Despite the passage of time, our vision of Native Americans remains
locked up within powerful stereotypes. That's why some images of
Indians can be so unexpected and disorienting: What is Geronimo
doing sitting in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded
buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and
challenge our outdated visions, even as the latter continue to
dominate relations between Native and non-Native Americans.
Philip Deloria explores this cultural discordance to show how
stereotypes and Indian experiences have competed for ascendancy in
the wake of the military conquest of Native America and the
nation's subsequent embrace of Native "authenticity." Rewriting the
story of the national encounter with modernity, Deloria provides
revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things-singing
opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood--in ways that suggest new
directions for American Indian history.
Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--a
time when, according to most standard American narratives, Indian
people almost dropped out of history itself--Deloria argues that a
great many Indians engaged the very same forces of modernization
that were leading non-Indians to reevaluate their own
understandings of themselves and their society. He examines
longstanding stereotypes of Indians as invariably violent,
suggesting that even as such views continued in American popular
culture, they were also transformed by the violence at Wounded
Knee. He tells how Indians came to represent themselves in Wild
West shows and Hollywood films and also examines sports, music, and
even Indian people's use of the automobile--an ironic counterpoint
to today's highways teeming with Dakota pick-ups and Cherokee sport
utility vehicles.
Throughout, Deloria shows us anomalies that resist pigeonholing
and force us to rethink familiar expectations. Whether considering
the Hollywood films of James Young Deer or the Hall of Fame
baseball career of pitcher Charles Albert Bender, he persuasively
demonstrates that a significant number of Indian people engaged in
modernity--and helped shape its anxieties and its textures--at the
very moment they were being defined as "primitive."
These "secret histories," Deloria suggests, compel us to
reconsider our own current expectations about what Indian people
should be, how they should act, and even what they should look
like. More important, he shows how such seemingly harmless (even if
unconscious) expectations contribute to the racism and injustice
that still haunt the experience of many Native American people
today.
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