Staging Indigeneity - by Katrina Phillips (Paperback)

About the Book

"As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. From the Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show in Pendleton, Oregon, to outdoor dramas like 'Tecumseh!' in Chillicothe, Ohio, and 'Unto These Hills' in Cherokee, North Carolina, locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, this incisive book reveals how they constituted what Katrina Phillips calls 'salvage tourism' - a set of practices paralleling so-called salvage ethnography, which documented the histories, languages, and cultures of Indigenous people while reinforcing a belief that Native American societies were inevitably disappearing"--

Book Synopsis

As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. From the Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show in Pendleton, Oregon, to outdoor dramas like Tecumseh! in Chillicothe, Ohio, and Unto These Hills in Cherokee, North Carolina, locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, this incisive book reveals how they constituted what Katrina Phillips calls "salvage tourism"--a set of practices paralleling so-called salvage ethnography, which documented the histories, languages, and cultures of Indigenous people while reinforcing a belief that Native American societies were inevitably disappearing.

Across time, Phillips argues, tourism, nostalgia, and authenticity converge in the creation of salvage tourism, which blends tourism and history, contestations over citizenship, identity, belonging, and the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development.

Review Quotes

"A compelling story of how Native American history is quite literally staged, why its staging persists as a tourist attraction across the United States, and what the complex conditions for its production and performance were and are."--American Indian Quarterly

"A powerful demonstration of the importance of Indian pageants in the historical and continued commodification of Indians and Indianness by white America for economic benefit. . . . [R]elevant and timely. . . . Staging Indigeneity is not just for Native American and Indigenous performance studies scholars interested in the construction of Indigeneity through performance but for anyone interested in US American identities. Phillips has provided a great example of how to uphold Native sovereignty and explore Indigenous identity within the confines of settler-colonial cultural productions and performances."--Theatre History

"An excellent study of conquest or settler tourism. . . . I learned a great deal from reading this book."--American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"Nuanced. . . . [Phillips] situates the dramas she has come to watch in the context of each town's economic ambitions and its fraught history with Indigenous people."--Journal of American History

"Phillips deftly demonstrates how tourism based on loose interpretations of historical events both builds cultural memory and elides concrete classification into categories like 'authentic' or 'exploitative'."--Western Historical Quarterly

"Phillips's excellent book forces us to consider how we depict our history--who creates it, who controls it, and for what purposes. . . . In an age when some Americans are calling for us to sanitize our history--to revere and celebrate it rather than to think critically about it--[Staging Indigeneity] could not be more appropriate, useful, or relevant."--Journal of American Ethnic History

"This is an important study about 'playing Indian' and the complexities of American Indian identity."--CHOICE

"This is an important study about "playing Indian" and the complexities of American Indian identity."--CHOICE

"Thoroughly researched and well-written. . . . Phillips rejects simple narratives and, instead . . . brings a nuanced understanding of these varied motivations as well as the shifting meanings that the pageants hold for American Indians over time."--North Carolina Historical Review