Citizen Indians
By the 1890s, white Americans were avid consumers of American Indian
cultures. At heavily scripted Wild West shows, Chautauquas, civic
pageants, expositions, and fairs, American Indians were most often cast
as victims, noble remnants of a vanishing race, or docile candidates for
complete assimilation. However, as Lucy Maddox demonstrates in Citizen
Indians, some prominent Indian intellectuals of the era―including
Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Eastman, and Arthur C. Parker―were able to
adapt and reshape the forms of public performance as one means of
entering the national conversation and as a core strategy in the
pan-tribal reform efforts that paralleled other Progressive-era reform
movements. Maddox examines the work of American Indian intellectuals and
reformers in the context of the Society of American Indians, which
brought together educated, professional Indians in a period when the
"Indian question" loomed large. These thinkers belonged to the first
generation of middle-class American Indians more concerned with racial
categories and civil rights than with the status of individual tribes.
They confronted acute crises: the imposition of land allotments, the
abrogation of the treaty process, the removal of Indian children to
boarding schools, and the continuing denial of birthright citizenship to
Indians that maintained their status as wards of the state. By adapting
forms of public discourse and performance already familiar to white
audiences, Maddox argues, American Indian reformers could more
effectively pursue self-representation and political autonomy.
From the Back Cover
"Lucy Maddoxs Citizen Indians brings to life the active
work done by Native American intellectuals on behalf of uplift,
progressive reform, of universally conceived Indian rights as well as
specific tribal concerns. Focusing on the Society of American Indians
(SAI) and a broad range of figures including Chief Simon Pokagon, Daniel
La France, Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear, Maddox redraws
American intellectual history of the period that witnessed widespread
discussions of the Indian problem and of assimilation as well as the
quest for cultural and political sovereignty."Werner Sollors, Harvard
University
"A brilliant account of the issues and constraints
confronting the first generation of modern pan-Indian intellectuals,
Citizen Indians stands at the forefront of a long-overdue reassessment
of the cultural productions and political efforts of Native people
during the first half of the twentieth century. Unraveling the complex
dynamics underpinning Indian performances, Lucy Maddox places Native
people at the center of a national conversation, forcing readers to
reconsider familiar histories of race and politics in the United
States."Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan
"Citizen
Indians is a highly sophisticated book about American Indian
intellectuals in the Progressive Era. Lucy Maddox presents a complete,
informed study of American Indian writers of the period and the social
and political contexts in which they did their work. Maddox writes well,
has done very careful and painstaking research, and is effective in
making the case she does for understanding the complexities and
particularities of Native America and Native American writers of the
turn of the twentieth century."Robert Warrior, University of Oklahoma
"Citizen
Indians is a major contribution to our understanding of how American
Indian intellectuals turned stereotypes and political subjugation to
their own purpose, promoting autonomy through reform and redefining the
grounds for their participation in the nations social and cultural
life."Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature, UCLA
"In
this engaging and well-written account of the rise of a certain kind of
Indian public intellectual in the United States at the turn of the
twentieth century, Lucy Maddox shows how a fundamental dilemma of
political representation inspired creative solutions and a powerful
social and political critique. The efforts of Indian intellectuals and
activists to fashion a critical voice as well as a politics of race and
reform framed in their own terms remain controversial to this day.
Maddox documents those efforts and shows how the pressure of Native
critiqueand the anxiety it generated in Anglo cultureshaped both the
Indian reform movement and the culture that had sought to absorb
it."Priscilla Wald, Duke University
think
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
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