Red Thunder Cloud, 1919-1996
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Red Thunder Cloud (born May 30, 1919, Newport, Rhode Island – died January 8, 1996, Worcester, Massachusetts), born Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, also known as Carlos Westez, was a singer, dancer, storyteller, and field researcher. For a time he was promoted by anthropologists as "the last fluent speaker of the Catawba language" but he was later revealed to have learned what little he knew of the language from books. The grandson of a prominent African-American attorney and community leader, Red Thunder Cloud was an African American who reinvented himself as a Native American.
Anthropologist Frank Speck said he believed Red Thunder Cloud to be a genuine Catawba Indian and proceeded to provide him with training in field methods of recording notes for ethnological studies. Speck insisted Thunder Cloud spoke the Catawba language, though Catawba leadership said he only knew "a few words," that he had learned from Speck's books. After "Thunder Cloud" died, and was revealed to be Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, public confirmation came of what the Catawba leaders had already known: "Red Thunder Cloud" was neither Catawba nor Native American, and had never had any contact with the Catawba people until Speck introduced them.
Despite doubts and skepticism about West from the communities he studied, West continued to represent himself as an expert on multiple Native cultures and languages. He continued to work for Speck, collecting ethnographic data and folklore from various Native American cultures, and collaborated with several other anthropologists to write about Native American cultures and languages with which he had also had no contact.
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