American Indians and the Mass Media. Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez, eds. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. 284 pp. $24.95 pbk.The first and only issue of the first English-language newspaper in America, Boston's Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, included several telling articles about American Indians. Some Indians were friendly (they were Christianized); others were threatening (they were miserable savages). In one form or another, these contrasting categories have been ingrained in popular culture from the colonial era the present, resulting in a misleading and harmful set of ideas and images about American Indians that this text sets out describe, deconstruct, and correct.Meta G. Carstarphen of the University of Oklahoma and John P. Sanchez of the University of Pennsylvania have put together a comprehensive overview of how American Indians have been portrayed in the mass media. The book is organized into four parts: Historical Analyses, Contemporary Viewpoints, Mediated Images and Social Expectations, and Interior Views and Authentic Voices. Each section includes articles by scholars, journalists, and activists, many of whom write-refreshingly-from American Indian perspectives. They offer research and commentaries on topics ranging from labels (Are they tribes? nations? Indians? Americans?) legal issues, such as tribal sovereignty and the continuing reliance on eighteenthand nineteenth-century stereotypes in news, advertising, and the movies.The purpose of the collection, co-editor Carstarphen writes, is to chart some of the seminal issues concerning American Indians and the media, from past portrayals contemporary icons, in a manner that explicates the new and the nuanced. In this, the book is largely successful, though the quality and significance of the articles varies and the collection would benefit from a more powerful and coherent theoretical foundation. That said, the best of these essays tackle important questions about race and representation in American culture and describe ongoing efforts carve out a place for Native American in contemporary media. Even in the twentieth-first century, as contributor Victoria E. Sanchez notes, American Indian voices and selfrepresentations are overshadowed by the pervasive and monolithic images perpetuated and reinforced by the institutions of the American mass media.One of the most interesting chapters is Lynn Klyde-Silverstein's analysis of the 2002 controversy surrounding the Fighting Whites, the deliberately provocative name of an intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado. The team, which offered a clean-cut, smiling white man as its mascot, generated huge media coverage and allowed American Indians raise pointed questions about Indian mascots. Nevertheless, Klyde-Silverstein found that American Indians did not have the power frame the issue themselves and could not stop some readers and reporters from trivializing the topic. Through trivialization, she concludes, [Colorado] newspapers created a picture of American Indians as unimportant mainstream American life. …