Ghost dancing in the salon: The Red Indian as a sign of white identity

Diogenes

Volumn 45, Issue 177, 1997, Pages 93-110

  Hatt, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547606984     PISSN: 03921921     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/039219219704517707     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Some of the material in this article is taken from "'To a Man, a Race, and a Cause: St. Gaudens and the Shaw Memorial,'" the Tomas Harris Lectures 1996, which I delivered at University College, London, in March of that year. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my profound thanks to Professor David Bindman and the History of Art Department at University College for inviting me to speak
2. One might object to the term 'Indian' on the grounds that it is racist; the more widely accepted, and more acceptable term, seems to be 'Native American.' However, I wonder if the latter really is an advance. The aboriginal peoples of North America only become Native Americans after a colonial power has named that land mass 'America' - and hence 'Native American' is complicit with the colonial appropriation of the country just as 'Indian' is. Moreover, the use of any homogenizing term, rather than the names of individual peopies, like Zuni or Cherokee, is a problematic gesture. The solution would have to be something unusably cumbersome like 'peoples of the geographical land mass that subsequently came to be America'! I therefore use Indian for two reasons: firstly, that the very difficulty of finding an acceptable term is a reminder of their status as a subject people of a colonial power, and, second, because Indian signifies the construction of the aboriginal in white discourse and the white imagination, and my topic here is actually the white representation of a native people
3. J. Durham, "Cowboys and...," Third Text, 12, Autumn, 1990, p. 7
4. D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography, New York, 1890, p. 253
5. F. S. Drake (ed.), The Indian Tribes of the United States, 2 Vols., Philadelphia, 1891, Vol 1., p. 11
6. H. J. Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity: the Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2:1, 1979
7. The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 36, No. 856, 21 May 1892, p. 122
8. H. Garland, "The Red Man as Material," Bookiover's Magazine, August 1903, p. 196
9. Quoted in W. E. Washburn, The American Indian and the United States: A Documentary History, 4 Vols., New York, 1973, Vol. 1, p. 435
10. G. Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke, 1988, pp. 275-6
11. Spivak, "Practical Politics of the Open End" in Sarah Harasym (ed.), The Post-Colonial Subject, London and New York, 1990, p. 108