Barnd, Natchee Blu

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UCLAAmerican Indian Culture and Research Journal TitleChief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star. By Tom Swift.Permalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0c54c5pjJournalAmerican Indian Culture and Research Journal , 33(4)ISSN0161-6463AuthorBarnd, Natchee BluPublication Date2009-09-01DOI10.17953Copyright InformationThis work is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, availalbe at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of CaliforniaReviews 165spiraled into disaster during one moment (finally revealed in ch. 21) under-cuts some of the power and beauty of his life story and ultimately that of the author’s preceding chapters. The core of Bender’s amazing playing career stretched from 1903 to 1917, and Swift offers generous coverage of most of those years, as well as compelling stories about his life before and after his time in the big leagues. Yet Swift’s constant and disruptive allusions to Bender’s “failure” ventures too close to the vanishing, noble Indian narrative that Bender’s life story seems so effectively to disrupt. In this way, it mirrors the narratives more appropri-ately constructed in David Fleitz’s Louis Sockalexis: The First Cleveland Indian (2002) and Brian McDonald’s Indian Summer (2003) about the Penobscot star who flashed onto the national baseball stage in 1897 before flaming out in equally glorious and tragic fashion after only a single season. In contrast to Sockalexis, Bender actually enjoyed a successful, sustained career with far fewer public implosions, even as he endured similar racially discriminatory treatment. Further, and as Swift successfully relays, Bender enjoyed a bril-liant personal life and employment history long after his playing days were finished. Although Sockalexis might have fit the trope of the tragic Indian destroyed by Western “civilization,” Bender was clearly not Sockalexis. Swift goes to great pains to try and convince us of this, but much of the structure of his work suggests the opposite. Swift is not alone in being swept up by the narratives of Western prog-ress and inevitable, tragic American Indian demise, but his intellectual veering away from the racial “burden” of Bender’s career leaves him less well defended than some other recent work on American Indian baseball players. The most direct comparison clearly comes from Kashatus’s earlier biography on Bender. The two books cover much of the same materials, use many of the same sources, and offer overlapping arguments, although Swift is clearly more exhaustive in his treatment of the details and generous play-by-play descriptions of key games. As Kashatus’s subtitle suggests, he also views Bender’s career and life largely through the lens of failure, despite the clear trumpeting of his successes. Swift’s volume benefits from a later publication date in that he stakes out a few obvious points of contention with Kashatus, including rebuffing that author’s suggestion that Bender intentionally lost the 1914 World Series game that effectively ended his major league career. He also offers a handful of anecdotes and data from new sources that will be of special interest to serious historians. Kashatus’s version, however, offers a couple of valuable tidbits sorely lacking in Chief Bender’s Burden, perhaps reflecting Swift’s effort to distinguish the two works. One of the most obvious is Kashatus’s inclu-sion of a tidy chart of Bender’s career statistics. Although chapter 23 adeptly discusses Bender’s career statistics as a way of contextualizing his place among the greatest baseball players ever, I was quite surprised to find that this base-ball researcher did not offer an easily consumable table featuring Bender’s numbers and comparing them to contemporaries. Without these, the reader is compelled either to try to compile them using the data strewn across twenty-five chapters or to seek them elsewhere. AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL166In the end, although both volumes are dedicated to Bender, Kashatus offers a much better contextualization of the baseball legend in relation to other contemporary American Indian baseball players, as well as those that came before and after the pitcher’s illustrious career. Money Pitcher also offers a more robust collection of striking historic photographs and media parapher-nalia, again creating a richer portrait of this important historic sports figure. Powers-Beck’s The American Indian Integration of Baseball offers a second contrast useful for situating Swift’s potential contribution to academia. Powers-Beck’s volume provides a more general overview of American Indian baseball players from professional, minor league, and boarding school teams, as well as a sustained discussion of the social barriers they faced and a better reflective assessment of their individual and collective achievements. Although Powers-Beck’s volume cannot match the narrative complexity or depth of Swift’s more focused piece, it does offer the most impactful choice as a teaching selection. Clearly, any researcher covering race and sports or American Indian athletes must obtain Swift’s exhaustive new source on Bender. Yet I cannot point to a signature chapter or two that would merit inclusion in a course reader, and assigning the entire text would not prove as productive as assigning The American Indian Integration of Baseball. Swift’s careful biography illuminates the achievements and experiences of an important professional baseball star and figure in American Indian history, but unfortunately does not offer enough concise or overarching narratives to work well within a packaged academic program.Natchee Blu BarndCalifornia College of the Arts Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America. By Kerstin Knopf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 517 pages. $157.00 cloth.Kerstin Knopf’s Decolonizing the Lens of Power adds to much-needed scholarly approaches to contemporary indigenous filmmaking. Unlike previous texts related to the subject, such as Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s Celluloid Indians (1999) and Beverly Singer’s Wiping the War Paint off the Lens (2001), which provide mostly historical overviews of depictions of Native Americans in film and the devel-opment of early indigenous cinema, Knopf’s book foregrounds theoretical approaches to production as well as the content of several indigenous docu-mentaries, shorts, and feature films. As its title suggests, the book draws heavily on Foucauldian formulations of the gaze, in this case a colonial lens coun-tered by indigenous “answering discourse” (xii). To elucidate this answering discourse, Knopf employs postcolonial theory and indigenous and film studies. Knopf sets out her purpose to be an exploration of how film allows the colonized to enter dominant film discourse in order to counter it. She states that as indigenous people enter this discourse, they “cease to be studied and described as objects and become subjects who create self-controlled images of indigenous cultures” (xiii). To do this, Knopf explains, indigenous filmmakers 

Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star. By Tom Swift.

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