Whatever cultural significance they may have for Native peoples, full feather headdresses and beaded buckskins are, first and foremost, White North America’s signifiers of Indian authenticity. This is why Littlefeather didn’t show up in a Dior gown, and why West and Campbell and Fontaine didn’t arrive at their respective events in Brioni suits, Canali dress shirts, Zegni ties, and Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. South and Central America have the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Maya. After all, Dead Indians are the only antiquity that North America has. I probably sound testy, and I suppose part of me is. Phil Fontaine (Ojibway) was attired in the same manner when he stood on the floor of the House of Commons in 2008 to receive the Canadian government’s apology for the abuses of residential schools. (Cheyenne-Arapaho), the director of the American Indian Museum in New York, showed up for the 2004 opening ceremonies of the museum, they took the podium in Dead Indian leathers and feathered headdresses. Senator Benjamin Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne) and W. At the 1973 Academy Awards, when Sacheen Littlefeather ( Yaqui-Apache-Pueblo) refused the Best Actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando, she did so dressed as a Dead Indian. Rodeos, powwows, movies, television commercials. Or, in other words, the only truth of the thing is the lie itself. For those of us who are not French theorists but who know the difference between a motor home and a single-wide trailer, a simulacrum is something that represents something that never existed. These bits of cultural debris-authentic and constructed-are what literary theorists like to call “signifiers,“ signs that create a “simulacrum,” which Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and postmodern theorist, succinctly explained as something that “is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none.” What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks, moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers. North America has had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two groups have shared, North America no longer sees Indians. They are the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears.
But the Dead Indians I’m talking about are not the deceased sort. North American popular culture is littered with savage, noble, and dying Indians, while in real life we have Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians.ĭead Indians are, sometimes, just that. Indians come in all sorts of social and historical configurations. Few looking at photos of mixed-bloods would be likely to say, “But they don’t look like Irishmen.”
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