Playing IndianYale University Press, 1998 M01 1 - 249 pages The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts are just a few examples of the American tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles. This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Indians to shape national identity in different eras--and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence--for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure. |
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aboriginal actual Indian American Culture American identity American Indian antimodern authentic Boston Tea Party boundaries Boy Scouts British Camp Fire Girls carnival celebrations claim colonial colonists Confederacy contradictory Counterculture Counterculture Indians D. H. Lawrence dance defined disguise dress Ernest Thompson Seton Ethnographic Objects European example exterior Indian folder Frank Hamilton Cushing Fraternal Indians Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Hobby Indians hobbyists Identities of Modernity Identities of Revolution images imagined Improved Order Indian costume Indian play Indians and Ethnographic Indians and Identities Indians and Republican Iroquois Kilroe land Lewis Henry Morgan Literary Indians meanings metaphor misrule Mohawks Morgan Papers national identity native Natural Indians non-Indians Notes to Pages Parker Patriotic Indians Philadelphia playing Indian political powwow Powwow Trails Race racial real Indians rebellion Republican Identities revolutionary ritual savage social symbols Tammany society tion traditions transformed tribes University Press white Americans William Woodcraft Woodcraft Indians York Zuni