Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at Bacone College

Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at Bacone College

Neuman, Lisa K.

Hardcover

Native American HistoryGeneral EducationRegional: Southwest

ISBN10: 0803240996
ISBN13: 9780803240995
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Jan 1 2014
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.60
Height: 1.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

When Indian University--now Bacone College--opened its doors in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880, it was a small Baptist institution designed to train young Native Americans to be teachers and Christian missionaries among their own people and to act as agents of cultural assimilation. From 1927 to 1957, however, Bacone College changed course and pursued a new strategy of emphasizing the Indian identities of its students and projecting often-romanticized images of Indianness to the non-Indian public in its fund-raising campaigns. Money was funneled back into the school as administrators hired Native American faculty who in turn created innovative curricular programs in music and the arts that encouraged their students to explore and develop their Native identities. Through their frequent use of humor and inventive wordplay to reference Indianness--Indian play--students articulated the (often contradictory) implications of being educated Indians in mid-twentieth-century America. In this supportive and creative culture, Bacone became an Indian school, rather than just another school for Indians.

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