Review of \u3ci\u3eEverything You Know about Indians Is Wrong\u3c/i\u3e by Paul Chaat Smith

Abstract

In his recent collection of essays, associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian Paul Chaat Smith argues for a reorientation of knowledge about Indian peoples. The essays, all previously published, are sometimes autobiographical, sometimes humorous, and range in topic from Ishi to the Alcatraz occupation. In The Big Movie, for example, Smith takes on films that feature Indians, from the first moving picture made by Thomas Edison in 1894, Sioux Ghost Dance, to The Searchers, Last of the Mohicans, and Dances with Wolves. Indians, Smith writes, have become a kind of national mascot. These films, particularly Westerns, are a part of the American master narrative-and, well, they never tell the real story. Smith often focuses his essays on central questions. In a piece called Luna Remembers, about artist James Luna, for instance, he asks, \u27\u27Are Indian people allowed to change? Are we allowed to invent completely new ways of being Indian that have no connection to previous ways we have lived? Smith writes, In North America the ideological prison that confines Indian agency has unique features. We have never been simply ignored, or simply romanticized, or been merely the targets of assimilation or genocide. It is rather all these things and many more, often at the same time in different places. In this essay and others, Smith questions the static image of Indian peoples and argues not only for the real story but also for a conceptualization of modern Indians that emphasizes agency and adaption-both politically and technologically