Mediating Indianness

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 songs 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.