Stories in Red and Write: Indian Intellectuals and the American Imagination, 1880-1930.

Abstract

This dissertation examines cultural production by Indian intellectuals: Charles A. Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear; four that represent an important cohort for identifying changing currents in Indian representational politics. Read together they give us a new picture of the circuits of Indian America. These were not simply isolated and exceptional individuals, but rather they functioned as interlocutors within wider networks driven by the circulation of political ideas, literary texts, epistolary culture, and public performance. Indeed, they represented the high cultural edge of a moment in which Indian people were forced to navigate their Indianness in complicated and also contradictory ways. Therefore, the dissertation emphasizes how these figures navigated discourses concerning gender, race, nation, and empire. It highlights the work they accomplished within white society, where Native people used a range of strategies to mobilize Indianness for their own advancement and on behalf of Indian country writ large. It takes the form of a collective cultural biography in order to chart different networks pertaining to the intellectual and material effects of Indian cultural production on the development of United States Indian policy and the emergence of pan-tribal organizations. In addition, the dissertation considers the cultural, political, and class-centered contexts in which these individuals constructed their identities. Finally, based on archival research and close reading the dissertation analyzes the political and poetic work of Indian intellectuals to pinpoint how they engaged with changes in ideological formations defined by White Americans and Native Americans interested in assimilation, citizenship, and nationalism from the 1880s and into the 1930s.