Contents and Foreword, "Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television Documentary and Native...

8/6/2019 Contents and Foreword, "Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television Documentary and Native American

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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: JOURNEYS AND QUESTS

Chapter One: GETTING IT: THE POLITICS OFCOMPETING CULTURAL REALITIES

PART I: MEDIA DISCOURSES

Chapter Two: DISCURSIVE IMPERIALISM: NATIVEAMERICANS IN AMERICAS POLITICAL ANDCULTURAL IMAGINATION

Chapter Three: CONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN STRANGER

PART II: THE CONJUNCTURAL MOMENT:

DISCOURSES OF RESPONSE AND REACTION

Chapter Four: CONTESTED TRUTHS

Chapter Five: MISSIONS OF CHARITY: CHRISTIANRHETORIC AND GESTURES OF ALTRUISM

Chapter Six: ALL EYES ON MONTANA: TELEVISION ANDTHE CULTURAL POLITICS OF REGION

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PART III: STORMING THE DISCURSIVE FORT

Chapter Seven: DEFINING INDIANNESS: DISCOURSES OFRACE, ETHNICITY AND NATION

Chapter Eight: TELEVISION AND ITS PUBLICS: SHIFTINGFORMATIONS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Chapter Nine: MEDIA ACCESS, ACTIVISM AND THEPOLITICAL EFFECTIVITY OFREPRESENTATION

APPENDICES

Appendix A: TRANSCRIPT OF THE KINESCOPE OF THEAMERICAN STRANGER

Appendix B: TRIBAL PERSPECTIVES ON TERMINATION

Appendix C: EPILOGUE: THE CONTRACT WITHAMERICA--A RETURN TO TERMINATION?

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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Wilson, Pamela. "Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, TelevisionDocumentary 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


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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


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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 anda 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


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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.


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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 foror 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 fora


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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 wordsas 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


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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

seenthe 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


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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.


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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 newsprogramming 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


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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.


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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.


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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 whichquestions are the most relevant, and beg

most effectively to be addressed. And then, of course, come the questions of howto

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


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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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.

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