Staging Indigeneity

I never went to see Blue Jacket, a Native-themed outdoor drama, though I live roughly ten miles from the place where it ran from 1982–2008. It struck me as hopelessly hokey and more than a little offensive. After reading Katrina Phillips's book Staging Indigeneity, I kind of wish I had taken the trip. Phillips examines three, long-running outdoor dramas that feature Native Americans through the lens of what she calls “salvage tourism.” The phrases “salvage archaeology,” and “salvage anthropology” have circulated for some years. The “salvage” in this book involves struggling local economies in small, sometimes remote places and a strategy local boosters hit on to stage theatrical extravaganzas with Indians at their center, to draw summer tourists. As Phillips writes, in the face of economic decline, “American Indians, Indian history, and images of Indians became the most promising and potentially profitable regional tourist endeavor” (p. 13). Phillips takes us to Pendleton, Oregon; Cherokee, North Carolina; and Chillicothe, Ohio—places probably not on the top of too many tourist itineraries—to explore the presentation of Native history in the dramas staged each summer in these small towns. She situates the dramas she has come to watch in the context of each town's economic ambitions and its fraught history with Indigenous people

Archaeology · Art · Cherokee · Context (archaeology · Drama · Indigenous · Tourism · Visual arts · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History