Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century by C. Richard King (review)

C. Richard King’s Unsettling America examines the various ways, from nationalistic forms to localized representation of Native American culture, in which Indianness has been manipulated by American popular cul-ture in order to construct idealized and self-reflective modes of identity. These manipulative forms incorporate contexts of the Great Plains whether in use as the frontier, Wild West, or Indian Country. Modern aspects of Indianness become enacted through video games or films that ground historic experiences of American nationalism.

In chapter 2, King reviews the video game gun, which locates “Apaches” on the frontier plains and portrays them as animalistic, militant, and murderous. King looks at the impact in which the glossing mechanisms of video games render Native Americans into twodimensional caricatures of highly stereotypical representations. Drawn as mindless engines of mayhem, the Apaches become for the role player a way to experience the true-to-life contexts of the Wild West violence, brutality, lust, and American personal greed. Set in the Plains, the frontier town of Dodge City is a symbolic locale of the lawless West where the game’s gun is the ultimate meter of personal justice. In the game, Indians, then, are the ultimate receiver of justice from the gun. King refers to this form of symbolic violence as new racism through the consumption of consumer culture.

In chapter 3, Hollywood film is critiqued in the theatrical release Inglourious Basterds, where again the protagonists assume an Apache persona for cruel military actions against Nazis. In this fantasy, Apache-ness serves as a function of fantastic revisionist history. King refers to this mechanism as a cul-tural “reservoir, a ready source for recrafting self” in terms of identity and society in America. King grounds his critique in the construction of masculinity and American male identity and the myth of the West.

Apache-ness is yet again a vehicle in chapter 5. Goyahkla/Geronimo, living on the Plains, is borrowed as a symbol of Native resistance by Native peoples and as a symbol of insurgency by US forces as King deconstructs the use of “Geronimo” as the code name given to Osama bin Laden during the military operation to capture him. The Plains/Iraq is Indian Country, and the taming and conquering of Indian Country celebrates “manifest destiny, pioneers, … the frontier” as an “updating of a core form of Indian hating in the United States.”

King’s research connects place, the Plains of the American western frontier, and a people, the Apache, as representative of the idealized Wild West. Because Indians had been conceived of as connected to the land, the context of resistance and toughness are conjoined in place and people as the mean Apache and the mean land resisting civilization and American expansion. Used as symbols, the Apaches and the Plains in Unsettling America can be utilized as critical elements of the processes involved in nation-building such as manifest destiny and colonialism.