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Fighting Colonialism with Hegemonic Culture: Native American Appropriation of Indian Stereotypes. By Maureen Trudelle Schwartz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. xi + 235 pp. Photographs, notes, index. $80.00 cloth.
Representations and misrepresentations of Native Americans pervade dominant culture and result in material consequences for Native peoples in present-day neocolonial society. These portrayals are varied and often contradictory, associating Native Americans with anachronism, ecology, nobility, savagery, and spirituality. Maureen Trudelle Schwartz's Fighting Colonialism with Hegemonic Culture: Native American Appropriation of Indian Stereotypes examines the ways in which Native peoples have actively engaged with dominant typecasts-resisted and subverted these images-i n order to empower themselves and their communities. Through a diverse series of case studies, most of which focus on movements, commercial products, and collaborations and conflicts between Native Americans and non-natives, the text demonstrates that "In the hands of American Indians, hegemonic culture can, therefore, be said to have become a tool against colonialism rather than simply a tool of colonialism" (189).
Trudelle Schwartz situates contemporary case studies within the framework of historical circumstances and the structural violence of federal Indian policy. Consequences of the Dawes Act of 1887, which divided tribal...