Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1992
Abstract
In a region as well mapped and paved as Kansas Indian studies, anyone promising better roads to improved understanding faces large obstacles. The author pledges himself to a "true picture" of certain Kansas Indians as "multidimensional human beings," one that shows how they "strategically utilized their syncretic cultures in order to survive in a hostile Kansas." If not obvious, the latter statement is conceptual garbage, while the story he tells is everything but multidimensional. On the contrary, what this author does is to impose on the historical record his own version of the currently popular, orthodox Indian Story: his "enduring Indians" are pruned, twisted, and decorated to fit the latest Noble Savage stereotype. Unwitting readers may well be bamboozled by the author's sanctimonious declarations; those with special knowledge of Kansas Indians will not have their thinking shaken at its roots.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 12:1 (Winter 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.