His Art Was Real. His Native American Heritage Wasn’t.

Nobody could tell a story like Roxy Gordon. He would stay up all night on the porch of his house in East Dallas—this was in the eighties and nineties—surrounded by artists and musicians, spinning tales, singing songs, drinking vodka. Roxy, who wore his dark glasses even at night, had the charisma of a rock star, with long black hair spilling out of his cowboy hat, a coyote-tooth necklace, and a tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm. In his deep West Texas drawl, he would talk about growing up in a small town near San Angelo, going off to Montana to live on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation, or the time he met Willie Nelson. The books he’d written, the albums he’d made, the magazines he’d started. Roxy knew his Western history and told about the Indians in Texas, their struggles with Ang