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Title: Playing Indian by Philip Joseph Deloria ISBN: 0-300-08067-0 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.29 (7 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: American and Indian Identity Explored
Comment: Philip J. Deloria presents an interesting assessment of American identity as it relates to Indian identity. Yes, this is an important aspect of American identity in general because it shows how far American's perceptions of Native Americans have come since the establishment of American society during the eighteenth century. Deloria's Playing Indian is important scholarship in understanding Americanness from a historical perspective.
However, Deloria's book, once again, lacks the voices of Native Americans. Yes, there is mention of the controversial Tammany Society and their relations with Creek Indians, but where are the Creek voices? Deloria chooses to write from one perspective that does not completely reveal the complicated issue of Playing Indian. He attempts to clearly discuss how Indian identity has shaped the national identity of Americans, but some where in the fold where he discusses the interior and exterior Indian, he lost me. It only took a matter of re-readings to somewhat understand his point.
Nonetheless, the concluding chapters discuss the counterculture embracing Indianness as part of their identity. Deloria ties this aspect of American and Indian relations in order to show how Indianness brought a sense of unity as it pertained all races during the tumultous 1960s and early 1970s. This may have been the most significant part of the book that offers an inkling of how close Americans came to "coming together" communally with Indians, but Americans still did not fully grasp the reality of being Indian or fully welcoming Native American people within American society. Indeed, Indians still appear as the Other.
Rating: 1
Summary: boring and racist
Comment: Deloria uses the same tired stereotypes to describe relations between Indians and Whites that AIM and other Native activists have offered up for years. His sections on the use of Native spirituality by non-Natives is horribly racist and shows little understanding (or reading) of work in the field. The book plays strongly on feelings of white guilt and minority sympathy. Instead of working to build understanding and bridges bewteen cultures that have been bitterly divided by historical injustices and conflicts - in order to find a way to peaceably inhabit North America together - Deloria continues to inflame feelings of hatred and animosity. Further, the book is developed in a horribly dry and tedious manner, devoid of life or human - as opposed to sensational - feeling. For a better overview of Native/non-Native spirituality issues, read Stephen Buhner's One Spirit Many Peoples. Better perspectives on finding common ground between Indians and non-Indians can be found in the work of Chief Dan George, Ed MCGaa, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Black Elk, and Fools Crow. NOT recommended unless you are doing research or are forced to read it in a college class.
Rating: 1
Summary: What!
Comment: This book was required for me to read for my class. I found the book very dull and dry. It left you thirsty and quite annoyed. It took too, long for Deloria to say what he wanted to say. The book kept pulling you along and made you very tired and sleepy. It is an excellent book to read if you have trouble sleeping.
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Title: The White Man's Indian : Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present by Robert F. Berkhofer ISBN: 0394727940 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 12 February, 1979 List Price(USD): $13.60 |
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Title: Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film by Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor ISBN: 0813109523 Publisher: University Press of Kentucky Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination by Shari M. Huhndorf ISBN: 0801486955 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind by Roy Harvey Pearce ISBN: 080186996X Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art by James Clifford ISBN: 0674698436 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 1988 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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