Unsettling America

C. Richard King is a professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. He is one of the leading scholars of contemporary American Indian Studies, and he also studies race and ethnicity more broadly. A past president of the Society for the Sociology of Sport, he serves on the editorial board for several journals, including Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World, Journal of Popular Culture, and Society of Sport Journal. King is the author/editor of a number of books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (2001, a CHOICE 2001 Outstanding Academic Title), Native Americans in Sports (2003), Animating Difference (Rowman & Littlefield 2010), and The Native American Mascot Controversy: A Handbook (Scarecrow 2010).

This short book explores the persistence of pernicious stereotypes and racial depictions of Native Americans in the twenty-first century in popular culture, advertising, and sports mascots. The author devotes one chapter to the absence of media coverage of Native suffering after Hurricane Katrina and the simultaneous promotion of Mardi Gras 'Indian' tribes of masked African Americans playing Indian. King (ethnic studies, Washington State Univ.) explores marketing campaigns that portray Native Americans as subhuman and savage, and considers the trope of the Indian warrior as a mascot that neoconservatives have appropriated after 9/11 in the war on terror. He examines the peculiar association of enemy combatants—the killing of Osama bin Laden, code named Geronimo EKIA (enemy killed in action), and nineteenth-century Apache resistance. Contemporary Native American intellectuals and activists employ social media, the Internet, and their own media to contest anti-Indianism, debunk stereotypes, and redefine their collective identity and history. King considers these topics in chapters devoted to Native American comic books, the struggle against mascots and place-names, and the use of the pejorative 'squaw' to characterize Indian women. An important consideration of the enduring cultural legacy of white supremacy and settler colonialism, and the strategies of Native resistance. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

• How Indianness Matters Now: An IntroductionI. Old Battles1. George Bush May Not Like Black People, But No One Gives a Damn AboutIndigenous Peoples: Visibility and Indianness after the Hurricanes2. Embattled Images in the Marketplace: Commodity Racism, Media Literacy, and Struggles over IndiannessII. Ongoing Wars3. On Being a Warrior: Race, Gender, and American Indian Imagery in Sport4. Defending Civilization from the Hostiles: Notes on the Ward Churchill Affair5. Always Enemy Combatants? The Killing of Osama bin Laden and the Native American Struggle for HumanityIII. New Fronts6. Borrowing Power: Racial Metaphors and the Struggle Against American Indian Mascots7. Alter/native Heroes: Native American Books, and the Struggle for Self-Definition8. De/Scribing Squ*w: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United StatesReclaiming Indianness: Notes Toward a Conclusions