Staging Indigeneity

A compelling story of how Native American history is quite literally staged, why its staging persists as a tourist attraction across the United States, and what the complex conditions for its production and performance were and are."--American Indian Quarterly

An excellent study of conquest or settler tourism. . . . I learned a great deal from reading this book."--American Indian Culture and Research Journal

An exciting first book . . . [that] contributes important historical and methodological interventions for how one can engage the history of the past and present."--H-AmIndian

Nuanced. . . . [Phillips] situates the dramas she has come to watch in the context of each town's economic ambitions and its fraught history with Indigenous people."--Journal of American History

Phillips deftly demonstrates how tourism based on loose interpretations of historical events both builds cultural memory and elides concrete classification into categories like 'authentic' or 'exploitative'."--Western Historical Quarterly

Phillips's excellent book forces us to consider how we depict our history--who creates it, who controls it, and for what purposes. . . . In an age when some Americans are calling for us to sanitize our history--to revere and celebrate it rather than to think critically about it--[Staging Indigeneity] could not be more appropriate, useful, or relevant."--Journal of American Ethnic History

This is an important study about "playing Indian" and the complexities of American Indian identity."--CHOICE

Thoroughly researched and well-written . . . Phillips rejects simple narratives and, instead . . . brings a nuanced understanding of these varied motivations as well as the shifting meanings that the pageants hold for American Indians over time."--The North Carolina Historical Review