Description:
An acerbic, candid reckoning with Indigenous identity, visibility, and the messy realities of cultural change
In Indian Enough, curator and critic Paul Chaat Smith probes the paradox of contemporary Indigeneity: enormous, hard-won cultural visibility in museum exhibits, land acknowledgments, mascot removals, and more alongside persistent erasure in everyday life. Rejecting the easy comforts of identity politics (he was, he admits, a fan of the Land O'Lakes Butter Maiden), Smith brings "honest confusion" to his inquiry, using sharp wit and wry humor to confront the gap between symbolism and lived reality.
Both memoir and cultural critique, Indian Enough follows Smith from a suburban childhood in Washington, D.C., filled with Kurt Vonnegut and Vine Deloria Jr., through teenage years steeped in Native politics leading to a thrilling and eventually disillusioning stint with the American Indian Movement, to his pivotal role in creating the inaugural exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian. His insider account of NMAI exposes how well-meaning efforts to redress Native erasure can simply swap one set of stereotypes for another, and his candor shows how institutions and activists--himself included--all grapple with the tension between good intentions and political realities.
Irreverent and searching, Indian Enough tackles culture writ large--the rise of punk and the fall of AIM, pop culture as a battleground, Indigenous slaveowners and other histories we'd rather forget, MAGA Indians, and what it means to win when the ground keeps shifting. Together these essays reveal a truth that's hard to reconcile in an era of "progress" representation is everywhere, certainty is not.
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Brief description:
Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) is author of Indian Enough: Essays and Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, published by the University of Minnesota Press, and coauthor with Robert Warrior of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. He was curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian for twenty-four years.
Review Quotes:
"Poignant. Insightful. Self-deprecating. Paul Chaat Smith pokes at hot-button topics like identity, authenticity, cultural essentialism, land acknowledgments, and what it means to present 'Indian history' in a gallery--looking not for the simple answer, but the complexities that lie beneath. Enjoyable and hilarious, with a generous helping of pop music metaphors." --Carolina A. Miranda, author of Juan Sánchez: Art and Politics Ricanstructed
"A bit contrarian, with a dry sense of humor and a relentlessly honest eye, Paul Chaat Smith has long been one of Indian Country's most intriguing critics. In Indian Enough, he turns readers into time travelers, revisiting decades of hot takes on museums, activism, academia, and Native arts--and on himself, for as Smith celebrates successes, owns up to miscalculations, and contemplates his unique path, he offers a compelling roadmap of the ironies and complications found in both American and Indian life and history." --Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract
"Like its author, the Indians, and the country he wrestles with, this book exceeds any title, any category. Find me another American writer who threads together a running discussion of Indian identity that refuses to take the easy way out, a cutting analysis of the failure of Native intellectuals to avoid the trap of essentialism, a history of American Indian activism in all its glory and failure and contradiction, and myriad references from the only decades of rock n' roll that matter. All that is here and more. And it's funny and sly and honest as hell." --Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Lecturer, Stanford University