San Antonio College Library

"Chronicling milestones in the relationship between Indians and the media, some of the chapters employ a historical perspective, and other focus on contemporary practices and new technologies. All foreground American Indian perspectives missing in other books on mass communication. Particularly valuable are the essays highlighting authentic tribal voices in current and future media. The author chronicles the formation of the Native American Journalists...

"Leading national and international critics of Native literature and culture examine images in a wide range of media from a variety of perspectives to show how depictions and distortions have reflected and shaped cross-cultural exchanges from the arrival of Europeans to today. Focusing on issues of translation, European and American perceptions of land and landscape, teaching approaches, and transatlantic encounters, the authors explore problems of...

A collection of essays consider the selling of American Indian culture and how it affects the Native community, showing how appropriation of American Indian cultures have been persistent practices of American society over the last century, constituting a form of cultural imperialism that could contribute to the destruction of American Indian culture and identity.

An Ihanktonwan-Sicangu Sioux, explaining why he enjoyed his years spent performing in Wild West shows, remarked: "It gave me a chance to get back on a horse and act it out again." Between the 1880s and the 1930s Show Indians depicted their warfare with whites and portrayed scenes from their culture in productions that traveled throughout the United States and Europe and drew huge audiences - well over a million people in 1885 alone. Were they simply...

Publisher description: Americans' first attempts to forge a national identity coincided with the apparent need to define--and limit--the status and rights of Native Americans. During these early decades of the nineteenth century, the image of the "Indian" circulated throughout popular culture--in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, plays about Pocahontas, Indian captivity narratives, Black Hawk's autobiography, and visitors' guides to the national...

Answers questions about Native Americans, including those related to identity, origins and history, animals and land, language and education, love and marriage, and culture.

"This history tells the story of an idea, "The Southwest," through the development of American anthropology and archaeology. For eighty years following the end of the Mexican-American War, anthropology more than any other discipline described the people, culture, and land of the American Southwest to cultural tastemakers and consumers on the East Coast. Digging deeply into primary public and private historical records, the author uses biographical...

"Human zoos, forgotten symbols of the colonial era, have been totally repressed in our collective memory. In these 'anthropo-zoological' exhibitions, 'exotic' individuals were placed alongside wild beasts and presented behind bars or in enclosures. Human zoos were a key factor, however, in the progressive shift in the West from scientific to popular racism. Beginning with the early nineteenth-century European exhibition of the Hottentot Venus, this...