Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora's Transcultural Aesthetics
Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of “modern” Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora's work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.
The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians
"The Great Father" was widely praised when it appeared in two volumes in 1984 and was awarded the Ray Allen Billington Prize by the Organization of American Historians. This abridged one-volume edition follows the structure of the two-volume edition, eliminating only the footnotes and some of the detail. It is a comprehensive history of the relations between the U.S. government and the Indians. Covering the two centuries from the Revolutionary War to 1980, the book traces the development of American Indian policy and the growth of the bureaucracy created to implement that policy.
From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian
W HEN THOMAS JEFFERSON WROTE his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), he professed to draw heavily "on what I have seen of man, white, red, and black." Here, as elsewhere, Jefferson demonstrated a knack for phraseology: he was probably the first public spokesman to use the tricolor metaphor that has flourished, with minor rearrangement, ever since.' And now, with the historical profession's increasing attention to race and ethnicity, "red, white, and black" is enjoying a rhetorical boom. Attracted by the color trilogy's symmetry and symbolism, scholars have recently employed it in numerous book and article titles. Color terminology is as firmly fixed in writings on early America as it is in conversations about modern race relations.2 The tacit justification for using the chromatic metaphor in colonial and early national studies-apart from its ironic parody of "red, white, and blue"-is basically sound: Indians, Europeans, and Africans played central roles in early America, and the commonly accepted color labels are convenient and unambiguous, even though they exaggerate human complexions. Implicitly, if not explicitly, such usage further