Contact: Meredith Dickenson (214) 768-7654[email protected]
October 24, 2000
SMU HISTORIAN STUDYING TURN-OF-THE CENTURY CHRONICLERSOF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE
DALLAS (SMU) -- Southern Methodist University historian Sherry Smith's academic niche is seeing Native Americans through the eyes of Easterners who went West.
The author of a book on how U.S. Army officers and their wives perceived Western Indians, Smith has written a new book, Reimagining Indians, 1880-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2000), which examines a group of Anglo-American writers who lived among the Indians and championed Native American culture in the popular press.
In her book, Smith argues that whites at the turn of the century gradually began to shift their attitudes about Indians away from conquer and assimilate to preserve and respect Native American cultures.
At the same time anthropology emerged as an academic subject, popular turn-of-the-century writers were relating their experiences with western tribes, according to Smith. Among these writers were Mabel Dodge Luhan and Charles Fletcher Lummis, who spent time with tribes in California and the Southwest, and Walter McClintock and George Bird Grinnell, who turned their attention to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies. They publicized their experiences with Indians in lecture tours, essays, poems, best-selling books and national magazine articles. Smith's book is illustrated with period photos of many of the authors posing in Indian dress with their respective tribes.
"Some of these popularizers meant to do nothing more than capture for posterity a presumably fading portrait of Indian life in America. Some sought to find themselves through immersion in an alien yet attractive culture. Some sought to shatter stereotypes and replace them with complicated, humanized images of vibrant people and cultures. Taken altogether, their works transcended the personal and proved both culturally and politically consequential," Smith writes in her book.
During this time federal Indian policy was at its most heavy-handed, she says. Laws tried to carve Indian reservations into homesteads, place Indian children into white-run boarding schools, and in general strip tribes of their traditions. In addition to these sympathetic writers, pioneering anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, who encouraged the concept of cultural relativism, were also recording Indian languages, practices, customs and religious ceremonies. All believed -- falsely as it turned out -- that modern times would soon make American tribes extinct.
By the 1930s, Smith says the impact of these impressions had changed enough Anglo-American views about Indians to pave the way for a new federal Indian policy, the Indian New Deal, which scrapped assimilation and promoted cultural preservation. Later generations of whites, especially adherents of the New Age Movement, are still influenced by these turn-of-the-century writers.
"It is my contention that these books were widely read and influential and help us to understand what I would call 'modern Anglo-American ideas about Indians,' which really almost venerate Indians and present them in very positive terms," she says.
Previously at the University of Texas at El Paso, Smith is the first Western historian to be recruited nationally to Dedman College's history department from the proceeds of a $10 million gift from former Texas governor William P. Clements Jr., for whom the department is named.
She joins a small but growing number of scholars at SMU whose teaching and research interests focus on the people, institutions and cultures of the Southwest. In addition to hiring outstanding faculty, the gift also established a doctoral program in American history and an interdisciplinary research center, the Clements Center for Southwest Studies.
"Smith is an accomplished historian of the American West and Native American history. She will lend a great deal of support to our new Ph.D. program," says History Department Chair Jim Breeden.
Smith received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research her new book, which also contains 13 photographs of her subjects posing with Indian tribes. Other honors and grants she has received include a Fulbright Foundation Lectureship in New Zealand, the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, and fellowships from the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Among her many professional associations, Smith serves on the Council of the Western History Association and is the co-chair of the Western History Association's 2001 Program Committee. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington.
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