Great Expectations, Great Disappointments: American Indians and the Emergence of Modern American Culture

Philip J. Deloria. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii + 300 pp. Notes and index. $24.95.

During the summer of 2003, I was traveling by car through the northwestern quarter of the state of Montana, like so many summer tourists, on my way to Glacier National Park. The route westward from Interstate 15 to the park takes one through the middle of the Reservation of the Blackfeet Indian Nation. One sight I saw on this drive was most unexpected and has stayed with me since. In the town of Browning, near the Museum of the Plains Indian, a hand-made sign had been erected. Painted on the sign were the names of the Blackfeet who were serving in the Iraq War, along with a message of support for the troops and the military campaign of Operation Iraqi Freedom, then only months old. While I am not sure exactly what I expected to see while traveling through an Indian reservation, I had certainly not expected to see this. Upon reflection, this evidence of a community like any other in the United States, with youth who undertook military service, evoking the pride and support of their community, should not have shocked me. As a historian exposed to recent scholarship that has illuminated the service of American Indian peoples in the United States military during the twentieth century, I should not have been surprised at all by this evidence of the service of American Indians in the American armed forces.¹ But in this case the scholar had a taken a backseat to the tourist. As a American white man born, raised, and educated on the American eastern seaboard, I knew I was traveling through an Indian reservation (still something new for me) and was on the lookout for the exotic—perhaps for an alien culture that stood apart from the mainstream of American culture, implicitly and explicitly offering critiques of its content and existence. I subconsciously ignored the evidence all around me of the Blackfeet Indians' appropriations of American modernity (paved roads, split-level houses, convenience stores); I ignored all of the reservation landscape's testimonies to the on-going juxtaposition of, and negotiation between, "Indian-ness" and "American-ness." Oblivious to the reality of modern Indian life all around me, it took a simple sign that would have been a natural part of the landscape in most American communities in 2003 to dispel my illusion and to challenge the conventional wisdom I had received over the course of a lifetime of what an American Indian was and what it meant to be Indian.

I came back to this experience several times while reading Philip J. Deloria's collection of essays, Indians in Unexpected Places. Deloria's book is explicitly concerned with two things that were brought home to me during my 2003 trip. First, Deloria is interested in understanding the expectations non-Native Americans have brought, and continue to bring, to their encounters with American Indians. Deloria argues that these expectations are the products of a set of images—stereotypes—that are products of a discourse and ideology of colonialism that remains part and parcel of modern American culture. Second, Deloria also wants to remind his readers that these stereotypes that condition expectations have a history of their own, and it is a history, surprisingly, with many Native actors in it.

Deloria uses the period between 1890 and 1930 to demonstrate the ubiquity of negotiation between Indian and American cultural identities, both by Indian individuals and by communities. Yet while Indian peoples attempted to appropriate the forms and accoutrements of an emerging modern (largely white) American culture—film, music, sports, the automobile—to define themselves, this dominant culture pushed back and imposed a different set of definitions of what it meant to be Indian. Through the five discreet, yet related, essays in Indians...