Explores how American Indian artists have responded to the pervasive
misunderstanding of indigenous peoples as cultural minorities in the
United States and Canada
Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique
predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as
sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them
as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These
depictions of indigenous peoples as "Native Americans" complete the
broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world's immigrants and a
home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United
States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous
peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of
colonization.
Monika Siebert's Indians Playing Indian first identifies this
phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in
North American colonial history and in the political mandates of
multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary
indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of
indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in
Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the
political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural
incorporation.
Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of
contemporary indigenous art--museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine
art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction--and
explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall
multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of
indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum
of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma
Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela
Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and
novelist LeAnne Howe.
