![]() ![]() Traditionally speaking that’s how gaming has treated the other, particularly America’s most under-represented other, the Native American or American Indian. I was always the “bad guy.” And I always lost. The game we played was “Cowboys and Indians.” I was always the Indian. But long before that, back when I was first socializing, the other neighborhood kids used to come to visit with their shiny cap guns and their toy feathers and plastic hatchets. The truth is that in many ways, I “passed,” and it wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I realized that the ways and traditions that people marked as “crazy” in my mother were, in fact, Cherokee. I grew up a mixed blood Cherokee in quasi-rural east central Indiana. In each of these historical moments, Americans have returned to the Indian, reinterpreting the intuitive dilemmas surrounding Indianness to meet the circumstances of their times. ![]() Over the past thirty years, the counter culture, the New Age, the men’s movement, and a host of other Indian performance options have given meaning to Americans lost in a (post)modern freefall. Their equally nervous post- World War II descendants made Indian dress and pow-wow-going into a hobby, with formal newsletters and regular monthly meetings. At the turn of the twentieth century, the thoroughly modern children of angst ridden-upper-and-middle-class parents wore feathers and slept in tipis and wigwams at camps with multi-syllabic Indian names. ![]()
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