Week 9 - Letter to Mr. Deloria

Dear Mr. Deloria, 

I found your description of how white American society has been constantly shifting between positive and negative portrayals of American Indian identity in your book “Playing Indian” to be very enlightening, and it made me think more broadly about American society as a whole.  Specifically, how white American society adopts and champions Other identities only when they view it as beneficial to themselves.  This selective desirability has persisted since the Boston Tea Party and continues to be problematic in our society today.  

Picking and choosing only certain elements of a group’s identity as desirable is not only hypocritical, but it is unfair.  This white American practice of cultural appropriation extends across ethnic backgrounds.  A white colonist can dress up as an Indian to (very ironically) feel a surge of freedom one day, but he can take off this costume and violently force the real American Indians off their land in the next.  Similarly, a white man in blackface can entertain certain elements of being black while safely maintaining his sense of white superiority.  You exemplified this hypocrisy well in your examination of the concepts of the “noble savage” as well as the degree of Otherness.  White American society picks when it is beneficial to be like the Other and when (as it is most of the time) it is deemed not.  Our founding fathers praised and adopted American Indian values when it was convenient for their patriotic efforts, yet they would immediately turn around to discard and abuse this culture when it was no longer of benefit.  

Not only was adopting “Indianness” a large part of the foundation of the American identity, but it was the foundation for the cultural appropriation by white America that would persist for centuries to come.  I am very curious in learning more about how this persistence of cultural appropriation interacts with notions of white supremacy in modern society.  I want to continue to explore and understand how cultural appropriation has acted and continues to act in relation with other identities.  White colonists played Indian and their descendants would continue to do so for generations to come, and I am curious to explore to what extent this influences our present as well as how aware we are of this phenomenon.

Sincerely,

Christine

Comments

  1. Anna GreeneMay 28, 2018 at 10:15 PM

    I too found the book Playing Indian very enlightening. From my understanding the theme Deloria emphasized throughout was that the idea of a white society that selectively desires “Indianness” is most importantly predicated on the fact that white society aka white America is simply and completely impossible without Indianness. More than a foundational component of white American identity of establishing a self distinct from England – a distinct self that would not have been even imaginable without Indians as a means of becoming native to the United States – I think that viewing the way white Americans have appropriated, twisted, and used the idea of Indians must not be understood as auxiliary or outside of the essential truth that was and is the core identity of white America. Indianness lays at the heart of American uniqueness in the Revolutionary time, and conceptualizing white society as anything but a society of white people that could not exist in identity without the ambiguous double identity of insider and outsider and noble and savage of Indians would be to view whiteness in America as something potentially independent of constant racial otherness.

    If I was to answer some of the questions you have posed for myself, I would turn to the idea proposed by Deloria that the United States is an unfinished liminality, even today. It seems to me that white America has been in constant existential crises about its identity and nativeness to this land. I think personally this sentiment could be found today in a lot of anxieties and obsessions of white people holding onto a “way of life” or “classic/true America”. When there is nothing real other than racism to hold onto, the prospect of facing that is frightening so white Americans buckle down on what they are good at: racism and xenophobia. I would also point to current debates right here at Stanford – everything on campus named “Serra” is after Junipero Serra, a Spaniard who perpetrated mass genocide of native peoples here in California. Native people on campus have been urging administration to change the names for years and yet Stanford has completely ignored them and the history of Native-erasure on campus.

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