Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History

Synopsis

As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. From the Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show in Pendleton, Oregon, to outdoor dramas like Tecumseh! in Chillicothe, Ohio, and Unto These Hills in Cherokee, North Carolina, locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, this incisive book reveals how they constituted what Katrina Phillips calls "salvage tourism"—a set of practices paralleling so-called salvage ethnography, which documented the histories, languages, and cultures of Indigenous people while reinforcing a belief that Native American societies were inevitably disappearing. Across time, Phillips argues, tourism, nostalgia, and authenticity converge in the creation of salvage tourism, which blends tourism and history, contestations over citizenship, identity, belonging, and the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

262 Pages

ISBN-13:

9781469662329

Related ISBNs:

9781469662336, 9781469662305, 9781469662312

Publisher:

The University of North Carolina Press

Date of Addition:

01/28/22

Copyrighted By:

The University of North Carolina Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Social Studies, Drama, Plays and Theater

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.