Description: An historical examination of the early-twentieth-century Indian Craze, a widespread interest in Native American art, that explores its importance for Native Americans, Euro Americans, and the history of modernism.
Review Quotes: "The Indian Craze is a lucid and compelling account of the entangled histories of Native and European-American aesthetic and intersubjective exchange in the formative years of American modernism. Told with deep historical understanding, it restores subjecthood and agency to Native artists too often deprived of both by the persistence of primitivizing attitudes. Such studies as Elizabeth Hutchinson's offer a very different, insistently hybrid history of modernism, sensitive to the ethical ambiguities that reside in virtually every instance of uneven encounter between colonizer and colonized. This is a long-awaited contribution to how we understand the complex cultural negotiations attendant on the growing aesthetic value accorded to Native arts around the turn-of-the-century."--Angela Miller, lead author of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity