Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian

Dillon Lampert

American Indian Studies

Playing Indian Essay

        In Philip Deloria’s “Playing Indian”, Deloria does an excellent job of using rhetoric to portray how non-Indian Americans have used their own stereotypes of Native Americans to create national and personal identities not derived from Europe or other continents. Deloria highlights how American identity draws from that of Indians without acknowledging the cultural and actual genocide of their populations. He makes use of examples dating back as far as the 1770’s that illustrate a continuing interest in Native Americans as an authentic identity sought after by non-Indians. In his book, Deloria references historical events such as The Boston Tea Party, The Tammany Societies, The Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, and the Grateful Dead as legitimate evidence to support his thesis. White Americans have used their ideas about Indians to form identities in revolutionary, fraternal, and ethnographic manners.

        On page 1 of the introduction, Deloria includes a quote by D.H. Lawrence that sets the tone for the remainder of the book. The quote describes that creating a new identity is not a task which can be completed overnight, but rather one that requires time and experience to achieve. I think this was a powerful way to lead up to his thesis. Deloria continues to reference Lawrence on page 3 in his idea that Americans wanted to “savor both civilized order and savage freedom” and that they had a tendency to define themselves by what they were not. Simply put, Americans were “playing Indian”. Deloria begins by demonstrating how Americans played Indian in a Revolutionary, or Patriotic, fashion. Prior to the American Revolution, it was not uncommon for colonial crowds to preach their discontent while dressed up as Indians. The most notable example of this is undoubtedly the Boston Tea Party of 1773, where Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty, while sporting Indian attire, boarded three ships in Boston harbor and threw 342 chests of tea into the water. The tea party along with the revolution itself is seen as the climax of a transformation of misrule-based protest in America. Deloria explains on page 25 that the “Indianization” of misrule allowed rioters to invent the American customs they so lacked at the time. It helped them define custom and tie themselves in as a part of the continent’s ancient history; Indians and land. Playing Indian allowed rioters to invent local understandings about the freedom and naturalism of native custom, and suggested that these qualities were embedded in the continent itself. However, residents hardly valued actual Indians. In posing as Indians, they were simply making a statement to their authority while relaying images of rebellion alongside citizenship. On page 26, Deloria writes, “Indian disguise allowed individuals to cross the boundaries of law and civilization while simultaneously reaffirming the existence and necessity of those boundaries.” Aside from the use of Indian clothes was the use of Indian language. Indian words crossed boundaries to eventually become part of a greater, or combined, colonial language. Greetings, mottoes, terms of exchange, gender and sexuality, rank, and politics were all adopted into prerevolutionary language in America. Deloria explains on page 33 that this language shifted the ways in which colonists understood themselves and their world. This is how Americans “played Indian” in a Revolutionary, or political, manner.