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Author Maddox, Lucy

Title Citizen Indians : Native American intellectuals, race, and reform / Lucy Maddox
Published Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, ©2005

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Description 1 online resource (205 pages)
Contents Introduction: going public -- A mighty drama : the politics of performance -- General principles and universal interests : the politics of reform -- For the good of the Indian race : the reform of politics -- The progressive road of life : writing and reform -- Conclusion: a present and a future
Summary By the 1890s, white Americans were avid consumers of American Indian cultures. At heavily scripted Wild West shows, Chautauquas, civic pageants, expositions, and fairs, American Indians were most often cast as victims, noble remnants of a vanishing race, or docile candidates for complete assimilation. However, as Lucy Maddox demonstrates in Citizen Indians, some prominent Indian intellectuals of the era-including Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Eastman, and Arthur C. Parker-were able to adapt and reshape the forms of public performance as one means of entering the national conversation and as a core strategy in the pan-tribal reform efforts that paralleled other Progressive-era reform movements.Maddox examines the work of American Indian intellectuals and reformers in the context of the Society of American Indians, which brought together educated, professional Indians in a period when the "Indian question" loomed large. These thinkers belonged to the first generation of middle-class American Indians more concerned with racial categories and civil rights than with the status of individual tribes. They confronted acute crises: the imposition of land allotments, the abrogation of the treaty process, the removal of Indian children to boarding schools, and the continuing denial of birthright citizenship to Indians that maintained their status as wards of the state. By adapting forms of public discourse and performance already familiar to white audiences, Maddox argues, American Indian reformers could more effectively pursue self-representation and political autonomy
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Indians of North America -- Politics and government.
Indians of North America -- Intellectual life
Indians of North America -- Government relations.
Indians, Treatment of -- North America -- History
Indian activists -- North America -- History
Indians in literature.
Social problems -- United States -- History
HISTORY -- Native American.
Indian activists
Indians in literature
Indians of North America -- Government relations
Indians of North America -- Intellectual life
Indians of North America -- Politics and government
Indians, Treatment of
Politics and government
Race relations
Social policy
Social problems
SUBJECT United States -- Social policy. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140547
United States -- Race relations. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140494
United States -- Politics and government. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140410
Subject North America
United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501728396
1501728393