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Yale Historical Publications Series
Playing Indian
The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead just a few examples of white Americans' tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles
"A valuable contribution to Native American studies."— Kirkus Reviews
This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras—and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual.
At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises.
Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.
"A valuable contribution to Native American studies."— Kirkus Reviews
This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras—and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual.
At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises.
Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.
262 pages, Paperback
First published April 20, 1998
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About the author
Philip J. Deloria
23 books32 followersPhilip J. Deloria is Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
April 18, 2021
Dense- much more sociological than I would have expected, but Deloria, like the diligent work of his Ancestors, does a wonderful job at writing from a critical lens of the history, tendency, and psychological reasoning of non-Natives to play as Native.
August 2, 2021
I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book, but what I got was a lot more interesting than whatever it was that I had in mind. Deloria takes you through a whoel host of forgotten histories relating to the strategic deployment of Native American dress, tropes, ideas, figures, and myths in American cultural life. What I found most interesting about this was the way that Deloria handled these narratives--not with an outrage that could almost certainly rightly be felt at the appropriation going on in these situations, but with a respect that takes seriously the important role such appropriation had in the formation of American culture and identity at large. There's little judgment on display here, as each case and time is very simply presented, explored, and explained not with detachment but with a careful, critical eye that recognizes that simply taking offense at something (even when offense is justified) doesn't help anyone understand the larger meaning or import of anything. I learned a lot here, about Native American culture, about American culture, and about the importance of thoughtful, careful scholarship.
May 4, 2021
Deloria looks at how various American groups (Boston Tea Party revolutionaries, early anthropologists, boy scouts, New Agers) across time used “Indian play” to advance political agendas and construct a complex myriad of identities. In focusing on "Indianness" and identity, the author also reflects on the power and meanings of disguise. With these themes in mind, Deloria focuses primarily on “two pragmatic moments—the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life.” Thus Playing Indian spans over a more than two-hundred-year period—showing that white American culture is fundamentally and inextricably linked to “the Indian.”
August 30, 2015
This fascinating and informative study guides the reader through more than 200 years of white Americans playing Indian, from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 to New Agers in the 1990s. Along the way, Deloria dissects the role of Indian play in groups as diverse as the Tammany societies, the Boy Scouts, hobbyists, and countercultural commune-dwellers.
Deloria is concerned with the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in white constructions of Indianness. I found his analysis of the Tea Party Mohawks particularly illuminating, and his careful unpacking of the symbolism they employed sets the tone for the rest of the book. The core themes he discerns in their Indian play are ones he pinpoints in later manifestations of white folks assuming Indian rituals and dress: the quest for identity and the search for authenticity and meaning.
Playing Indian provides plenty of food for thought, especially when explaining white Americans' contradictory views on Native Americans. Deloria is an astute observer of the phenomenon he describes, and he never overplays his hand.
Deloria is concerned with the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in white constructions of Indianness. I found his analysis of the Tea Party Mohawks particularly illuminating, and his careful unpacking of the symbolism they employed sets the tone for the rest of the book. The core themes he discerns in their Indian play are ones he pinpoints in later manifestations of white folks assuming Indian rituals and dress: the quest for identity and the search for authenticity and meaning.
Playing Indian provides plenty of food for thought, especially when explaining white Americans' contradictory views on Native Americans. Deloria is an astute observer of the phenomenon he describes, and he never overplays his hand.
May 19, 2023
so interesting to learn how intrinsically linked american patriotism is to 'playing indian' and how play was in fact the perfect vehicle for this kind of transformative (yes i'll say it) drag.
November 29, 2018
Fascinating exploration of the ways that white (and, in rare cases, black and Latinx) Americans have appropriated Native American culture. Deloria argues that Americans use Native American imagery to form a sense of national identity. He uses case studies to demonstrate some of the identities that have been proposed over the last 250 years.
Dressing up as "Indians" and creating a fictional history of the Indian "King Tammany," eighteenth-century colonists justified their separation from Britain and the use of paramilitary "misrule" to achieve freedom. Rising nativism in the early republic saw Tammany become simply a mascot, not a role model, as white Americans upheld Christopher Columbus as their spiritual ancestor and began to force eastern Native Americans from their homes. White scholars and hobbyists thought Native Americans were doomed to die out, so a wave of secret societies such as the Improved Order of Red Men and Lewis Henry Morgan's Grand Order of the Iroquois sought to "preserve" Native culture. In practice, the antics of these secret societies were not so different from the rituals that Tammany societies invented decades earlier. Politically savvy Native Americans realized that they could manipulate the paternalistic attitude of these societies to their benefit. Iroquois youth Ely S. Parker got Morgan to intervene on behalf of the Seneca in their struggle to keep their land.
At the turn of the twentieth century, competing visions presented Native Americans as an alternative to modern life or as a hopeless relic. Several Native American scholars — notably Ella Deloria, Arthur C. Parker, and Charles Eastman — played up the anti-modern interpretation, so that Native Americans seemed to possess wisdom that modern Americans had lost. By playing into white fantasies of Native decline, these Native scholars sought to earn white respect. In the 1920s–30s, white Americans formed hobbyist clubs, recreating Native American artwork and clothes; some black and Puerto Rican Americans joined these groups in the 1960s. Deloria describes two separate strains of white suburbians who embraced Native culture — conservatives, who believed in a heroic, American exceptionalist past; and people who, sympathizing with the Beatniks, wanted an alternative to 1950s corporate culture and Cold War liberalism. Native Americans, particularly the Hopi, have repeatedly protested the hobbyists' appropriation of sacred rituals, but there have been a few cases where Native Americans and white hobbyists formed communal bonds. More often, the white guys playacting Indian have been ignorant to the problems of colonialism.
In the brilliant final chapter, Deloria describes how New Age spiritualists and counterculture adherents have tried to become Native American in their worldview. Libertarians living on communes and New Left activists protesting the Vietnam War imagined Native Americans as custodians of the Earth and victims (like the Vietnamese) of U.S. imperialism. Native activists in the American Indian Movement worked with New Left activists, notably during the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969–71. Many New Age religious seekers pursued a vague "Indianness" without learning about specific Native nations or interacting with the Native people in their communities. The New Agers sometimes knew less about Native practices than the hobbyists! Deloria views the combinatory religious practices of the New Agers, questioning established wisdom, as a form of postmodernism. One sees the limits of postmodern invention, however, when one considers that real Native people suffer discrimination and extreme poverty. Their experiences exist in unresolved tension with the grab-bag practices of white New Agers. This unresolved tension characterizes the longstanding U.S. relationship with Native America: Whites want to conquer the continent, but cannot fully conceive of themselves without Native Americans.
Deloria's reliance on critical theory leads to sometimes opaque prose. At times, his descriptions of power relations are hard to follow. He could have done more to link the secret societies and hobbyists, which strike me as pretty similar in their behavior and assumption that Natives are dying out. Deloria could have done more to explain the ideologies of conservative versus "Beat" hobbyists, and he could have done more to explicitly link 1970s communes to libertarianism. Still, there's a lot of good material here, and much to reflect on.
Dressing up as "Indians" and creating a fictional history of the Indian "King Tammany," eighteenth-century colonists justified their separation from Britain and the use of paramilitary "misrule" to achieve freedom. Rising nativism in the early republic saw Tammany become simply a mascot, not a role model, as white Americans upheld Christopher Columbus as their spiritual ancestor and began to force eastern Native Americans from their homes. White scholars and hobbyists thought Native Americans were doomed to die out, so a wave of secret societies such as the Improved Order of Red Men and Lewis Henry Morgan's Grand Order of the Iroquois sought to "preserve" Native culture. In practice, the antics of these secret societies were not so different from the rituals that Tammany societies invented decades earlier. Politically savvy Native Americans realized that they could manipulate the paternalistic attitude of these societies to their benefit. Iroquois youth Ely S. Parker got Morgan to intervene on behalf of the Seneca in their struggle to keep their land.
At the turn of the twentieth century, competing visions presented Native Americans as an alternative to modern life or as a hopeless relic. Several Native American scholars — notably Ella Deloria, Arthur C. Parker, and Charles Eastman — played up the anti-modern interpretation, so that Native Americans seemed to possess wisdom that modern Americans had lost. By playing into white fantasies of Native decline, these Native scholars sought to earn white respect. In the 1920s–30s, white Americans formed hobbyist clubs, recreating Native American artwork and clothes; some black and Puerto Rican Americans joined these groups in the 1960s. Deloria describes two separate strains of white suburbians who embraced Native culture — conservatives, who believed in a heroic, American exceptionalist past; and people who, sympathizing with the Beatniks, wanted an alternative to 1950s corporate culture and Cold War liberalism. Native Americans, particularly the Hopi, have repeatedly protested the hobbyists' appropriation of sacred rituals, but there have been a few cases where Native Americans and white hobbyists formed communal bonds. More often, the white guys playacting Indian have been ignorant to the problems of colonialism.
In the brilliant final chapter, Deloria describes how New Age spiritualists and counterculture adherents have tried to become Native American in their worldview. Libertarians living on communes and New Left activists protesting the Vietnam War imagined Native Americans as custodians of the Earth and victims (like the Vietnamese) of U.S. imperialism. Native activists in the American Indian Movement worked with New Left activists, notably during the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969–71. Many New Age religious seekers pursued a vague "Indianness" without learning about specific Native nations or interacting with the Native people in their communities. The New Agers sometimes knew less about Native practices than the hobbyists! Deloria views the combinatory religious practices of the New Agers, questioning established wisdom, as a form of postmodernism. One sees the limits of postmodern invention, however, when one considers that real Native people suffer discrimination and extreme poverty. Their experiences exist in unresolved tension with the grab-bag practices of white New Agers. This unresolved tension characterizes the longstanding U.S. relationship with Native America: Whites want to conquer the continent, but cannot fully conceive of themselves without Native Americans.
Deloria's reliance on critical theory leads to sometimes opaque prose. At times, his descriptions of power relations are hard to follow. He could have done more to link the secret societies and hobbyists, which strike me as pretty similar in their behavior and assumption that Natives are dying out. Deloria could have done more to explain the ideologies of conservative versus "Beat" hobbyists, and he could have done more to explicitly link 1970s communes to libertarianism. Still, there's a lot of good material here, and much to reflect on.
August 6, 2016
I read this book after a few controversial incidents occurred regarding Native American culture - The Victoria Secret fashion show head-dress incident, the Paul Frank pow-wow party, and The Gap's Manifest Destiny t-shirt design. I realized I had almost no understanding of the history of Indian culture in the Americas. Particularly revolving around how Americans have used Indian culture to suit their needs and the history of the distortion of Native culture. I read this book to try to remedy that. And it did. I really enjoyed it but it is a bit dry (even for non-fiction) so if you don't have this same interest I'm not sure I could recommend it. It was very well researched, well thought-out, well presented, and raised some very interesting questions.
February 12, 2022
A highly complex examination of the political/social construction of race, especially the "white" racial identity. How it is a "negative construction" (defined by what it is not, instead of what it is) and the subsequent existential hollowness/fallacy of "whiteness" as a cultural identity and how this has resulted in the co-option of various native/ethnic elements and spirituality to fill the void. A must-read!
October 13, 2012
Philip J. Deloria underscores how American nationalist identity draws from American Indian identity by means of appropriation without acknowledging cultural and actual genocide of indigenous populations. Deloria's "Playing Indian" is important scholarship in understanding Americanness from a historical perspective.
Put differently, Deloria demonstrates how people like to dress up in feathers and moccasins without having a clue about the historic meanings behind the garb.
Put differently, Deloria demonstrates how people like to dress up in feathers and moccasins without having a clue about the historic meanings behind the garb.
February 16, 2017
A very interesting look at how white Americans have culturally appropriated Indianness in order to (attempt to) establish an identity. Anyone looking for a background on the boy scouts should read this. It's a bit eye opening.
February 2, 2020
An important book for US History teachers.
August 2, 2017
(4.5) A well-crafted account of how Americans have attempted to use "Indianness" to create a unique American identity, a process that as this book argues, is not yet finished, and potentially can't be. Each chapter examines a different period of American history and examines the way playing Indian shifted to make sense of newly developed contradictions in American identity, always coming back to Indians as the dichotomy of interior (often thought of as the noble-savage) vs. exterior (or the savage-savage). While most of the earlier periods are more focused on Americans, the last few chapters, particularly after WWII, has an intriguing development of the white actors embracing Indians' judgement in hopes of finding authenticity. At the time of the Red Power movement, this is particularly important, as Deloria describes the cultural power Indians had, as opposed to say military power, that they could use to gain social and political power during the Cold War.
There are many more things that can, and really should, be said about this impressive work, but I'll save those for the things I HAVE to write, rather than spending time on it here. Just know it's worth a read if you're interested in how many Americans have used both actual Indians and the idea of them in their attempts to understand themselves, without ever really forming an identity that isn't as contradictory as when they started.
There are many more things that can, and really should, be said about this impressive work, but I'll save those for the things I HAVE to write, rather than spending time on it here. Just know it's worth a read if you're interested in how many Americans have used both actual Indians and the idea of them in their attempts to understand themselves, without ever really forming an identity that isn't as contradictory as when they started.
January 3, 2022
I read this for an online course. It was an interesting book. I had no idea how often "white Americans" dressed up as Native Americans for various reasons throughout "American history." The author discusses the different interpretations he has as to why non-Native Americans have dressed up as Native Americans from before the colonies ever formed into on nation until the present day (at least until 1989, when the book was published). The basic premise of the book is that the United States is in the midst of a national identity crisis and until "we" can resolve our "issues" with the Indigenous People of the land, we will never have a full identity or an ending of our national identity crisis. We have to embrace the Indigenous People we have displaced over the growth and expansion of this nation as part of us, part of our collective identity and who we are as a nation, before we can ever hope to become "better" (on some level).
It held my interest throughout for the most part. I did start thumbing to the back to see how many pages I had left to read, so there is that. And it was a struggle to finish reading it even after we finished reading the required pages for the class. I felt that the author had some interesting interpretations even if I did not fully agree with everything he said. I am glad that I went ahead and took the time to finish reading it.
It held my interest throughout for the most part. I did start thumbing to the back to see how many pages I had left to read, so there is that. And it was a struggle to finish reading it even after we finished reading the required pages for the class. I felt that the author had some interesting interpretations even if I did not fully agree with everything he said. I am glad that I went ahead and took the time to finish reading it.
November 13, 2015
I wish I'd read this before I wrote "Race, Sacrifice, and Native Lands" -- Quoting DH Lawrence: "No place exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed." -- and Deloria argues that white American culture has defined itself as much in opposition to redness as blackness; has struggled between wanting to destroy and to assimilate Indians (4).
Deloria traces the history of the ways whites have engaged in what I would call "Indian cosplay" for various purposes, from the Boston Tea Party to Boy Scout and other movements (which had "playing Indian" as a central feature of what they did -- helped me understand some of my discomfort with Boy Scouts).
After WWII, there were groups of hobbyists who engaged Indian culture in various ways -- the "object hobbyists" who replicated old Indian artifacts and costumes as "authentically" as possible, but "were generally uninterested in dancing and singing with native people, seeing Indians in classic antimodern terms as exterior figures. Racially different and temporally separate, Indians were objects of desire, but only as they existed outside of American society and modernity itself" (135). What Deloria calls people hobbyists, on the other hand, "enjoyed the intercultural contact and boundary crossing they found at contemporary powwows. Emphasizing cultural boundary blurring, the people hobbyists constructed interior, us versions of the Indian other . . . unlike earlier groups, the people hobbyists had to reconcile their cultural imaginations with the real Indian people they wanted to see dancing next to them in the powwow circle" (135). Object hobbyists sought authenticity in the past and physical objects; people hobbyists sought authenticity through interaction with actual living Indians.
At the same time, many people hobbyists retained a cultural openness to Indians while maintaining racist stances toward other groups. They imagined that it was appropriate for Whites to imitate Indians but strange for others to do so, which was logical since "Americans had a long history of imagining and claiming an Indianness that was about being indigenous, free, white, and male" (146). At the same time, the high value whites placed on Indian culture may have helped Indians fortify their own identities in the face of federal pressure to urbanize. "As hobbyists fabricated Indianness in terms of authenticity, Indian people, in fact, 'became' more authentic"(147). "Hobbyists were simultaneously nonconformists and people who worked doubly hard to comply with two cultural codes" (147).
He describes the story of the Koshare scouts, who made costumes for the Zuni Shalako ceremony, which the Zunis protested. After seeing the costumes, however, the Zunis instead decided the costumes were authentic and real, took them back to Zuni, and built a special kiva for them. Thus the Koshares moved "beyond the simple reproduction of Indian material culture or the memetic production of new intercultural forms. the historian Jay Mechling argues that although the Boy Scouts of La Junta were were not Indians, they were also more than simple, straightforward white boys. After having their craft and the identity that accompanied it authenticated by the Zunis, the boys became something peculiarly new -- Koshare. And they could have arrived at this odd status only through a process of meaning-making that was collaborative and strikingly cross-cultural" (152).
"Playing Indian . . . has been constantly reimagined and acted out when Americans desire to have their cake and eat it too. Indians could be both civilized and indigenous. They could critique modernity and yet reap its benefits" (157).
The words of "Chief Seattle" were written by a white screenwriter from Texas, as part of a television script on pollution produced by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1972. The speech encoded Indians as valedictory/having gone away; implanted them as part of the American landscape. "Like the vanishing Indian plays of Jacksonian America, Seattle's words erased contemporary social realities and the complicated, often violent history of Indian land loss. Instead, all people were one, bound by a universal web of blood connections and their relations to the earth" (167).
"[Multiculturalism], placed in the context of a postmodernism that emphasized relativism and openness, it was easy to read cosmpolitan multiculturalism as a license for anyone to choose an ethnic identity -- Indian, for example -- regardless of family, history, or tribal recognition. When non-Indian New Age followers appropriated and altered a cosmopolitan understanding of Indianness, they laid bare a slow rebalancing away from the collective concerns with social justice that had emerged in the 1960s and toward the renewed focus on individual freedom that has characterized America since the 1980s" (173).
Examines phenomena of writers of texts of Native American wisdom (Ed McGaa, clarissa Pinkola Estes, etc.) "Readers of such texts then put the words into concrete forms, performing them through vision quest weekends and pipe ceremonies in National Forest hideaways, many of which carried the heady price tag that signified conspicuous bourgeois consumption. The tendency of New Age devotees to find in Indianness personal solutions to the question of living the good life meant that Indian Others were imagined in almost exclusively positive terms -- communitarian, environmentally wise, spiritually insightful. This happy multiculturalism blunted the edge of earlier calls for social change by focusing on pleasant cultural exchanges that erased the complex histories of Indians and others" (174).
"Whereas Sun Bear and Medicine Woman Lynn Andrews inhabited a cultural world easily shared by Indians and non-Indians, oppositional native people focused on social and political worlds, where the differences between the reservation, the urban ghetto, and the Beverly Hills Hotel, with its silky breezes and honeysuckle air, stood in stark relief. When they tried to force non-Indians to translate from the cosmopolitan language of open cultural meanings to the pluralist languages of power, struggle, and inequality" (177).
Deloria traces the history of the ways whites have engaged in what I would call "Indian cosplay" for various purposes, from the Boston Tea Party to Boy Scout and other movements (which had "playing Indian" as a central feature of what they did -- helped me understand some of my discomfort with Boy Scouts).
After WWII, there were groups of hobbyists who engaged Indian culture in various ways -- the "object hobbyists" who replicated old Indian artifacts and costumes as "authentically" as possible, but "were generally uninterested in dancing and singing with native people, seeing Indians in classic antimodern terms as exterior figures. Racially different and temporally separate, Indians were objects of desire, but only as they existed outside of American society and modernity itself" (135). What Deloria calls people hobbyists, on the other hand, "enjoyed the intercultural contact and boundary crossing they found at contemporary powwows. Emphasizing cultural boundary blurring, the people hobbyists constructed interior, us versions of the Indian other . . . unlike earlier groups, the people hobbyists had to reconcile their cultural imaginations with the real Indian people they wanted to see dancing next to them in the powwow circle" (135). Object hobbyists sought authenticity in the past and physical objects; people hobbyists sought authenticity through interaction with actual living Indians.
At the same time, many people hobbyists retained a cultural openness to Indians while maintaining racist stances toward other groups. They imagined that it was appropriate for Whites to imitate Indians but strange for others to do so, which was logical since "Americans had a long history of imagining and claiming an Indianness that was about being indigenous, free, white, and male" (146). At the same time, the high value whites placed on Indian culture may have helped Indians fortify their own identities in the face of federal pressure to urbanize. "As hobbyists fabricated Indianness in terms of authenticity, Indian people, in fact, 'became' more authentic"(147). "Hobbyists were simultaneously nonconformists and people who worked doubly hard to comply with two cultural codes" (147).
He describes the story of the Koshare scouts, who made costumes for the Zuni Shalako ceremony, which the Zunis protested. After seeing the costumes, however, the Zunis instead decided the costumes were authentic and real, took them back to Zuni, and built a special kiva for them. Thus the Koshares moved "beyond the simple reproduction of Indian material culture or the memetic production of new intercultural forms. the historian Jay Mechling argues that although the Boy Scouts of La Junta were were not Indians, they were also more than simple, straightforward white boys. After having their craft and the identity that accompanied it authenticated by the Zunis, the boys became something peculiarly new -- Koshare. And they could have arrived at this odd status only through a process of meaning-making that was collaborative and strikingly cross-cultural" (152).
"Playing Indian . . . has been constantly reimagined and acted out when Americans desire to have their cake and eat it too. Indians could be both civilized and indigenous. They could critique modernity and yet reap its benefits" (157).
The words of "Chief Seattle" were written by a white screenwriter from Texas, as part of a television script on pollution produced by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1972. The speech encoded Indians as valedictory/having gone away; implanted them as part of the American landscape. "Like the vanishing Indian plays of Jacksonian America, Seattle's words erased contemporary social realities and the complicated, often violent history of Indian land loss. Instead, all people were one, bound by a universal web of blood connections and their relations to the earth" (167).
"[Multiculturalism], placed in the context of a postmodernism that emphasized relativism and openness, it was easy to read cosmpolitan multiculturalism as a license for anyone to choose an ethnic identity -- Indian, for example -- regardless of family, history, or tribal recognition. When non-Indian New Age followers appropriated and altered a cosmopolitan understanding of Indianness, they laid bare a slow rebalancing away from the collective concerns with social justice that had emerged in the 1960s and toward the renewed focus on individual freedom that has characterized America since the 1980s" (173).
Examines phenomena of writers of texts of Native American wisdom (Ed McGaa, clarissa Pinkola Estes, etc.) "Readers of such texts then put the words into concrete forms, performing them through vision quest weekends and pipe ceremonies in National Forest hideaways, many of which carried the heady price tag that signified conspicuous bourgeois consumption. The tendency of New Age devotees to find in Indianness personal solutions to the question of living the good life meant that Indian Others were imagined in almost exclusively positive terms -- communitarian, environmentally wise, spiritually insightful. This happy multiculturalism blunted the edge of earlier calls for social change by focusing on pleasant cultural exchanges that erased the complex histories of Indians and others" (174).
"Whereas Sun Bear and Medicine Woman Lynn Andrews inhabited a cultural world easily shared by Indians and non-Indians, oppositional native people focused on social and political worlds, where the differences between the reservation, the urban ghetto, and the Beverly Hills Hotel, with its silky breezes and honeysuckle air, stood in stark relief. When they tried to force non-Indians to translate from the cosmopolitan language of open cultural meanings to the pluralist languages of power, struggle, and inequality" (177).
January 16, 2023
“Playing Indian, then, reflects one final paradox. The self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests on the ability to wield power against Indians - social, military, economic, and political - while simultaneously drawing power from them. Indianess may have existed primarily as a cultural artifact in American society, but it has helped create these other forms of power, which have then been turned back on Native people. The dispossessing of Indians exists in equal tension with being aboriginally true. The embracing of Indians exists in equal tensions with the freedom to become new. And the terms are interchangeable. Intricate relations between destruction and creativity - for both Indians and non Indian Americans - are themselves suspended in an uneasy alliance. And so while Indians have lived out a collection of historical nightmares in a material world, they have also long haunted a long night of American dreams. As many native people have observed, to be American to be unfinished. And although that state is powerful and creative, it carries with it nightmares all of its own.” Getting this tattooed on my bicep
April 23, 2024
A history of white people in America dressing up like Indians. It's not damning, for the most part, but trying to understand what people got out of doing it. Some periods covered in the book I didn't even know about. It does great framing of the Boston tea party, too. The book isn't about Indians very much, except where they interacted with the play-actors. Still, would have been good to have more insight about ideas popular among native people in the same periods.
Ultimately the thing the author rails against is post-modernism...which feels a little out of place. It's a little hard to grip sometimes, but is damn good for having started as a dissertation. It was written in the 90s but holds up really well.
Ultimately the thing the author rails against is post-modernism...which feels a little out of place. It's a little hard to grip sometimes, but is damn good for having started as a dissertation. It was written in the 90s but holds up really well.
October 4, 2017
It's very academic. I appreciate all the citations and sources, but would have liked more... how to say this? More stories. More examples or details about specific people and what they do and how they feel about white people playing at being Indian. Less of the large abstract ideas. I think the author has a lot of personal experience with this topic, but he only mentions it briefly in two footnotes. Let me know if anybody has suggestions for other books on this subject.
July 19, 2022
Playing Indian is a meticulously researched and well written book. It sheds light on the roots of white people “playing Indian” throughout history. It’s interesting and well crafted, but can be very dry, given its basis as an academic dissertation. It still didn’t answer all of my ponderings about the subject at hand, but it was informative.
July 28, 2022
I read this to understand pretendians and the fascination of white people to dress, act, become, Indian. It was the most recommended book and it did not fail. Warning: high academia vocabulary alert. It might suit to read in e-book with links to dictionary and the web.
March 6, 2024
Witty, thoughtful, provocative and enlightening. This book can and should direct all of us who call ourselves Americans into new inquiries about who we really are and how we got here. More importantly, perhaps, where do we go from here?
December 3, 2024
Wow! Deloria's research and presentation of how Indians have impacted and been represented throughout American History makes it a must read. This should be required reading for everyone who teaches History in the US.
March 3, 2025
Really important history and questions that need to be wrestled with, but incredibly difficult to read. The author often used overly complicated language that obscure his points rather than refine them.
February 4, 2019
This book is full of dense and rich information and analysis. Its thought provoking and will tug at your cultural perceptions.
August 29, 2021
A really interesting look at how white americans (even before it was America), dressed up and played as american indians
July 29, 2024
An incredibly insightful read and a must-read for anyone living in the US. It took me a LONG time to get through this book due to its density but I am so glad I persevered.
August 25, 2024
Fantastic book. As a mix of European and Native American ethnicity, a must read. Fantastic.
September 10, 2023
There were some interesting parts, but I found the book very repetitive. I started skipping large sections of the book to get to something new.
February 14, 2024
I think I got it? This book was very dense and I often got lost in it all but I am hoping that further discussions in class will aid in my understanding.
Definitely not what I was expecting, and I definitely learned a lot!
Definitely not what I was expecting, and I definitely learned a lot!
September 7, 2024
Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria is an eye opening piece of our history, I wish it focused more on certain time periods or people than covering such a broad range. This book is also more dry and academic than I was expecting it to be. It's almost tough to step back into that style while reading nonfiction.
February 23, 2019
Read for class, but I thought it could have been better written.
Full review here: https://charmainelimen.wordpress.com/...
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