The Savage American

THE SAVAGE AMERICAN tells the story of Victorio, an Apache Indian, a Vietnam decorated war veteran and the last living member of a Willow Creek Reservation family. His anger builds as he observes the continuous erosion of their Treaty rights and suffers the abuse of Dumbroff, a San Vicente County Deputy Sheriff. Tribal efforts to build an earth fill dam to serve their cattle, all within reservation boundaries, is dynamited with the loss of many Indian lives as well as loss of agriculture property bordering Willow Creek. Elected Chairman of the Tribal Council, Victorio calls a Tribal Meeting and delivers a passionate plea to close the reservation to all non-residents until their rights are recognized by law enforcement and governmental authorities, Treaty rights established for more than a hundred years. He creates barriers on highway entrances to Willow Creek, pulls up railroad tracks and closes the Federal dam that services off-reservation ranchers. The reaction explodes in a series of brutal killings. When the National Guard occupies the reservation Victorio leads his squads in a series of counter moves that receive international attention. THE SAVAGE AMERICAN, with an appealing hero, plenty of villains and non-stop dramatic action is a gripping and shocking story of a wonderfully authentic Native American drama. Interwoven in the crisp, tight action is a poignant love story.

THE SAVAGE AMERICAN tells the story of Victorio, an Apache Indian, a Vietnam decorated war veteran and the last living member of a Willow Creek Reservation family. His anger builds as he observes the continuous erosion of their Treaty rights and suffers the abuse of Dumbroff, a San Vicente County Deputy Sheriff. Tribal efforts to build an earth fill dam to serve their cattle, all within reservation boundaries, is dynamited with the loss of many Indian lives as well as loss of agriculture property bordering Willow Creek. Elected Chairman of the Tribal Council, Victorio calls a Tribal Meeting and delivers a passionate plea to close the reservation to all non-residents until their rights are recognized by law enforcement and governmental authorities, Treaty rights established for more than a hundred years. He creates barriers on highway entrances to Willow Creek, pulls up railroad tracks and closes the Federal dam that services off-reservation ranchers. The reaction explodes in a series of brutal killings. When the National Guard occupies the reservation Victorio leads his squads in a series of counter moves that receive international attention. THE SAVAGE AMERICAN, with an appealing hero, plenty of villains and non-stop dramatic action is a gripping and shocking story of a wonderfully authentic Native American drama. Interwoven in the crisp, tight action is a poignant love story.

Since the seventeenth century, ethnicity has been the central issue in the American search for a national identity. The articulation of this issue can clearly be seen in the representation of non-white others in the literature of the nineteenth century, specifically in the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. This book examines how both Cooper and Melville manipulated literary images of Native Americans, African Americans, and other non-Europeans, thus revealing how America created the image of the savage - by which it was alternately attracted and repulsed - as a way of defining its own identity.

The Savage Side critiques the primary models of deity in dominant political theologies, especially those which align God with the natural world. The justice-seeking, political revolutionary God that the oppressed worship has dwindled back to the political fervor from which it sprang. In its place, a God based on our struggling existence in the natural world emerges, terrifyingly indifferent to any political or moral ideology.

“Her book offers many insights into the criminality of Native people, as well as that of women or anyone else who is poor and oppressed.” —Canadian Woman Studies Luana Ross writes, “Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a ‘real’ prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned.” In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates. Drawing on the Native women’s own words, she reveals the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their respective responses to it, and how those responses affect their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. Comparisons with the experiences of white women in the same prison underline the significant role of race in determining women’s experiences within the criminal justice system. “Professor Ross, through painstaking phenomenological analysis, has unmasked some of the ways in which (race, class, and gender) prejudices, and their internalization by individuals targeted by them, exert enormous influence on the processes and outcomes of the American criminal justice system . . . This book will be of tremendous import to a broad, interdisciplinary audience.” —Franke Wilmer, Associate Professor of Political Science, Montana State University

In 1585, the British painter and explorer John White created images of Carolina Algonquian Indians. These images were collected and engraved in 1590 by the Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bry and were reproduced widely, establishing the visual prototype of North American Indians for European and Euro-American readers. In this innovative analysis, Michael Gaudio explains how popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its “savage other.” Going beyond the notion of the “savage” as an intellectual and ideological construct, Gaudio examines how the tools, materials, and techniques of copperplate engraving shaped Western responses to indigenous peoples. Engraving the Savage demonstrates that the early visual critics of the engravings attempted-without complete success-to open a comfortable space between their own “civil” image-making practices and the “savage” practices of Native Americans-such as tattooing, bodily ornamentation, picture-writing, and idol worship. The real significance of these ethnographic engravings, he contends, lies in the traces they leave of a struggle to create meaning from the image of the American Indian. The visual culture of engraving and what it shows, Gaudio reasons, is critical to grasping how America was first understood in the European imagination. His interpretations of de Bry’s engravings describe a deeply ambivalent pictorial space in between civil and savage-a space in which these two organizing concepts of Western culture are revealed in their making. Michael Gaudio is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.