Description

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Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric—that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of “authenticity.” From William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging “true-to-life” scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC’s announcement that his songs tell his people’s “own history” and draw on their “true” culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, “the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences,” said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.

About the Author

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Cathy Covell Waegner taught American Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in 2013.

Praise For…

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“Mediating Indianness offers a cornucopia of voices proclaiming that Native American identity is alive, expressive, and still under construction. . . . Standing behind the volume, visible here and there in shadowy form, sometimes stepping out into the light, is the archetypal figure of the writer and activist Gerald Vizenor.”
—Paul Spickard, author of Almost All Aliens and Multiple Identities


This volume is as crucial as it is timely, and it is precise in its fusion of historical research with astute descriptions of contemporary Native American life.
—Mita Banerjee, Director, Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany

Theoretically sophisticated, the assembled essays create a veritable palimpsest of readings by Native scholars, European experts, and creative artists.
—John Wharton Lowe, Barbara Lester Methvin Distinguished Professor, University of Georgia

Mediating Indianness is an exemplary project arising from a fruitful international dialogue at the current intersections of ethnic and media studies.
—Klaus Zilles, Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations, Barcelona, Spain

I was struck by how flexible and alive this collection was, purposely unsticking, unsealing so many working assumptions about Native identity and culture.
—Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness

Mediating Indianness offers a cornucopia of voices proclaiming that Native American identity is alive, expressive, and still under construction. . . . Standing behind the volume, visible here and there in shadowy form, sometimes stepping out into the light, is the archetypal figure of the writer and activist Gerald Vizenor.
—Paul Spickard, author of Almost All Aliens and Multiple Identities