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Books Blog: Comanche author Paul Chaat Smith
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment

"Non-natives charmed by The Education of Little Tree, Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, and Thunderheart, for starters, might find in Paul Chaat Smith's Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong , a bracing wake-up call.

In this rigorously insightful collection of essays written between 1992 to 2008, Smith, a wry, sharp-edged cultural critic, and associate curator for the National Museum of the American Indian, addresses the myriad ironic complexities of American Indian reality. Some samples: "I despise the whole concept of tribal certification, but I have to admit I felt all warm inside when I picked up my own Comanche ID card." "I'm not oblivious to the fact that my career in the Indian business began with AIM and I am now a curator for the Smithsonian: a government employee." "U.S. history teaches us that some of the most catastrophic forces visited upon Indians were created by our most enlightened and progressive friends. Good intentions aren't enough; our circumstances require more critical thinking and less passion, guilt, and victimization."

Smith, who as a child attended Cherokee Lane Elementary School in Adelphi, Maryland, has also lived in Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, California, New York and Virginia, and has spoken extensively on native culture in North and South America, and Europe.

Within Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong --the newest addition to the Indigenous Americas Series of the University of Minnesota Press--is a call to native artists to refuse to play the invented romantic, mythological and other cliched roles assigned to them by others, and to demand "honesty in their own work and that of others that truly honors the outrageous story of our continued existence." For these artists, Smith says, a great project awaits that is "nothing less than a reclamation of our common history of surviving the unparalleled disaster of European contact and the creation of something new and dynamic from the ashes.""

Get the Story:
Short Stack: Author Paul Chaat Smith, National Museum of the American Indian (The Washington Post 6/2)

Related Stories:
Blog: Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (04/29)