Management

Philip J. Deloria. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii + 300 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1344-1. Reviewed by Jim Buss (Department of History, Purdue University) Published on H-AmIndian (January, 2006) Philip Deloria opens his book Indians in Unexpected Places by describing a mid-twentieth century photograph depicting an Indian woman, dressed in a beaded buckskin dress, siing under a salon hair dryer. He sees the image as more than a juxtaposition of white expectations that stereotype Indians as primitive and the technologies associated with modernity. Instead, the author reads a centuries-long colonial project into the picture. Deloria uses this opportunity to open a discussion about how Native Americans oen refused to fulfill the expectations of non-Indians and established their own notion of Indianness that “engaged the same forces of modernization that were making non-Indians reevaluate their own expectation of themselves and their society” (p. 6). He focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where he sees Americans trying to steady anxieties brought about by modernity and coexist with a large indigenous population. Deloria uses his skills as a cultural historian to investigate the artifacts of cultural production– Indian participation in athletic events, Indian purchases of automobiles, Indian performance in early film, and the adaptation of native music by whites–oen overlooked by American Indian studies scholars as locations where Indians and non-Indians participated in a historical process that restructured the meaning and expectations of Indianness. Deloria explores these themes in five essays that will appeal to a wide audience, including American Indian studies scholars and those interested in American history at the turn of the twentieth century. e first two chapters explore the historical context behind non-Indian expectations by examining the involvement of Indians in the production...