Description
Book SynopsisBy the 1890s, white Americans were avid consumers of American Indian cultures. At heavily scripted Wild West shows, Chautauquas, civic pageants, expositions, and fairs, American Indians were most often cast as victims, noble remnants of a vanishing...
Trade ReviewLucy Maddox describes the efforts of Native intellectuals to transform the public's conception of the Indian. She centers her discussion around the Society of American Indians (SAI), a group of diverse Native activists who held disparate views on how Indian people ought to accommodate and contest majority conceptualizations.... Some have contended that the SAI's efforts were futile, and they point to the dated stereotypes that remain embedded in American culture. To a considerable extent, Maddox disagrees with this argument in her excellent work.... Perhaps more important, Maddox adds in her conclusion, is the fact that American Indian thinkers of the Progressive era paved the way for their intellectual descendants' exploration and experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s.
-- Tim Alan Garrison * North Carolina Historical Review *
Maddox's book... demonstrates that Native Americans were actively engaged in trying to create a place for themselves as both Indians and Americans during the Progressive era, and in doing so she has filled in some... missing pages in our national textbook.
-- Steve Conn * American Historical Review *
