Description
Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media - including print, film, theatre, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric - that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of authenticity. From William Buffalo Bill Cody's claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging true-to-life scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows, to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC's announcement that his sons tell his people's own history and draw on their true culture, media of all types have served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. As it pulls apart stereotypes and assumptions about Indigenous identity and culture and strips away old concepts and ways of seeing and doing history, this vibrant collection points towards a dynamic future that recognizes Indigenous identities in a complex intersection of cultural influences. Contributors include: Kimberly Blaeser, Ellen Cushman, Nicholle Dragone, Sonja Georgi, Jane Haladay, Gordon Henry, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Evelina Zuni Lucero, Ludmila Martanovschi, Sally McBeth, Molly McGlennen, Jesse Peters, Christine Plicht, John Purdy, Kerstin Schmidt, Billy J. Stratton, Gerald Vizenor, Cathy C. Waegner Cathy Covell Waegner taught in the English Department of the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in July 2013. Her current research focuses on constructions of Indigeneity.