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Paul Chaat Smith is associate curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. He is the coauthor, with Robert Warrior, of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee.
From Publishers Weekly
In this acerbic collection of essays, Comanche cultural critic and
art curator Smith (Like a Hurricane) riffs on the romantic
stereotypes of Indian as “spiritual masters and first
environmentalists,” as tragic victims of technology and
civilization, as primal beings brimming with nomad authenticity,
their every artifact a gem of folk art. Such tropes, he complains,
hide the riotous complexity of the modern Indian experience, which
he visits in pieces that explore his grandfather's Christian
church, Sitting Bull's savvy manipulation of his media image (he
had an agent) and the author's own Comanche forebears, who were
both “world-class barbarians” and avid adopters of the white man's
gadgetry. These loose-limbed essays range all over the landscape,
from Hollywood westerns to the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee to
(somewhat obscurely) the contemporary Indian art scene. Smith
doesn't entirely square his view of Indians as “just plain folks”
with his advancing of a unique Indian cultural perspective, but his
keen, skeptical eye makes such ironies both amusing and
enlightening.
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