Review of The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions & Government Policies and Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy

Authors

Paul A. Olson, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

1992

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 12:3 (Summer 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Both of these books concern the force of myth. James Clifton's The Invented Indian, a book put together by Clifton with sixteen other authors, represents an account of the collaboration between Native Americans and whitesanthropologists, poets, do-gooders, and government policymakers-to create a stereotypical "Indian" and an equally stereotypical history of Indians. The stereotypes are conveyed as "facts" in school texts, the media, and "scholarship," i.e., that perhaps hundreds of millions of Indians lived in America when Columbus came, that Pocahontas saved the Virginians and Squanto the Pilgrims, that the United States Constitution derives from the Iroquois, that Indians worshipped Mother Earth, that Indian "primal" religion reveals the secrets of healing, that Carlos Casteneda's stories about Don Juan are true, and so forth.