Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, 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 contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. 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 has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, “the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences,” said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.
ContentsPrefacePart One. Transethnicity/Transculturality and Protest in Historical ContextsBilly J. Stratton, “You Have Liberty to Return to Your Own Country”: Tecumseh, Myth, and the Rhetoric of Native SovereigntySonja Georgi, “IndiVisible” Identities: Mediating Native American and African American Encounters and Transethnic Identity in A Thrilling Sketch of the Life of Okah TubbeeCathy Covell Waegner, “Buffalo Bill Takes a Scalp”: Mediated Transculturality on Both Sides of the Atlantic with William F. Cody’s Wild West, from Show to Hollywood and YouTubeA. Robert Lee, Native Postmodern? Remediating History in the Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and D. L. BirchfieldA. Robert Lee, Flight Times in Gerald Vizenor’s Blue Ravens: White Earth Mediating HistoryPart Two. (Trans)media Literacy, Youth Cultures, and NationEllen Cushman, ᏣᎳᎩ ᏗᎪᏪᎵ Cherokee Writing: Mediating Traditions, Codifying NationChris LaLonde, “We Can Tell Our Own History, We Can Tell Our Own Future”: Quese IMC, Culture Shock Camp, and an Indigenous Hip-Hop MovementChristine Plicht, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man Revisited: Still Thwarting All Cultural and Cinematic Notions of AlterityLudmila Martanovschi, Mediating the Native Gaze: The American Indian Youth’s Cinematic Presence in Chris Eyre’s FilmsKimberly Blaeser, Refraction and Helio-tropes: Native Photography and Visions of LightInterludeEvelina Zuni Lucero, RefleXions: A Creative EssayJane Haladay, Festa de Sant Joan: June 23, 2012, Barcelona, SpainPart Three. Performance, Gender, and Cultural CapitalSally McBeth, “The Bear Is Our Protector”: Metaphor and Mediation in the Northern Ute (Nuche) Bear DanceNicholle Dragone, Eric Gansworth’s Theatrical Productions: “Indianness” Mediated through the Juxtaposition of Cultural Capital and PerformanceJohn Purdy, Eric Gansworth’s Re-Creation Story: Mediation and RemediationKerstin Schmidt, Mobile Indians: Capitalism, the Performance of Mobility, and the Mediation of Place in Minda Martin’s Documentary Free LandPart Four. “Crow Commons”: Creative Correspondences and Virtual AffiliationsKimberly Blaeser, Jane Haladay, Gordon Henry Jr., Molly McGlennen, and Jesse Peters, An Exposition of Virtual ExchangesGerald Vizenor, Envoy: Response to “Crow Commons”Notes on Contributors
