I'm putting this here for now, though I know from his actions in particular that he qualifies outright as a fraud, to see if anyone else has experience with this travelling duo of Professional Indians.
Curtins Hopkins and his wife have been travelling around from community to community providing various services/ceremonies for a living and my community is one of them.
He came here not too long ago and gave out 16 names in ONE AFTERNOON, at the health centre and was paid a hefty honourarium. There's not an Indian alive who can give a name in one afternoon properly, to people he doesn't know, let alone 16!!!
He was brought here to build what was at first called a "Waubunung or Eastern Lodge" then it became a "Zhowanung Lodge" probably because the door faced south instead of east.
The lodge was supposed to be made in the traditional way, but ended up being covered in plastic tarps that of course blew off in the first strong wind. So, now all that stands is the ribs.
He gets "honorariums" in the thousands for his "services" and has been brought here by some "born again" Indians who have bought into his nonsense because they just don't know any better.
I sat in on one of Curtis's sessions where he told a room full of people he didn't know, that included some people with substance abuse problems, that they could go into the bush and find a mushroom that would be "just like morphine" and he described where to find it, how to cut it up, how to take it. My wife, a full blood Ojibway originally from Manitoba, and I were shocked. He spent two whole days just talking out of his ass about how dinosaurs came to be, how people used to pluck feathers off of eagles as they flew by, and more assorted nonsense.
He has apparently been contracted to facilitate "Justice Circles" despite the fact he has no background in law, doesn't know the community members beyond the dupes he spends time with, and the big kicker is, he cannot speak any Anishinabe language, though he claims to be Lenni-Lenape and a "carrier of the sacred scrolls" also known as the Walam Olum. He conducts pipe ceremonies, naming ceremonies, in English, something any Native person with the slightest understanding of our ceremonies, knows you cannot do, despite what certain new age wannabes tell you about "universal language"
Of course, those Lenape scrolls were debunked as being the work of a french missionary and as recently as the late 90's were once and for all debunked by linguists and scholars:
Wikipedia:
"By the 1980s, however, ethnologists had collected enough independent information "to discount the Walam olum completely as a tradition".[18] Herbert C. Kraft, an expert on the Lenape,[19][20] had long suspected the document to be a fraud. He stated that it did not square with the archaeological record of migrations by the prehistoric ancestors of the Lenape. In addition, he cited a 1985 survey conducted among Lenape elders by ethnologists David M. Oestreicher and James Rementer that revealed traditional Lenape had never heard of the narrative. The older Lenape people said that they "found its text puzzling and often incomprehensible." Oestreicher examined the Lenape language text with fluent native speaker, Lucy Parks Blalock, and they found problems such as frequent use of English idioms.[2]
In 1991 Steven Williams summarized the history of the case and the evidence against the document, lumping it with many other famous archaeological frauds. The existence of genuine historic pictogram documents elsewhere does not overcome the textual and ethnological problems of the Walam Olum.[21]"
I would be interested in knowing if anyone else has experience with this fraud who, while maybe part Indian, is using culture as a means to make a LOT of money for himself, and fake, made up culture at that.
