What is Geronimo doing sitting in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and challenge our outdated visions of Native America. Philip Deloria's revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things - singing opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood - explores this cultural discordance in ways that suggest new directions for American Indian history. Deloria chronicles how Indians came to represent themselves in Wild West shows, Hollywood films, sports, music, and even Indian people's use of the automobile - an ironic counterpoint to today's highways teeming with Dakota pickups and Cherokee sport utility vehicles. He also examines longstanding stereotypes of Indians as invariably violent, suggesting that, even as such views continued in American popular culture, they were also transformed by the violence at Wounded Knee. Throughout, Deloria reveals previously hidden narratives that force us to rethink familiar expectations. These ""secret histories,"" Deloria suggests, compel us to reconsider our own current expectations about what Indian people should be, how they should act, and even what they should look like. More important, he shows how such seemingly harmless (even if unconscious) expectations contribute to the racism and injustice that still haunt the experience of many Native American people today.

About the Author
Philip J. Deloria, of Dakota Sioux heritage, is professor of history and director of the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. He is author of Playing Indian and coeditor of the Blackwell Companion to Native American History.

Reviews
Deloria is as good a cultural historian as there is writing today. Here he takes what in lesser hands would be the ephemera of American Indian life and uses it to illuminate a whole world not apart from American society but locked in the heart of it. - Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West ""A provocative, intriguing, and fascinating book that demonstrates a new sophistication in cultural studies about identity and power, continuity and change, and authenticity and artifice."" - George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger ""Deloria's endpoint is to quiz stereotypes for their impact on ideological discourse, which he accomplishes with humor, grace, and depth. Highly recommended."" - Choice ""Subtle and complex, this fascinating, well-researched book will no doubt find its way into unexpected places of honor in American cultural studies."" - Santa Fe New Mexican ""An excellent book that reveals a secret history of Indian modernity too often obscured by our powerful wish to associate Indians with the traditional, the primitive, and 'the blanket.'"" - Werner Sollors, author of Neither Black Nor White Yet Both



Book Information
ISBN 9780700614592
Author Philip J. Deloria
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint University Press of Kansas
Publisher University Press of Kansas
Weight(grams) 425g