Contesting Constructed Indian-ness seeks to highlight the investment of white American males with the history of their relationship with the ideas of the Indian. This book documents the investments of white men with that of the ideal Indian, while disregarding the reality of Native Americans in this country.

Introduction Chapter 1: The Frontier as Place/Space Chapter 2: Gender, Masculinity, and Male Identity Chapter 3: White Identity, White Ideologies, and Conditions of Whiteness Chapter 4: Constructing the Native Voice Conclusions Bibliography

Careful. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Nuanced. Revealing. Anthropologist and Native American studies scholar Taylor delivers an important contribution with this artfully crafted examination of Native American mascots. His analytical skill resituates the debate about how Native Americans are represented in the broader US culture in a multilayered discussion connecting gender, race, and place, noting how Native voices are opposed to, defend against, and are drowned out by a white majority intent on reinforcing the boundaries between the conquered and the conquerors. The mythic frontier serves as a backdrop, the dynamics of which are played out on football fields around the US. Taylor begins and ends his book with an account of sitting in his own high school bleachers watching a Seneca student don buckskin and headdress to dance as the team mascot, and sensing the shared confusion of other Seneca students amid a majority white crowd and their realization of the magnitude of self-betrayal in which they are being asked to participate. It is an arresting, haunting depiction of the painful and complicated pathways that young Native students travel in a white world, making choices that may appear to be their own but are actually those that others have set before them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.