Expect to See Indians: Native American and Indigenous Peoples in Modern America

United States culture and society have a long-running Indian problem, often presenting American Indians as a people of a distant past despite more than five hundred years of interactions between colonizers and Indigenous peoples that continue into the present. What can explain how Native peoples are at once denigrated and romanticized, their cultures appropriated and caricatured with so little regard or recognition as modern, contemporary peoples or for the imagining of Indigenous futures? Some answers to these questions can be found in Americans, an ongoing exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington D.C. Americans vividly illustrates how Native American names, stories, and images have pervaded popular historical narratives and the experiences of everyday life in the United States, but almost always in ways that serve the social, cultural, and economic purposes of non-Indians.

Scholarship in American Indian history shoulders considerable responsibility for both the development and potential revision of these popular narratives. NMAI Director Kevin Gover (Pawnee) has argued that a commitment to an honest discussion about the past is an essential precursor for recognizing American Indians as contemporary actors who “prick the conscience,” present modern issues, and make political demands.¹ But only in recent decades has there been a concerted effort by historians to understand the experiences of American Indians in the twentieth century. Much of this work follows from Philip J. Deloria’s seminal Indians in Unexpected Places (2004). It was not the first book to show Native people doing things like acting in Hollywood films, playing college football, and driving Model-T Fords, but it did provide an intellectual jolt and the language for exploring American Indian participation in the trends of modern American life as regular, dynamic, and meaningful, contrary to popular stereotypes. A growing sub-field in American Indian history is now working to historicize the claims made by anthropologist James Clifford in Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (2013): Indigenous peoples have emerged from generations of survival, struggle, and renewal, still negotiating settler-colonialism, but adapted to modernity, and increasingly visible as they move through local, regional, and global networks.

The three volumes under review here, each in an important series from an academic press, carry this trend forward in crucial ways by delving into early-twentieth-century performance and advocacy, mobility and urbanization, and late-twentieth-century political movements and activism. Building on the work of scholars who were among the first to address such topics, these authors often take new paths and make crucial interventions. Along with other recently published books and articles, they are helping to expand the understanding of American Indians as modern peoples who negotiated, participated in, and shaped the major trends of twentieth-century United States history, but always in ways that were rooted in their histories and identities as individuals and members of tribal and intertribal communities.

Kiara M. Vigil’s Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930 joins a relatively short list of titles published by Cambridge University Press in its long-running Studies in North American Indian History series, some of which have fundamentally reshaped the field of Native American history. Notably, Indigenous Intellectuals is unique in relying on literary sources contextualized within a broader framework of cultural history, which reflects Vigil’s positioning as an American Studies scholar emphasizing literary analysis combined with historical context and narrative. Focusing on a generation of American Indian activists that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous...