Playing Indian.

• Author: Rolo, Mark Anthony
• Position: Review

Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria Yale University Press. 249 pages. $25.00.

Philip Deloria makes the extremely disturbing argument that appropriation of Native American customs is embedded in the white American psyche. Not since the 1970s bombshell Custer Died for Your Sins by the revered scholar Vine Deloria Jr., Philip's father, has there been a more compelling and startling work on Indian and white relations. Custer shattered longstanding stereotypes about Indians and ripped into federal policies designed to wipe out Native Americans through cultural assimilation. Now Philip Deloria brings his own critique of racial relations to the fore.

Though he lacks his father's literary flair, humor, and caustic tone, Deloria delivers--proving himself to be a serious and relentless researcher. Unlike other Indian Studies authors who offer a voyeuristic glimpse into another culture, Deloria engages white readers in an inclusive discussion on race and identity. That is very rare.

Americans have always looked to the Indians to help define a national identity, he argues. But this quest has proved elusive. What it means to be American is still in question. The reason, he argues, is because white America has never known how to deal with real Native Americans. Many colonists admired Native Americans for their freedom and their connection to the land. Yet American Indians also stood in the way of frontier expansion and land acquisition. The reality that colonization neither wiped Native Americans off the continent nor fully assimilated them into the Euro-American culture largely explains this identity dilemma.

"There was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Indians," writes Deloria. "At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained."

This contradiction explains some of the suffering Native Americans have experienced since white people came to this continent. Deloria writes, "Indianness was the bedrock for creative American identities, but it was also one of the foundations (slavery and gender relations being two others) for imagining and performing domination and power in America."

Playing Indian is a scrutinizing historical study of America's bizarre fascination with Indians. Deloria discusses D.H. Lawrence's 1924 work of literary criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature, where Lawrence observed that the American identity was "unfinished." Because Americans insisted on retaining their...