devoss lebeau final 9-11-09

Reading and Composing Indians: Invented Indian Identity through Visual Literacy

Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

Michigan State University

Patrick Russell LeBeau Michigan State University

Address all correspondence to Dànielle Nicole DeVoss at: Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures; Michigan State University; 235 Bessey Hall; East Lansing, Michigan 48824; 517/355-2400 (office), 517/353-5250 (fax), [email protected] (email).

ABSTRACT Brandi Nalani said in 2009 that “good intentions can wear a false face.” Her Hawaiian elders warned that “in words there is life; in words there is death.” The stories and images used to explain the histories and cultures of American Indians, especially to elementary students, have generated and perpetuated an invented Indian identity, which is immersed in stereotypical archetypes and frozen in America’s past. Jean O’Brian and Leanne Howe warned that these distorted stories are “replacement narratives” that cause more harm than good to the public’s overall understanding of American Indians. Evidence of the power of these replacement narratives is that traceable effects of these narratives can be found in the drawings of 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Here, we anchor Indian identity to visual representations, specifically to explore the stories that popular representations tell, and to then put those stories next to the visual tales that children tell when asked to “draw an Indian.” Focusing on visual representation is an appropriate anchoring point because of the ways in which stories are told through imagery and because of the attention given to visual literacy and visual rhetoric in recent scholarship across disciplines. In this manuscript, we first explore the term visual literacy and then read a variety of contemporary representations of American Indians, building to an analysis of compositions created by elementary school children as to what story they tell through their visual representations of Indian identity. We use their compositions as rich visual starting points for getting at how Nalani means by “good intentions can wear a false face.” We suggest that reading students’ visual representations of Indians allows a space from which we can engage students in a rich and more complex understanding of their own literal knowledge and cultural practices, and engage students in a more complex and critical sense of cultural identities and how cultural identities function. By using this framework, we are able to provide suggestions to educators and researchers at all levels interested not only in representations and stories of Otherness in American culture, but also interested in integrating analysis and production of visual composition in their classrooms.

Reading and Composing Indians 2 DeVoss and LeBeau

“Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English through its publications, conferences, and affiliates support professional development and promote public awareness of the role that viewing and visually representing our world have as forms of literacy” (NCTE, 1996).

Scott Lyons (2002) recently commented that “Indian” is an argument made drawing upon available

cultural and social means. Lyons suggested that a more productive question than “what is an Indian?” is

“what does an Indian identity do?” We could also add: “what does an Indian identity do for me?” Here we

read a collection of visual representations of Indians as a space from which we can engage a rich and

more complex understanding of cultural practices of representation—the stories told by drawings,

specifically (but certainly also by food wrappers, labels, logos, mascots, and the myriad other visual

aspects of U.S. culture). We frame this analysis and our discussion by theories of visual literacy and of

visual rhetoric; multimodal literacy approaches provide scaffolding for situating the representations we

read, and provide a stable base from which we can build practices to engage students in a more complex

and critical sense of cultural identities and how cultural identities function. Meaning-making is a complex

act. Recent scholarship has evolved to address not only the traditional, text-based modes of producing

and circulating ideas, but visually complex and often multimodal ways of knowing.

VISUAL LITERACY

Not surprisingly, in our media-saturated contemporary world, visual rhetoric, visual literacy, and visual

fluency are all terms that have recently received a good deal of attention across fields.1 Special issues of

journals have been dedicated to addressing issues related to “the visual” (e.g., Computers and

Composition, volume 18, numbers 1 and 2, 2002; Technical Communication Quarterly, volume 5, number

1, 2001; Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, volume 5, number 4, 2000; Enculturation: A

Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, volume 3, number 2, 2001; Metaphor and Symbolic Activity,

1 1 This sense of visual literacy as a “new” topic in theory and pedagogy is, however, not quite accurate. For historical explorations of visual topics, see, for example: Dondis (1978); Fransecky & Debes (1972), Visual Literacy: A Way to Learn—A Way to Teach; Kolers, Wrolstad, & Bouma (1980), Processing of Visible Language: Vol. 2; Wileman (1980, 1983), Exercises in visual thinking, Visual Communicating.


volume 8, number 3, 1993; Argumentation & Advocacy, volume 33, number 1, 1996). More and more

college-level textbooks oriented toward the teaching of writing, specifically, include visual elements, and

the producers of these textbooks heavily highlight these “visual” elements while marketing the texts (e.g.,

Everything’s an Argument 4, 2006, Lunsford & Ruszkiewicz; The Call to Write, 2009, Trimbur;

Convergences, 2008, Atwan; Picturing Texts, George, Palchik, Selfe, & Faigley, 2005; Reading Culture,

2009, George & Trimbur; Seeing & Writing, 2006, McQuade & McQuade). A variety of readers designed

for students in fields not necessarily camped within the fields that have traditionally or typically taught

visual texts (such as Popular Culture Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies, etc.) have emerged; often,

these texts are geared toward students interested in and studying “visual culture” and “visual studies”

(e.g., Hall, 2000; Howells & Gill, 2002; Mirzoeff, 1999, 2002; Sturken & Cartwright, 2001; Walker &

Chaplin, 1997).

Literacy as Culturally and Historically Situated

Understanding how knowledge is produced, circulated, and regulated in our culture is crucial for us as

educators and as scholars. Thus each of these special issues, many of our professional discussions, and

some of the book authors have sought a common definition of literacy itself, and especially of visual

literacy and what this term entails and includes. Although some theorists have appropriately suggested

that “literacy” itself is a problematic and contested term (see, for example, Wysocki & Johnson-Eilola,

1999) and offer alternatives such as “visual fluency” (see Winkielman, Schwarz, Reber, & Fazendeira,

2003), we use the term literacy here to apply to the broad skills and understandings required of us when

we read and compose multiple symbols in multiple spaces in multiple ways. We borrow Wysocki and

Johnson-Eilola’s incredibly useful definition of literacy: “not as a monolithic term but as a cloud of

sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions. Literacy can be seen not as a skill but a

process of situating and resituating representations in social spaces” (p. 367). This definition reminds us

of the claims of Mikhail Bakhtin—that utterances are always dialogic and heteroglossic, and thus our


understandings of the world that surrounds us is created in concert with the utterances orbiting around us,

be they verbal, textual, or graphical.2

We situate literacy within cultural and historical tension, such as the uses of literacy to regulate

social spaces and practices (Gee, 1996; Street, 1995) and to regulate the boundaries of text and

alphabetic literacy (Stroupe, 2000)—what “counts” as literate activity. We also situate literacy within

technological evolution—literacy has evolved to include technological procedures and understandings, as

more and more reading and composing takes place in virtual and digital realms. Olson (1994) defined

literacy as “the competence to exploit a particular set of cultural resources” and further elaborated that

literacy “is not just learning the abc’s; it is learning to use the resources of writing for a culturally defined

set of tasks and procedures” (p. 43). Literacy encompasses social space and multiple, diverse

technologies and the contexts in which we use them. Brian Street (1995) has explored how cultural tasks

are defined and how literacy is culturally positioned. He overviews the power of autonomous literacy in

western society; within modern understandings of the world and of cultural conditions, literacy often

becomes a totalizing force and powerful social muscle, proclaimed as an asset, as a sort of commodity

that people need to function, survive, and thrive in society. Literacy is an unquestioned good, and is

assumed to be understood and measurable. Illiteracy is blamed for a variety of social ills, without much

regard to the actual social conditions that cause social strife (few of which are directly related to illiteracy).

This approach to literacy allows those in power to vilify and lay social blame upon those who often aren’t

politically equipped to answer their accusations. Deborah Brandt (1995) identified literacy as hybrid and

complex; these seem apt adjectives to describe literacy in light of the shifting social change and

ideological base of practices that Street describes. Literacy is an ongoing, dynamic ability that piles up,

2 This definition of literacy also includes visual literacy as part of larger sets of literacy, rather than fragmenting visual literacy as apart from other reading and writing practices. We agree with scholars such as Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola when they question the actions, meanings, and associations that “literacy” brings to mind when we apply it in new realms or to new practices (e.g., these authors warn that it is perhaps limiting to use the same language we use to describe and analyze practices of reading text to practices of reading visuals). Here we do rely on these associations, but recognize the need to question them and to question the use of the term literacy.


spreads out, and brings with it residual trappings of previous literacy skills and social and cultural

dimensions. Brandt suggested that, currently, literacy “requires an ability to work the borders between

tradition and change, an ability to adapt and improvise and amalgamate” (p. 660). Literacy is not a set of

neutral skills, but instead an ideological practice—a complex set of practices and values implicated in

power relations and embedded in cultural meanings and practices. In American culture—especially in

American academic contexts—literacy often relates distinctly and directly (although superficially) to the

ability to read and write text. This emphasis on alphabetic knowing as primary and most crucial has

served to relegate visual and multimodal ways of knowing to “immature” or even semi-literate status.

Historically, however, it is obvious that knowing, telling, and sharing take place in multiple, complex, and

culturally situated ways, including storytelling outside of the privileged modes of communication (e.g., the

textbook, the theoretical text).

Tensions of the Textual and the Visual

We use the term “visual” here in juxtaposition to “textual,” although visual elements have textual features

and supplements, and often text has visual elements and supplements. For example, many visuals are

accompanied by captions when presented as figures in manuscripts such as this one. Many visuals also

often have text added to them, as we often see in advertisements where a slogan or quote (“copy”)

appears on top of an image. Text involves visual and design characteristics often ubiquitous to most of

us, including typeface, font size, leading, spacing, margin settings, and more. Text itself is a visual

element—something that has design features, something that calls forth mental images, something that

allows us to make associations.

At a roundtable discussion at the 2001 Conference on College Composition and Communication,

titled “Issues and Directions in Visual Rhetoric,” chaired by Anne Wysocki, the participants (Tharon

Howard, Stephen Bernhardt, Charles Kostelnick, Susan Hilligoss, Greg Wickliff, Karen Schriver)

discussed

• the complexity of visual languages, emphasizing the need for languages in plural


• the need for a shared vocabulary for discussing visual rhetoric, but admitting that the

complexity of visual languages prohibits this

• the remediation of concepts from textual analysis to visual analysis, but also the

recognition that if we rely upon textual meaning and interpretation to explain visuals, we

limit ourselves

• the recognition that technical skill sets related to both reading and composing visual

language is incredibly diverse, even among the homogenized group “student”

• the need to create spaces for students to experiment with visual design and visual

creation

• the recognition that education typically divorces visual language from textual language

early in learning (i.e., elementary school), and that education needs to better integrate

visual learning and visual languages across the curriculum

(http://aw.colostate.edu/reviews/cccc2001/session_l25.htm)

This is but one discussion, one set of voices in what is becoming a cacophony of voices debating issues

of text and image, visual language and visual rhetoric. But this one discussion serves well to articulate

some of the key concerns with which we grapple as we negotiate the blurry boundaries of text and image

and allow for more robust understandings of visual and multimodal means of knowledge making.

In the section that follows, we review the ways in which a monolithic and problematic story is told

about Indians in American culture. We then focus specifically on how students translate their

understandings of what an “Indian” is to visual texts, and how we can read these visual texts as rich base

knowledge upon which we can build a more complicated understanding of contemporary cultural

representations of Native American life.

HOW AMERICA READS INDIANS

Historically, there are two competing Indian icon dynasties: That of the brave, noble warrior, and that of

the violent, ignoble savage. Old Westerns, dime-store novels, movies, and myriad other cultural artifacts


reflect the Indian as either a war-weary yet majestic Chief or a blood-thirsty, untrustworthy brute (Aleiss,

2005; Bataille & Silet, 1980; Berkhofer, 1979; Bird, 1996; Boehme, 1998; Bordwich, 1997; Hilger, 1995;

King, 2005). These two representations have watered down to a generic Indian icon prevalent today in a

multitude of visual sources, including food wrappers, billboards, and sport utility vehicles.

Sports teams—Redskins, Fighting Reds, Indians, Warriors, Chiefs—and their accompanying

imagery—large-nosed, head-dressed chiefs holding bows and arrows or tomahawks—have received a

great deal of attention (an excellent resource site that includes multimedia work related to mascots is

available at http://www.aistm.org/; a collection of essays that addresses the topic is King, Springwood, &

Deloria, 2001). A Lalo Alcaraz (2002) political cartoon shows an image of a white man with “go savages,

kill em” painted on his abundant stomach, a head-dress with a few bedraggled feathers stuck in it, and a

tiny flag announcing “go warrior savages” stating to a frowning young Native American man wearing t-

shirt and jeans, “but I’m honoring you, dude!” Defenders argue that this sort of cultural appropriation is

somehow an honor or sign of respect: “we love our braves” or “we’re respecting the great Indian

heritage.” This imagery misrepresents and homogenizes a group of people representative of more than

500 nations in 2009 and, further, promotes misunderstanding and fosters ecologies of appropriation and

ridicule.

Many scholars have both analyzed and critiqued the multiple images of Native Americans that

appear across our culture—Redman Chewing Tobacco, Natural American Spirit cigarettes, Calumet

Baking Powder, Mazda Navajo, Jeep Cherokee (see, for example, Bataille, 2001; Caldwell-Wood &

Mitten, 1992; Faris, 1996; Gidley, 1992; King et al., 2001; Pewewardy, 1991, 1994, 1998; Trimble, 1988).

Whereas Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker have both received a new look occasionally over the years to

present a more current, updated image, the images of Native Americans circulating in our culture are

stale, and have not been replaced by more contemporary views of Indian life. The images and the text

that accompanies representations of Indians are stale and stereotypical; the images are almost always

men, wearing feathered headdresses and braids, holding spears or more likely tomahawks or bows and

arrows. In many images, the men stare reflectively off into the distance (their gaze never looks outward,


toward/at the viewer), or are mounted upon a horse, holding a weapon, sometimes with the carcass of a

deer or buffalo at their feet (see Figures 1, 2, 3). Very few women appear on products and certainly no

women are associated with sports figures or sport utility vehicles. The sole Indian woman that holds a

prized cultural seat is Pocahontas, and often she is portrayed Disney-style, with Caucasian features, light

skin, painted lips, and in highly sexualized costume (see Figures 4, 5). The language that accompanies

images of Indians are expressions of “noble,” “mystical,” and “magical,” and often spirits and ceremonies

are presented ambiguously or without context or explanation. Expressions of a “time gone by” or “the

history of these remarkable people” riddle the descriptions of the trinkets for sale, labeled only “Indian” or

“Native American.” Few specify nations or make mention of tribes.


Figure 1: Untitled Collector’s Plate

Figure 2: “Native American Hunting” Alabastrite Figure; accompanying text: “With his horse at full gallop,

this Native American hunter aims at his prey with bow and arrow.”


Figure 3: “Native American Figurine—Chief Sculpture”; accompanying text: “A majestic Native American

chief, dressed in feather head-dress and tribal garb, holds a peace pipe.”

Figure 4: “Native American Indian Maiden” Coffee Mug; accompanying text: “In each moment of every

day, lies a little touch of magic.”


Figure 5: “Mouse Pad Indian Maiden with Prayer Fan”; accompany text reads: “Indian Maiden Praying To

Great Spirit Wolf & Eagle Spirit.”

Imaginary Indian Identity: Real and Virtual

Not only are “Indian” images and lore borrowed for trinkets and collector’s items, but Indian identity is

borrowed as well. In the early 1900s, a group of students at the University of Michigan formed a

university-sanctioned student club, and created an Indian tribe to use as an identity marker. As LeBeau

reported, these students took “symbolic possession” of Indians in a way that catered to romantic,

stereotypical beliefs about American history and the place of Native Americans. The “Michigamua”

students created elaborate rituals and ceremonies, selecting among and appropriating the “Indian”

characteristics they most admired—most related to “warrior virtues” (LeBeau, p. 112).

The use of Indian lore and mystique is not limited to “real” space; an infamous example of

“passing” as Indian occurred in digital space, in an American OnLine chatroom in the early 1990s, where

a Caucasian man rebirthed himself as “Blue Snake,” a supposed Eastern Shawnee chief. Blue Snake

existed in a virtual sweat lodge, passing a peace pipe to visitors who passed through, offering Native

American blessings, making visitors honorary Indians, and gifting them with membership in the “Evening

Sky Clan.” In elaborate online rituals, he bestowed names upon his followers: “Crystal Bear Woman,

Stormcloud Dancer, and Darkness Runs From Her” (Martin, 1997, p. 125). Eventually, Native American

AOL members caught on to Blue Snake; one woman frothed: “I couldn’t believe it. His seminars were a

hodgepodge of the worst kind of bullshit stereotypes and gobbledygook possible” (Martin, p. 125). Blue

Snake defended himself, suggesting that his adoption of an Indian identity and his perpetuation of what

some people called online fraud was a respectful gesture toward honorable Native American cultures and

traditions. Glen Martin, who reported on the entire incident in Wired magazine, and who quoted from a

document scripted by members of three tribes of the Shawnee nation, noted that in this case, imitation

was not flattery, nor was it sincere in any way. Miller, one of the most vocal opponents of Blue Snake,

was eventually banned from AOL. She suggested that “the company [AOL] didn’t want us disturbing the


fantasy... it doesn’t want real Indians—we’re not ‘Indian’ enough” (p. 128). Apparently, AOL wanted what

most of mainstream America seems to want—in homes, on plates, decorating coffee mugs and

mousepads—the buckskin fringes and the feathers, the noble warrior. Many Native peoples online today,

instead of spending their time establishing active, contemporary identities and participating in larger

communities, spend their time policing sites that present a distorted, inaccurate, or inappropriate glimpse

at supposed “native” customs and life (Haas, 2005). Vine Deloria, Jr., writes: “The whites are sincere but

they are only sincere about what they are interested in, not about Indians about whom they know very

little. They get exceedingly angry if you try to tell them the truth and will only reject you and keep

searching until they find the Indian of their fantasies.” Thus, in their attempts to remedy the absent

presence of Indians (Powell 2002), they are often trapped in roles that continue to make them absent.

Indian Identity as Commodity

This pervasive view of the Indian as a commodity and as a romantic reflection of America’s cultural past

often relies on an absence of an understanding of Indian culture. Images of Indians in headdress and

tomahawk rarely are created or interpreted with an understanding of the cultural and tribal conventions

explaining dress and custom. Thus, Indians become both icon and archetype—a singular, static motif—of

a glorious American past. Although many scholars would argue that these ever-present stereotypical

representations must be removed from our cultural imaginary, here we argue that they are far too

prevalent to ignore, dismiss, or erase. They are so prevalent, in fact, that children readily view, absorb,

and—as the example drawings we will share below articulate—remediate them. A recent political cartoon

shows two schoolchildren walking together, one saying to the other “Really? You don’t look Indian...”.

Above his head appears a thought bubble with images of a Disneyfied Pocahontas, a Kansas City Chiefs

helmet, the mascot of the Cleveland Braves, a caricature of a goonish-looking brave, a majestic-looking

brave on horseback, and a tomahawk. It is relatively easy to dismiss such representations, but, instead,

imagery of Indians can be recognized as base knowledge—as an established set of cultural and visual


literacies—upon which more dynamic, accurate, contemporary understandings of Native Americans and

Native cultures can be formulated.

COMPOSING INDIANS

For many years now, Patrick has been leading workshops and assemblies regarding Michigan Indians,

yesterday and today, for audiences that range from elementary school children to college-age adults. To

begin his discussions, Patrick always asks attendees to draw what they know about Indians. (We have

included the entire prompt, along with some commentary and further explanation, in an Appendix.) The

motifs that quickly appear across the perhaps 1500 images Patrick has collected in his travels and

speaking engagements are not surprising: the teepee, the tomahawk, and the feathered headdress figure

prominently among the images participants produce. See Figures 6 and 7 for examples.


Figure 6: Example of Indian motifs in drawings.


Figure 7: Example of Indian motifs in drawings.

These images are not surprising, considering what children know about Indians, and the icons

and items that shape what they know of Indians. It is easy to point out that the students apparently have

no cultural sense of the range of tribes and nations and variances in dress, language, geography, etc. It is

easy to emphasize the generic quality of the drawings, and the fact that students very, very rarely

represent contemporary images of American Indians and/or Native American life. Rather than dismiss

these drawings as simplistic and stereotypical representations, however, we prefer to read them

differently.

These images are rich creations and representations of base knowledge. Obviously, the

individuals who take part in this exercise and create these images have a complex understanding of what

“Indian” is, and are able to create complicated visual representations of that understanding—

representations that blend textual and visual knowledge of Indian identity, and that tell a story of Indian

identity. If we return to the three figures above, we get a sense of the depth of students’ knowledge. If we


look at Figure 6, we can observe the student’s attempt to explain (with words and images) Indian life. This

student knew that Indians ate steer and buffalo, represented by the horned skull with “food” written above

it and by the nuts or berries and the fish with the arrow through it. This student knew that native peoples

hunted with the tomahawk and the bow and arrow, with “wipins.” The student knew that Indians lived in

different types of “shelters,” including the teepee and the mud hut. “Dancing,” represented by the

somewhat abstract sketch with a face below it, was part of Indian culture(s). We can read from this

student’s collage his complex sense of the items he associates with what it meant (means) to be an

Indian. Other images reveal such complexity. See Figures 8 and 9.

Figure 8: What Indians Eat (1)


Figure 9: What Indians Eat (2)

Interesting sketches come from those students who have integrated Patrick’s discussion into their

images—some students attempted to spell out the Ojibwa words Patrick taught them during his


presentation (see Figure 10). Other students created a visual map of the trajectory of historical Indians to

the present space of Native American life. Figure 11 presents what we assume is a comparison of a

historically represented Indian to a contemporary representation of an Indian. Figure 12 presents at least

two possible readings: First, we might read the set of images as progression for us of Indian life, where

the family represented moves from living in a teepee to living in a contemporary dwelling (relocated via

moving van). However, a second reading is indicated by the numbers the student has included. If we

allow the numbers to frame our reading, we might pull two sets of representations from this image: The

first set of sketches (labeled 1st, 2nd, 3rd) might represent what the student might consider to be typical

Indian life, defined by teepees and horses. The second set of sketches (again labeled 1st, 2nd, 3rd)

juxtaposes a rendering of “mainstream” life, defined by cars, urban dwellings, moving vans, and

speedboats to historic Indians of the past. Figure 13 integrates both historical and contemporary

representations of Indian life—this student has included typical Indian iconography (i.e., bow, arrow,

teepee, headband), but also a rifle and, most interestingly, a slot machine complete with a pullhandle and

flashing light on top.

Figure 10: Hello (Aannii), People (Anishinaabe) and Until Later (Baamaapii)


Figure 11: Diachronic Transitions


Figure 12a: Diachronic Transitions (2)


Figure 12b: Diachronic Transitions (3)

Figure 13: Traditional Images and Casino, a new traditional image?


Reading and Negotiating Representations of Identity

We can obviously read images such as those examples included above in two ways: First, as

condemnable, stagnant stereotypes that trap Indians in the past. The second approach, however, allows

a more productive read of these images, and allows us to read these images as multi-modal visual stories

that serve as arguments and that demonstrate students’ rich base knowledge and ability to learn new

concepts within a few minutes of storytelling.

Before we further explore the notions of base knowledge and the multiple literacies students

express and demonstrate in these images, we want to address notions of identity, as notions of Indian

identity are crucial to these images. Identity is, essentially, the sense of self that grows out of one’s

interactions with others. Importantly, many of the participants in Patrick’s work have not had significant

interactions with flesh and blood Native peoples—or, if they have, they do not associate these folks with

the representations of “Indians” that have been culturally conjured for them. Again, think of the political

cartoon of the boy explaining to the young girl, “Really? You don’t look like an Indian.” Instead, these

students’ interactions with “the Indian” have been limited to stereotypical images, romantic constructions,

and reproduced icons. If we reflect upon the current cultural context in which students confront this

imagery, we can see how slippery notions of identity are, and how these particular notions of Indian

identity feel comfortable, approachable, and solid.

Historically, one of the most familiar and comfortable anchoring points was a solid sense of self:

The I-think-therefore-I-am stable notion of identity. Currently, however, in our postmodern context, this

sense of self and our abilities to rely upon other familiar anchoring points (e.g., sovereign nation states,

The Family, Truth) have crumbled—have disappeared in a landscape of dynamic global expansion, vast

technological change, the rapid multiplication of micropolitical entities, and the explosive growth of

alienating forces like global crime and terrorism. Manuel Castells (1998) explained how individuals make

meaning and understand identity in a rapidly shifting world; that political identities formulated around

language and literacy practices are


fast becoming the main, and sometimes the only source of meaning…. People

increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of who they

are, or believe they are. (3)

It is somewhat paradoxical that in the face of identity slippage and shifts that the image of Indian identity

is trapped in the past. However, perhaps the image of the Indian allows us a sense of stability, of security,

have a shared, concrete, understandable history in the face of a world in which identity shifts so

dynamically and constantly. We may cling to icons and identities that feel stable in a world in which our

senses of self slide around constantly, depending on variables such as place, space, and time in the

world. Our sense of self, our identity, is a story that we write everyday.

Using a postmodern understanding of time, space, and literacy practices, Deborah Brandt (1995)

suggests that literacy, instead of being a somewhat stable, static, measurable thing, is actually a dynamic

process. New literate practices constantly arise in a society where “not even elites of the past have

encountered the current contexts in which literacy in its many forms is being practiced and learned” (p.

651). Today, students’ literate practices are mediated and remediated by a variety of media and events,

including the dynamic, evolving space of the World Wide Web. Brandt suggests that perhaps the best

way to actually measure what would typically be called literacy is to assess “a person’s capacity to

amalgamate new reading and writing practices in response to rapid social change” (p. 651). She

suggested that literacy piles up, and spreads out. Further, literacy has a residual character. We do not

instantly and easily replace one “old” practice with a new practice, but instead build our literacy practices

upon one another, which, in turn, shifts and reshapes our literacy practices. This takes place much as

stories are told and shared—stories evolve with each telling, just as literacy changes as we adapt and as

we adopt new practices. If we read students’ representations of the Indian as base knowledge, or initial

literacy and understandings, we can then use this as a structure upon which to build additional

understanding.

If we, however, attempt to eradicate students’ rich base knowledge—to devalue it as stereotypical

and racist—we are not acknowledging the cultural sources and spaces where students learn these


representations of Indians. Nor are we paying close attention to students’ knowledge. We can read

students’ expressions as base knowledge—or, as Brandt describes it—as artifacts of literacy, which move

back and forth and across generations and contexts.

In their “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies,” the New London Group (1996) presents a learning and

literacy manifesto. The authors note the traditional page-based, official forms of learning and teaching

and argue that the “idea of literacy pedagogy to account for culturally and linguistically diverse and

globalized societies” and that “literacy pedagogy must account for growing variety of text forms

associated with information and multimedia technologies” (61). The authors describe the changing work,

public, and private lives of individuals living today, and argue that schools are often both the gatekeepers

of “appropriate” means of literacy and the regulators of this literacy.

“All meaning-making,” the authors argue, is multi-modal, relying on visual, audio, gestural, and

spatial understandings and expressions of understanding. These hybrid practices are well-reflected in the

images collected during Patrick’s presentations. This hybridity reflects student attempts at bridging the

textual and the visual, as they label their images. These hybrid designs reveal the relationship of different

knowledges presented in a single document. To engage students in extending their knowledge of the

Indian, we can rely on one of the frameworks the New London Group offers: critical framing, which

“relates meanings to their social contexts and purposes... framing in relation to historical, social, cultural,

etc., of particular systems of knowledge and social practice” (86).

The group presents an approach that includes available designs (the resources of design),

designing (which reproduces given knowledges, social relations, etc.), and the redesigned (the resulting

new meaning, which, in turn, becomes new available designs). Certain modes of meaning facilitate these

processes, including visual meanings, audio meanings, gestural meanings, spatial meanings, and, most

importantly, multimodal meanings. All meaning, the authors argue, is multimodal. The hybridity and

intertextuality of meaning help us to understand the relationship of different designs in meaning.

The visual claims here rely upon at least three kinds of context: “immediate visual context,

immediate verbal context, and visual culture” (Birdsell & Groarke, 1996, p. 6). Visual context is sometimes


difficult to measure, and is incredibly complex. Are the students responding to Patrick’s appearance and

their assumptions about who and what he is? Are the students responding to the space in which the

discussion is taking place? Are the students responding to visual cues that teachers and/or principals are

giving? The verbal context here includes the text the students composed, be these styled as captions or

supplementary explanations of their drawings. Robert Sitz (1997) reported on a similar phenomenon he

observed when he asked a group of students to draw a “pop bottle” and reported that students

embellished elaborately with “background detail or with verbal balloons, captions, and other notations” (p.

88), many of which related to Coca-Cola. Even though students were instructed to not use words, most of

them did; Sitz reads their textual compositions as “background or contextual information... revealing in

regard to student interests, sense of humor, attitude, and so on” (p. 88). The visual culture students draw

upon during these exercises is the world in which the students exist, rich with information.

TEACHING VISUAL ANALYSIS

The most compelling suggestion, for us, is to ask all educators to understand students’ base knowledges.

Obviously, students come into our classrooms with rich cultural histories and from contexts that help

shape those histories. Often, it is tempting to condemn students’ beliefs, especially when they are

personally or politically offensive. However, condemnation does not lead to student learning and

development. Instead, tracing student beliefs is a worthy activity, exploring why individuals think the way

they do regarding, for example, Native Americans. This understanding can then be a springboard to

shape more complex and accurate understandings of difference.

American Indian stereotypical imagery is hard to avoid and hard to ignore. A cursory examination

of Indian units taught in many schools have students drawing or otherwise constructing artifacts

recognized as “Indian”: tepees, headdresses, canoes, buckskin outfits, etc. Linking these artifacts to

specific Native American people or situating them into a specific historical frame is rarely part of the unit’s

or lesson plan’s listed goals. Without much effort, these stereotypical artifacts can be used in instruction,

but need a precise and accurate context. The challenge teachers face is not to avoid these objects and


activities or to condemn them—or to use them without thought or perspective. Creating buckskin outfits

out of grocery bags or designing a canoe from birch bark can build an understanding about a specific time

and place. But there must be room for that context and understanding to change and grow as students

and teachers develop new knowledge. Therefore, teachers and students should recognize images that

stereotype and/or freeze Native Americans in the historical past. Obviously, artifacts like feather

headdresses influence the way we think about Indians, but we can add to that influence by, for example,

creating context and perspective by asking and answering questions about the artifacts we find in

American consumer culture.

An initial step toward deeper, contextual visual engagement is to seek out examples of images of

Indians in stores, on billboards, and on products. These images support three important points: First,

most of the images found in grocery stores or toy stores are of warriors and/or princesses. Second,

enough stereotypical examples exist to substantiate the claim that people are more likely to encounter

stereotypical images of the American Indian than to meet flesh and blood Native American people.

Finally, this search of stereotypical imagery shows the prevalence of such imagery in American culture in

a way that is hard to ignore. Teachers and students, through this exploration and analysis, through this

accumulation of images, can better understand the proliferation of these approaches to Native

Americans, and the stereotyping of American Indian culture, rituals, practices, and beliefs.

A second step is to encourage educators to work toward replacing students’ cultural

stereotypes—both positive and negative—with more fluid, dynamic understandings of tendencies. It is

tempting generally to reduce an entire cultural group, tribe, or nation to a simple representation. Edmond

Weiss (1998) warns, however, that “even if these facile generalizations are mainly true, we should always

be uncomfortable with any conception that treats members of a group as instances of a profile—tokens of

a type—rather than as individual persons” (p. 260) and Linda Beamer (1992) adds that although

stereotypes “may be helpful and even accurate to some degree, they are limited insights, revealing only a

part of the whole culture” (p. 294). We encourage educators here to approach stereotypes as both

positive and negative because although most stereotypes emerge from fear or misunderstanding, some


stereotypes hold limited truths and are useful in a limited capacity. Because “stereotypes” is such a

loaded expression and fosters negative perceptions in readers’ minds, we follow the model of DeVoss,

Jasken, and Hayden (2001) and suggest the use of the term tendencies, which allows “space for

deviations and differences from our expectations of the ‘norm’” (p. 80). One method toward putting an

understanding of tendencies into practice is described by DeVoss et al. (2001): asking students to think

about the groups in which they are members, and asking students to further reflect upon the stereotypes

that others might hold about those groups, where these stereotypes arise, and how justified these

stereotypes are. Creating visual renderings of their own group identities is a space to visually represent

these associations. Often, students don’t have a strong sense of stereotypes until they themselves

become the objects of stereotyping. This exercise also allows for the analysis of how stereotypes limit

communication contexts and cultural understandings.

An activity that can follow an activity like the one we’ve described in the appendix is to ask

students to tell stories about their own cultures, both textually and visually. These stories could be of

North American/United States culture in general, or more specifically, this prompt could ask that students

reflect upon their own racial/ethnic identity. Students may find it much more difficult to tell stories about

their cultures, or to visually represent their cultures. Ask that students how they situate themselves within

a cultural background. What stories do their drawings tell? Does any person resemble their drawings?

CONCLUSIONS

As teachers, we must be prepared to negotiate the cultural visual references that students have built and

will bring to our classrooms. And if we believe, as Scott Lyons does, that “Indian” is an argument made

drawing upon available cultural and social means, we can borrow from students’ established literacy

practices and further those practices to equip students with stronger ballast for their stories regarding

what an Indian is and thus reconstruct what an Indian identity does, and we can engage students in thick

analysis of their own identities and representations. In doing so, we may be able to reach a point where

students move beyond stereotypical and historic notions of Indian identity to realize a broader bandwidth


of both historical and contemporary Native American identities. Ignoring the rich practices and

understandings of students—or dismissing them—erases the potential moments and spaces within which

we can make change; ignoring students’ preconceived notions negates the fissures within which we can

move our understandings of Native Americans into more robust, more appropriately representative

spaces.


Appendix

The History of the Prompt: Drawing Knowledge in Elementary School Classrooms

Patrick Russell LeBeau

DRAWING INDIANS

Over the past 23 years as I have been lecturing and teaching on the general subject of American Indian

Studies, I have collected audience drawings of Indians. Regardless of whether I am introducing a film,

giving a lecture, teaching a class, presenting at an elementary school assembly, or conducting a teacher-

training workshop, I ask participants at the start of the session to draw what they think the

film/lecture/class/presentation/workshop is about. Participants already anticipate the content to be

something about American Indians, due to the title, subject, or focus of the event. Even my Lakota/Plains

Chippewa ancestry provides a physiognomic prompt as I stand before them and make my request.

Provided with a title, a subject, and an American Indian teacher, participants spend 10 minutes drawing

and doodling images of what they believe to be relevant to the day’s discussion. Although what they draw

is somewhat predictable, the level of imagination and knowledge of Indians and consistency of the

imagery between disparate audiences is something surprisingly interesting to analyze and study.

After collecting images for 10 years, I made a collage piece out of them. Very apparent in the

collage was the difficulty in distinguishing between what was drawn by elementary students from

Michigan and California and what was drawn by adults, which included graduate students, social studies

teachers, professors, and community members from across the United States. Regardless of

geographical location, the different audiences shared an elaborate and imaginative idea of American

Indians as revealed by their drawings, even though their drawings are predictable, stereotypical, stylized,

and frozen in the past. Some differences are evident: A number of elementary students used crayons or

markers, while most adults drew stick figure Indians and scenarios with pencil or pen (less confident, I

believe, in their artistic abilities). More remarkable are the similarities—most the of pictures drawn can be

reduced to teepees and warriors, with war weapons and feathered headdresses. Why are the same


pictures drawn over and over again by all age groups regardless of gender, age, or educational

background? Clearly, the participants had knowledge of Indians, albeit oversimplified, standardized, and

ahistorical.

SITUATING INDIANS ACROSS MEDIA AND EDUCATION

Since the late 1960s, scholars have researched the presence of Indian stereotypes in American

consumer culture, Hollywood films, television programming, toys, children’s literature, America canonical

literature, American art, and American popular culture. The presence of Indians across popular media,

objects, and artifacts is the understandable source of information that has shaped what an ordinary U.S.

citizen knows about Indians. Raymond Stedman’s Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American

Culture (1967), Arlene B. Hirschfelder’s American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader

and a Bibliography (1st Edition 1982), Peter C. Rollins’ and John E. O’Connor’s Hollywood’s Indian: The

Portrayal of the Native American in Film (1998), Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s Celluloid Indians: Native

Americans in Film (1999) and Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998) and Indians in Unexpected Places

(2004) are among many works that have documented the pervasive presence of American Indian

stereotypes in American culture and society. The scholarship has proven that stereotypical images of

Indians are easy to find and that these images have had a subliminal influence on impressionable minds.

Although early education about American Indians begins in elementary school—most often in

fourth grade—the knowledge young people in the United States have of Indians predates classroom

instruction. For example, an education major working with elementary students and taking one of my

classes on the origin and history of American Indian stereotypes brought to me after a lecture on Indian

classroom artifacts an Indian paddling a canoe a classroom project where students constructed the canoe

out of paper and cardstock; when completed, each student’s name was inscribed on the paddle (see

Figure 14). However, this student reported that despite the project, most of the students could tell

elaborate stories about Indians and they could also draw very detailed pictures of Indian life frozen in a

distant past, as the main part of this essay explains. The education major was amazed children knew so


much about Indians. In a another elementary school activity he described to me, students are instructed

how to build a simple three-dimensional Indian-life diorama.

Another teacher noted that providing the students with basic materials (shoebox, colored

construction paper, a teepee template, a few toy horses, scissors, crayons, and markers), and a simple

prompt (make an Indian home) was all that was needed for a 50-minute activity (see Figure 15). Not only

were students absorbed with the construction of the diorama, they play-acted and were able to tell

detailed stories about make-believe Indians. Although much that is created and playacted is most often

stereotypical, teachers are often surprised at the sophisticated knowledge young people can bring to the

classroom before and during lessons about American Indians. I have had many students in my

undergraduate classrooms remember fondly their first “Indian” lessons and school projects. One student

gave me a drawing made in fourth grade that was a prized keepsake until the student learned about the

pervasive and perplexing presence of Indian stereotypes in American culture (see Figure 16). He told me

he always could imagine an “Indian world” when he looked at that drawing and he liked it so much he

even brought it to college with him.

THE PROMPT EVOLVES

With years of experience and travel, along with interactions with scholars and college students, I continue

to ask audiences to draw what they know of Indians. Recently I was scheduled to visit over 50 elementary

classrooms, grades 4 through 6, over a period of 10 days (or 5 classrooms a day), My goal was the same

as it has been for some time: I wanted to explore “what students already know and what they found

fascinating” about American Indians while at the same time teaching them something new.

I modified my original prompt from a single, simple logo or drawing to “draw whatever you know

about Indians.” Although some teachers frowned on having students draw during my presentation, I

encouraged the students to do so and the results were, in their way, a form of note-taking and a type of

visual annotation of my presentation. My task was (in 40 minutes) to teach 4th through 6th graders

something about Michigan Indian history and to give them a simple language lesson. I wanted to stress


that Michigan Indians live in the present day and that Indians have a continuous history rather than one

frozen in the past. I taught them three Ojibwa words: Aannii (Hello), Anishinaabe (People) and Baamaapii

(Until Later). The results were amazing.

The elaborate story-filled pictures elementary students produce when asked to draw what they

know about American Indians reveals a complex visual language students can use to communicate

knowledge they are confident they possess and further, they began to incorporate new knowledge like

“Aannii” and Indians in modern settings. The drawings reveal an elaborate connection between pictures

and words constructed with letters of the alphabet as demonstrated by the numerous drawings of

recognizable implements, like a bow, aligned aside a word, like “bow.”

What I learned was that stereotypes, though perpetuating false histories, can be a foundation for

new knowledge and a way of introducing imaginative minds to complicated ideas and concepts about

American Indians, the complete opposite of a simple stereotype.


Figure 14: An education major in my course on “Rethinking Michigan Indian History” and working in a

local elementary school classroom gave me this canoe after listening to a lecture where I produced examples of similar projects conducted by elementary school teachers in other schools


Figure 15: A School Project


Figure 16: College Student’s 4th Grade Drawing


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