Native American Representations

First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations

Gretchen M. Bataille

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780803213128
• eBook ISBN: 9780803200036
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From Columbus's journal jottings about "Indios" to the image of Sacagawea on the dollar coin, from the marauding Indians portrayed in the traditional western to the appearance of Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, from cigar box caricatures to the Crazy Horse monument rising near Mt. Rushmore, Native Americans have been represented—and misrepresented—over the past five centuries. What such depictions mean—what they say, and what they do, historically, culturally, and ideologically—is the subject of this book. In Native American Representations, leading national and international critics of Native literature and culture examine images in a wide range of media from a variety of perspectives to show how depictions and distortions have reflected and shaped cross-cultural exchanges from the arrival of Europeans to today. Focusing on issues of translation, European and American perceptions of land and landscape, teaching approaches, and transatlantic encounters, the authors explore problems of appropriation and advocacy, of cultural sovereignty and respect for the "authentic" text. Most significantly, they ask the reader to consider the question: "Who controls the representation?" Illuminating and timely, the animated debates and insightful analyses in this book not only showcase some of the most provocative work being done in the field of Native Studies today, but they also set an agenda for its development in the twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory
• The Indians America Loves to Love and Read: American Indian Identity and Cultural Appropriation
• Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property
• Representation and Cultural Sovereignty: Some Case Studies
• Tricksters of the Trade: "Remagining" the Filmic Image of Native Americans
• Telling Stories for Readers: The Interplay of Orality and Literacy in Clara Pearson's Nehalem Tillamook Tales
• Cooperation and Resistance: Native American Collaborative Personal Narrative
• Western Literary Models and Their Native American Revisiting: The Hybrid Aesthetics of Owens's The Sharpest Sight
• Identity and Exchange: The Representation of "The Indian" in the Federal Writers Project and in Contemporary Native American Literature
• Reversing the Gaze: Early Native American Images of Europeans and Euro-Americans
• Metacritical Frames of Reference in Studying American Indian Literature: An Afterword
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index