Citizen Indians

Citizen Indians
Author: Lucy Maddox
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801473425

By the 1890s, white Americans were avid consumers of American Indian cultures. At heavily scripted Wild West shows, Chautauquas, civic pageants, expositions, and fairs, American Indians were most often cast as victims, noble remnants of a vanishing race, or docile candidates for complete assimilation. However, as Lucy Maddox demonstrates in Citizen Indians, some prominent Indian intellectuals of the era--including Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Eastman, and Arthur C. Parker--were able to adapt and reshape the forms of public performance as one means of entering the national conversation and as a core strategy in the pan-tribal reform efforts that paralleled other Progressive-era reform movements.Maddox examines the work of American Indian intellectuals and reformers in the context of the Society of American Indians, which brought together educated, professional Indians in a period when the "Indian question" loomed large. These thinkers belonged to the first generation of middle-class American Indians more concerned with racial categories and civil rights than with the status of individual tribes. They confronted acute crises: the imposition of land allotments, the abrogation of the treaty process, the removal of Indian children to boarding schools, and the continuing denial of birthright citizenship to Indians that maintained their status as wards of the state. By adapting forms of public discourse and performance already familiar to white audiences, Maddox argues, American Indian reformers could more effectively pursue self-representation and political autonomy.

Wondrous Difference

Wondrous Difference
Author: Alison Griffiths
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2002
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780231116961

Focusing on the precursors and contexts of ethnographic film, this text depicts the dynamic visual culture of the period as it collided with the emerging discipline of anthropology and the new technology of motion pictures.

Dressing In Feathers

Dressing In Feathers
Author: S. Elizabeth Bird
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429980531

One hundred members of NatChat, an electronic mail discussion group concerned with Native American issues, responded to the recent Disney release Pocahontas by calling on parents to boycott the movie, citing its historical inaccuracies and saying that "Disney has let us down in a cruel, irresponsible manner." Their anger was rooted in the fact that, although Disney had claimed that the film's portrayal of American Indians would be "authentic," the Pocahontas story the movie told was really white cultural myth. The actual histories of the characters were replaced by mythic narratives depicting the crucial moments when aid was given to the white settlers. As reconstructed, the story serves to reassert for whites their right to be here, easing any lingering guilt about the displacement of the native inhabitants. To understand current imagery, it is essential to understand the history of its making, and these essays mesh to create a powerful, interconnected account of image creation over the past 150 years. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines and specialties, reveal the distortions and fabrications white culture has imposed on significant historical and current events, as represented by treasured artifacts such as photographic images taken of Sitting Bull following his surrender, the national monument at the battlefield of Little Bighorn, nineteenth-century advertising, the television phenomenon Northern Exposure, and the film Dances with Wolves. Well illustrated, this volume demonstrates the complacency of white culture in its representation of its troubled relationship with American Indians.

Manifest Manners

Manifest Manners
Author: Gerald Robert Vizenor
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803296213

Gerald Vizenor counters the cultural notions of dominance, false representations, and simulations of absence, and, by documents, experience, and theories, secures a narrative presence of Native Americans.