Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:1 (Winter 2011).
Abstract
In his recent collection of essays, associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian Paul Chaat Smith argues for a reorientation of knowledge about Indian peoples. The essays, all previously published, are sometimes autobiographical, sometimes humorous, and range in topic from Ishi to the Alcatraz occupation. In "The Big Movie," for example, Smith takes on films that feature Indians, from the first moving picture made by Thomas Edison in 1894, Sioux Ghost Dance, to The Searchers, Last of the Mohicans, and Dances with Wolves. Indians, Smith writes, have become "a kind of national mascot." These films, particularly Westerns, are a part of the American master narrative-and, well, they never tell the "real" story.
Smith often focuses his essays on central questions. In a piece called "Luna Remembers," about artist James Luna, for instance, he asks, ''Are Indian people allowed to change? Are we allowed to invent completely new ways of being Indian that have no connection to previous ways we have lived?" Smith writes, "In North America the ideological prison that confines Indian agency has unique features. We have never been simply ignored, or simply romanticized, or been merely the targets of assimilation or genocide. It is rather all these things and many more, often at the same time in different places." In this essay and others, Smith questions the static image of Indian peoples and argues not only for the "real" story but also for a conceptualization of modern Indians that emphasizes agency and adaption-both politically and technologically.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.