American Indians and Popular Culture. Vol. 1, Media, Sports, and Politics, and vol. 2, Literature, Arts, and Resistance. edited by Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman (review)

The noble savage. The bloodthirsty savage. The princess. The vanishing Indian. The ecological Indian. If these European American (mis)conceptions of America’s indigenous peoples sound all too familiar to the Native American studies scholar, they will likely be haunting her in her sleep after leafing through the two volumes of American Indians and Popular Culture. This is not to criticize the editor, Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman, and her forty- seven contributors. Rather, the constant review of well- known stereotypes in the forty- six essays (three of them are collaborative exercises) testifies to the pervasiveness and ubiquity of stereotypes in all modes of cultural expression dating back to the time of contact: Christopher Columbus’s accounts helped construct a “fossilized pattern of American Indians,” Frederick White (Haida) reminds us at the outset of an essay that proceeds to recount stereotypes of Native cultures in television (1:135).

Scrutinizing countless cultural artifacts, including the vampireromance novel series Twilight, the science-fiction movie Avatar, the tv show Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the offensive logos of sport teams in Washington and Cleveland, one writer after the other in the 768-page opus dismisses common clichés in the tradition of Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian or Robert Berkhofer’s White Man’s Indian. The collection submits, in the editor’s words, “unassailable evidence that indigenous people . . . do not resemble the stereotypes found throughout American popular culture” (1:xii). I would have liked to see, however, a more extensive engagement with the origin and purpose of these stereotypes. What were/are the cultural, political, legal, and even psychological advantages as well as reasons for disseminating warped images of indigenous cultures? A work describing a myriad of stereotypes should address on a theoretical level why they emerged and were perpetuated.

Fortunately, the collection’s emphasis on othering is complemented by revisions of stereotypes and analyses of Indian self- representations. The conjunction “and” in the title of the two-volume work thus bears great significance: numerous essays examine the artistic expressions and societal contributions of American Indians, showing them to be active participants in and critics of American popular culture. As Oliver de la Paz and John Lloyd Purdy write in their essay, a growing number of “American Indian scholars, writers, and filmmakers . . . take the misrepresentations to task” (2:155). In the same spirit, more than one-third of the contributors to American Indians and Popular Culture are members of Native nations from Alaska to Louisiana.

The first volume covers media, sports, and politics, while the second volume focuses on literature, arts, and resistance, with almost all contributions primarily situated in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. Overlaps exist, of course— volume 1, for instance, contains an essay on Seneca resistance against the construction of the Kinzua Dam. The themes of the chapters, some narrow, others broad in scope, range from discussions of American Indian architects, visual artists, and soldiers to overviews of the development and specificities of powwow dance, “Indian basketball,” and American Indian film. Some essays have a surveylike form, with a series of brief subsections (e.g., on a particular painter or on powwow logistics). Reading less as complex scholarly engagements than as informational encyclopedia articles, these contributions entice the reader to conduct further research—on Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, Athabascan writer Velma Wallis, and Makah filmmaker Sandra Osawa, or on differences between northern- and southern- style powwows.

Among the more established scholars in the delightfully mixed group of contributors, Dean Rader offers a sharp discussion of Native American poetry during the past thirty-odd years. Tentatively claiming that contemporary poets are more likely to engage in formal experiments than their predecessors, who tended to align themselves with oral traditions and offen addressed the repercussions of colonialism, Rader also insists that contemporary “Native poets are challenging readers...