Did Indians Read Dime Novels?: Re-Indigenising the Western at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

It is no secret that, of all the popular genres produced in the USA, the western most depended on and occluded Indigenous peoples. There is now a long tradition of scholarship analysing and exposing the kinds of cultural work done by stereotypes of Indigeneity in popular fiction—especially as it mushroomed in the new dime novels and frontier club formulas at the turn of the twentieth century—and how that work supported colonisation and violent settlement (see Bold 2013). A more recent strain of scholarship has refocused the question, asking what roles Native people played as producers of popular culture. This chapter examines the implications of that scholarship for understanding US popular print culture at the turn of the twentieth century. What principles emerge, what forgotten figures are remembered, and how might this Indigenous impact shift the coordinates of popular print study? The second half of the chapter carries these questions into a reading of one long-forgotten dime western series.