Jamake Highwater, Date of Birth, Date of Death

    

Jamake Highwater

American writer

Date of Birth: 14-Feb-1942

Date of Death: 03-Jun-2001

Profession: writer, children's writer

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius


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About Jamake Highwater

  • Jamake Highwater, born as Jackie Marks, and also known as Jay or J Marks (14 February 1931–June 3, 2001), was an American writer and journalist of eastern European Jewish ancestry, who from the late 1960s claimed to be of Cherokee and Native American ancestry.
  • In that period, he published extensively under the name of Jamake Highwater.
  • One version of his shifting story was that he had been adopted as a child and taken from his Indian home in Montana to grow up in a Greek or Armenian family in Los Angeles, Southern California. Marks later lived in San Francisco, where he formed a dance company for a time, moving to New York City in the late 1960s.
  • After this move, about 1969 Marks assumed a false American Indian identity as Cherokee, using the name "Jamake Highwater" for his writings.
  • He never said that he was enrolled in the tribe, but that he had "recovered" his Native identity.
  • As Highwater, he wrote and published more than 30 fiction and non-fiction books of music, art, poetry and history.
  • His children's novel Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey (1973) received a Newbery Honor.
  • His book The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America (1981) was the basis of a PBS film documentary about Native American culture, and he made other documentaries for PBS. His fabrications were exposed in 1984 by activist Hank Adams (Assiniboine) and reporter Jack Anderson in separate publications.
  • Highwater had already received more than $800,000 in grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 1982 to 1983, based on his claims to be Native American.
  • Despite this documentation by Adams and Anderson, Highwater remained widely perceived as Native American.
  • He continued to be called on to speak and participate as such in cultural activities, although he received no more federal grants on Native American topics.
  • His claims about his year and place of birth, and the circumstances of his adoption, were reported as part of his obituaries in 2001 in mainstream press such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
  • Hank Adams wrote an Open Letter to the Editor in response, rejecting again Marks' claims.
  • Indian Country Today in 2015 reported additional findings about Marks' elaborate pose.
  • It published a copy of his 1931 birth certificate as Jackie Marks from Los Angeles and a photograph of his father's military gravestone, marked with a Star of David.

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