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By Gregory McNamee
Playing Indian, by Philip J. Deloria (Yale University
Press). Cloth, $25.
FOLLOWING D. H. LAWRENCE'S observation that the American
character is essentially unformed and constantly under revision,
University of Colorado historian Philip Deloria, a Sioux, traces
the tendency, apparent since the arrival of the first colonists,
of Anglo Americans to appropriate Native American dress, customs,
and habits.
It was no accident, Deloria writes, that the perpetrators of
the Boston Tea Party donned Indian headdresses before sending
British cargo into the drink; they at once wanted to disguise
themselves and proclaim a kind of solidarity with the continent's
first inhabitants. "As England became a them for colonists,"
he writes, "Indians became an us." Reveling in
Indian dress allowed the New England Puritans to enjoy freedoms,
and even a certain licentiousness, that would not have been possible
in plainspun black tunics.
And the Puritans were not the only ones to seize on the possibilities
of this freedom, won at the same time that the people who inspired
it were enduring all manner of oppression: Indian societies were
deconstructed and imagined in American literature, in secret societies
like the Tammany and Cayuga Wolf all-white "tribes";
in the latter-day, Prescott-based Smoki fraternity; and in open
organizations like the Boy Scouts, whose American founder, Ernest
Thompson Seton, suspected real Indians of harboring "unpatriotic
sentiments."
Deloria turns up fascinating oddments, including the story of
one Colorado Boy Scout troop that went native to the point that
the national organization tried to reeducate them into again accepting
WASP norms. As Deloria notes, "the Boy Scouts of La Junta
were not Indians, but they were also more than simple, straightforward
white boys," youngsters who managed to reconstruct the secret
Shalako ceremony of the Zuni Indians so convincingly that Zuni
elders built a special kiva for the masks the scouts had made.
Deloria is less admiring of the hippies, Deadheads, and modern
New Agers who continue to appropriate elements of Native American
religion and culture today without understanding the consequences
of their actions. Even so, he concludes, "Americanness is
perhaps not so much the product of a collision between European
and Indian as it is a particular working-out of a desire to preserve
stability and truth while enjoying absolute, anarchic freedom."
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