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Brian W. Dippie, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940. By Sherry L. Smith. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii, 273 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-19-513635-7.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1091–1092, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700461
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Amid a flood of books on the constructed Indian, historians have been holding their own. Cultural studies with its virtual monopoly on discourse analysis may think it invented the subject, but historians have had a longstanding interest in ideas about the Indian and their practical consequences in policy formulation. Recently, historians have analyzed the newspaper Indian, the Protestant missionary Indian, and, in Sherry L. Smith's latest book (she earlier examined army perceptions of Indians), the Indianists' Indian.
Smith profiles ten white nonacademic writers—six men, four women, half concerned with the Northwest, half with the Southwest—who, from a variety of personal motives, “discovered” Indians in the years between the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 and the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and championed them as an antidote to civilization's discontents. In the process they fostered respect for Indian cultural diversity, though each had favorite tribes often referred to with a nowgrating proprietorial pride (my Blackfeet, my Navajo). Some went beyond tribes, humanizing individuals for a public that thought Indians a collective entity decked out in beads and feathers. Smith's case history approach, critical but balanced, individualizes the Indianists, too—Charles E. S. Wood, George Bird Grinnell, Walter McClintock, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Frank B. Linderman, Charles F. Lummis, George Wharton James, Mary Austin, Anna Ickes, and Mabel Dodge Luhan—while evaluating their contributions to a new understanding of Indians and to the fundamental shift in government policy from assimilation to cultural revitalization.
