Playing Indian

The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts are just a few examples of the American tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Indians to shape national identity in different eras and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises.Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure. Download Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria – kino-fada.fr This fascinating and informative study guides the reader throughthan 200 years of white Americans playing Indian, from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 to New Agers in the 1990s Along the way, Deloria dissects the role of Indian play in groups as diverse as the Tammany societies, the Boy Scouts, hobbyists, and countercultural commune dwellers Deloria is concerned with the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in white constructions of Indianness I found his analysis of the Tea Party Mohawks This fascinating and informative study guides the reader throughthan 200 years of white Americans playing Indian, from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 to New Agers in the 1990s Along the way, Deloria dissects the role of Indian play in groups as diverse as the Tammany societies, the Boy Scouts, hobbyists, and countercultural commune dwellers Deloria is concerned with the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in white constructio...Philip J Deloria underscores how American nationalist identity draws from American Indian identity by means of appropriation without acknowledging cultural and actual genocide of indigenous populations Deloria s Playing Indian is important scholarship in understanding Americanness from a historica...4.5 A well crafted account of how Americans have attempted to use Indianness to create a unique American identity, a process that as this book argues, is not yet finished, and potentially can t be Each chapter examines a different period of American history and examines the way playing Indian shifted to make sense of newly developed contradictions in American identity, always coming back to Indians as the dichotomy of interior often thought ...I wish I d read this before I wrote Race, Sacrifice, and Native Lands Quoting DH Lawrence No place exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed and Deloria argues that white American culture has defined itself as much in opposition to redness as blackness has struggled between wanting to destroy and to assimilate Indians 4.Deloria traces the history of the ways whites have engaged in what I would call Indian cosplay for various purposes, I wish I d read this before I wrote Race, Sacrifice, and Native Lands Quoting DH Lawrence No place exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed and Deloria argues that white American culture has defined itself as much in opposition to redness as blackness has struggled between wanting to destroy and to assimilate Indians 4.Deloria traces the history of the ways whites have engaged in what I would call Indian cosplay for various purposes, from the Boston Tea Party to Boy Scout and other movements which had playing Indian as a central feature of what they did helped me understand some of my discomfort with Boy Scouts After WWII, there were groups of hobbyists who engaged Indian culture in various ways the object hobbyists who replicated old Indian artifacts and costumes as authentically as possible, but were generally uninterested in dancing and singing with native people, seeing Indians in classic antimodern terms a...It s very academic I appreciate all the citations and sources, but would have likedhow to say this More stories More examples or details about specific people and what they do and how they feel about white p...I read this book after a few controversial incidents occurred regarding Native American culture The Victoria Secret fashion show head dress incident, the Paul Frank pow wow party, and The Gap s Manifest Destiny t shirt design I realized I had almost no understanding of the history of Indian culture in the Americas Particularly revolving around how Americans have used Indian culture to suit their needs and the history of the distortion of Native culture I read this book to try to remedy that I read this book after a few controversial incidents occurred regarding Native American culture The Victoria Secret fashion show head dress incident, the Paul Frank pow wow party, and The Gap s Manifest Destiny t shirt design I realized I had almost no understanding of the history of Indian culture in the Americas Particularly revolving around how Amer...Fascinating argument about the problematic relationship that White America has with American Indians This book makes an incredibly interesting argument about the mythic space that the American Indian was pushed to by White America The prevalence of American Indian imagery and associations in our modern society might lead someone to believe that there is a reverence to American Indian culture However, as Deloria argues it isof an attempt of severance of the actual Native Americans from t Fascinating argument about the problematic relationship that White America has with American Indians This book makes an incredibly interesting argument about the mythic space that the American Indian was pushed to by White America The prevalence of American Indian imagery and associations in our modern s...Has a lot of interesting info about the Boston Tea Party, the beginning of ethnography, and the New Age movement But unfortunately, Deloria s contention that Indians challenged and shaped whites cultural beliefs this isn t well developed Also, I can t help but wonder why he obscures his own background as part Sioux and son of the legendary activist and scholar Vine Deloria Thirdly, Playing Indian is laden with a lot of terminology that was au courant in the 1990s otherness, liminality, e Has a lot of interesting info about the Boston Tea Party, the beginning of ethnography, and the New Age movement But unfortunately, Deloria s contention that Indians challenged and shaped whites cultura...This book was so interesting and informative, well researched and eye opening, and surprisingly readable for originally having been a doctoral thesis Deloria explores the ways non Indians have taken on the most attractive elements of Indian ness while ignoring actual, you know, Indians, since revolutionary times The penultimate chapter on hippies and New Agers was particuarly funny I suppose having first hand experience and knowledge of those people allowed him to bring on the bitter humor This book was so interesting and informative, well researched and eye opening, and surprisingly readable for originally having been a doctoral thesis Deloria explores the ways non I...A highly complex examination of the political social construction of race, especially the white race, and how it is a negative construction , ie defined by what it is NOT, instead of what it IS and the subsequent existential hollowness fallacy of whiteness as a cultural identityand how this...

• English
• 24 June 2018
Philip J. Deloria
• Paperback
• 262 pages
• 0300080670
• Philip J. Deloria
• Playing Indian