Native American Representations

First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations

Gretchen M. Bataille

Publication Year: 2001

From Columbus's journal jottings about "Indios" to the image of Sacagawea on the dollar coin, from the marauding Indians portrayed in the traditional western to the appearance of Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, from cigar box caricatures to the Crazy Horse monument rising near Mt. Rushmore, Native Americans have been represented—and misrepresented—over the past five centuries. What such depictions mean—what they say, and what they do, historically, culturally, and ideologically—is the subject of this book.

In Native American Representations, leading national and international critics of Native literature and culture examine images in a wide range of media from a variety of perspectives to show how depictions and distortions have reflected and shaped cross-cultural exchanges from the arrival of Europeans to today. Focusing on issues of translation, European and American perceptions of land and landscape, teaching approaches, and transatlantic encounters, the authors explore problems of appropriation and advocacy, of cultural sovereignty and respect for the "authentic" text. Most significantly, they ask the reader to consider the question: "Who controls the representation?"

Illuminating and timely, the animated debates and insightful analyses in this book not only showcase some of the most provocative work being done in the field of Native Studies today, but they also set an agenda for its development in the twenty-first century.

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Contents
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pp. v-vi

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-viii

Any project of this size and complexity is successful only because of the efforts of many people working together. The impetus and primary support came from the Borchard Foundation in Los Angeles. For their enthusiastic support...

Introduction

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pp. 1-10

On August 6, 1996, the Wall Street Journal (Aeppel A1, A6) had a front-page article about "tribes of foreigners" visiting Indian reservations, remarking that Germans are particularly taken with Native Americans. A Zurich tour company offers $3,200 package tours to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota....

As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory

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pp. 11-25

It's very convenient, isn't it, that so much of what we perhaps loosely term postcolonial theory today is written by "real Indians" — with such names as Chakrabarty, Chakravorty, Gandhi, Bhabha, Mohanty, and so on — so that, in writing...

The Indians America Loves to Love and Read: American Indian Identity and Cultural Appropriation

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pp. 26-51

"At its most powerful," Seamus Deane writes, "colonialism is a process of radical dispossession." While many in the academy attend to theories of postcolonialism, the process of which Deane speaks relentlessly maneuvers itself onward...

Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property

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pp. 52-79

Competing as "the party of inclusion" must be 1990s discourse for the Latinate eighteenth-century American ideal of e pluribus unum. If, indeed, America would view itself as the "most successful" crown of community atop a millennium of Crusades...

Representation and Cultural Sovereignty: Some Case Studies

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pp. 80-99

Representations are what we all live by and with, not only as scholars but also as citizens and members of communities, but the dangers involved in the control of representation are as great, if not always as evident, as the need for representation itself. One difficulty lies in the...

Tricksters of the Trade: "Remagining" the Filmic Image of Native Americans

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pp. 100-119

So much criticism has been devoted to the ways makers of movies and books have misrepresented American Indians that it has become almost cliche�d to call attention to the fact, at least in academic circles. However, all too often...

Telling Stories for Readers: The Interplay of Orality and Literacy in Clara Pearson's Nehalem Tillamook Tales

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pp. 120-133

Anyone hoping to engage a body of traditional Native American narratives as literature would do well to reflect on Melville Jacobs's challenge in 1962, based on his long, often frustrating, and unrecognized work with Native repertories in the state of Oregon: "Are Oregon's Indian literatures so shabbily represented...

Cooperation and Resistance: Native American Collaborative Personal Narrative

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pp. 134-151

Twenty-three years ago, driving the two-lane highway from Tucson to Sells, Arizona, site of the tribal headquarters of the Tonoho O'odham Indian nation, I hummed with anticipation, eager to begin my first fieldwork project.¹ The...

Western Literary Models and Their Native American Revisiting: The Hybrid Aesthetics of Owens's The Sharpest Sight

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pp. 152-167

Non-Native literary genres and myths have been integrated into contemporary Native American fiction to represent Native American concerns. The Sharpest Sight (1992), in which the author, Louis Owens, has explored several nontraditional...

Identity and Exchange: The Representation of "The Indian" in the Federal Writers Project and in Contemporary Native American Literature

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pp. 168-197

The following discussion rests on the observation that Native American literature originates where other Anglophone indigenous literatures originate as well: in an intercultural space given and defined by their "Anglophony." This...

Reversing the Gaze: Early Native American Images of Europeans and Euro-Americans

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pp. 198-223

The images of the American Indian, noble or savage, and of the mixed-blood, liaison between two cultures or outcast, have fascinated Western Europeans since their arrival on this continent. The evolution of these images and their...

Metacritical Frames of Reference in Studying American Indian Literature: An Afterword

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pp. 224-226

Representation tends to mean two different things, but what is most often meant by the term rests with the virtualmore than with the actual — of course, all terms having to do with "the real" slip around. The first meaning simply denotes...

E-ISBN-13: 9780803200036
E-ISBN-10: 080320003X

Page Count: 265
Publication Year: 2001

Native American Representations

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory

The Indians America Loves to Love and Read: American Indian Identity and Cultural Appropriation

Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property

Representation and Cultural Sovereignty: Some Case Studies

Tricksters of the Trade: "Remagining" the Filmic Image of Native Americans

Telling Stories for Readers: The Interplay of Orality and Literacy in Clara Pearson's Nehalem Tillamook Tales

Cooperation and Resistance: Native American Collaborative Personal Narrative

Western Literary Models and Their Native American Revisiting: The Hybrid Aesthetics of Owens's The Sharpest Sight

Identity and Exchange: The Representation of "The Indian" in the Federal Writers Project and in Contemporary Native American Literature

Reversing the Gaze: Early Native American Images of Europeans and Euro-Americans

Metacritical Frames of Reference in Studying American Indian Literature: An Afterword

Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Research Areas

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3

Native American Representations

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory

The Indians America Loves to Love and Read: American Indian Identity and Cultural Appropriation

Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property

Representation and Cultural Sovereignty: Some Case Studies

Tricksters of the Trade: "Remagining" the Filmic Image of Native Americans

Telling Stories for Readers: The Interplay of Orality and Literacy in Clara Pearson's Nehalem Tillamook Tales

Cooperation and Resistance: Native American Collaborative Personal Narrative

Western Literary Models and Their Native American Revisiting: The Hybrid Aesthetics of Owens's The Sharpest Sight

Identity and Exchange: The Representation of "The Indian" in the Federal Writers Project and in Contemporary Native American Literature

Reversing the Gaze: Early Native American Images of Europeans and Euro-Americans

Metacritical Frames of Reference in Studying American Indian Literature: An Afterword

Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Research Areas

Recommend

Related Content

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3