Native acts: Indian performance, 1603-1832

Before the Boston Tea Party, where colonists staged a revolutionary act by masquerading as Indians, people looked to Native Americans for the symbols, imagery, and acts that showed what it meant to be "American." This book explores the role that Native peoples themselves played in creating and enacting the Indian performances appropriated by European Americans. These essays chronicle of the performance of "Indianness" by Natives in North America from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In this collection, Indian peoples emerge as active, vocal, embodied participants in cultural encounters whose performance shaped the course of early American history.

Introduction / Laura L. Mielke -- Lying inventions: native dissimulation in early colonial New England / Matt Cohen -- The Deer Island Indians and common law performance / Nan Goodman -- Native performances of diplomacy and religion in early New France / John H. Pollack -- Wendat song and carnival noise in the Jesuit relations / Olivia Bloechl -- "I Wunnatuckquannum, this is my hand": native performance in Massachusett language Indian deeds / Stephanie Fitzgerald -- In a red petticoat: Coosaponakeesa's performance of Creek sovereignty in colonial Georgia / Caroline Wigginton -- Playing John White: John Wompas and racial identity in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world / Jenny Hale Pulsipher -- "This wretched scene of British curiosity and savage debauchery": performing Indian kingship in eighteenth-century Britain / Timothy J. Shannon -- Performing Indian publics: two native views of diplomacy to the western nations in 1792 / Phillip H. Round -- Editing as Indian performance: Elias Boudinot, poetry, and the Cherokee Phoenix / Theresa Strouth Gaul.