Staging Indigeneity
Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History
Katrina Phillips
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 01/2021
Pages: 262
Subject: Social Science, History, Performing Arts
Print ISBN: 9781469662312
eBook ISBN: 9781469662329
DESCRIPTION
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.
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.
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