Indians playing Indian : multiculturalism and contemporary indigenous art in North America

Summary: "In Indians Playing Indian, Monika Siebert explores the appropriation, or misappropriation, of Native American cultural heritage for political and commercial ends, and the innovative ways in which indigenous artists in a range of media have responded to these developments. Contemporary indigenous people in North America confront a unique predicament. As legal and diplomatic practice in the early twenty first century returns to the recognition of their status as citizens of historic sovereign nations, popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities on the par with other ethnic Americans. This popular misperception of indigeneity as culture rather than as a historically developed political status sustains the myth of America as a refuge to the world's immigrants and a home to successful multicultural democracies. But it fundamentally misrepresents indigenous people who have experienced a history of colonization rather than a tradition of immigration on the continent. Contemporary indigenous cultural production is caught up in this phenomenon of multicultural misrecognition as well. The current flowering of indigenous literature, cinema, and visual arts is typically taken as evidence that Canada and the United States have successfully broken with their colonial pasts to become thriving nations of many cultures, where Native Americans, along other minorities, enjoy full freedom to represent their cultural difference"--