playing indian deloria essay

Introduction▻ Vine Deloria, Jr. 1933– American Indian young adult and adult nonfiction writer and editor. Deloria is representative of a new breed of American Indian: well-educated and concerned for the plight of the Indian forced to live in a white man's system. In his writings, Deloria argues for the return of sacred grounds and an isolationist policy that would enable his people to function as a separate nation within the United States. A Standing Rock Sioux born and raised on a reservation, Deloria is particularly qualified to enlighten the public on the Indian's present status in our society. Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Deloria trained for a career as a minister. After receiving his degree in divinity from the Lutheran School of Theology, however, he realized a more effective means of serving the Indian's cause was through the legal system, and consequently earned a law degree from the University of Colorado. As executive director of the National Congress of American Indians in Washington, D.C., Deloria turned that nearly defuct organization into a forceful voice for the Indian tribes. Deloria has stated that his exposure to Western culture has served to reaffirm his childhood commitment to the traditional Indian way of life. The main premise of his writings is the need for an Indian cultural nationalism, as opposed to the intellectual assimilation of minorities advocated by the white establishment. Deloria approaches the issues from a religious and legal standpoint. He believes that Christianity is no longer practical, with its promise of heaven so remote from everyday life in an industrial society, and that the naturalism of Indian religion is the only hope for Western civilization. Deloria also believes the government should honor the various treaties made with the Indians concerning their lands. Despite the seriousness of his.
Philip J. Deloria. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii + 300 pp. .95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1344-1. Reviewed by Jim Buss (Department of History, Purdue University) Published on H-AmIndian (January, 2006) Philip Deloria opens his book Indians in Unexpected Places by describing a mid-twentieth century photograph depicting an Indian woman, dressed in a beaded buckskin dress, sitting under a salon hair dryer. He sees the image as more than a juxtaposition of white expectations that stereotype Indians as primitive and the technologies associated with modernity. Instead, the author reads a centuries-long colonial project into the picture. Deloria uses this opportunity to open a discussion about how Native Americans often refused to fulfill the expectations of non-Indians and established their own notion of Indianness that engaged the same forces of modernization that were making non-Indians reevaluate their own expectation of themselves and their society (p. 6). He focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where he sees Americans trying to steady anxieties brought about by modernity and coexist with a large indigenous population. Deloria uses his skills as a cultural historian to investigate the artifacts of cultural production--Indian participation in athletic events, Indian purchases of automobiles, Indian performance in early film, and the adaptation of native music by whites--often overlooked by American Indian studies scholars as locations where Indians and non-Indians participated in a historical process that restructured the meaning and expectations of Indianness. Deloria explores these themes in five essays that will appeal to a wide audience, including American Indian studies scholars and those interested in American history at the turn of the twentieth century. The first two chapters explore the.
Playing Indian is a 1998 book by Philip J. Deloria. In it, Deloria discusses the way in which white American men have adopted Indian traditions, images, and clothing, citing examples like the Boston Tea Party, the Improved Order of Red Men, Tammany Hall, Scouting, hippies, and New Agers.[1] Referring to D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, Deloria argues that white Americans used the idea of the Indian to create their own national identity, both identifying with Indians as liberated New World inhabitants and opposing them as a savage other. Disguise readily calls the notion of fixed identity into question, writes Deloria. At the same time, however, wearing a mask also makes one self-conscious of a real 'me' underneath. [2] The book is a reworking of Deloria's 1994 Yale doctoral dissertation.[3] Deloria refers to David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness, a similar book about the construction of the white race in opposition to black slaves;[4] his book has itself been compared to scholarly work on blackface[5] and to the work of Richard White.[3] References[edit] ^ Faragher, John (May 2000). Playing Indian. Pacific Historical Review 69 (2).  ^ Deloria, Philip J. (1998). Playing Indian. Yale University Press. p. 7.  ^ a b Iverson, Peter (December 1999). Playing Indian. The American Historical Review 104 (5).  ^ Halttunen, Karen (2008). A companion to American cultural history. John Wiley and Sons. p. 365.  ^ Melnick, Jeffrey (Fall 2000). Playing Indian. Radical Teacher (58): 31–32.  Retrieved from Categories: 1999 booksCultural appropriationNon-fiction books about Native AmericansYale University Press booksNative Americans in popular cultureUnited States history book stubs.
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Professor Philip Deloria -2014 PBK Visiting Scholar The Alpha of Oregon Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was honored to host Professor Philip J. Deloria as the 2014 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar at the University of Oregon May 14-15, 2014.  The recording of Professor Deloria’s Public Lecture, “American Indians in the American Popular Imagination” delivered on Wednesday, May 14 at 7:30pm in the EMU Ballroom can be found here. Biography: Philip Deloria is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor, with a joint appointment in the departments of History and American Culture.   He is currently the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, where he administers student academic support, learning communities, public goods, and a range of innovations programming, from faculty pedagogy workshops to massive open online courses.  He has served as president of the American Studies Association, as a council member of the Organization of American Historians, and as a trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places, and coeditor of The Blackwell Companion of American Indian History and C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions:  Dreams, Visions, Nature, and the Primitive by Vine Deloria Jr.  He has also written numerous articles, essays, and reviews in the fields of American Indian studies, environmental history, and cultural studies.  Visiting Scholar Agenda: Wednesday, May 14: 11:00am to Noon: PBK Undergraduate Lunch (RSVP Only) 1:00-1:50pm: Class Visit to English 222: Introduction to English Major (Professor Paul Peppis) 4:oo-5:20pm: Class Visit to History 469/569: Native Nations and the United States (Professor Jeff.