Front cover image for Fugitive poses : Native American Indian scenes of absence and presence

Fugitive poses : Native American Indian scenes of absence and presence

Native peoples today are best known to others, and often to themselves, through their fugitive poses: textual and graphic depictions preserved by scholarship, consumed by the dominant culture, and steeped in a modernist aesthetic of romantic victimry, tragedy, and nostalgia. Because such representations do not easily convey the immediacy and distinctiveness of Native cultures, they effectively celebrate the absence rather than the presence of the Native. The fugitive poses captured in photographs, portraits, translations, official documents, New Age stories, blood-quantum counts, captivity narratives, and museum objects simulate Native peoples rather than reveal them
Print Book, English, 1998
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Neb., 1998