Red Thunder Cloud (May 30, 1919January 8, 1996), born Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, also known as Carlos Westez, was an American 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. and had never had any contact with the Catawba people until Speck introduced them. and collaborated with several other anthropologists to write about Native American cultures and languages with which he had also had no contact.
Red Thunder Cloud identity
West reinvented his identity at this point and lived the rest of his life as Red Thunder Cloud of the Catawba tribe. Frank Speck believed West to be a genuine Catawba Indian and employed him on small projects, collecting ethnographic data and folklore among Long Island Indians. He also collected data on the Montauk, Shinnecock, and Mashpee tribes for George Gustav Heye, founder of what became the National Museum of the American Indian.
In December 1943, West lived at the University of Pennsylvania for two weeks, providing what he convinced them was information on the Catawba tribe, recording music, and aiding in ethnobotanical research, despite not being Catawba himself, and having never visited a Catawba community.
In 1964 and 1965 he worked with G. Hubert Matthews, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also able to convince Matthews that he could help document the Catawba language. Together they published five texts in 1967. Matthews included in these books West's fabricated family genealogy, listing West's nonexistent Catawba ancestors in his maternal line. West told Matthews his mother's name was “Singing Dove” and that her father was “Strong Eagle,” saying the latter was a graduate of Yale Law School and had died in 1941. However, West's mother was actually Roberta M. Hawkins West, and her father, William Ashbie Hawkins (1862-1941) was not only one of the first Black lawyers in Baltimore, but a prominent and well-known community leader, the son of the Rev. Robert Hawkins and Susan (Cobb) Hawkins, all very well-known, and well-documented African-American people. At the time of his death, Leonor Pena, a close friend from Central Falls, Rhode Island, gave his name as Carlos Westez. She listed his occupation as "shaman". His sister, as administrator to his will in probate court, gave his name as Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West.
- Songs and Traditions of the Catawba (1992)
See also
- Buffalo Child Long Lance
- Grey Owl
- Iron Eyes Cody
- Pretendian