Star Trek: 10 Things You Never Knew About Chakotay
8. Jamake Highwater
In 1993, Jamake Highwater aka Jack Marks was hired as a consultant on Star Trek: Voyager. He was primarily engaged with creating an authentic character biography of Chakotay, so as to make him as strong a representation of Native American culture as possible. There was a very large issue with this hiring.
As early as 1984, Marks had been exposed in separate publications as a fraud. Native American activists had long suspected that his claims of ancestry were false and that he had no Cherokee blood in him as he claimed. Journalist Jack Anderson followed up on this, interviewing him and exposing him. After more than 30 novels had been published under the name Highwater, Marks said that he felt he wouldn't have been able to get into the writing world under his own name.
Despite this negative press, he was brought on board by Paramount. Much of the depictions of Chakotay were only broadly defined, without a true sense of accuracy. Marks passed away in 2001, with his obituaries repeating the claims of false ancestry. These were debunked, again, in an open letter written by Assinobine activist Hank Adams, who not only clearly stated that 'There never was a Jamake Highwater', but also that he had in fact stolen millions of dollars in grant money from actual Native Americans.