Officially Indian: Symbols that Define the United States

By Cécile R. Ganteaume
National Museum of the American Indian (2017)
184 pages

Review by Bradley Shreve

All history is revisionism, but every so often a work comes along that fundamentally alters American historiography. Such is the case with Cécile R. Ganteaume’s fascinating book, Officially Indian. To be sure, Ganteaume is not an academic historian per se, but an art historian and an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC. But it is precisely this background that enables her to offer us a fresh, transformative look at the United States’ complicated and perplexing relationship with Native peoples.

Lavishly illustrated, Officially Indian never bores with uninterrupted pages of mundane text or an uninspired chronicle of events. Indeed, perusing Ganteaume’s work is like a visit to the NMAI itself, as the myriad illustrations and photographs power the narrative’s flow. The book is chronologically organized, beginning with the contact experience. from the get-go, European newcomers were fascinated, even obsessed with Native peoples. Of course fear played an ugly role, triggering countless violent encounters, but there was also admiration and often glorification of American Indian societies, cultures, and peoples. Indeed, a Native woman was often employed to symbolize America itself.

As the colonizers settled in, they began developing an identity separate from the European states from whence they came, embracing American Indians as the symbolic representation of who they were as a distinct people. American Indians offered them a pedigree. An ancestry that could be traced to Pocahontas was considered “uber American,” to borrow the words of Kevin Gover (Pawnee), president of the NMAI. Even as they clashed violently with Indigenous nations, Native peoples themselves represented liberty, freedom, strength, equality, democracy—the very values that the colonists would eventually proclaim as the foundation of their new republic, the United States.

Despite the warfare and dispossession that came with westward expansion, the United States never tried to hide away the land’s Indigenous peoples. Quite the opposite, it enshrined them in emblems, currency, statues, crests, diplomatic medals, architectural reliefs, murals, paintings, and a slew of other symbols created under official governmental aegises. Today, a visitor to the nation’s capital need not look far to see this symbolism prominently on display.

In his moving afterword, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) observes that “the United States is the strangest and unlikeliest country in the history of Earth,” a point that Ganteaume’s book so ingeniously illuminates. Officially Indian moves well beyond the overly simplistic narrative that has dominated Western-oriented academics’ telling of American Indian history. Rather than wallow in the “emptiness and banality of the usual portrayals of Native history as a mournful recitation of inevitable wars lost,” as Smith puts it, Ganteaume embraces complexity, contradiction, and gray matter. In so doing, she underscores just how crucial American Indians are to the United States’ core identity, and how entangled and bewildering the American experience really is.

Bradley Shreve, Ph.D., is managing editor of Tribal College Journal.