10/05/2023
WURTHLESS PAPERBACK
October 3, 2023
TAAF Director's Blog
An Update on Erika Wurth:
We have an update on pretendian fraud Erika Wurth that’s a long time coming but well worth a read. It's just in time for the launch of the paperback version of her book White Horse.
Erika Wurth surprised us earlier this year (in May) by getting a lawyer’s secretary to send an email that threatened to sue us and others. The alleged offense? Defamation and tortious (contract) interference. The damages? Up to $500,000.
Wurth said that we contacted festivals, bookstores, and others who were promoting her works and made “allegations” and “disparaging comments” about her “Native American heritage”. Wurth complained that some of these organizers heard our concerns about her claims of American Indian identity and disinvited her (to their credit). A publisher also decided not to include her work in a proposed anthology for the same reasons. (Kudos to that publisher!)
So, what did Wurth want out of her complaint? In addition to $500,000 in damages, she wanted the courts to require us and others to retract their statements and any documents that questioned her claims of American Indian heritage.
Let’s take a step back and see how we got here. As we’ve described in the sections below, Erika Wurth built a career by falsely claiming to be an urban Indian author of Cherokee, Chickasaw and Apache descent. She’s written several books, including White Horse, a book touted by the New York Times and others. These books explore American Indian trauma and history with readers who think she speaks with an American Indian voice. She captivates her audience with exotic, fictional family stories about a Chickasaw madam, a well-off Cherokee runaway and mysterious Apache connections.
TAAF, the Fake Indians Blog, and others didn’t think these claims added up. These legitimately American Indian people and their allies carefully studied Wurth’s public claims against established public records such as census reports, birth/death/marriage certificates, property transactions, newspaper articles and most importantly, American Indian tribal rolls and records. They spoke with experts to fill gaps in the story. None of those reviewing these records could find a single American Indian ancestor from these tribes or any other. The Fake Indians Blog and TAAF both published genealogies which you can see on their websites.
We at TAAF decided that neither her empty threats nor her delusional demands were worth the electronic paper they were printed on, or worthy of any response whatsoever. It was an email sent from a legal assistant on behalf of a lawyer whose signature was pasted in. The assistant sent the letter over Memorial Day Weekend and demanded that we respond within a week, lol. They wanted us to sign an agreement with Wurth never to question her claims again or tell others what we found. Our response? We laughed heartily, shared a collective eyeroll, wondered how much money she wasted complaining that we were costing her money, and went about our day.
Others named in the complaint responded to the claims through a lawyer with expertise on both defamation and American Indian law. That lawyer asked for evidence that shows that Wurth is an American Indian, as she claims, and they shockingly got no reply…
Where does that leave us, then? That’s the interesting part. A month or so later, Wurth tweeted that she decided not to sue. Why? Because, she said, she got “right-minded people” to do “the work” for her. She added that she’d “prefer the solution to bad speech, be good speech.” What’s good speech, though? For us, it’s speech backed by evidence (which we posted). Not lies and fiction (which Wurth posted). If Wurth took the same approach, she could have saved herself some grief. Urban Indians are indeed a legitimate part of the American Indian community. But for her to be an “urban Indian”, she’d actually have to have a drop of American Indian ancestry and she has been definitively proven to have zero.
Wurth continued to tweet, claiming that the genealogies that upset her were faked. The more she said, the more she confirmed the genealogies she tried to disprove. She also confirmed how little she knows about the ancestry she uses to tout her books. Take a look at this tweet, for example. The genealogy we published explains who each of these people are. We found the mistakes she made in her genealogy. We published it. There is no denying what we have proven to be true.
She seemed perplexed by the full name Annie Tommie James. Wurth said, “the name Annie Tommie “doesn’t sit right with me”. Yet, we found the name Annie, Tommie or Annie Tommie James on several different documents. We imagined “Tommie” was a nickname. And low and behold, Wurth’s aunt explained it all on Ancestry.com. She has had an account there for at least 10 years and has all the genealogy there, plus her own commentary. Here's what she had to say about Annie’s name: “Tommie James, oh, what a family history! (Annie) Tommie James was named after her father Thomas James, because he wanted a boy”!
She shared another tweet claiming that Annie James was not the white woman named in the genealogy that led her to threaten litigation, but a Black woman born nearly 15 years earlier.
We looked into that, and we couldn’t find a Black woman named Annie James born in 1847 in Texas. We did, however, find a Black woman named Annie James who was born in 1852. The problem is that “James” was her married name according to the 1870 census. She appears again in the 1900 census as a widowed servant.
Wurth has a problem here because this Annie James can’t possibly be her relative. Why?
Because she has no relatives with the names that Wurth gave as her own relatives. This Annie James didn’t marry a John Riggs (or an Albert Coffin) and had no child named Earl. The white Annie James that she now denies did. Wurth has again validated the genealogy she denied.
Next, we discovered that Wuth’s aunt has an Ancestry.com account. Wurth’s very own aunt has all the genealogy on the family posted for the public to see and it matched our own genealogy work. Not to mention the aunt debunks the American Indian rumors in their family, she even took a DNA test! Not surprisingly, no American Indian DNA.
In her own words, “DNA results show no Native American blood. This story must have started with Tommie James or Smith or Tom James. My mother lived native Chickasaw and her brood all our lives. And now I feel like Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk, what a paradigm shift!”
Oh, but there’s more to this story. Behind the scenes, as mentioned above, Wurth hired a Cherokee genealogist to do the work that she herself hadn’t done. She wanted to find a Cherokee ancestor. Was that genealogist and others among the “right-minded” people she had in mind? We’ll never know, but we do know something went wrong for Wurth.
We were sent a set of leaked emails between Wurth and her paid genealogist. We learned that Wurth hired what she called a “Native PR” firm to dig into the genealogies of TAAF spokesperson Lianna Costantino and others who dared to question her claims with the hope of finding some way of impugning their character, hoping they themselves had no Indian ancestry or mocking their blood quantum (which is a colonial genocide tactic that TAAF never uses). Did she seriously think any of us would be dumb enough to play Indian while accusing her or anyone else of doing that? We responded to Wurth’s claims about Lianna on our website: https://tribalallianceagainstfrauds.org/taaf-blogs/f/who-is-the-taaf-director-and-an-erika-t-wurth-update
This is a common pretendian tactic: Distract the public using any means possible to discredit the messenger in order to deflect from their own fraud. Problem: Lianna and the others she desperately tried to impugn are all citizens of federally recognized tribal nations. Unlike her, they are claimed by thousands of fellow tribal citizens. Lianna’s lineage is notable and unimpeachable. So, let’s focus on the relevant issue: Erika’s is not. Her American Indian ancestry does not exist.
Wurth also provided more information on her alleged Cherokee links. The relatives she named again match the genealogies. They also show that her relative, Oda Edith Martin, wasn’t the Cherokee runaway she hoped for. The Fake Indians Blog explored this in detail and even helped Wurth find the origin of the photo that she claimed was Oda. That photo was so popular that it was a WW1 pin-up and had a name: Kaloma. You, and (we hope) Erika, can read all about it right here: http://ancestorstealing.blogspot.com/2023/01/performing-identity-erika-wurths-tall_22.html
Wurth wrote again when her lawyer heard back from others she targeted in her threats. She was surprised that their lawyer asked for Wurth’s genealogy and didn’t mention what she called the “tortious aspect or the harassment.” Could it be because of something called the First Amendment in the US Constitution? We have a right to free speech in this country and the right to assemble. Protests happen all the time, and events (and authors) get canceled when they lie. The truth is THE defense against false claims of libel or defamation. Erika is lying. We have exposed her lie. Lying has consequences. Erika can choose to correct this situation.
This email also identifies another Annie James, who was Black and born in 1871/72. We looked her up too and found her in the 1900 Census. “James” is her married name, just like the Annie James born in 1852 who Wurth thought was born in 1847.
The other problem is that her relative Earl Westley Riggs was born in 1893, when this Annie James was married to a man named Payton. Earl Riggs is not listed in this Census.
Wurth wrote again and it looks like her lawyer finally got the memo. Again, the problem is that statements can’t be defamatory if they are true. Clearly her lawyer is aware of that and he wanted proof that Wurth was in fact an American Indian and Wurth obviously can’t give it. She said so herself, right here.
We know that the Cherokee genealogist Wurth hired had no luck finding any Cherokee ancestor. The PR firm she hired was not interested in helping her harass legitimate Indians in her attempt to distract from her own fraud either. They dropped her.
We also know that Wurth tried to find other genealogists too, hoping someone would pull an Indian rabbit out of their hat. No luck for Erika. The email above shows that Wurth thought a DNA test would provide the proof her lawyer needed. That stunt didn’t turn out so well for Elizabeth Warren and shows just how little Wurth knows about Native peoples and their identities. She should read Kim TallBear’s book “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science and then take a look at this piece from NBC News and learn something:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/elizabeth-warren-connected-dna-native-american-heritage-here-s-why-ncna921166?fbclid=IwAR2Eyg9tvgAxyAWK0VMBI8YtEankS3Al5qhy7wen4allE1baC5ZEV9uNG7c
We hope that Erika Wurth takes the opportunity to learn about her own family and celebrate them for who they are. We also hope that those who enable her seriously think about why that is and why her exotic fantasies of whorehouses, sexual abuse, and violence were more attractive than the voices of actual Native peoples.
Enough is enough!
See all the screenshots on the website:
https://tribalallianceagainstfrauds.org/taaf-blogs/f/wurthless-paperback
An Update on Erika Wurth:
