American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Together, the articles in this special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal offer a discussion of how Indigenous peoples have represented themselves and their communities in different periods and contexts, as well as through various media. Ranging across anthropology, art history, cartography, film studies, history, and literature, the authors examine how Native people negotiate with prominent images and ideas that represented Indians in the dominant culture and society in the United States and the Americas. These essays go beyond the problems of cultural appropriation by non-Indians to probe the myriad ways Native Americans and Indigenous people have challenged, reinforced, shifted, and overturned those representations.

This paper highlights works created by Indigenous cartographers throughout history and reflects on the ways in which they engage ideas of space, nation, territory, and relationships to land, as well as resist colonial occupation and epistemologies. In this sense, it also asserts the technological and theoretical interventions Indigenous cartographers have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the fields of cartography and geography. Lastly, this paper makes the argument that an increase in cartographic training in Indigenous communities is necessary in ongoing efforts to document indigenous histories and cultures, as well as efforts to strengthen tribal sovereignty and mobilize towards restorative justice.

“Idiot sticks” was a derogatory term used to describe miniature totem poles made as souvenirs for white tourists by the artists of the Kwakwaka'wakw people of British Columbia in the early twentieth century. Tracking the post-contact history of the Kwakwaka'wakw using a combination of historical accounts and interviews with contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw artists, this article explores the obscured subversive and satirical nature of these objects as a form of resistance to settler colonialism, and in doing so reconsiders who really could be considered the “idiot” in this exchange.

The New Deal represents a critical period in the development of American Indian art. Shifts in policy created opportunities for American Indians to study art, and New Deal commissions for murals in post offices and other public spaces enabled artists to develop skills, establish their reputations, and make a living. American Indian artists also faced challenges in the form of dominant expectations for Native art and paternalism from officials and administrators. The benefits of New Deal commissions and the struggles with their limitations nonetheless formed a foundation for subsequent generations of Native artists who claimed more control over their art.

This article explores the careers and political activism of Native opera singers in the Southwest of the 1920s. I argue that a number of talented Native artists recognized that engaging their audiences directly in live performances provided opportunities for public education in addition to their economic benefits. Partnering with regional boosters, they built careers performing in multiple pageants and events sponsored by municipalities across the Southwest. Live performance with its direct access to audiences also facilitated their political agendas of publicizing Indigenous histories. Their careers highlight the mobility of Indigenous people, demonstrating how they helped create modern urban spaces across the American Southwest.

Nipo Strongheart's role in the DeMille production of Braveheart enables us to see the Native American performers of his generation as actors, in multiple senses of the word, not as mere objects of the cinematic gaze. Like other “contact zones” where Indigenous intellectuals and performers engage with non-Indigenous audiences and expectations, Native agency was exercised in the movie industry as well. This article demonstrates that even as they forged careers and identities in studio Hollywood, professionals such as Strongheart would negotiate the terms of Native representation and attempt to disrupt the dominant discourse.

The majority of scholarship regarding Native Americans and film has focused on the images of Native Americans as constructed by non-Native filmmakers, but how might we better understand the careers of Native people working as actors in studio Hollywood? I propose studying film publicity material to find traces of the labor and negotiations performed by Native actors as they constructed and maintained their personas. Examining both the construction of studio publicity and analyzing the content of publicity regarding Chief Many Treaties (Blackfeet actor William Hazlett), Chief Yowlachie (Yakama actor Daniel Simmons), Chief Big Tree (Seneca actor Isaac Johnny John); and Chief Rolling Cloud (Muscogee [Creek] actor Charles Brunner), I reveal how publicity material can contextualize actors' experiences and suggest ways that these Native performers used their personas to critique and influence their presences onscreen.

Through analysis of two debut novels, Linda Hogan's Pulitzer-Prize-nominated murdermystery Mean Spirit 1990 and Tom Holm's private eye detective story The Osage Rose 2008, this article considers what Native-authored mystery fiction has to offer in terms of self-representation of Indigenous history and culture. Paying particular attention to detective fiction genre elements—such as the novels' openings, the detectives, the forms of detection, and the resolution—shows how Hogan and Holm employ the mystery genre to present Native narratives about the Osage oil murders, and, given their ability to reach wide audiences, how such narratives ultimately provide broader understandings of Indigenous history and culture.

The 1961 independent film The Exiles is remarkable for many reasons. Nonprofessional Native actors played themselves, created their own dialogue, and developed the storyline, for example, and the film positions itself as documentary and ethnography in ways that validate these Native interventions. Although The Exiles is fundamentally a portrait of American Indian life in Los Angeles, readings from film and urban studies primarily focus on filmmaking technique. As a result of this critical focus, the film's significance in regard to the cultural agency and urban history of Native peoples becomes secondary, and urban Natives are erroneously depicted as anomalous as well. Looking closely at Yvonne Williams, the female Native protagonist, I find that the film embodies Native American survivance through capturing an urban experience that was controlled by Native people more than any other filmic representation up to that point. This article argues for the tremendous import of The Exiles by highlighting the ways in which it challenges expectations of modern Indian people.

Established in 2006, the Chickasaw Press is the first tribally owned and operated publishing house in the United States. This article recounts the history of this innovative Indigenous enterprise, explores its decolonized practices and publications, and connects the press to national initiatives for American Indian cultural revitalization. In doing so, I reveal how the press serves as an active agent in the movement for Indigenous cultural and intellectual sovereignty and showcase how this outlet brings together traditional knowledge and cutting-edge technologies to decenter colonial narratives about the Chickasaw people and, thus, to reinstate Chickasaw tribal knowledge and perspectives.