Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination

Shari M. Huhndorf

Cornell University Press, Feb 15, 2001 - History - 220 pages

Since the 1800's, many European Americans have relied on Native Americans as models for their own national, racial, and gender identities. Displays of this impulse include world's fairs, fraternal organizations, and films such as Dances with Wolves. Shari M. Huhndorf uses cultural artifacts such as these to examine the phenomenon of "going native," showing its complex relations to social crises in the broader American society—including those posed by the rise of industrial capitalism, the completion of the military conquest of Native America, and feminist and civil rights activism.

Huhndorf looks at several modern cultural manifestations of the desire of European Americans to emulate Native Americans. Some are quite pervasive, as is clear from the continuing, if controversial, existence of fraternal organizations for young and old which rely upon "Indian" costumes and rituals. Another fascinating example is the process by which Arctic travelers "went Eskimo," as Huhndorf describes in her readings of Robert Flaherty's travel narrative, My Eskimo Friends, and his documentary film, Nanook of the North. Huhndorf asserts that European Americans' appropriation of Native identities is not a thing of the past, and she takes a skeptical look at the "tribes" beloved of New Age devotees.

Going Native shows how even seemingly harmless images of Native Americans can articulate and reinforce a range of power relations including slavery, patriarchy, and the continued oppression of Native Americans. Huhndorf reconsiders the cultural importance and political implications of the history of the impersonation of Indian identity in light of continuing debates over race, gender, and colonialism in American culture.

Contents

• If Only I Were an Indian: 1
• Imagining America Race Nation and Imperialism at the Turn of the Century: 19
• Nanook and His Contemporaries Traveling with the Eskimos 18971941: 79
• The Making of an Indian Forrest Carters Literary Inventions: 129
• Rites of Conquest Indian Captivities in the New Age: 162
• Rituals of Citizenship Going Native and Contemporary American Identity: 199
• BIBLIOGRAPHY: 203
• INDEX: 215

About the author

Shari M. Huhndorf is Professor of Native American Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture, both from Cornell, and the coeditor of Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination; Cornell paperbacks
• Author: Shari M. Huhndorf
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2001
• ISBN: 0801486955, 9780801486951
• Length: 220 pages
• Subjects: History / Indigenous Peoples in the Americas; History / United States / General; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Indigenous Peoples in the Americas; Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism; Political Science / Political Ideologies / Nationalism & Patriotism; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / Discrimination; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies; Social Science / Sociology / General