“It would be a folly,” Phillip Deloria writes, “to imagine that white Americans blissfully used Indianness to tangle with their ideological dilemmas while native people stood idly by, exerting no influence over the resulting Indian images. Throughout a long history of Indian play, native people have been present at the margins, insinuating their way into Euro-American discourse, often attempting to nudge notions of Indianness in directions they found useful.” Attending to Deloria’s call for a dynamic understanding of the way native cultural workers recognized and utilized dominant “Indian images,” this senior capstone course considers the relationship between the cultural politics of late 19th and 20th century American Indian literary practice and popular Western models of representing the figure of the “Indian” and the “West.” To this end we will think critically about dominant modes of representation, from literary and ethnographic “realism” to literary and performance based modes of “romance” (such as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show), as we consider the strategic ways native writers engaged such narratives in an effort to simultaneously capture their white reader’s imagination, while interrogating the cultural logics that enabled U.S. colonial expansion.

Primary readings most likely will include both “autobiographical” and “fictional” stories by writers such as Zitkala-Sa, Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, James Welch, and Thomas King. Secondary readings may include but not be limited to the work of Phillip Deloria, Vine Deloria, Jr., Gerald Vizenor, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Nancy Glazener, Richard Slotkin and Richard White.