Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (review)

This book is an inquiry into the relationship between "dominant constructions of American individuality" and their influence on federal policies for American Indians (15). The author further pursues his interest in the cultural and literary history of subjectivity by analyzing an impressive array of sources: official documents, photographs, political writings, autobiographical texts, and fiction. Each of the book's two parts is divided into two chapters that "chart the uneven and often contradictory ideological passage from the nineteenth century's industrial-producer-sentimental culture and its styles of individuality (which value character, the work ethos, self-control, respectability) to the twentieth century's corporate-therapeutic culture and its styles of individuality (which value personality, the psychological self, impression management, sex appeal)" (14).

The first part focuses on the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians, which aimed at erasing their students' Native cultural heritage and producing "civilized" individuals. The second part traces the "connections between the early-twentieth-century Taos White bohemians and [John] Collier's protomulticultural Indian New Deal" (13). Pfister opts for the case study rather than the survey approach because it enables a more nuanced and complex account of "the historical and ideological multidimensionality" of his sources (13). He views "individuality [as] a social form of subjectivity production" and follows the history of individualizing that influenced federal policies on American Indians (11). The book's title draws on Williams' concept of "incorporation" developed to explicate how hegemonic power structures control political and cultural discourse.¹ That American Indians have, historically, been successful at incorporating White culture—as evident in much of their art—is just one of the ironies that Pfister's study highlights.

The main goal of the policies in both case studies was full participation of American Indians in mainstream U.S. life. Pfister investigates the paternalist views driven by capitalist interests, from nineteenth-century Indian hating to twentieth-century glamorizing of the sanitized "primitive." In his historical analysis of how forms of individuality have been produced, Pfister closely follows the main individual figures within American and American Indian intellectual history who were responsible for re-writing "Indianness" from a White perspective and determining policies. Moreover, he carefully considers the more ambivalent position of American Indian collaborators who were successful products of the system, if only for a while (such as Charles Eastman, a key factor at Wounded Knee, who became disenchanted with the failure of assimilationism). Pfister closely evaluates the historical circumstances from which these social constructions of individuality emerged and the political associations that they produced.

The study of the forms of individuality that shaped federal policies, though helpful in illuminating how different federal policies emerged, does not explicate why, despite the shifts in those forms of individuality, the invariable results were further confiscation of Indian lands and denial of Indian rights, including freedom of religion.