This will be a different kind of chirp, today. Most probably will not recognize who this is above. His name is Thomas King. He is an author who has written a number of indigenous themed books. He has written a series of Thumps DreadfulWater books that I discovered a couple years back and fell in love with. Thumps is indigenous, living by a reservation with an on and off indigenous girlfriend who lives on the ‘rez’.

The books appealed to me because I worked with indigenous people for close to 20 years. I admit I enjoyed the books. I found them humorous, and I ate each book up. King claimed to be Cherokee. He is now 82 years old.

It came out in the news earlier this week, that King found out he was not Cherokee after all. He claimed to have just found this out. I was kind of surprised and a bit disappointed about this. I then decided to go to Bluesky and to Threads, just to see if others felt the same way I did. Boy did I get a learning experience.

There were a whole boatload of comments by people of indigenous descent. Apparently, stories have been going on for years that Thomas King was a pretendian. That his claim to fame was his claim that he was indigenous. Now that it has come out that he was not Cherokee, there were tons of posts, saying how could he not know that he was not Cherokee. He is 82 years old after all.

Now, in Indian land, King is being discounted as a pretendian, following the footsteps of other well known pretendians, such as Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Will I read any more of his books? Possibly. But it won’t be the same, will it?

That’s all I have for today.