Indians In Unexpected Places Chapter Summary

Deloria Short Paper Assignment

In the book Indians in Unexpected Places, written by Philip J. Deloria, Indians strive to redefine their place in American society through their involvement in athletic events, acquisition of automobiles, and early film performances. All of these factors plus the adaptation of Native American music by white people play a part in helping to connect Indians and non-Indians together in a modern world. Deloria begins his book by explaining the background behind non-Indians expectations by analyzing the involvement of the Indians production of cultural artifacts. This helped emphasize the Indians as being a primitive people as well as explain nineteenth century America’s vision of a segregated world between Indians and non-Indians. This meant they approved of the reservation boundaries and had no

Deloria, from the very beginning of the chapter, uses tons of images to identify the expectations placed upon them with the arrival of technology into the now modern world. He starts the chapter by mentioning Geronimo’s Cadillac as a song, image, story, and most importantly, an idea (Deloria 136). Deloria, more than anything, strives to get the reader to picture Indians behind the wheel of a shiny new car as something that could be considered normal as well as to see Indians welcoming technology into daily life. Despite this, Deloria mentions humor as one of the ways non-Indians could ‘safely regard’ Indians in fancy vehicles as the abnormality, meaning that Indians with money and fancy technology was not to be considered the norm (Deloria 178). With this in mind, the realization that non-Americans still secretly want segregation through reservation boundaries even in the twentieth century, seems all but