LibGuides at USA: NAS 101: Native American Cultures: Representations, Misrepresentations, and Self-Representations

Web Sources

Americans (museum exhibit)
Americans highlights the ways in which American Indians have been part of the nation’s identity since before the country began. It will surround visitors with images, delve into the three stories, and invite them to begin a conversation about why this phenomenon exists. Pervasive, powerful, at times demeaning, the images, names, and stories reveal the deep connection between Americans and American Indians as well as how Indians have been embedded in unexpected ways in the history, pop culture, and identity of the United States.
After Columbus: Four-hundred Years of Native American Portraiture
This digital presentation draws upon an exhibition presented by the Library in 1994, Four Hundred Years of Native-American Portraits, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the Americas. Offering a selective view of the history of Native American portraiture, drawn exclusively from the Library's collections, it reprised an earlier Library exhibition held in the then-new landmark building on Fifth Avenue in 1912. In that same year the last of the contiguous United States territories achieved statehood, a political act that symbolically and literally closed the "frontier" phase of United States history.
Why the Myth of the "Savage Indian" Persists
Iconic children’s books and popular media that Gen Xers grew up with are riddled with damaging Native stereotypes—but things may finally be shifting.
Indians of the Midwest
The Indians of the Midwest project draws on the expertise of a large network of Native and non-Native scholars affiliated with the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. The Center was founded in 1972 to improve the quality of what is written about American Indian peoples.

Documentaries and Films

Unspoken: America's Native American Boarding Schools (PBS Documentary)
KUED takes a moving and insightful look into the history, operation, and legacy of the federal Indian Boarding School system, whose goal was total assimilation of Native Americans at the cost of stripping away Native culture, tradition, and language.
The Absence of Native American Power (Extended Interview with Sherman Alexie)
In an extended clip from an episode of Moyers & Company, writer Sherman Alexie, who was born on a Native American reservation, talks to Bill about feeling “lost and insignificant inside the larger culture,” and how his culture’s “lack of power” is illustrated in stereotypical sports mascots.
Reel Injun (Kanopy Documentary)
Hollywood has made over 4000 films about Native people; over 100 years of movies defining how Indians are seen by the world. This documentary takes an entertaining and insightful look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through the history of cinema.
Travelling through the heartland of America, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond looks at how the myth of "the Injun" has influenced the world's understanding - and misunderstanding - of Natives.
Foreigners in Their Own Land (Kanopy Documentary)
This documentary explores the period from 1565-1880, as the first Spanish explorers enter North America, the U.S. expands into territories in the Southwest that had been home to Native Americans and English and Spanish colonies, and as the Mexican-American War strips Mexico of half its territories by 1848.

Articles

Trademarking Racism: Pseudo-Indian Symbols and the Business of Professional Sports (AnthroNow article)
Pauline Turner Strong, professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores why sports teams continue to promote themselves with names, symbols, practices and paraphernalia that demean and degrade Native Americans. This article includes an excellent bibliography.
'Frozen in Time': The Impact of Native American Media Representations on Identity and Self-Understanding
In this article, the authors contend that the invisibility of Native Americans in the media undermines self-understanding by homogenizing Native American identity, creating narrow and limiting identity prototypes for Native Americans, and evoking deindividuation and self-stereotyping among contemporary Native Americans.
Probing the Paradoxes of Native Americans in Pop Culture (Article discussing the Smithsonian exhibit)
This article discusses a new exhibition at the Smithsonian, which picks apart the cultural mythologies surrounding the first “Americans.” More information about the exhibition can be found at https://nmai.si.edu/americans/.
Representations of Native Americans in Elementary School Social Studies
The way that we're taught about Native American culture and history in elementary school has a lasting impact on our perceptions. This article explores how instructional language influences how Native Americans are represented/misrepresented in the classroom.
“Run to the Hills?” – Representations of Native Americans in Heavy Metal (InVisible Culture Article)
This article discusses an incident involving American heavy metal band Mastodon, who designed a t-shirt featuring a violent and sexualized reimagining of the "First Thanksgiving." The authors uses this incident to analyze the representations of Native Americans in heavy metal music and traces these threads through other aspects of American culture.