Playing Indian
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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.
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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.
Liked Playing Indian? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Playing Indian. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
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Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present Shares nonfiction, history, native -
The Comanche Empire Shares nonfiction, history, American history -
Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee Shares nonfiction, history, indigenous -
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World Shares nonfiction, history, American history
“People who read Playing Indian tend to reach for these next.”
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Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
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It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
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When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846
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The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
