Indian, referring to people from the country India, and Indian, referring to indigenous people living in North America. Like I said, most Native American groups didn't have a way of contacting each other, and contact between Native Americans and Indian people would have been even more tenuous.
I did a little more digging in instances of the quote in books, and I found a Hindu epic poem called the Ramayana. The quote is credited to Tulsi, a 16th century Indian poet and spiritual figure who wrote a different interpretation of the same poem over 2000 years later. Maybe they’re just people with the same name.
This 1883 English translation of the Ramayana has the oldest close match I could find at time of publication.
Not Emerson and still more myth than specific origin, but it’ll do. This timeframe is close enough that it might be attributed to Emerson by mistake. But definitely not Tecumseh.
The quote also shows up unattributed in an 1890 Boston essay called "The Esoteric".
The 1919 book “The Complete Works of the Swami Vivekananda, Part 5” (second edition) also refers to the same subject.
On page 365:
Finally, something solid - and also the oldest instances I could find. Each is unfortunately after Emerson already died, so I'm not thinking Emerson even wrote the quote down at some point, unless someone can find evidence otherwise.
These sources are more concrete. I was hesitant because they're also outliers by volume, to say the least. I admit I could not find the exact source that caused a switch from "this is a Hindu concept" to "this is a Native American concept". But there has been serious confusion about which is which for a long time, and a mistake like that showing up here feels very amatuer hour for History.
Conclusion
I have found at least seventy unique instances of this quote online and can now take a look at the trends themselves as a whole.
The quote either comes from supposedly the Bible, OR supposedly Ralph Waldo Emerson remembering a quote from a celebrity he probably didn’t meet, OR some Native American somewhere, OR from Hindu mythology.
Considering that this quote is usually attributed to one of a dozen different sources, many of which are general to the point of anonymity, I don’t think there is a legitimate origin from a Native American tribe. Or if there is, I couldn’t find a legitimate source taking credit for it before 1883. If you can find an earlier instance of this line, I would be happy to know it. Feel free to email me.
As far as I can tell, the true earliest instance is from that 1883 copy of the Ramayana and any social media post, blog, book, newspaper article or other work that says it's from somewhere else is wrong. At time of publication, I could not find any other fact-checking work that debunks this specific quote.
Just to go even further full-circle, I found an instance in a 2018 book about an indigenous society in India, and the book attributes the quote as an American Indian Cherokee proverb!
And there is reason to think Emerson would have been interested in Hindu poetry and writing, although he also uses the interchangeable "Indian" term. That is probably how he got mixed into this in the first place.
This quote is taken out of its original context – even its original culture – misinterpreted, dressed up into “Native American wisdom” as a nice public speech soundbite, refurbished into self-help quote farms, and picked up by social media as an original truth.
It’s apocrypha. The quote has turned into a truth object with no origin except the ether. It’s close enough. Why double-check?
I could not identify the smoking gun - the work that first did this culture translation error. At this point, I don’t think I need to. I would guess it's something from Emerson, if he had actually used the quote at all.
That's the positivist ending, one question, a search and one solid answer.
The rest of this is a critical ending. Because my exploration is a blend of multiple types of misinformation: digital, rhetorical, and anthropological. It has a strange tension - I could easily have come to the wrong conclusion, but the right answer could have been the first insight that came to mind. Look in the dictionary for a word with multiple meanings, and you’ll find them all.
The digital side:
When I saw there were multiple instances on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Pinterest, I searched for the quote on each of them for more. I describe the process this way because I wasn’t going out looking for a niche corner of the Internet - although I found them, too. An anonymous quote that gets shared this much across the biggest platforms on the Internet will lose some information in the best of circumstances.
Each social media that appears has their own affordances - design features that make quote-sharing easy. Twitter supports short, confident statements (like quotes). Pinterest and Instagram do the same thing in the form of pictures and graphics. It's not practical to fit a lot of text onto a picture. Facebook encourages groups based on friends and family who share milestones (like deaths) with each other. And I didn’t even mention instances on LinkedIn. Fake quotes: for business!
Death is a great opportunity for spam - the dead don’t talk.
Yes, social media is notorious for its ability to spread misinformation, like a misattributed quote. It’s easy to share and repeat nonsense with no accountability. It’s just as easy to think your audience is more in a joke than they really are. Your context collapses because you can’t control who sees what you post and who shares what you post.
One similar common trend I see on social media is anonymous “science says” pop psychology with no verifiable sources. The clickbait stays the same, no matter what format it is in: AI nonsense or spam or just a lack of consideration for a lay audience. Google is free, but that does not mean Google is right or even knows what you’re looking for.
People used to have fates and destinies. Now we have algorithms and AI and "for you" pages - and we invoke them with varying degrees of seriousness. Don’t question the computer. The computer is where the information comes from.
Sloppy quotation or paraphrasing is a common problem on the current Internet landscape that is funny until it hurts already marginalized creators. For context, I was writing most of this around the time “Plaigarism and You(Tube)” came out, so it was already top of mind.
Dramatic stories can leave out important context. A video of a guy sleeping next to a wild cheetah doesn’t tell you he’s volunteering in a wildlife sanctuary. A social media post with a “Native American proverb” lets you fill in the blanks of who and when.
When we talk about new technologies like hallucinations and black box problems for AI, there are boring analog human versions of those problems. We talk about the Internet as the sum of all human knowledge, but what happens when the information is garbage or unusable? The Internet doesn’t know or care that it’s full of garbage.
Google is free, and ChatGPT is free (mostly), and Bing CoPilot is free, and they can be wrong.
For the record, this is the only thing I used AI for in this article. You can see from the second screenshot that Copilot cites more than one of my sources for the fake instances. So that’s reassuring. I tried again and got essentially the same wrong answer. Copilot was repeating itself.
Generative AI writing use cases in commercials (at time of writing) do not portray “AI gives you a starting point or a first draft that you fact-check, revise, or re-interpret later”, but instead “AI does the work for you”.
Quote-checking should be a perfect use case for this type of AI because I was trying to clarify a large volume of contradictory data, and there is an objective correct answer to the question. But the AI is still biased by problems like “most common answer = correct answer”, even when I tell it to look for a different pattern. The problem is both that most of the available answers are wrong and that AI should be able to see through the wrong answers instead of repeating them uncritically. It doesn’t. Garbage in and garbage out. If this isn’t what generative AI is supposed to be used for, it shouldn't be allowed to answer these types of questions in the first place. I don’t think it should be used in academic contexts, which is another common use case because students can and have abused it. I would not use it for substantive work until we make a rigorous method of making sure AI outputs are not hallucinations.
Even if we assume the best, that AI results are still learning as they go, then why are they given priority over - literally above - the actual search results I actually want to see? If humans don’t have all the answers, why do we think AI will? What does that say about us?
The rhetorical side:
And yet the problem of fake quotes did not start with AI or even with contemporary social media. We saw how many personal blogs and websites outside of the largest social media showed up with instances as we went. This isn’t a phenomenon that can be boiled back down to a pithy idea like don’t trust everything you read on the Internet. There were non-Internet sources here, too. Books and newspapers repeated the same unverifiable claim. It’s also easier to fact-check online content than print sources. You have to pull physical books from shelves or issue reprints or new editions instead of individual lines of code. That apparently didn’t happen here, though.
Getting a quote wrong is not a new problem and existed before the Internet. Philosophers like Hideo Kojima (and the other writers for Metal Gear Solid 2) pointed this out decades ago. Fake quotes are just one part of a wider pattern of cultural misinformation, popular on the Internet because the Internet is our current technology and makes large-scale communication easier.
There’s a lot of self-help garbage here, too.
Misinformation and scams are the names of the game nowadays. This example is fairly obscure as a meme and low stakes as cultural touchpoints go, which is why it ended up as straightforward to a source as it was. The historians, journalists and fact-finders of the world work harder than me. They dedicate their careers to this work I'm doing on a whim in a relatively straight line. Memetic nonsense is a social problem, and it has social consequences. Sometimes those social consequences are election results or conspiracy theories that want to crash the economy. It seems like it’s been shared around and doesn’t appear to have a verifiable source from the beginning. Why fact-check it?
Sometimes we think we’re far away from the ancient anonymous storytellers, but I think we overestimate that distance. Historians have reason to treat supposed sources of wisdom and culture, like Aesop’s fables or classical Greek stories like the Iliad, with suspicion. And those are sources that are part of a strong literary tradition. Native American and Indian storytellers have oral traditions that just aren't written down as much or are as accessible to Western audiences. That’s not a technology problem and you can’t technology your way out of it.
Attributing this "When you were born" quote to Native Americans of any kind would be like the equivalent of saying your barber wrote the Iliad: because "barber" kind of sounds like "barbarian" and ancient Greeks, like Homer, called any foreigners "barbarians". We're missing something here.
Demands to “do your research” and “check your sources” are also assumptions that the truth is obvious.
And then there’s the other reason why the quote gets passed around as Native American when it’s not.
The anthropological side:
When I mentioned before that New Age spiritualism was reviving interest in traditional Indian religious literature, I am referring to white Americans' broad interest in non-Christian spiritual practices - an interest that especially grew in the 1960s and 1970s as part of other counter-cultural sensibilities. The same impulse attracts white people to Native American aesthetics. And it may have done both at the same time here. That spiritual impulse has a cluster of influences and borrows from a wide variety of aesthetics in search of "personal enlightenment", itself a particular European fascination.
Religious studies scholar Armin Geertz mentions in his 2004 book chapter “Can we move beyond primitivism” that projecting values onto Native Americans and treating them as a source of wisdom to comfort non-indigenous American or European sensibilities is just another way to not treat Native Americans as complex humans.
Geertz says in the essay,
"Despite eloquent defenders, the fact remains that [the New Age treatment of indigenous shaman aesthetics] does not bring us any closer to the real people we are purportedly studying. Nor does it help us pursue the study of particular religions or even of religion in general. It simply reaffirms the age-old European and American need to romanticize the exotic in order to address our own spiritual, ideological, and religious needs. Thus, there is very little room for living indigenes who do not conform to our stereotypes." (pg. 59)
This is a comparative religion perspective that I find useful. Indigenous scholars and other cultural scholars have already had plenty to say about ways to “decolonize” the way we talk about and teach about non-Euro-American cultures. Edward Said’s classic book “Orientalism” breaks down the relationships Europeans and Americans have with some Eastern cultures, and I really recommend it if you want an in-depth discussion of this exact concept.
But even ideas that Said takes for granted, like “East” and “West”, are more complicated in the twenty-first century than he could have predicted. There are new, exciting, digital ways to manifest your destiny.
This isn't learning from a different culture with humility. It’s cheap pop. It’s a desire to buy your way into an identity that is not yours because you want ego comfort. When you feel like your social and economic life is unfulfilling, you can just take someone else's and tack it to your bulletin board. This sort of angst is itself a luxury for when your home isn't flooded.
The problem is not limited to my single greeting card. If you want spiritual enlightenment by borrowing an aesthetic from a culture that is not yours, you can find it with a price tag for a few dollars and your soul. I am not immune to this. That comment about fate and destiny replaced by AI wasn’t a joke.
The colonial history of America is marked with repeated and varied harm against Native Americans. Attributing a unique indigenous sense of wisdom to colonial imagination or misinterpretation, a trope called “the noble savage”, is just one of those ways to make indigenous ways of thinking seem exceptional and not really worth serious consideration except as a novelty. Or as a political tool. Or as a narrative convenience. Not as a matter of justice for actual people.
Fake attribution of supposed Native American wisdom to gain social media clout or money from a greeting card seems especially dishonest when it doesn’t address (and support fixing) contemporary Native concerns - healthcare and access to healthcare, clean water, language extinction, land, even basic safety and justice. Again, none of these are new problems for these communities.
I said at the beginning that I was specifically referring to Native Americans in the present-day United States, but colonial damage does not offer that courtesy. I am making an arbitrary distinction.
We should call out the impulse that wants it both ways, treating anonymous and seemingly profound ideas like they come from a Native American source, but then not bothering to cite specifics. It shows a colonialist bias about what kinds of people deserve individual recognition and what gets to be folklore. (The “Rainbow Crow” myth comes to mind as just one example.) Fake quotes are only the beginning.
A centuries-old quote appears in greeting cards and online condolences cited from an entirely different culture because interconnected social motivations tangle together. That tangle hurts everyone involved. We know that now. We must call it out when we see it. We must not buy it.
That feels like the least we can do as good citizens of the Internet. I don’t think people should sell cards or other products that perpetuate the same impulse. (For the sake of transparency, I got my card as a gift.) But this is so complicated that I don’t think anyone was repeating this fake quote on purpose. We already know the Internet is not immune. I made this whole essay to show I am not immune, either. I have reason to think this specific example was a pattern of honest, innocent mistakes.
So let’s do what we can to stop now.
We also have to consider how erasure of Indian people is the opposite side of this coin. Native Americans are called “Indians” in vernacular (which is its own entire rabbit hole of colonial incompetence). But that is not how they refer to themselves now.
The British orientalist imagination focused quite heavily on India as a colony of Britain. Again, this is another multi-book context adventure with many pop culture artifacts.
Because we know that sharing a quote without bothering to check whether it’s Indian or Native American is possible, we must denounce it as inexcusable.
Cultural practices and ideas we think of as folk or traditional wisdom do not just come out of the ether. They turn into memes, like fake quotes. Some ideas get to be from specific people or canons of knowledge, and some are just anonymized. A cruel saṃsāra, after all.
This is not a cultural primer on any Native American groups or on the history of India. It’s also not meant to suggest that contemporary India doesn’t have its own ingrained racist practices even though it is a former British colony. I only mean that this is not the first time someone has made this kind of mistake, regardless of what specific culture it comes from.
What can we learn?
A digital environment that prioritizes attention over context. A rhetorical environment that is at least comfortable with perpetuating ridiculous nonsense. An anthropological environment that only cares about elements of other cultures as far as those elements provide self-fulfillment and profit. This is the context that surrounds this fake quote.
It would have been so much easier to stop along the way, but that’s how you get misinformation and conspiracy. We fell into some common fact-checking tropes, too - especially multiple dead ends that agree with each other but are vague about their true origins.
The good news is because this is a problem with a lot of sides, there are solutions from all sides, too.
If you come across quotes or social media posts that claim to share true information like this, double-check that they come from reputable sources - or at least cite reputable sources. Don’t share posts that rile you up without thinking through if they make sense. Don’t assume random social media users know what they’re talking about unless they show you where their ideas come from.
Don’t you dare share this quote around after reading this. I’ve seen it enough.
I had to really go looking to find this origin because I wanted to find an answer I thought would appear in an obvious way. The immediate and obvious-seeming answer was wrong. Dozens of Google entries were wrong. Classic American literature was wrong. The AI chatbot was wrong.
And despite that, I am so lucky because my card falls into a lot of classic fake quote tropes: it’s taken out of context, it's opaque about where exactly it's sourced from, it’s presumably a translation from a different language, and it treats a cultural source of wisdom as a monolith instead of acknowledging its place as one perspective among many. Beware of these when you see them elsewhere on social media. Don’t buy them in gift shops.
Please don’t share them around. Some questions we have about humans seem simple and intuitive at first, but if your seemingly simple question leads to a lot of nuance and complexity, maybe the question itself is missing something important.
Here's what I think you should do instead.
(And I need this advice more than anyone): get outside more. The more you interact with the people that surround you, the less you think of them as inscrutable and mystical, and the more you can see them as the weird, passionate, caring, beautiful everyday people they are.
Support the people and programs who truly do the hard work in the weeds to fact-check and fight misinformation, not like me who did this on a whim. For example -
Quote Investigator (personally, the only reason this essay exists is because I couldn’t find a record of it in quote hunts like his):
Fake History Hunter (a fantastic Twitter fact-checker):
Inviting History (another fact-checking Twitter account):
Milo of Miniminuteman (an archaeologist):
This video about Orientalism in music from Farya Faraji is a great supplemental watch: Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music - YouTube
Freakonomics Radio also did a two-part series about academic fraud - another great perspective.
Chelsea Vowel debunking a similar “Native American” proverb: https://apihtawikosisan.com/2012/02/check-the-tag-on-that-indian-story/
Support indigenous projects that record their own history. For example -
Archive of Native American Recorded History:
Navajo Oral History Project:
Hopi Cultural Center:
Five Civilized Tribes Museum:
Support and/or donate (if you can) to your local Native American charities or mutual aid organizations. There are a lot of options.
If you're in Arizona, Native Health Phoenix, Native American Connections, the Navajo Relief Fund, and Kinłani/Flagstaff Mutual Aid might be good places to start.
Read Native American writers. Here are a few of my recommendations.
Native American Poetry and Culture selection from Poetry Foundation:
Joy Harjo's 2015 talk "Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets":
Natalie Diaz's 2020 poetry collection "Postcolonial Love Poem"
The National Endowment for the Arts' 2021 post celebrating Native American Hertiage Month:
Read Indian writers. Here are a few of my recommendations:
Cyborgbay, 1997 by Varun Gupta
Psychedelic Nights in Mawlynnong by Maitreyee B. Chowdhury
I Google How to Stop Crying by Sumana Roy
Deleting the Picture by Arundhathi Subramaniam
Don't let beautiful art from either of these cultures be lost without a name.
Endnote: I am less willing to give the benefit of the doubt for instances that specify a false "Native American" origin than if they had a more ambiguous "Indian" attribution (which could refer to either group).
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