Performing Indigeneity ― Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences

This engaging collection of essays discusses the complexities of “being” indigenous in public spaces. Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny bring together a set of highly recognized junior and senior scholars, including indigenous scholars, from a variety of fields to provoke critical thinking about the many ways in which individuals and social groups construct and display unique identities around the world. The case studies in Performing Indigeneity underscore the social, historical, and immediate contextual factors at play when indigenous people make decisions about when, how, why, and who can “be” indigenous in public spaces.

Performing Indigeneity invites readers to consider how groups and individuals think about performance and display and focuses attention on the ways that public spheres, both indigenous and nonindigenous ones, have received these performances. The essays demonstrate that performance and display are essential to the creation and persistence of indigeneity, while also presenting the conundrum that in many cases “indigeneity” excludes some of the voices or identities that the category purports to represent.

Laura R. Graham is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa. She is a filmmaker and author of Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among the Xavante Indians of Central Brazil.

H. Glenn Penny is an associate professor of modern European history at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800.