General > Frauds

Lynn Carol Eggers AKA Lynn Andrews

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educatedindian:
I know, that she's a fraud is old news to just about everyone here, and even to just about everyone except the most delusional twink. But I stumbled on something interesting. This is from a review on Amazon (Somehow it's survived.) :

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She claims to have been taught by a Hopi Medicine Woman. Her Indian ex-boyfriend later revealed that she perpetrated a multi-million dollar hoax. A Beverly Hills actress who claims that in the mid-'70s she became an apprentice to Agnes Whistling Elk, a Native American medicine and a Cree shaman from Manitoba. Her Workshop "Into the CrystalDreamtime" has gone on nationwide tours. Medicine Woman, the initial account of her experiences, won Andrews an enormous response from readers across the country. Suspiciously, all subsequent books were marketed as nonfiction. The reason for this was that in November 1988 an affidavit was filed with a lawsuit brought by David Carson, Choctow, a writer and former live-in companion of Andrews, contending that "as a result of our personal relationship, she and I composed a series of literary works." Carson has since made claims suggesting that many of Andrews 's experiences were the results of his own creative imagination. He claimed he wove them into a fictional narrative describing her exotic adventures with various shamans based on his own limited knowledge of Choctow culture.
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I'll see what else I can find about this. 

debbieredbear:
If you could lay hands on old Psychology Today mags, about 15 years ago, they had the full story. It was an interview with Carson. Wish I had kept it.

educatedindian:
Found this. Trish and Pat, could you post this as a warning on our sites when you get the chance?

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=905
Selling Native American Sould by Jon Magnuson, Lutheran campus pastor at the University of Washington in Seattle and cochair of the Native American Task Force of the Church Council of Greater Seattle.
    An even more devastating illustration of the selling of Native American soul is embodied in the controversy surrounding Lynn Andrews. Five highly acclaimed books focusing on her relations of Native spiritual teachings have built a career for Andrews, a Beverly Hills actress who has taken her Workshop "Into the Crystal Dreamtime" on nationwide tours. Medicine Woman (Harper & Row, 1980) , the initial account of her experiences, won Andrews an enormous response from readers across the country. That and subsequent books were marketed as nonfiction. Her writings describe how in the mid-’70s she became an apprentice to Agnes Whistling Elk, a Native American medicine woman who Andrews claimed was a Cree shaman from Manitoba. Jaguar Woman (1985) , Star Woman (1986) and Crystal Woman (1987) , her sequels, all became New York Times best sellers.
    In 1987 1 asked a Taos Pueblo Native who is also a clinical psychologist and college professor what he knew of Andrews’s reputation among tile Cree people of Manitoba. (He has worked as a consultant among the Cree.) His comments, though guarded, were unsettling. On his journeys into Manitoba and his frequent work among the Cree he had sought to verify her claims. No one had even heard of her.
    In November 1988 an affidavit was filed with a lawsuit brought by David Carson, a writer and former live-in companion of Andrews, contending that "as a result of our personal relationship, she and I composed a series of literary works that includes Medicine Woman, Flight of the Seventh Moon, Jaguar Woman and Star Woman." Jonathon Adolph, a senior editor of New Age Journal, and journalist Richard Smoley began an immediate investigation. In their New Age Journal report, "Beverly Hills Shaman" (March-April 1989) , they acknowledge that in February Carson and his attorney unexpectedly indicated their intention to drop the suit, and they document that prior to that action Carson had made claims suggesting that many of Andrews ‘s experiences were the results of his own creative imagination. David Hall, a longtime acquaintance of Carson who said he watched the two work together, claims that Andrews supplied rough sketches from her experiences in Beverly Hills, and Carson wove them into a fictional narrative describing her exotic adventures with various shamans based on his own knowledge of Native American culture. Carson has claimed he is of Choctaw descent. Both Adolph and Smoley document court papers that show that even before Carson filed his suit he had been offered $15,000 by Andrews’s New York agent.
    Adolph and Smoley also collected bitter criticisms of Andrews from Native American leaders contending that she had made errors regarding geography and custom, especially in her descriptions of ancient ceremonies. In an interview with New Age Journal Andrews said that "a lot of Indians are not upset, with my work." But when her publicist was asked to provide names, she produced only two: one who described herself as a Chicano and another woman who said she had a distant Native American relative.
    Andrews’s own religious experience is not the issue as much as her use of Native American references and symbols out of context. For instance, in her books her teacher Agnes Whistling Elk uses Hopi and Lakota terms, even though she is supposedly a Cree. Two of the exotic ceremonies performed by Crees in Medicine Woman are unknown among the Cree people of Manitoba, according to Flora Zaharia, former director of the Native Education Branch of the Manitoba Department of Education. Adolph and Smoley quote Zaharia as saying that "Andrews is making a joke out of our spirituality and Native culture."
    The popularity of Andrews’s writings reflects a great spiritual hunger. To her credit she knows, better than most, that the American dream has moved, in these last decades of the 20th century, into a desperate search for the sacred and mystical. But for Andrews or anyone else to address this need by deliberately misappropriating and misrepresenting whatever fragments of spirituality are left among indigenous peoples is unethical and spiritually misguided. Both Native and non-Native become the poorer for it.

Sarangerel:
When you say that "everybody knows" she is fake the education is not good enough.  Do you know you can buy translations of her books in Ulan-Ude?  There is nothing to indicate to Buryat readers that she does not represent real Native American beliefs.  Harner and Castaneda are on the bookshelf right next to her too.  It is a big trouble for me to have to explain that they are all frauds.  It perpetuates the romanticized image of Native Americans abroad that you are all trying to combat.  
Thankfully now the indigenous shamans are starting to fill up the bookshelves with their own writings and they now that they are there are more popular than that American trash.
When we established the Golomt Center back in 1997 I was the computer geek of the group and I combed the Internet looking for sites about shamanism looking for international contacts for our organization.  Of course the overwhelming majority of what I found was airy-fairy New Age Native American wannabe stuff.  What struck me about Lynn Andrews' site was that it used a lot of traditional Native Siberian symbols on it.  I e-mailed them about it and, of course, no answer.  I was dubious about the authenticity of her teachings even th

Sarangerel:
This is the rest of the last post, I am having connection problems and lost my connection as my post was uploading:

What struck me about Lynn Andrews' site was that it used a lot of traditional Native Siberian symbols on it.  I e-mailed them about it and, of course, no answer.  I was dubious about the authenticity of her teachings even then because I had read one of her books, but I was curious about why she was appropriating our symbols for our website.
So when I was in the United States in 1998 and I read that she was appearing at this one conference not far away from where I was staying I decided to try to meet her.  I dressed in Buryat clothing and went there where she was doing a book signing.  I told her I was a Native Siberian shaman and would like to talk to her.  She said she was very interested and she told me to come back at a certain time.  When I came back at the appointed time I found out she had left almost an hour before!  Draw your own conclusions, but my conclusion was that she did not want to deal with a representative of a genuine indigenous tradition.  If she has a spiritual hunger it was not evident that day.

regards,

Sarangerel

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