Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI

by Dean Rader

From Sherman Alexie's films to the poetry and fiction of Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko to the paintings of Jaune Quick-To-See Smith and the sculpture of Edgar Heap of Birds, Native American movies, literature, and art have become increasingly influential, garnering critical praise and enjoying mainstream popularity. Recognizing that the time has come for a critical assessment of this exceptional artistic output and its significance to American Indian and American issues, Dean Rader offers the first interdisciplinary examination of how American Indian artists, filmmakers, and writers tell their own stories. Beginning with rarely seen photographs, documents, and paintings from the Alcatraz Occupation in 1969 and closing with an innovative reading of the National Museum of the American Indian, Rader initiates a conversation about how Native Americans have turned to artistic expression as a means of articulating cultural sovereignty, autonomy, and survival. Focusing on figures such as author/director Sherman Alexie (Flight, Face, and Smoke Signals), artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, director Chris Eyre (Skins), author Louise Erdrich (Jacklight, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse), sculptor Edgar Heap of Birds, novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, sculptor Allen Houser, filmmaker and actress Valerie Red Horse, and other writers including Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and David Treuer, Rader shows how these artists use aesthetic expression as a means of both engagement with and resistance to the dominant U.S. culture. Raising a constellation of new questions about Native cultural production, Rader greatly increases our understanding of what aesthetic modes of resistance can accomplish that legal or political actions cannot, as well as why Native peoples are turning to creative forms of resistance to assert deeply held ethical values.

297 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored thirteen books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Other titles include the poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and the anthologies Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence.

Rader writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, Ploughshares, Artforum, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where he co-authors a poetry column with Victoria Chang. In 2020, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. In 2022, he began the popular video series, "Poems that Changed Me."

His most recent collection of poems, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was named by Bookriot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. Rader’s writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the MacDowell Foundation, Art Omi, and The Headlands Center for the Arts. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and a professor at the University of San Francisco.

Reviews

[Karen deVries · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished teaching this book to undergrads in a course on Representations of Native Americans. Overall, it's excellent. My only beef with it is the short shrift Rader gives to Amy Lonetree and others in the last chapter on the National Museum of the American Indian. While I thoroughly understand and agree with Rader's portraya of the NMAI as an instance of "compositional resistance," his description of Lonetree et al's critiques under the rubric of "contextual resistance" largely misses their point which is that the Guns/Treaties/Bibles exhibit is too abstract to convey the story of mass genocide to the average museum visitor. Aside from that last chapter, however, I highly recommend.

[Kyle Aisteach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating intellectual examination of contemporary Native American semiotics and linguistic expression. Rader argues that the arts for the Native American are about engaging the dominant culture in dialogue about the oppression of Indigenous peoples, and he includes acts of resistance (such as the occupation of Alcatraz) as a sort of performance art fitting with this theme. Though admittedly not a book for the mainstream, Rader's ideas are engaging and this book is a good companion to most any curriculum in American Indian studies.

[Patricia Killelea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've read in such a long time. Rader's chapters devoted to Native American poetry are especially useful.