i

Wilson, Pamela. "Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television Documentary and Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s." Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1996.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Foreword: Chapter One: JOURNEYS AND QUESTS GETTING IT: THE POLITICS OF COMPETING CULTURAL REALITIES

iii viii 1

PART I: MEDIA DISCOURSES

Chapter Two: DISCURSIVE IMPERIALISM: NATIVE AMERICANS IN AMERICAS POLITICAL AND CULTURAL IMAGINATION CONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN STRANGER

32

33

Chapter Three:

128

PART II: THE CONJUNCTURAL MOMENT: DISCOURSES OF RESPONSE AND REACTION

Chapter Four: Chapter Five: CONTESTED TRUTHS MISSIONS OF CHARITY: CHRISTIAN RHETORIC AND GESTURES OF ALTRUISM ALL EYES ON MONTANA: TELEVISION AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF REGION

202

203

310

Chapter Six:

362

ii

PART III: STORMING THE DISCURSIVE FORT

453 Chapter Seven: DEFINING INDIANNESS: DISCOURSES OF RACE, ETHNICITY AND NATION TELEVISION AND ITS PUBLICS: SHIFTING FORMATIONS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE MEDIA ACCESS, ACTIVISM AND THE POLITICAL EFFECTIVITY OF REPRESENTATION

454

Chapter Eight:

527

Chapter Nine:

600

APPENDICES
Appendix A: TRANSCRIPT OF THE KINESCOPE OF THE AMERICAN STRANGER TRIBAL PERSPECTIVES ON TERMINATION EPILOGUE: THE CONTRACT WITH AMERICA--A RETURN TO TERMINATION?

646

647

Appendix B: Appendix C:

673 689

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

702

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing acknowledgments for such a complex endeavor is an extremely difficult task, since there have been so many people who have generously given me their time and energy throughout my quests and journeys to assemble this dissertation. First, this project could not have been completed without the help and expertise of professional historical archivists across the United States who helped to unearth long-forgotten records, documents, letters, photographs and motion picture recordings. Many of them went far beyond the call of their professional duty to allow me access to formerly inaccessible records or to enthusiastically help me to find the proverbial needle in the archival haystack. I hope these keepers of the historical flame realize how precious their expertise has been to me. Foremost among those who controlled access to specific manuscript collections were Nanci Young of Princeton Universitys Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library, Janet Kennelly of the Smithsonian Institutions National Anthropological Archives; Sister Margaret LaPorte of the Sisters of Providence convent archives in Spokane; Laura Arksey of Spokanes Cheney Cowles Museum; Brother Ed Jennings of Gonzaga Universitys Foley Library; Richard Fusick of the National Archives; Dwight Strandberg of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library; Kathryn Otto of the Montana Historical Society; and Dale Johnson of the University of Montanas Mansfield Library. Those who were essential in the search for kinescopes and early television representations of Native Americans were Rosemary Haynes and Madeline Matz of the Library of Congress; Jake Homiak of the Smithsonian Institutions Human Studies Film Archives; the staff in the Montana

iv

State Librarys Reference Section; Emilia Seubert of the Museum of the American Indian; and Glenn McMullen of Iowa State Universitys Archives of the Factual Film. Finally, I could not have made it this far without the wonderful referrals of all types provided by Maxine Fleckner Ducey of the Wisconsin State Historical Societys Center for Film and Theater Research; her brother, John Fleckner, of the Smithsonian Institutions Museum of American History; and Dan Einstein of UCLAs Film and Television Archives. For my local and regional research in Montana, I am greatly indebted to a number of people from Western Montana who opened their metaphorical vaults for me, both personally and professionally. My rich findings about the history of the Blackfeet Tribe would not have been possible without the cooperative interest and warm generosity of the McKay family, especially Joe McKay and his mother Lucille (Mrs. Iliff) McKay; Tribal Chief Earl Old Person; Tribal archivist Joyce Spoonhunter, all of Browning; former Tribal Chairman Walter Wetzel of Helena, and Mae Crawford Boyd of Teecnospos, Arizona. On the Flathead reservation, Bob Bigart of the Salish-Kootenai Community College archives was very helpful. In Great Falls, I owe much gratitude to Dorothy Bohn, a lifelong Great Falls community activist with whom I spent a wonderful and memorable day in conversation; regional broadcast historian Norma Ashby; Barbara Mittal, the historian for the Great Falls Tribune who opened the newspapers morgue to me; Sister Laurence Crowley of Great Falls College of Education; Julianne Ruby of Cascade County Historical Society; Dick Pompa, KFBB News Director, Great Falls and Ray Nicklay, former KGVO News Director, Missoula. I found the people of Western Montana to be among the most hospitable I have ever

known, warmly welcoming this wandering stranger from the East as I delved into their local pasts. Among those with some affiliation to the television industry (past or present), I wish to express my thanks to Mary Dorman, Peter Hackes and Bob Asman of NBCs Washington News Bureau; to Yuien Chin of NBCs (New York) News Archives; to Reuven Frank and Charles Van Doren for answering my letters, and most of all to Bob McCormicks very engaging daughter Karen McCormick Skilling and her family. Without Karens interest, continuing support and eagerness to help me in any way possible--not to mention her finding of the original kinescope in the attic of her New York apartment--I would never have had the gumption to keep plowing through the convoluted channels into which this project led me. Thanks to Karen, I persevered. Some other very special people deserve much recognition. Academic research often remains locked up in our brains or on our computer disks. When we finally get opportunities to present preliminary findings and interpretations of our research at colloquia and scholarly conferences, the responses we receive from our colleagues are precious and not easily forgotten. Some have provided significant research assistance. An occasional and devoted colleague agreed to read a chapter here or there and provide much-needed criticism; a few foolhardy souls actually read the whole thing, and survived to tell about it. In addition to my advisor, John Fiske, and members of my dissertation committee (Julie DAcci, Michele Hilmes, Vance Kepley, and Gary Sandefur), who waded through a number of drafts of my empirical evidence and interpretive prose and offered kind, enthusiastic and constructive feedback along the way, Id like to also thank friends, family members and colleagues who have

vi

shown more than a passing interest in the project and whose feedback in one form or another has been invaluable. In alphabetical order--since any other order would be impossible to weight--many thanks to Chris Amirault, William Boddy, Aniko Bodroghkozy, David Bordwell, Steve Classen, Beth Corbett, Chad Dell, Glenda Earwood-Smith, Shari Goldin, Bo Grist, Hap Kindem, Bob McChesney, Lisa Parks, Roberta Pearson, Andrea Putscher, Lynn Spigel, Michelle Stewart, Sasha Torres, Mary Ann Watson, Mark Williams, and others whose names Ive failed to include. I especially want to thank my parents, Bob and Linda Wilson, and my sisters, Cara and Amy, for their unfailing support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Greg and Nolan, who have spent parts of the last four years almost as immersed in the project as I have. I think Nolan became immersed while in utero, since his beginnings and those of the project roughly coincided. Most of my research travel was done during Nolans first year, so I owe both of them more than I can ever repay for the hours spent traveling and waiting--in bare motel rooms and hot, dusty cars--while I gathered just a few more files and interviews. We saw some beautiful sights as we pursued archival leads in the Pacific Northwest and northern Great Plains that summer, so I hope that the scenery made some of the waiting worthwhile. During the writing phase, I have often felt like an absentee mother as I holed up in my office under seige by my files and computer for days at a time, yet both father and son seem to have survived and even thrived during my sporadic absences. Along with the support of all of my family during a very difficult period of family crisis, I especially appreciate Gregs constant and unwavering faith that, yes, I would someday finish this dissertation, no matter what. His belief in me and

vii in the ultimate significance of this project has been the single most important force that got me through the transitions of the last four years. His intellectual and personal contributions to my scholarship are not footnoted, but have been essential to my intellectual development and the ultimate shape of this dissertation. Ironically, the three people who have had the most influence upon this project are those who gathered and maintained the original historical evidence through their visionary and perhaps prescient understanding of their own place in this history. Although they have only spoken to me through their secondary records and the rich documents they left behind, I owe strong debts and deep affection to Bob McCormick, Sister Providencia, and Iliff McKay. They were three people, from three very different worlds, whose lives intersected for a short but profound time in the conjunctural moment that has been permanently frozen by these historical records. Their spirit survives in their legacy.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania April, 1996

viii Wilson, Pamela. "Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television Documentary and Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s." Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1996.

FOREWORD: JOURNEYS AND QUESTS

In her book White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg subtitled her Introduction Points of Origin, Points of Departure. The concept of a Foreword as a point of departure--or as a recounting of such--resonates with my personal experience in the process which has culminated with this dissertation. This process has indeed been a journey, and the writing has only been the most recent leg of a trip which I seem to have embarked upon many years ago. In fact, its hard to pinpoint exactly when the trip began which has led me to this point, but after many detours, dirt roads, hiking trails and superhighways, I find myself here. And even here is not my destination, for the questions that have nagged at me throughout this endlessly-unfolding process of researching and writing this dissertation now occupy me even more fully--and the act of writing is not an act of completion, but merely an act of recording ones thoughts and understandings at one particular stage of the process. My points of departure for this journey have been multiple. My interest in social and cultural issues, particularly the intercultural interface at the point of tension between ethnic, racial or economically-circumscribed subcultures and the dominant American society, began early in my life. I have always been interested in both the theoretical and practical aspects of questions surrounding the social construction of

ix knowledges, of realities and of so-called (hotly-contested) truths. Perhaps by sharing some details of my personal and professional journey, I can point to some methodological and historiographical issues which have clung to me as Ive traveled along this road--all of which inform my larger project. Growing up in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood in a small Southern city, I experienced racial difference--and knowledge of my own whiteness--at an early age. I also had an awareness of, though not a complex understanding of, the subtleties of class difference (and particularly differences in types of what Bourdieu calls cultural capital) as a young girl. My father came from a rural Southern, though non-farming, family in the tobacco region of North Carolina. My grandfather was a rural mail carrier, so his family of sons had not suffered as much economic deprivation during the Depression and had experienced more privilege than many of their neighbors. My mothers family, from the foothills of the North Carolina mountains, was downright aristocratic (though not cosmopolitan) in their provincial small-town way, since my grandfather was a respected local attorney and my grandmother a society wife who engaged in altruistic volunteer work in her community. Both of my parents were college-educated to varying degrees: my mother left college to get married and start a family, and my father became disillusioned with academia while in a Ph.D. program and turned to the corporate world instead. My childhood was spent in a neighborhood in Lynchburg, Virginia which was all white and primarily working class. However, my parents educational background and white-collar work positioned us as socially different from the families around us in many ways, leading to many subtle distinctions in class and cultural capital. In this

x Kennedy era, my mother embraced a classic liberal and politically progressive attitude, though my father at that time was more stubbornly conservative and considered himself a Republican. Our family was similarly divided by religion: though both parents had been raised in traditional mainstream Protestant churches (Methodist and Baptist), my mother had become a Unitarian and took her children to that liberal church, a place of high cultural capital which also reinforced an ideology of humanitarianism, anti-racism, tolerance of other lifestyles and the potential for social transformation through committed altruism. Being considered a liberal and a Unitarian in Lynchburg during that time was akin to being a Communist during the Cold War, since Lynchburg was the home base of Jerry Falwells Moral Majority, the evangelistic and politically conservative Southern Baptist organization, and a hotbed for the growing Christian Right which would gather increasing political strength over the next several decades. The other factor which led to my positioning as different was the fact that my parents, striving for the best educational opportunities for me, sent me across town (in this pre-busing era) to a program that would today be considered a magnet program for gifted children. I did not attend school with my neighbors until I was in fourth grade. By that time, my sense of difference--ideological, class, political--had been firmly established. My mothers progressive political views led me to my first experience with racism. During the 1964 campaign season, the children of the neighborhood began to talk politics as only children can. The parents next door were avid Goldwater supporters, and the children ran around the yard chanting Goldwater, Goldwater, we want Goldwater. When I asked my mother who we supported, she told me that she

xi was favoring Lyndon Johnson, so I ran out and started a battle of name-hurling as we shouted Goldwater! No, Johnson! back and forth across the playground. The next day, the children next door taunted me by calling me a nigger lover. I vaguely knew what the epithet referred to, but had no idea why I was suddenly being called this name, until my mother tried to explain very simply the political ramifications of what were then Democratic versus Republican positions on social and racial issues. Though I was vaguely aware of the existence of black people at that time, we had very little day-to-day contact in the socially segregated society of Lynchburg (in fact, the schools there did not officially integrate until 1970). That was the first time that I remember witnessing the anger and hatred of racism--from the mouths of children. As I grew older, I had limited interactions with African American people in my daily life, most of whom were black women. An occasional middle-class black family could be found to have broken through into the white school system, and one of my earliest school friends was a girl my age who was one of the only black children in the gifted school. When my mother started back to work in various social-work type positions, she hired a series of black housekeeper/child care workers who came to our home every day and took care of my preschool-age sisters. Although treated respectfully by my mother, and well-loved by us, these domestic workers were chronically underpaid. However, their lives--especially the experience of seeing their homes in the poorer and blacker parts of the city when we took them home after work--provided me with my only somewhat intimate insights into the economic and sociological struggles of social minorities.

xii My experience with ethnic difference was almost non-existent prior to attending college, with one major exception. My first exposure to Native American culture came when I spent the summer before my senior year of high school at an NSF-sponsored Summer Linguistics Institute, an intensive academic program for high school students which introduced methods of scholarship in anthropological linguistics and included bringing in Navajo speakers as informants for us to interview to try to understand the complexities of the Navajo language. It is significant that we did not actually do on-site field work on the Navajo Reservation, but rather had these informants supplied to us in a laboratory setting. However, on our weekend field trips we explored the Northern Arizona region, and became aware of the variety of Native American cultures that existed there. That experience initiated an interest in Native American issues to which I would keep returning. After years of feeling more culturally privileged than those around me (and feeling vaguely uncomfortable about it), I faced a rude shock when I attended Bryn Mawr College and came face-to-face with the Northern, Ivy League intellectual and social aristocracy. I was never aware of my Southernness until I was in college in this wealthy Philadelphia suburb, and I was frequently treated as a provincial cousin by many of my more urbane and cosmopolitan classmates. Although there were some students of color at Bryn Mawr, my concept of ethnicity and ethnic difference during those years was more shaped by regional difference and especially the ethnicities associated with the urban Northeast, such as urban Jewish and Italian-American cultures. As an anthropology major, I was avidly interested in the varieties of cultural differences and ways of knowing and acting experienced by the globally diverse

xiii cultures we studied in class. However, all of them seemed so far away, so unreal in terms of the day-to-day realities of life to most of us in American society. I became increasingly interested in exploring the ways that cultural differences could be maintained within large, complex societies, and was especially interested theoretically in the way those differences were symbolically expressed through language and other verbal and visual arts. In the meantime, to earn enough money to continue in school, I took summer jobs working for old-moneyed Philadelphia families (all members of the Social Register), and found myself once more confronted by the way that race, class and culture intersected to keep our society effectively divided into so many isolated subcultures, ones which were maintained both from within and without through various forms of racism, sexism, classism and other prejudicial and exclusionary attitudes. This experience--one in which I observed the almost feudal multigenerational relationships between the Irish-American servant class and the landed, white professional class (of unmarked ethnicity)--also reinforced my sense that forms of cultural imperialism and dominance in our society have deep historic roots. I returned to Native America again years later by chance, when, after acquiring a masters degree in cultural anthropology and folklore (my main area of cultural research was Southern Appalachian culture), I took a job working as a field executive for a Girl Scout council in western North Carolina. My assigned area included the Qualla Boundary, the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This was a community in which my predecessors had been largely unsuccessful at organizing and sustaining a volunteer-based youth program, and I took up the challenge with the

xiv piqued interest worthy of my ethnographic training. I took as my task the goal of trying to understand the social structure of the community as well as the cultural differences and contradictions which had perplexed most of my Girl Scout colleagues. Typically, they would receive a great deal of interest from parents who wanted their daughters to be in a Girl Scout program, and the schools and churches would be supportive about supplying meeting spaces and support. Yet the core element of the Girl Scout program--the adult volunteers from the local community--were extremely difficult to either recruit or to maintain, and as a result, the program continually failed. It was clear that there were different, unvoiced, expectations within the community as to what the Girl Scout organization would and could provide for their children. And in spite of the large number of people who would sign up their children for the program, there was still a current of distrust and skepticism about an outside agency trying to come into the community and start something up--a lack of trust deeply rooted, I found, in the history of interactions between the Eastern Cherokee and the outside white society. I am forever indebted to a few tribal members who served as wise cultural translators for me, helping me to understand the unspoken dynamics of the intercultural tensions. You [white] people never come through, they would tell me when being particularly candid, or You always back out or leave things unfinished. I was told over and over about the Trail of Tears, the conquest of the Cherokee by U.S. soldiers in 1838 through which thousands of Cherokees were forcibly driven by foot to the Oklahoma territories (and perhaps a quarter perished); a century later, the Eastern Cherokee still define themselves around that historical event, proudly claiming to be the descendants of those who hid out deep in the mountains and re-established their

xv society from the survivors. I began to realize that it would take several years, at least, to build the foundations of trust upon which a self-sustaining volunteer youth program could be developed and maintained. Unfortunately, I lacked the support of my agency to carry out such a project. Desiring immediate results and not getting them, my supervisors bemoaned my waste of the agencys time and money and reassigned me. It was a strong lesson for me, one which has definitely though indirectly launched me on the journey which has led to this project. During this same period, I became associated with a national organization called the American Indian Scouting Association. I had heard about the annual conferences which this organization provided for both volunteers and staff members working in the Boy Scout and Girl Scout organizations who were working to develop or maintain programs in Indian communities. I initially talked my agency into sending me to my first national conference in hopes that I could pick up some tips to help with the Eastern Cherokee project. It was a life-changing experience. Run by Native Americans, the organizations purpose was two-fold: to provide opportunities for program leaders and directors from Indian communities, many of whom are Native Americans themselves, to bring their young people together to experience a national gathering of tribal Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and to provide intense informal training in intercultural awareness to non-Indian (mostly white) adults who worked as administrators or program directors serving Indian communities. Since the organization was run on terms determined by the Native American leadership, these white participants generally began to feel overwhelmed by their whiteness early in the week as they were confronted with cultural difference in the radical restructuring of

xvi their pre-existing ideas of professional conference protocol--affecting everything ranging from the informality in the way meetings are run, the seeming lack of concern with time constraints, the pervasiveness of Indian humor, the frequent giving of gifts, and the intensely personal nature of professional interactions and relationships which demand that a person not only act out a professional role but be engaged with each other at personal levels as well. I became involved in helping to plan the second conference, which was held in North Carolina, and subsequently received the honor of being one of only a handful of non-Indians elected to the AISA steering committee. Through this organization, I met some wise and wonderful and warm people from across the United States and from various tribes, whose friendships provided me with deeper insights into what it must mean to be an Indian in America in the latter part of the 20th century. The most specific point of departure for this journey, however, came when I was a student in the Ph.D. program in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1990s. I had left academic anthropology nearly a decade earlier because I was becoming increasingly wary about the assumptions of cultural imperialism which had pervaded both my professional and academic callings. After leaving the Girl Scouts, I had decided to pursue my interest in visual arts--especially documentary film--at the University of North Carolina. I discovered that in the time I had been out of the academy an infectious new paradigm had invaded anthropology and all of the social sciences. This self-reflexive approach (often called the postmodern turn in anthropology) interpellated me and reeled me back into an academic career. I went to Wisconsins Ph.D. program because I was

xvii very interested in the new field of Cultural Studies, which seemed to combine many of my interests in critical cultural theory in an examination of aspects of contemporary society, especially what is considered mass culture and the media. At that time, those leading the field of the cultural studies of media were promoting an understanding of television audiences, and were especially interested in what meanings and pleasures viewers either received or actively created for themselves from the act of watching television or consuming popular culture. There was also a growing interest among some of my faculty in applying a social/cultural history approach to film and television studies, and in situating the media squarely in their cultural historical positions. However, I was also taking classes with the folks down the hall in the Film program, who on the whole were much more text-oriented and involved in culling sophisticated understandings of the way media texts operate to create meaning for spectators. A significant number of them also were engaged in research about the history and political economies of the film and broadcasting industries. We also had visiting scholars whose interests aligned with and sometimes merged one or more of these interests. As a result, I found myself trying to create a niche for my own research which synthesized the elements which I was most interested in--an understanding of the textual and contextual (historical, social, cultural, political and economic) components and meanings generated by a particular film, television show or popular culture item or icon. Methodologically, I had always considered myself more an ethnographer than a textual analyst, a laboratory scientist or an historian. However, I discovered a vast wealth of archival resources in the State Historical Society of Wisconsins Center for

xviii Film and Theatre Research which turned me into an historian, and which opened the doors for this project. I was interested in documentary television as an area which had received very little scholarly attention, so I was searching the archives for some cases which would have adequate material to do the sort of analysis I desired--one which would provide empirical evidence and insights into the conditions of production, distribution and reception. If I were fortunate enough to find a number of such cases, I wanted to work on a documentary which dealt with intercultural issues, and especially one which might have provoked a response from the audience regarding cultural representations. One day in early 1992, after weeks of combing unsuccessfully through the papers of producer after producer of television documentaries, only to find merely pieces of the puzzle--a videotape or film reel here, a bunch of viewer letters or production material (but never both) there--I stumbled upon the Robert K. McCormick papers, a cache the richness of which was unequaled as far as I could determine. McCormick, an NBC journalist, had donated his papers to the Historical Society in two distinct groups over a period of decades. The first was a collection of material surrounding a documentary on American Indians he had produced in 1958; the archive index said very little about this material but warned that some pieces seemed to be missing and that there seemed to be some inconsistencies in the material. This material was donated a year after the broadcast. Why McCormick chose the Historical Society is unclear. The rest of the papers, donated much later in the 1970s, include radio news scripts, etc. and the materials surrounding his involvement in another controversial documentary, Angola: Journey to a War, in 1961.

xix The papers on The American Stranger, the American Indian documentary which was part of a series called NBC Kaleidoscope, appeared to be quite thorough. It included pre-production research, notes and correspondence as well as hundreds of viewer letters and, importantly, correspondence between NBC and government officials which pointed to a high-level conflict over the broadcast of this show. Mesmerized by the sheer potential of this material, I jumped in and began to try to sort through the material and try to reconstruct and make sense of the extreme emotional comments that I found scattered throughout the files. It was clear that this was no routine documentary or news report, both from McCormicks painstaking handling of it in pre-production and in the responses after the broadcast. I wasnt sure what I had, but I knew I had found something very special. After combing through the materials several times and searching the audiovisual end of the archives, I realized, however, that there was a central component which was missing--a copy of the film or broadcast itself. It was like a donut without the hole: I had found all the supporting documentation, but the text itself was missing. In spite of the doubts of some of my faculty members who could not foresee a dissertation on a television show without a existing text, I became increasingly excited as I worked through the material that in this material was a spectacular story waiting to be told. If my hunches were correct, this intercultural controversy over a single television program had far-reaching repercussions, sending ripples of activism throughout the American public and effecting a lasting impact on public policy. A body of historical material which actually documented the public response to such a broadcast, as well as the behind-closed-doors correspondence between the federal

xx government, the network, legislators and other public figures, seemed like quite a phenomenal cache. Early in 1993, I started a full-scale search for a copy of the broadcast on film. Because it had been a live broadcast, there was a possibility that it had never been archived on film (a process called a kinescope), but some archival documents indicated that a number of kinescopes had been circulating soon after the broadcast, which led me to believe that there might still be some kinescopes out there somewhere. I decided to contact the major institutions and organizations which were involved in the controversy to see if they had records of correspondence about the show in their archives, as well as asking if they had copies of the film. I became more and more curious about certain individuals who were repeatedly mentioned in the papers, and decided to try to find any of the key players who might still be alive. My goal was to search for as many competing perspectives on the controversy surrounding The American Stranger--and the larger issues it reflected--as I possibly could find. I was aware that McCormick was no longer alive, but hoped that I might be able to locate some of the other people who played a major part in the drama surrounding The American Stranger. I began, in February of 1993, by trying to locate Sister Providencia Tolan, an activist nun who had been a faculty member at the College of Great Falls in Montana during the 1950s. Tolan had been a primary contact and source of information for McCormick, and the McCormick files were stuffed with correspondence from Sister Providencia to the degree that her spirit and personality just came alive from her writings. She also seemed to have been a cornerstone of

xxi the anti-terminationist liberal activism in Western Montana, with strong working relationships with many tribal leaders and a central role in fighting the conditions of poverty in the Great Falls urban Indian ghetto, Hill 57. Calls to the college led me to find that Sister Providencia had died in 1989. I was directed to the Montreal-based Sisters of Providence convent in Spokane, Washington, which had been the recipient of Tolans voluminous personal papers. One of the lessons Ive learned on this journey has been an appreciation for the variety of ways that history can be archived--and for the fact that remnants of the past get archived at all. A theme running through my quest has been the sometimes awesome, sometimes comic, and sometimes tragic disparity between types of archiving institutions and the way that archival materials have been stored, treated, and made available to researchers. I have been alternately welcomed, excited, intimidated, encouraged, screened, sanitized, soiled, overwhelmed and disappointed by my experiences with historical archives. I have learned that the most carefully controlled and monitored archives do not necessarily hold the most precious or valuable records. I have learned that the hierarchies which determine whose (and what) items are worthy of officially saving and archiving are directly reflective of the hierarchies related to social class, race, ethnicity and power. Also, different cultures attach different values to saving material records. And the differences between official and unofficial, formal and informal, public and private are very important in talking about types of collections and the conditions therein. And I have also learned that combing archival collections, of any size, can be like sifting and culling precious jewels from the bedrock and mundane debris in which

xxii gems are found. More frequently than not, I found myself working in collections that were unprocessed, uncatalogued and yielding virgin material to this researcher. These experiences--first, of locating relevant collections, and second, of actually physically gaining access to and carefully spending hours and hours going through personal and corporate papers--have been the most exciting and rewarding of any intellectual experience I have encountered. The search for evidence--historical, social, political, personal--gave me the kind of emotional and intellectual charge that I imagine an archaeologist experiences when uncovering ruins, or a detective feels when searching for forensic evidence following a crime. These gems are the remainders and traces of life at an earlier time, the footsteps and fingerprints left inadvertently, the significant clues to an understanding of the personalities, motivations and behaviors of people of the past. The gathering--just finding these clues which have somehow survived the tidying up and erasures of time--is a feat unto itself. The analysis would come later. For now, it was just a search for evidence. The Sisters who staffed the convent library in Spokane were very forthcoming in their admiration for Sister Providencia, and told me they had gads of stuff of Sister Providencias in boxes lining the hallways and closets which had not yet been processed, and it was still coming in. I was welcome to come and go through the archives, they said, though they were fairly sure there was no film, just papers and photographs. I planned a trip to Spokane for the summer, when I could get away from my teaching duties for a long visit. Searching for missing pieces of the puzzle from the production end--especially the kinescope as well as certain key pieces of correspondence between NBC and

xxiii government leaders--I tried contacting NBCs corporate headquarters in New York, trying to ascertain if they maintained corporate correspondence, as well as archival prints of television shows in their news archives or library, but got no satisfactory results. After numerous calls in which I only got voice mail messages and rarely spoke to a living employee of the television network, I managed to get through to a few people. However, these contacts were relatively frustrating. For example, the secretary to a top executive told me that old corporate records were in a warehouse somewhere, and they weren't available to the public. Even though I explained to her that I was working with the official NBC corporate records at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (which become spotty and incomplete as they move into the late 1950s and 1960s), and was searching for the archived correspondence of executives like former President Robert Kintner, she brushed me off and said that they tell people just to go to the museums of broadcasting to do their research, and refused to talk with me further. Next, I began contacting every place in the country that I thought might have archived films about Native Americans from the period. I put calls in to the Library of Congress as well as state visual archives. A staff member at the Montana State Historical Society Photo Archives was pessimistic, saying, "Nobody in Montana collects films." Still, I called Montana state institutions, educational audio-visual collections, Native American museums and tribal college media centers, and had no luck, though I aroused the interest of many librarians and archivists who helped me search. The staff at Montana State Library were very helpful in leading me to relevant collections, and also made many calls on my behalf searching for the elusive

xxiv kinescope. I tried Wisconsin media collections, too, especially those around the Menominee Reservation, but also drew blanks. I also tried broadcasting museums around the country, and television stations in Western Montana, but still no luck. Next, I started contacting organizations which were represented in the 1958 materials, to see if by chance any of them had historical archives of either papers or audiovisuals. I also procured a listing of contemporary Native American organizations and began to contact some of those which had been in existence during the 1950s, writing letters to dozens of Native American libraries and museums to try to locate relevant materials. I had just gained access that spring to a university email account, so I decided to use the new technologies to post research queries on several media-related computer list bulletin boards and Internet news groups, as well as lists for professional archivists and on Native American issues. Through calls and letters to the National Archives and Bureau of Indian Affairs, I also began to try to find federal government records which might shed light on the governments role in the controversy. Most responses were evasive or pointed me to another branch or department. I began to realize that dealing with histories of corporations like NBC or of federal agencies was going to be an uphill struggle, since locating historical material was time-consuming, provided no present-day payoff for them, and was on the whole something these corporations and agencies would rather not be involved with. In the meantime, following leads that people were giving me was becoming a fruitful enterprise. For example, an archivist at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (the brother of a Wisconsin archivist) pointed me in a number of directions which proved very helpful--such as the Smithsonians Human Studies Film Archives,

xxv where I located a 1952 Iowa television program on Native Americans and termination--as well as giving me the names of many people at different agencies whom I could contact directly rather than risk having a general To whom it may concern letter or inquiry lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. Over the next few months, I received an occasional response to my letters and voice mail messages, and these brightened my outlook considerably. For example, a staff member at the Museum of the American Indian in New York did some sleuthing on my behalf, and also provided me with helpful information about other archives and also other researchers who might have some information about the use of media in Native American activism during the 1960s. A National Archives staff member wrote in April to tell me that he had located some files about The American Stranger in the Interior Department archives, and suggested that I come to Washington to look through the archival holdings for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and for the various tribes to see if I might find anything else of relevance. Already planning a West-coast trip for the summer, I added an East-coast trip to my agenda. The same week, I located the papers of former Senator Lee Metcalf, who was interviewed on the broadcast and was a leading figure in Indian Affairs during the 1950s, in Montanas State Historical Society archives. Another stop on my Western research tour. My dance card was getting fuller. One of my most significant finds came through email in May of 1993. Having seen my request on the computer list which circulated among archivists of moving images, an archivist at Princeton University contacted me to let me know that her institution had the entire collection of papers of the Association for American Indian

xxvi Affairs, a pro-Indian advocacy organization which played a central role in the conflict over termination during the 1950s. I had called and written to the organization itself, but had received no reply. The papers had recently been received, and had not been processed or catalogued. She told me that there were well over two hundred boxes, which I was welcome to go through if I wanted to come to New Jersey and spend a few days. I added another stop on my East-coast itinerary. About the same time, the Jesuit Archives at Gonzaga University in Spokane informed me that they held the papers of Father Cornelius Byrne, another key figure in the broadcast. That doubled my interest in traveling to Spokane. Meanwhile, I received a letter from the Great Falls television station KFBB regretfully informing me that all of their records had been destroyed in a 1969 fire. This was to be the first of several potential collections of useful archival material which I discovered to have been lost to the flames of history. Meanwhile, I was still writing or calling anyone I could think of who might have some information or suggestions as to where I might find some answers. I had called the Blackfeet Tribal Offices, and had been told (mistakenly) that both Iliff McKay and Walter Wetzel were both deceased, and that there were no tribal archives. I contacted a former Girl Scout colleague, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, to find out what she might know about some of the Blackfeet leaders prominent in the broadcast, as well as who to contact at the tribal level to find archival records. In one of those cases of extreme irony, it turns out that my colleague herself was the tribal stenographer for the Tribal Council during that period, and had vague memories of a television show about the tribe. She was also very familiar with the families, and told me that McKays widow would have her husbands personal papers and might let me see them. She also said

xxvii that she thought that Wetzel was still alive, but was living out of the area with one of his children or grandchildren. I stumbled upon another major (unprocessed, uncatalogued) archival collection when I called the Washington, D.C.-based headquarters of the National Congress of American Indians to followup on a letter Id never received a response to. They referred me to their archivist at the Smithsonians National Anthropological Archives, who told me that they had recently received about fifty percent of the organizations archival materials dating between 1944 and 1989. She was also en route to an NCAI conference, and said she would be talking to some of the NCAI old-timers. I was particularly interested in locating Helen Peterson, who had been the Executive Director of the national Indian organization during the 1950s and a strong voice in supratribal politics. Unfortunately, Petersons health had deteriorated to the point that she was no longer able to talk to interviewers or researchers, although she expressed an interest in the project and confirmed that much of her correspondence surrounding the termination issues--and The American Stranger--would be in the unprocessed files. Excited about the possibilities of finding Native American perspectives on the controversy surrounding the broadcast, I arranged a visit in June as part of my Eastern research trip. In the meanwhile, I followed as many leads as possible, many of which sounded promising but led to dead-ends. As exciting as the occasional discoveries of treasures may be, the day-to-day process of searching for historical evidence can be very tedious. I continued to hammer at the seemingly unsurmountable wall around NBC, hoping to find at least one sympathetic corporate soul who would unlock some

xxviii of the doors of the vaults and let me discover at least if the records I needed, and the kinescope, still existed or if they had been destroyed, passed on to another institution, or were sitting inaccessible in a warehouse somewhere gathering the dust of history. One lucky day, a colleague shared with me the name of a contact person in NBCs news archives who had been helpful to him in another search. However, when I called, I was told that the fees just to search their archives would cost me at least $400 to $500, and then if they were fortunate enough to locate anything it would cost me another sizeable amount to get a copy of it. Since I was living on a graduate students income, without research funds--and planning costly research trips to both coasts--I was forced to wait. In early June of 1993 I left Wisconsin and headed East, with my first stop in the Nations Capital, the locus of much of the political activity that had transpired during the late 1950s surrounding the Indian question. I began at the National Archives, following standard rules of wearing white gloves and using only pencil and Archives-approved paper as I perused the Classified Central Files from the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs files containing primary correspondence between the Indian Bureau and the Blackfeet, Flathead and Menominee reservation field offices and tribes. I found some correspondence regarding the controversy surrounding The American Stranger, but it became evident that the files had been selectively purged at some point. The Blackfeet Agency files, however, provided me with important background on disputes between the Tribe and the federal government, as well as copies of the minutes of all their Tribal Council meetings, which included discussion about The American Stranger. At the Library of

xxix Congress and the Smithsonians Human Studies Film Archives, I viewed other television shows and films from the 1950s and 1960s regarding American Indians. I then headed out to Suitland, Maryland, where the National Congress of American Indians papers were housed. These provided me with excellent background materials expressing this national Native American advocacy groups perspective and lobbying efforts regarding termination legislations, and also turned up specific files with vital correspondence concerning The American Stranger. I followed this adrenaline rush with two days at the Seeley Mudd Library at Princeton University, delving into the several hundred boxes in the library basement which had come from the Association for American Indian Affairs. I felt like a child at Christmas as I unearthed file after file of correspondence on NBC and The American Stranger (including clippings files of press reviews and followup articles), on the organizations film and TV monitoring practices during the 1950s, important background material on termination and legislation regarding various tribes. A side trip to New York netted me a visit to the Museum of the American Indian and a research trip to the Museum of Television and Radio. I returned home with reams of photocopied archival documents which needed to be thoroughly read, filed and catalogued somehow. At first unsure that I had enough material upon which to build a dissertation, I began now to feel that I was inundated with papers--and needed to find some sort of management system for processing, cataloguing, storing and accessing the synthesized archives I was collecting myself. However, I had little time for such luxuries before I headed West to gather even more to add to my paper collection. In Spokane, I discovered not one but

xxx TWO repositories of Sister Providencia Tolans papers, and spent several days sorting through the voluminous documentation of this late activist and humanitarian. Ironically, it was in Sister Providencias papers that I discovered a bound Masters thesis analyzing The American Stranger written thirty years earlier by Robert Knutzen, who had been a student in my own department at the University of Wisconsin! (I tried to locate Knutzen, but a series of calls led me to find out that he was now deceased.) Tolans files at the Sisters of Providence convent library and at the Cheney Cowles Museum yielded a great deal of information, and many perspectives, about the local involvement in and responses to The American Stranger, as well as a wealth of material on the Blackfeet and Salish-Kootenai Tribes, the Hill 57 community of Great Falls, correspondence with legislators and with individual Indians. Also in Spokane, at Gonzaga University, I perused the papers of Jesuit priest Cornelius Byrne, who was a major figure in the broadcast and an outspoken white religious activist against termination. His files, though smaller, yielded numerous letters written to him by members of the television viewing public after his appearance on the NBC broadcast, as well as his responses. Upon leaving Spokane, I worked my way east to Great Falls, where I searched for local historical material. After gathering bits and pieces of valuable information from the Cascade County Historical Society and the morgue of the Great Falls Tribune, I was fortunate to be able to locate a surviving activist from the period I was researching, and was able to share a pleasant afternoon with Dorothy Bohn as she reminisced about her role in trying to improve race relations and Native American conditions in her community during the 1950s. Bohn was a core member of the Great

xxxi Falls citizens group which, in one incarnation, was known as the Friends of Hill 57" in their fight to improve the conditions in the urban Indian ghetto. Being able to actually talk to someone about the historical world in which I had been mentally residing for a number of months was a remarkable experience! It strengthened my resolve to incorporate an oral history approach into my research methodology whenever possible, though it presented problems for me about how to deal with the evidence of remembrances gained from such interviews in relation to the inscribed and archived evidence I found in the pages of correspondence and other papers. I realized that the sieve of memory erases some things, distorts many things, and yet clarifies other insights based upon the understandings the subject has gained between that point in the past and this point in the present. However, I realized that these understandings and statements would need to be problematized, since they were informed by a very different sensibility from statements made in 1958. With these new insights, I undertook the task that most intimidated me but which would yield what was perhaps the single most important body of evidence in my collection. In dealing with government institutions (such as the National Archives and Library of Congress) I had found myself intimidated by the authoritarian style in which the keepers of the things of the past guarded--and cautiously allowed access to--their domains. But because it was entrenched in bureaucracy, I could understand the rigidity of the system even though I might not feel comfortable with it. On the other hand, the informality with which I was able to explore the unprocessed boxes of goodies in the NCAI and AAIA papers delighted me, and I felt the most comfortable on my knees digging through boxes of uncatalogued papers scanning for key words

xxxii which might be relevant to my search. However, my previous experience with Native American communities had taught me that an outsider does not easily just walk into such a place and get handed what she is seeking. I knew from experience that I would need to earn the respect and trust of members of the Blackfeet Tribe--and I had allowed myself precious little time in my itinerary to do this. I was admittedly wary that I would appear to be someone who was merely coming into their community, trying to find (and take) something of their history, and use it for my own purposes. I had tried to make some preliminary phone calls, and had set up a couple of interviews a few days ahead of time, but realized that I might miserably fail to find whatever might exist as a record of the impact of The American Stranger on the tribal community. I braced myself for this possibility. In formulating my research interests, I had for many years been interested in intercultural issues involving American minority subcultures, including ethnic and racial groups. However, I had become increasingly cautious about the proprietary nature of cultural knowledge and claims to understanding, and wary of those who claim to speak for or try to explicate the systems of knowledge of any group, especially one to which the investigator does not belong by virtue of personal subjectivity, experience or community membership. This claim to understanding across cultures, while certainly enlightening at a personal level of consciousness to the investigator, raises problematic and troubling issues surrounding who has the ethnographic authority to speak on behalf of a certain group. Throughout this project, at every stage at which I had the opportunity to formulate which direction to go theoretically, I have tried to avoid any position which might be construed as attempting to speak for a

xxxiii Native American cultural group. I have focused my attention on the constructions of Native America by the (mostly non-Indian) media, by the (white) legislators, and by the (mostly non-Indian) public--and have included as many responses to these constructions by Indians themselves in their own words as I have been able to find. Perhaps I may be guilty of having been too cautious, but my fear of misrepresenting cultural knowledges and understandings by summarizing, or putting words in someones mouth, has prevented me from doing the kind of ethnographic summarizing and interpretation that has been common in many anthropological works. In dealing with the Blackfeet, my goal simply was to find as much recorded evidence as possible of the tribes response to the political hurricane surrounding their representation in The American Stranger. I had a cordial and brief, though informative, interview with Blackfeet Chief Earl Old Person, who remembered Robert McCormick and the television show about the tribe well since he was a young councilman at the time (and, as I found out later, was pictured in the broadcast though not interviewed). After reading my research proposal, he gave me his figurative stamp of approval, and wished me well. I was introduced to Joyce Spoonhunter, an employee of theTribe who was working on plans to develop a tribal archive. I then met with Joe McKay, whose father Iliff was the tribal Secretary and who was one of the primary leaders interviewed by McCormick in The American Stranger. Iliff McKay, along with Sister Providencia and McCormick himself, had become one of my three personal heroes in the unwritten saga that grew out of my research. Fortysomething, with traditional long, braided and ribboned hair and clothing, the younger McKay, who sits on the Tribal Council, discussed with me some

xxxiv of the theoretical questions in my proposal regarding the political nature of the way official histories are constructed, and McKay expressed interest in conceptualizing alternatives to official histories, especially at the tribal level. Joe McKay was as eager as I was to find a copy of the film, of which he had vague childhood memories--the irony, he pointed out to me, was that hardly anyone on the Blackfeet reservation owned a television in 1958, so few if any of the tribal members would have actually seen the documentary which so prominently featured the tribe and its leaders. He told me that he would speak to his mother to find out if she would allow me access to his late fathers papers, which remained untouched in a family garage in Browning. It was an informal archive, but a sacred archive just the same. After meeting Lucille McKay, she led me to the garage. There, after moving boxes of the familys stored clothing, holiday ornaments, old toys, and other dusty relics, I came face to face with the wall of filing cabinets which represented the lifework of Iliff McKay, who had been a tribal leader most of his life and who later held national office with the Association for American Indian Affairs. Breathlessly, I looked through 25 file drawers of neatly-arranged files before I discovered a bulging folder labeled The American Stranger which I had initially overlooked in the first drawer I had opened. There, I found hundreds of pieces of correspondence from members of the public who had written to the Tribe following the NBC broadcast. I also found many other pieces of valuable information which provided me with a fuller understanding about the political, social and economic issues which had faced the tribe in the late 1950s. I found myself awestruck and amazed that I had finally located what I felt to be one of the central pieces in the puzzle. I spent an entire day at the only public photocopying machine in

xxxv Browning, making copies of all the pertinent material. I was so sorry that I had no more time to spend on the reservation, because I could have spent weeks talking to the people I met, who were also very interested in this chapter of their tribes history nearly four decades earlier. While in Montana, I also followed a number of leads which indicated that Walter Wetzel, who had been the Blackfeet Tribal Chairman during the late 1950s, was indeed alive. I finally tracked him down by phone in Helena, Montana, but he regretted that his health was too poor to meet me for an interview. We had a lively phone conversation, however, and he remembered his role in The American Stranger well, though he really wanted to talk to me more about his life during the Kennedy era of the early 1960s. While in the Missoula area, I contacted the archivist at the Salish-Kootenai Community College in hopes of finding Walt McDonald, who had been the Salish-Kootenai Tribal Chairman and another of McCormicks primary consultants in the field of tribal issues. I learned that McDonald was deceased, and that the tribe had experienced a great loss when his large collection of papers and memorabilia perished in a house fire. In Missoula, at the University of Montanas Mansfield Library, I located the papers of Senators Mike Mansfield and James Murray, with files on The American Stranger that included viewer letters as well as other high-level government correspondence regarding the controversy surrounding the show. I also gathered some additional archival material by mail--including key correspondence about The American Stranger from the White House Central Files in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, and relevant files from the Lee Metcalf Papers at the Montana Historical Society.

xxxvi When I returned from my research trips, buoyed from the exhilarating experience of my archival investigations, I began to try to locate some of the former employees of NBC who might have been involved in the production of the broadcast; however, the corporate headquarters did not reveal personnel information. Searching through Whos Who-type guides in the library, I found addresses for, and wrote letters to, Charles Van Doren (who had hosted the series) and Reuven Frank (Executive Producer). Acting on a suggestion from a colleague, I tried to crack the NBC information barrier through another route. Since McCormick had worked as a journalist out of NBCs Washington News Bureau, I decided to call the Washington Bureau directly to see if I could find any of McCormicks former colleagues who might share some insights with me. In addition to some delightful phone interviews with veteran journalists, I found out some crucial information--how to contact Robert McCormicks daughter. After months and months of searching blind alleys for a copy of the kinescope, the pace of revelation began to quicken in late September and early October of 1993. I had already searched the listings at the Library of Congress with no luck; however, I later heard a rumor that the Library had an uncatalogued collection of NBC shows. The librarian told me that most news programming had been retained by NBC. Searching the NBC inventory list which had come with the boxes of films and videotapes, she found a reference to a 1958 Kaleidescope [sic] on the list of news items retained by NBC, and sent me a photocopy of the inventory list to use when contacting the NBC News Archives. Significantly, there were typographical errors in both the title of the series and the date on the list. This meant, then, that a copy of the

xxxvii kinescope had been in NBCs News Archives at least at some point during the past decade. I contacted the NBC News Archives, made arrangements to send them a copy of the inventory list, and hoped for the best. In early October, I received a call from one of the supervisors at the NBC News Archives letting me know that they had located the kinescope, but that it would cost at least $500 for them to dub it onto VHS tape. Since I needed to try to arrange for funding, I asked her to see what kind of shape it was in. She said she would call me back after a technician had pulled the film and checked it. On the same day, I was able to get in touch with McCormicks daughter, Karen Skilling, of Pawling, New York, who was amazed to hear that someone was doing scholarly research on her father and his work. She remembered accompanying her father as a teenager on his research trip through Indian country in the summer of 1958, and shared many personal anecdotes about her father and his work as a journalist. She confirmed that his work on The American Stranger was, for him, the highlight--and the most personally meaningful--of his lifes work (McCormick died in 1987 of lung cancer). Skilling said that she had several of his films (she wasnt sure which ones) and a few files of his papers and a scrapbook, all of which had survived a house fire. She promised to check out the titles and conditions of the films in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, I received a call from the NBC News Archives verifying that they indeed had a copy of the kinescope of the broadcast; however, the sound track was missing on the first half. They would be glad to make me a VHS dub upon receipt of my $500. I decided to hold out until I found out what films were in Skillings collection.

xxxviii A few weeks later, Skilling called to verify that some of the film cans were marked The American Stranger. I immediately contacted Maxine Fleckner Ducey, the film archivist at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, who made arrangements for them to be shipped to the Wisconsin archives. The first week of December, just over 35 years after the original broadcast, I went to the film archives to wait for the Federal Express shipment to arrive. I felt like an expectant father in a birthing room--unable to do much to actively hurry the process along, but terribly anxious to finally hold and see this precious object which I had been anxiously seeking for over nine months. The package finally arrived, and Max and I opened the box and carefully removed the films. In eager anticipation, I quickly went to work on the Steenbeck, one reel at a time. We soon discovered that we had two versions of the film--not only a kinescoped copy, but also the original edited film which was rolled in during the live broadcast. The first two reels I saw were the roll-in film, in pristine condition--all the edited field footage, with narration and music, lacking only the studio narrations by Van Doren and McCormick, the titles and credits, and the Kaleidoscope series framing. The image quality was exquisite. The second set I watched was the actual kinescope, complete with all the introductions, titles and studio narration, but lacking the sharp image quality of the first version. Finding both was more than I had ever dreamed of! One of my first feelings was that I really wanted to share this with Joe McKay. His fathers speech to the cameras was magnificent, and I felt that the film belonged as much to the Blackfeet as it did to anyone.

xxxix With the arrival of the film at the archives, the bulk of my gathering phase was completed, and it was time to move into the period of both physically (logistically) and mentally processing the volumes of evidence I had collected, of mental incubation, and, eventually, of writing. But before the writing, so much material must be ingested, digested and interpreted, sorted and selected, organized and reorganized into coherent and meaningful sections and around groups of cogent issues. Like any scientific process, the data raise many questions--and require in turn a great deal of theoretical thinking in order to decide which questions are the most relevant, and beg most effectively to be addressed. And then, of course, come the questions of how to approach the difficult and often overwhelming task of sorting through and making meaning of the various and sundry truths and realities which are embodied in the multitudes of documentary evidence I have uncovered. Whether we are documentary filmmakers, academic historians or non-academic writers with material of an historical nature, the theoretically-informed practices of researching and representing events of the past confront us with similar epistemological challenges about how to construct and present our versions of the past for our contemporary audiences. While those who work to represent the "cultural Other" have found guidance in the theories and practices of reflexive anthropology, collaborative ethnographic film and indigenous media, my journey has led me to wonder how we can extend some of these concepts to representations of the "historical Other." How do we represent historical events without claiming an ultimate objective truth? How do we deal with issues of our own authority? How do we position ourselves when we are immersed in a relationship with a world that often no longer

xl exists, a world we are re-creating through our scholarship or our filmmaking? How might we attempt to construct a text that allows for multiple perspectives, voices, knowledges and truths, without privileging our own structuring and mediating perspective? An application of post-structuralist thought to questions of historical representations challenges us to examine the structures of power implicit in our relationships with the material and people with whom we work--people who, in many cases, exist only through the archival remnants they left behind, and who are not able to engage in a dialogue with us, or to contest our interpretations. Do we speak for our subjects, when they are not able to literally speak for themselves? We must grapple with issues of authorship and control, with relationships to bodies of knowledge which are often conflicting and not easily reconciled. We may wrestle as well with cultural, class and gender differences, with differences not only in geographical cultures but temporal ones--for example, how can we understand the experience of living in a different era, and how does that irreconcilable gap affect our interpretation of actions and events of the past? These theoretical questions inform the practice of history-writing at several levels. First, knowing what to look for, who to talk to, and what materials to gather involves a theoretically-informed strategy which is frequently overlooked in historiographical criticism. Carrying out the search for an understanding of our historical moment, through our research methodologies and choices, lays the foundation for what is to follow. Secondly, once our primary research has been gathered, we are confronted with the question: What strategies we can create for

xli constructing a text--of words, sounds and images (still or moving, found or created by us)--which satisfies the challenges of post-structuralist documentary practice? These questions have radical implications not only for documentary practice, but especially for challenging the ways of writing historical accounts, both in and out of academia. Other problems arise, as well, which must be grappled with. A study such as this one, which takes on the task of trying to understand a moment in social and political history by applying contemporary tools and insights, faces the challenge of explicating multiple sets of terms, each loaded with cultural and political implications and based in different sociohistorical and political contexts. The social movements of the last few decades have radically challenged the terminological structures of naming which have been deeply intertwined with systems of racial and cultural imperialism, patriarchal gender structures, and capitalist class structures. Historians (who, by definition, write across historical periods) are faced with the question of under what conditions to use the terms--often considered racist or objectionable by contemporary standards--which were current in the specific sociohistorical period being examined, and under what conditions to use terms which reflect more contemporary political usage, particularly by those peoples whose identities are implicated in such terms. In my writing I have chosen to maintain, in historical context, the 1950s usage of the terms American Indian and Indian, which were loose labels for a generic classification of the members of the hundreds of independent indigenous American tribes existing in the U.S. at that time. It is important to note that there was no official grouping of these tribes; each tribe considered itself sovereign and had entered into separate processes of negotiation and recognition with the U.S. Government. The

xlii existence of a generic label, Indian, which groups members of all tribes into some sort of racial designation, was known and generally accepted by tribal peoples as the way they were perceived by the dominant, non-Indian society, as an external category--and was (and is) in fact frequently used by tribal peoples in this way, since no equivalent term existed internal to the loose collectivity of tribes. Politically today, the use of this term falls between the historically-contextualized use of the terms Negro and Black as a racial classification for people who were later referred to as Afro-American and (most recently) African American. Most of the Native Americans I have known outside of the academy have referred to each other as Indian people, and some have, in fact, found the politically correct Native American to be offensive. Since the 1970s, the use of the classificatory term Native American has gained favor among some elements of the population (especially radical nationalists and academic intellectuals), though it is not without controversy; and this term is generally perceived by most Americans as interchangeable with American Indian. However, when considered in tandem with the concept of Native America, which has developed among more radical scholars in the past two decades as a term for the nationally unified, politically-consolidated body of tribes, the terms Native American and Native America can be understood to represent a shift in conceptualization from a generic classification of individuals, based upon some vague racial characteristics, to a politicized concept of a unified supratribal nationhood. I have chosen to use these terms when discussing the issues in a critical and analytical way, signaling a shift from past to contemporary discursive constructions through my alternating use of terms. I apologize for any confusion this may cause the reader.

xliii Similarly, common public usage has generally dichotomized social classifications into a white/non-white bifurcation, which is obviously problematic. In my writing, I have grappled with how to concisely label those Americans who did not share membership in a Native tribe or culture. While acknowledging the inadequacies of such a label (and the problems with labeling in general), I have generally chosen to refer to the dominant power bloc as white (which, in the 1950s, it most decidedly was), and to the general public as non-Indian. I believe that it is important, when writing an account of a series of events which are invariably political, historical and intercultural in nature, to avoid attempts to hide behind a mask of objectivity and write merely the historical or cultural facts. First, I make my position about the social construction of such realities and truths clear throughout this dissertation--as what might be termed a post-structuralist theorist, one of my missions is to point out the fallacies in assuming such unilateral truths, and to demonstrate through my evidence that I perceive politics as actually being the jockeying competition between multiple and contradictory truths for some sort of official validation. That being said, my own position can therefore not be neutral, since in my very choice of language I position myself in the semiotic and political web of cultural contestation of which I write. Put simply, I am a non-Indian academic studying the role of the (white) media in portraying Native American issues--and in constructing a concept of American whiteness--in the 1950s. As my research has progressed, I have felt increasing sympathy for the interests of tribal peoples in their continuing struggles for recognition of their sovereignty, and increasing antagonism towards the political principles and processes which have continually taken land and rights away

xliv from indigenous tribal bodies. However, I have not considered myself culturally qualified to offer a version of "Native American history" or Native American culture. What I can do is to provide an overview (for those readers who are not familiar with the political background from which the controversy surrounding The American Stranger erupted) based upon the writings of a variety of people from different perspectives and periods. I will always attempt to indicate that my account is not about pinning down any absolute reality regarding what happened historically, but rather about what people have said about what happened, and the different historical realities that their perspectives necessarily invoke. I imagine that my own perspective will become apparent, if not always directly through my words then through the choices I have made of what to focus upon--and what to ignore--throughout this study.