Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 56-57.
Abstract
In the second chapter of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion(1973), Vine Deloria Jr. notes the dominant culture's persistent consumption of either villianized or romanticized images of Native Americans present in disputed histories such as The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox (1971). In Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native Americans Since 1945, James J. Rawls writes for primarily non-Indian readers who accept images such as Chief Red Fox as authentic representations of Native America and, therefore, "who may have some difficulty accepting Indians as contemporary beings." Rawls intends to reveal the falsity of what scholars, following Deloria, have called "white man's Indians" and "pretend Indians" by presenting the history of twentieth-century Native America.
Rawls begins his first chapter with a synopsis of an Apache attack on white settlers in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Marauding Apaches and the additional popular stereotypes of Native Americans Rawls lists contrast with the real Native American participation in World War II at home and overseas. In the following chapters, Rawls reviews the history of removal, reservations, allotment, and the Collier era at the BIA to contextualize termination, relocation, and the subsequent drive towards self-determination. This exploration of federal law and pan-Indian attempts to be involved in the legal process benefits from the inclusion of Native American voices on both sides of the political debates. In his discussion, Rawls considers national news-making events, such as the occupations of Alcatraz, the BIA, and Wounded Knee, and less spectacular but equally important events such as the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo in 1970. The up-to-date analysis includes assessments of Reagan's disastrous administration and the Bush and Clinton presidencies.
In the final chapters, Rawls examines poverty, health, and education on reservations, and pan-Indian activism in the 1960s and 1970s. He explains battles over energy resources, economic autonomy, and repatriation, and surveys contemporary Native American religion. While the section on the Native American fine arts movement is thorough and informative, Rawls rushes through a list of authors in the chapter "Native American Voices." Despite the hasty treatment, a contrast emerges between N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn (1968) and the continued existence in 1990s popular culture of the racist "subhuman" and romanticized "superhuman" Native American. The persistence of these stereotypes, which Rawls attempts to invalidate in his study, is a telling indication of white culture's resistance to Native American self-definition.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln