I hope you will forgive me for leaving your name out of my salutation. I was a fellow presenter at the Iroquois Research Conference this past weekend in western New York. I listened to most of your presentation about the historical novel you have written about the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and thought you should know why I did not listen to all of it.

You told the audience that you have consulted many of the standard published accounts of this story by authors that the conference attendees would know well: Morgan, Parker, Fenton, and Richter; as well as various Haudenosaunee like the late Leon Shenandoah. You also explained your method and the challenges of writing historical fiction, such as creating additional characters, scenes, and dialogue where none exist in the sources.

Your mispronunciation of almost every name you mentioned, including Haudenosaunee, stood out to me as a red flag that you had not spent much time talking to actual Haudenosaunee people, because your pronunciation was so radically different from the accepted mispronunciations by scholars we know and work with all the time. Maybe you did talk to some of our people and mentioned it later. I don’t know because I had to leave the auditorium to get some air.

Had I stuck around for the Q & A, I probably would have asked you one simple question: what gives you the right to take the traditional teachings of another culture and attach your personal copyright to it?