Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive, - Hardcover

DILWORTH L

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9781560986416: Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive,

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560986417 ISBN 13: 9781560986416

Publisher: Smithsonian, 1996

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In Imagining Indians in the Southwest, Leah Dilworth examines the creation and enduring potency of the early twentieth-century myth of the primitive Indian. She shows how visions of Indians - created not only by tourism but also by anthropologists, collectors of Indian crafts, and modernist writers - have reflected white anxieties about such issues as the value of labor in an industrialized society, racial assimilation, and the perceived loss of cultural authenticity.
Dilworth explores diverse expressions of mainstream society's primitivist impulse - from the Fred Harvey Company's guided tours of Indian pueblos supposedly untouched by modern life to enthnographic descriptions of the Hopi Snake dance as alien and exotic. She shows how magazines touted the preindustrial simplicity of Indian artisanal occupations and how Mary Austin's 1923 book, The American Rhythm, urged poets to emulate the cadences of Native American song and dance.
Contending that Native Americans of the Southwest still are seen primarily as living relics, Dilworth describes the ways in which they have resisted cultural colonialism. She concludes with a consideration of two contemporary artists who, by infusing their works with history and complexity, are recasting the practices and politics of primitivism.

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About the Author:

Leah Dilworth is assistant professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.

From Library Journal:

With the advent of the railroads, Americans flocked to the Southwest. Visitors were fascinated by the Native cultures, particularly those of the Pueblos, seeing in their "primitive" societies values lost to the mainstream industrialized culture. Dilworth (English, Long Island Univ.) contends that tourists, collectors, and anthropologists alike re-created the image of the Native societies to conform to Euro-American primitivist ideals. In exploring this thesis, Dilworth evaluates turn-of-the-century descriptions of the Hopi Snake Dance and discusses the crucial role played by the Fred Harvey Company in exploitation of these cultures. Arguing that Native realities were marginalized by those who purported to describe them, the author includes a consideration of two contemporary artists, Pueblo poet and sculptor Nora Naranjo-Morse and Hopi photographer Victor Masayesva, who re-create the Native-white exchange from a Native point of view. This thoughtful study merits inclusion in most collections.?Mary B. Davis, Huntington Free Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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