Abstracts of Papers
Christina Judith Hein:
Appropriating the Look: Media and the White Man
in Sherman Alexie's Dear John Wayne (2000)
Indigenous people have not only survived into the 21st century, they have also played their parts in the development of modern media. While much of their visibility in this context has been due to their positions as objects in both US Western movies and the testimonies of cultural anthropology, indigenous people have also used and appropriated the media for their own ends.
Literary and screenwriter Sherman Alexie is certainly one of the most prolific authors in indigenous North America these days. His short story, "Dear John Wayne," offers highly interesting perspectives not only on the interaction of Native people with modern media but also, and even more so, on those who have often been considered as their main purveyors and representatives - white men. The traditional and defining look that both the camera and the anthropologist have cast on indigenous people is reversed in the text; assumptions of power relations are undermined.
The paper traces the strategies employed by Alexie in the process of knitting a counter-narrative that locates his Spokane protagonist, Etta Joseph, at the center and that deflates, even queers, the figureheads of Western myth-making, the cultural anthropologist and Western movie star, John Wayne. Thus, apart from highlighting the unusual dynamic between members of white and indigenous communities, my reading also focuses on Alexie's treatment of traditionally assigned gender roles.
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