The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon. By Amy M. Ware

Abstract

The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon . CultureAmerica Series. By Amy M. Ware. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. x + 317 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.) “Was Will Rogers Really an Indian?” Amy M. Ware posits at the start of The Cherokee Kid (p. xi). Her study of Rogers’s personal politics of identity and the Cherokee roots of his performance art and public impact leaves little doubt of the answer. Ware synthesizes evidence mined from previously published works by and about Rogers with the newest standards of scholarship in Native American studies, offering her own deep reading of Rogers’s choices and words. The result is a multilayered elucidation of Rogers’s Indianness, Cherokeeness, and transnational citizenship in … bbai{at}loc.gov