Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (review)

During a question-and-answer session at an exhibit opening in a Vancouver museum, Comanche scholar Paul Chaat Smith finally let go of some of the anxiety of Indian identity that he had carried with him since his youth. “There are some standards of Indianness I will never meet, period, and some parking meters that will never be satisfied no matter how many quarters I feed them” (171). Smith says this revelation came about after a museum visitor asked him about the Bering Strait theory, with the likely aim, Smith suggests, of discrediting Indian claims of originating in the Americas. Like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it, conforming to markers of authenticity imposed from both the inside and outside is an exercise in futility for one who is trying to be Indian enough. Central to this collection is the question of why Indians have to fill such a bucket in the first place.

Moments such as this one punctuate this collection of essays written during the span of a decade. The essays range in topic from the kitsch factor of those ubiquitous “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” T-shirts that are stretched over more Anglo backs than Indian to the admiration of artists such as Jimmie Durham (Cherokee) and Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi) and a charge to Indian artists to keep challenging what it means to be Indian. While the subject matter varies, issues of Indian authenticity and the messy history that spawned them haunt each essay that challenges readers, Indian and non-Indian alike, to ponder exactly what they think they know about Indians.

Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong is especially useful to students and scholars of western literature because Smith devotes particular attention to western film and other artistic media focused on the region. He examines the history Indians share with the region that informs the ways Indians are fashioned for consumption in the US imaginary both on and off the screen or page. Smith argues that the narrative that is developed through the Western lens is at least partially, if not primarily, to blame for why some Indians feel anxiety about having to fit the stereotypes that undergird the national imaginary. “To be outside the narrative, then, is to not exist,” Smith writes. “The master narrative … is like an infinitely elastic spider web that grows stronger with each change of pattern and wider after each assault. Subversion appears impossible” (51). This passage is perhaps the collection’s most urgent imperative, and subsequent essays demonstrate the way Indian artists answer it by continually asking questions and exploring the terrain of Indian identity and presence.

To this end, Smith visits moments of his own life coupled with his interactions with various Indian artists. Readers unfamiliar with the Indian art scene might have to explore the major players further for added context. This criticism aside, Smith achieves the goal he established at the beginning of destabilizing static notions of Indians that many take for granted and demonstrating why such notions must remain in a dynamic state of constant challenge.