Apostate Englishman: Gray Owl the Writer and the Myths

In the 1930s Gray Owl was considered the foremost conservationist and nature writer in the world. He owed his fame largely to his four internationally bestselling books, which he supported with a series of extremely popular illustrated lectures across North America and Great Britain. His reputation was radically transformed, however, after he died in April 1938, and it was revealed that he was not of mixed Scottish-Apache ancestry, as he had often claimed, but in fact an Englishman named Archie Belaney. Born into a privileged family in the dominant culture of his time, what makes him flee to a far less powerful one?

Albert Braz's Apostate Englishman: Gray Owl the Writer and the Myths is the first comprehensive study of Gray Owl's cultural and political image in light of his own writings. While the denunciations of Gray Owl after his death are often interpreted as a rejection of his appropriation of another culture, Braz argues that what troubled many people was not only that Gray Owl deceived them about his identity, but also that he had forsaken European culture for the North American Indigenous way of life. That is, he committed cultural apostasy.