Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 307 pages
• Published by: Duke University Press May 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0822335476
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0822335474
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Review
"[A] serious book that raises provocative questions. . . . [M]uch more interesting than the easy Thanksgiving fables we once embraced as fact."
--Barbara McMichael, The Olympian (also ran in Kitsap Sun,

"Other scholars have broached several of the topics Raibmon's book engages. . . . However, no one has ever before analyzed them so effectively in a single work and considered how these elements interacted with one another. Authentic Indians is a thought-provoking, original study well deserving attention from readers interested in understanding how colonialism served to shape images of Native peoples (many of which remain with us today) and the responses Northwest Coast peoples created to reject, ignore, or appropriate these depictions."
--Susan Neylan, H-Canada , H-Net Reviews

“The book’s great strength is its close attention to nuance. . . . The book is also noteworthy for its cross-border focus. . . . [H]opefully this highly original and authoritative study will encourage others to explore authenticity as a factor in native-newcomer relations elsewhere in the North American West.”
--Forrest D. Pass, Journal of the West

“Paige Raibmon has written an engaging assessment of how colonialism, anthropology, and tourism converged to facilitate Aboriginal and white manipulations of ‘authenticity’ along the Northwest coast in the late nineteenth century.”
--Lissa Wadewitz, Canadian Journal of History

“With Raibmon’s work authenticity joins tradition, the imaginary, academic models, and the practice of selective visibility, among others, as recognized devices deployed in the imposition of the mainstream’s views on Aboriginal peoples.”
--Bruce Granville Miller, American Historical Review

“Raibmon probes this multifaceted scene with careful attention to detail that provides depth. . . .What comes across clearly is her point that problems can have a life of their own, which in some cases can be long.”
--Olive Patricia Dickason, The International History Review

“Authentic Indians intelligently contextualizes a hot-button issue: what, exactly, is an ‘Indian’? . . . The issue of authenticity has long been with us, and it will not be going away anytime soon. Paige Raibmon’s book makes an important contribution to the discussion.”
--Brian W. Dippie, BC Studies



“Other scholars have broached several of the topics Raibmon’s book engages. . . . However, no one has ever before analyzed them so effectively in a single work and considered how these elements interacted with one another. Authentic Indians is a thought-provoking, original study well deserving attention from readers interested in understanding how colonialism served to shape images of Native peoples (many of which remain with us today) and the responses Northwest Coast peoples created to reject, ignore, or appropriate these depictions.”
--Susan Neylan, H-Canada, H-net Reviews



“Authentic Indians is a masterful work that carefully weaves together a complicated theoretical argument with a lively historical narrative. Raibmon paints a clear picture of cultural and economic power structures that ruled the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast. And, through an innovative reading of a diverse array of primary sources, she finds native voices and tells a story that features indigenous peoples as meaningful historical actors.”
--Colleen O’Neill, Labor

“Authentic Indians . . . is both based in academically sound research and is interesting to read. It should appeal not only to historians and other scholars with an interest in the Northwest Coast but also to members of the general public who have an interest in Native American history.”
--Daniel L. Boxberger, Oregon Historical Quarterly

‘[A] remarkable study. . . . Raibmon uncovers surprising forms of indigenous agency, power, and determination. Indeed, her ability to simultaneously analyze the deployment of colonial discourses with their reception and utilization by Native groups offers a comparative model for other colonial encounters.”
--Ned Blackhawk, American Quarterly

Product Description
In this innovative history, Paige Raibmon looks at the political ramifications of ideas about “real Indians.” Focusing on the Northwest Coast in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, she describes how government officials, missionaries, anthropologists, reformers, settlers, and tourists developed definitions of Indian authenticity based on such binaries as Indian versus White, traditional versus modern, and uncivilized versus civilized. They recognized as authentic only those expressions of “Indianness” that conformed to their limited definitions and reflected their sense of colonial legitimacy and racial superiority. Raibmon shows that Whites and Aboriginals were collaborators—albeit unequal ones—in the politics of authenticity. Non-Aboriginal people employed definitions of Indian culture that limited Aboriginal claims to resources, land, and sovereignty, while Aboriginals utilized those same definitions to access the social, political, and economic means necessary for their survival under colonialism.

Drawing on research in newspapers, magazines, agency and missionary records, memoirs, and diaries, Raibmon combines cultural and labor history. She looks at three historical episodes: the participation of a group of Kwakwaka’wakw from Vancouver in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the work of migrant Aboriginal laborers in the hop fields of Puget Sound; and the legal efforts of Tlingit artist Rudolph Walton to have his mixed-race step-children admitted to the white public school in Sitka, Alaska. Together these episodes reveal the consequences of outsiders’ attempts to define authentic Aboriginal culture. Raibmon argues that Aboriginal culture is much more than the reproduction of rituals; it also lies in the means by which Aboriginal people generate new and meaningful ways of identifying their place in a changing modern environment.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) (Hardcover) if you are going to read 1 book on Indians in the next year, read this one. the author may have written the 'best in world' discussion of how and by whom Indians are defined. probably the best book on the subject since "The White Man's Indian : Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present" by Robert F. Berkhofer