Here's a review from a few years back of Jamie Sams. I had to go looking for her, I'd never heard of her in a relatively small world of Native American literature. Only one scholarly review, and this is it:

Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours. A Classic Native American Creation Story as Retold by a Seneca Elder, Twylah Nitsch, and her granddaughter, Jamie Sams. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. ISBN 0-6-250763-X. 147 pages.

       Using the Seneca Medicine Stone, Jamie Sams interprets the stories passed on from her grandmother. The trouble is that the book tries to "explain" often unspoken understandings of a tribal culture in the language of the dominant white culture. Thus we are told on the bottom {116} of page 81 that "The remnants of Turtle Island floated above the blue seas of seeming contentment as the new generations refused to look deeply into the watery past, which had left them with the legacy of separateness." And further on, this: "As the Two-legged children of our Planetary Family began to explore their individual beliefs, the understanding of the concept of the Great Mystery dwindled."
       What do phrases like "the legacy of separateness," with their Madison Avenue packaging, violate, miss, and destroy? What New Age incursions do phrases like "our Planetary Family" betray? One can easily imagine the next level of distortion the reader is apt to make: don't bother to sit at the feet of the elders or put in years of studying a particular tribe; just read this book and discover a Pan-Indian/New Age way to gloss all North American tribes, a shortcut to the usual time-consuming homework for tribal understanding.
       Let me emphasize that the book does not make this gross claim; the way it is written merely invites gross misunderstanding. The "Language of the Stones" section, for example, begins by explaining the basic symbol, the circle, thus:


The circle is the shape of harmony, representing perfection for Time Eternal. It is the symbol of the Creator, the Infinite Spirit, the Medicine Wheel, Sacred Space. In stone reading, the circle means a valuable lesson learned.

       It should be said on behalf of this volume that the retelling of the tales is riveting. However, the interpretations, slickly glib, invite misgivings. In this way the oral tradition is betrayed in print by being overtold.

Roger Weaver, SAIL 2, 5.1

Doesn't bode well for this woman being a connection to Indian spirituality in the way that some would hope.

However, there is a big double-standard that I alluded to before that this highlights. I went looking for a review, and had to look hard, because in the first 150 hits on Google, all had to do with bookstores. I finally went to the website for the Association for the Study of American Indian Literature (SAIL) to find this review. There's nothing the bookseller or publisher is going to say that is going to diminish the credibility they hope to establish by selling the book. The publisher of The Education of Little Tree (U of New Mexico Press) isn't going to put a disclaimer on their cover. I spoke to the president of the university about this once at a writers conference. He said that frankly they weren't going to touch it. It was their best-seller. Period. The double-standard comes into play when you look at the success=sellout formula that is so often leveled at Indian writers. It's what Alexie charged Owens with in the beginning (until Alexie became so big that he clearly was going to shoot himself down with his own argument). Or Madison Avenue="inauthentic" or "appropriated material." This isn't always the case. But it's a shame that the books about Indians that so many bond to emotionally were written by well-meaning white women with the Noble Savage, the museum artifact of the Wild West Shows in mind.

I agree with Katlaughing--a lot of us have friends and family who are Indians and these relationships are complexly based on many things other than the "wannabe" trope that we've tossed around here a bit to carelessly.

My friend Louis Owens was a deep thinker, and he said it so well. I'll put a couple of paragraphs from his Other Destinies in here (this is from the first and second page of text in the first chapter. It only gets better as you read it, but it isn't always easy, because he makes you think!)

To begin to write about something called "the American Indian novel" is to enter a slippery and uncertain terrain. Take one step into this region and we are confronted with difficult questions of authority and ethnicity: What is an Indian? Must one be one-six- teenth Osage, one-eighth Cherokee, one-quarter Blackfoot, or full- blood Sioux to be Indian? Must one be raised in a traditional "Indian" culture or speak a native language or be on a tribal roll? To identify as Indian-or mixedblood-and to write about that identity is to confront such questions. The fact that, as D. H. Lawrence clearly recognized, at the heart of America's history of Indian hating is an unmistakable yeaming to be Indian-romantically and from a distance made hazy through fear and guilt-compounds the complexity .The fact that so many people throughout the world have a strangely concrete sense of what a "real" Indian should be adds still greater stress to the puzzle; woe to him or her who identifies as Indian or mixedblood but does not bear a recognizably "Indian" name or physiognomy or lifestyle, as the cases of the Lumbee or Mashpee or the innumerable mixedbloods in the United States testify. Discussing the controversial 1976 land claim of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council, James Clifford has pointed out that "in court they were not helped by the fact that few of them looked strongly 'Indian.' Some of them could pass for black, others for white." With only some simplification, Karen I. Blu argues:

For Whites, blood is a substance that can be either racially pure or racially polluted. Black blood pollutes White blood absolutely, so that, in the logical extreme, one drop of Black blood makes an otherwise White man black. . . .White ideas about "Indian blood" are less formalized and clear cut. . . .It may take only one drop of Black blood to make a person a Negro, but it takes a lot of Indian blood to make a person a "real" Indian.


Identity for Native Americans is made more complex yet by the fact that the American Indian in the world consciousness is a treasured invention, a gothic artifact evoked like the "powwows" in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" out of the dark reaches of the continent to replace the actual native, who, painfully problematic in real life, is supposed to have long since vanished. Even individuals seemingly well informed about American Indian literature can exhibit this tendency to relegate "real" Indians to an absolute past, as when we see a writer for the New York Times, reviewing James Welch's Fools Crow, stating in the simple past tense that "Indians applied revelations from the world beyond to the workings of this one, for they believed that by tapping into the spiritual they could gain power over everyday occurrences."

SRS