In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Native Modern
  • Beth Piatote (bio)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Thomas King. U of Minnesota P, 2013.
Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, The Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema. Brad Evans and Aaron Glass, eds. U of Washington P, 2014.
That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America. David L. Moore. U of Nebraska P, 2014.

On the whole, it seems somewhat less shocking to see Kwakwaka’wakw actors lounging on set between takes for the 1914 film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, than to see Edward S. Curtis himself costumed in the frilly seventeenth-century collar and billowing coat of a Dutch artist for a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait. But neither of these photographic moments should be surprising in any way, given that the subjects are unquestionably aware of the camera’s gaze, and appear as willing participants in their own self-fashioning. They are equally modern subjects: Indians and Curtis. They are less equal, however, in their relative positioning in the massive colonial project of modernity, and capturing this tension—the structural conditions of settler colonialism that set the terms of domination, as well as the creative responses of Indians in adapting to new economic, cultural, and social patterns—is at the heart of three rich and illuminating new texts in film studies, literary studies, and Native American studies. Although these texts speak through different genres—one is a multifield collection, one a work of literary criticism, and the third a set of interconnected essays—the three books together reflect an attention to historical conditions and constraints, a commitment to transnational histories, and a focus on the agency of indigenous communities in shaping their own representations and responses to colonialism.

The lavishly illustrated and expansive Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema (2014), edited by Brad Evans and Aaron Glass comprises 17 original essays by art historians, literary and film critics, anthropologists, musicologists, photographers, and writers. The collection offers a trove of cross-disciplinary approaches to the assessment of the 1914 film, whose afterlife—with new versions of the film and music reconstructed in 1973 and 2008—is as fascinating [End Page 557] as its original creation. An impressive contribution to literary criticism, David L. Moore’s That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America (2014), considers the ways in which five indigenous authors, from William Apess in the 1830s to Sherman Alexie today, consistently return to central principles of sovereignty, community, identity, authenticity, and humor, while embracing different literary forms and political positions. Moore examines these themes with attention to the political contexts that shape each author’s engagements, showing why, for example, Sarah Winnemucca’s advocacy for indigenous land claims doesn’t look quite like Leslie Marmon Silko’s. And in The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2013), prizewinning author Thomas King draws on personal and legal history to reconstruct the experiences of indigenous people in response to land dispossession by the settler colonial states of the US and Canada.

Together, these works contribute to a growing body of scholarship that examines how indigenous communities, both historically and now, participate in cultural, political, artistic, and economic projects as modern subjects advancing their own interests. At the same time emphasizing indigenous agency, these critical works keep in view the asymmetries of power and historical contingencies that have shaped and constrained available choices. Among the excellent scholarly histories that establish this line of inquiry are Philip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places (2004); Paige Raibmon’s Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (2005); Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (2008); Kate Flint’s The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (2008); and the collection Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism (2012), edited by Carol Williams. Thomas King’s collection of essays is, as he points out, an account of history without employing the conventional fixtures of historiography; conversational in tone, it presents historical events...

pdf

Share