Inventing the American Primitive Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936

Inventing the American Primitive examines a body of work, both literary and anthropological, that describes, inscribes, translates and transforms Native American myths and poetry. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, as well as ethnography's recent textual turn, Carr reveals the conflicts and ambivalence in these texts. Through their writings, the writers and anthropologists studied were attempting to preserve a culture which their country, with their help or connivance, sought to destroy. The contradictions and tensions of this position run throughout their work. Although there is no simple narrative of progress in this story as it moves from the eighteenth-century primitivism to tweentieth-century modernism, the book shows the process by which the richness and complexity of Native American traditions came to be acknowledged