Representations Of Native Americans Research Articles

Sauvages, sex roles, and semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French ballet, 1736–1837, part one: The eighteenth century

(2000). Sauvages, sex roles, and semiotics: Representations of native Americans in the French Ballet 1736–1837, part two: The nineteenth century. Dance Chronicle: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 275-320.

Sauvages, sex roles, and semiotics: Representations of native Americans in the French Ballet 1736–1837, part two: The nineteenth century*

Sauvages, sex roles, and semiotics: Representations of native Americans in the French Ballet 1736–1837, part two: The nineteenth century*

Money, Memory, And Territory In Craig Lesley’s Winterkill

Ralph Gifford. CELILO FALLS, 1940. Courtesy Oregon State Archives, Highway Division Records, Photograph #1326. M o n e y , M e m o ry , a n d T e r r i t o r y in C r a ig L e s le y ’s Win t e r k il l D a v id B r a n d e Craig Lesley’s Winterkill (1984) tells the story of Danny Kachiah, a descendant of the ChiefJoseph band of the Nez Perce, who found them­ selves at war over their forced relocation from northeastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. The novel represents this character’s efforts to sit­ uate himself in relation to his cultural legacy and to pass on what he can of this legacy to his son. Whether the setting is the Umatilla Reservation, the Pendleton Round-Up, or the Wallowa high country, Lesley makes the ongoing, complex, and inequitable relations between Euro- and Native Americans a strong thematic focus; these relations must, if the story is to avoid ahistorical idealizations of its Native American characters, form the context in which the father-son rela­ tionship plays out in the novel. I will argue that, in spite of the prob­ lematic nature of a Euro-American writer’s construction of a Native American protagonist, Lesley’s narrative stages a nuanced critique of the Euro-American occupation ofNative American territories and does this without romanticizing Native peoples and cultures. Winterkill represents the ways in which the market forces driving Euro-American occupation have “deterritorialized” the Nez Perce and other northwestern tribes, turning tribal subjects into wage laborers and unequal partners in the guardian/ward relationship with government agencies, as well as the ways in which Lesley’s protagonist “reterritorializes ” or reclaims the territory that has been, from the point of view of the dominant market society, transformed into a stockpile of resources. That is, I will examine Lesley’s treatment of the material and symbolic forms of territorial appropriation, the ways in which he represents his own culture’s forms of “occupation”— as both invasion and use— of the land. At stake in the narrative are the cultural and ecological effects of a historical conflict over different ways of inhabiting the land: the dif­ ference between, on the one hand, a sustainable living to be gained on the interest of local ecologies and, on the other, the unsustainable pro­ duction of ever greater quantities for exchange on the market, or living off one’s ecological capital. These conflicting ways of making a living, in the novel, reflect different conceptions of the land: as territory that is sensual and particular or as an abstract space for the exploitation of resources. Finally, I argue, it is through the medium of stories inextricably 2 6 6 WAL 3 5 . 3 FALL 2 0 0 0 tied to particular places, stories that charge those places with historical, cultural, and spiritual significance, that Lesley’s protagonist locates him' self and his son in relation to their familial and tribal past. Two closely related issues, however, demand our attention if we are to keep from reproducing in our readings of the novel the idealist notions that the novel itself, I suggest, struggles to avoid: first, the eth­ ical and political questions raised by the construction of a Native American point-of-view character by a Euro-American writer; second, the enduring and inadvertently racist association of Native Americans with a “Nature” abstracted from particular territories— a pitfall only widened and deepened in the context of a dual focus on cultural and ecological questions. Both of these issues inevitably arise out of the Euro-American impulse to purge the nature from culture and vice versa; both have to do with a long history of white projections of Indian-ness, a history that reflects white culture’s own perplexities over identity and over its relations to nonhuman nature. Briefly, then, if I discuss Lesley’s representations of contemporary Northwest Native Americans living in a dominant Euro-American market society, I espe­ cially want to resist— as I think Lesley resists— sorting these cultures according to the persistent “logic” of the natural and the cultural, with...

Review: Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature, by Gordon Sayre

Review: <i>Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature</i>, by Gordon Sayre

Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Les sauvages Americains: representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial literature

Les sauvages Americains: representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial literature

Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Book Review: Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Book Review: Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature

Word-Healers and Code-Talkers: Native Americans in The X-Files

Chris Carter's comment about The X-Files episode “Paper Clip” is typical of X-Files discourse: playful, possibly a joke, possibly a defense of the series, and possibly an allusion, in this case to the famous definition of surrealism in which a sewing machine and an umbrella meet on an operating table. It is also a reference to the juxtaposition of Native American mythology and alien abduction mythology that takes place in “Paper Clip” and the two episodes that precede it. The white buffalo represents the construction of Native American identity in those episodes, loosely based on Navajo culture but grafted from many sources. The spaceship represents the trope of alien abduction, symbolizing the threat of colonization and conspiracy, as well as a whole series of discursive “extreme possibilities.” Their juxtaposition represents what I will label “X-Files postmodernism,” a combination of social critique and aesthetic complexity that challenges the logic of mainstream television, making The X-Files one of the most controversial, and most watched, television shows of the 1990s. By consistently undermining audience expectations and finding new ways to make the familiar strange, The X-Files creates a space in which to rethink the representation of Native Americans.

Dressing in feathers: the construction of the Indian in American popular culture

* Introduction: Constructing the Indian, 1830s1990s S. Elizabeth Bird. * The First but Not the Last of the Vanishing Indians: Edwin Forrest and Mythic Re-creations of the Native Population Sally L. Jones. * The Narratives of Sitting Bulls Surrender: Bailey, Dix & Meads Photographic Western Frank Goodyear. * Reduced to Images: American Indians in Nineteenth Century Advertising Jeffrey Steele. * Hudsons Bay Company Indians: Images of Native People and the Red River Pageant, 1920 Peter Geller. * Science and Spectacle: Native American Representation in Early Cinema Alison Griffiths. * There Is Madness in the Air: The Haskell Homecoming and Popular Representations of Sport in Federal Indian Boarding Schools John Bloom. * Indigenous Versus Colonial Discourse: Alcohol and American Indian Identity Bonnie Duran. * My Grandmother Was a Cherokee Princess: Representations of Indians in Southern History Joel W. Martin. * Florida Seminoles and the Marketing of the Last Frontier Jay Mechling. * Segregated Stories: The Colonial Contours of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument C. Richard King. * A War of Words: How News Frames Define Legitimacy in a Native Conflict Cynthia-Lou Coleman. * Going Indian: Discovery, Adoption, and Renaming Toward a True American, from Deerslayer to Dances with Wolves Robert Baird. * Her Beautiful Savage: The Current Sexual Image of the Native American Male Peter van Lent. * Cultural Heritage in Northern Exposure Annette M. Taylor. * Not My Fantasy: The Persistence of Indian Imagery in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman S. Elizabeth Bird. * Moo Mesa: Some Thoughts on Stereotypes and Image Appropriation Theodore S. Jojola. * What Does One Look Like? Debra L. Merskin.

The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology

By the end of the eighteenth century, the interest in science roused a corresponding interest in the study of man.1 The great age of exploration had inundated Europe with fauna and flora from around the world and explorers and travelers returned with tales of people never before seen. The great Swedish botanist, C. Linnaeus, had devised a system of classification that promised to bring order to the biological world; to impose an order on human kind was now thought necessary. Social philosophers erected stages of progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization to better describe their world. Non-European peoples were duly assigned a rank on the scale of progress. This ordering was a political act. Europeans not only negotiated and then defined the borders among non-European peoples but also inscribed their inferiority. Although methodologies for the comparative investigation of cultures largely were absent, this did not prevent Europeans from constructing representations of non-European peoples, searching for their origins, reading2 their bodies, assigning differences and determining ranks. The authorial discourse of ethnology was a complex interweaving of multiple narratives that possessed power-laden meanings and resonances for the time. In America, early ethnology was both a political and ideological discourse addressing national and international constituencies. In the multiple ethnological narratives written during the nineteenth century, representations of Native Americans articulated different social agendas. Although other races received attention, Native Americans were the privileged object of ethnological scrutiny and knowledge. Because of the repatriation theme of this special issue, this article will explore concepts of the body and power along with how representations of Indians were constructed and what these representations meant in nineteenth-century ethnology and archaeology. The concept of the body underlies nineteenth-century ethnological theory. If historian Dorinda Outram is correct, eighteenth-century French scholars brought new meaning to representations of the body. Depersonalized and desacralized, the body became data. It was redefined symbolically, politically, and scientifically and was seen more as a specimen for observation

Racial and ethnic distribution of faculty, students, and fellows in US epidemiology degree programs, 1992. Committee on Minority Affairs of the American College of Epidemiology.

The American College of Epidemiology Committee on Minority Affairs assessed the racial/ethnic distribution of faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows in epidemiology degree programs in the United States in 1992. Fifty-six programs in schools of public health, medicine, or veterinary medicine completed a one-page anonymous questionnaire (85% response rate). Of 711 faculty members (median of 8 per program), 46 (6%) were minorities (US black, Hispanic, or Asian/Pacific Islander). Of 2142 students (1206 masters, 862 doctoral, 74 postdoctoral: median of 17 per program), 293 (14% of all students; 17% of US citizen students) were minorities. In the 46 doctoral programs, there were 36 black students (in 20 doctoral programs), 15 Hispanic students (in 9 programs), and no Native Americans. There were three minority postdoctoral fellows, all blacks (4% of all postdoctoral fellows). Determined, consistent, and sustained efforts will be required to boost the representation of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in epidemiology.

Popular Culture, Curriculum, and Historical Representation: The Situation of Native Americans in American History and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes

Abstract An examination of how Native Americans come to be represented in classroom history lessons demonstrates how the shared cultural biases of teachers and students mediate the representation of different racial and ethnic groups in American history. Although multiple representations of Native Americans are present in the curriculum, a romanticized and stereotypical representation of Native Americans as nomadic, buffalo-hunting Plains Indians is privileged over alternative representations in the classroom. This is due not only to the influence of popular images of Indians found in mainstream American culture, but also to the use of a Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the presence of nomadic Plains Indians in American history while marginalizing the existence of other Native Americans. These findings suggest that efforts to create a multicultural history curriculum through the addition of women and people of color to the existing narrative of American history may do little to challenge the perpetuation of racial and ethnic stereotypes. (Sociology; Education; Culture)

The Hollywood Indian in Little Big Man : A Revisionist View

70 Kasdan - Tavernetti / Little Big Man The Hollywood Indian in Little Big Man: ? Revisionist View Margo Kasdan and Susan Tavernetti In Little Big Man Arthur Penn directed a film that inverts the mythologies of American frontier history usually presented in the western genre, and, in particular, the story of the westward expansion. The film combines established generic conventions—the post-Civil War period, Great Plains setting, conflict between whites and Indians—with a reconsideration of western history, a revisionist treatment of legendary figures of the time, of the western hero, and of Native Americans in a comic and ironic tone. This combination makes the film distinctive (while at the same time sows the seeds for such contemporary westerns as Dances With Wolves) . The fusion of elements in the film, including its representation of Native Americans—respectful yet satirical, convincing yet not entirely authentic— is the subject of this paper. Through the works of writers, artists, and photographers, Americans have been taught two contradictory myths about Indians. One, deriving from the Puritan fear of the uncontrolled wilderness and its inhabitants, depicts them as bloodthirsty savages. The other, which flourished in the writings of the eighteenth-century European Romantics, presents Native Americans as noble savages. In this conception, the unspoiled wilderness is a spiritual place uncorrupted by civilization; therefore, its original inhabitants are also pure and at one with the spiritual side of nature. The idealistic view was perpetuated in nineteenth-century America in such works as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's celebrated narrative poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Both conceptions found a place in James Fenimore Cooper's popular novels five of which, including The Last of the Mohicans, were gathered in The Leather Stocking Tales, published between 1823 and 1841: Indians were wild, uncivilized, ferocious, but also brave, dignified, proud, and wise teachers. The visual arts of the period transformed these literary stereotypes into powerful images that helped create the basic iconography of the Hollywood western film. Concentrating on dramatic portrayals of buffalo hunts, exotic tribal dances and ceremonies, as well as on heroic portraiture of the natives, George Catlin painted romanticized scenes of Indians within landscapes reminiscent of the garden of Eden, yet in vivid, nearly "Technicolor" hues. Upon his arrival in the new world, Swiss watercolorist Karl Bodmer drafted striking panoramic views of the Margo Kasdan Ts Professor Tn the Department of Cinema it San Francisco State University. Susan Tavernetti is Professor of Film in the Department of Film/TV at" De Anza College, Cupertino, California. They collaborated on the second edition of The Critical Eye: An Introduction to Looking at Movies published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199371 Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) and Chief Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George) are here framed together, identically attired, a sign of their kinship. Jack Crabb has become a full-fledged member of the Cheyenne and, as their spokesman, will finally tell the truth about the tribes' s culture, experiences and ordeals. Photo courtesy of the Publicity Department/Ciname Center Films. 72 Kasdan - Tavernetti / Little Big Man frontier and remarkable scenes of wild natives in the fierce Buffalo and Scalp Dances which mirrored his preconceptions of a savage America. These artists' representations of the Plains Indians were widely distributed through lithographs and aquatints. These works established the "facts" of Indians on horseback and wearing primitive costumes in ceremonies and molded that conception of them in the popular imagination. In contrast to this fabrication of an untamed yet noble people, the artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell introduced the "cowboy-as-epic-hero," a character-type whose role was to repress the threatening Indians and win the west. It was not until the early twentieth century when Edward Curtis posed Native Americans before his camera—recording a romanticized vision of the "noble" Indian and a vanishing way of life—that their cause was championed once again.1 Shaped by the marketplace, the popular media of the day— from paintings to photographs, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to dime novels and illustrated magazines—reinforced this dual conception of Indians, depicting Native Americans both as scantily-dressed men with feathers in...

The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framework. At the center of the book is Shakespeare's Tempest, at once transfiguring the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and prefiguring much of American literature. In a new, final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.