Mediating Indianness - Softcover

Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of mediauincluding print, film, theatre, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoricuthat 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 oauthenticity.o From William oBuffalo Billo CodyAEs claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging otrue-to-lifeo scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows, to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMCAEs announcement that his songs tell his peopleAEs oown historyo and draw on their otrueo culture, mediaof 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. Contributors: Kimberly Blaeser, Ellen Cushman, Nicholle Dragone, Sonja Georgi, Jane Haladay, Gordon Henry, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Evelina Zuni Lucero, Ludmila Martanovschi, Sally McBeth, Molly McGlennen, Jesse Peters, Christine Plicht, John Purdy, Kerstin Schmidt, Billy J. Stratton, Gerald Vizenor, Cathy C. Waegner.

Cathy Covell Waegner taught in the English Department of the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in July 2013. Her current researchfocuses on constructions of Indigeneity.