Authentic Indias by Paige Raidbmon Essay - 770 Words

Paige Raibmon’s book â€Å"Authentic Indians† take a closer look at the concept of authenticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the culturally diverse Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon examines how both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people constructed and used the idea of the authentic Indian to achieve their goals. Drawing examples from three ‘episodes’ or stories about Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon argues that authenticity is not a set marker that we can use to measure the distance between what an Aboriginal culture looks like today and what â€Å"real† Aboriginal culture looks like. Instead, Raibmon says that authenticity is an important and changing set of ideas that were used†¦show more content†¦The first episode details the performance of a group of Kwakwaka’wakw at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Aboriginal migrant hop field workers in the Puget Sound area are the focus of the second episode and the third looks at the legal proceeding of 1906 wherein the Tlingit artist Rudolph Walton endeavors to get his mixed race children accepted to the White public school in Alaska. Raibmon uses these episodes to discuss the implications of authenticity in a historical perspective and to draw connections between the different people in these episodes and how they handled their encounters with each other. Additionally, Raibmon shows how both the Aboriginal and non Aboriginal people in these episodes tackle the ideas of tradition, modernity and progress, among others, and how they shape those to fit their needs in terms of their cultural survival and their goals. Raibmon’s goal in this book is to show how people in the late nineteenth century constructed and used the idea of authenticity to achieve their goals, as well as show that how the idea of authenticity changes from group to group and even within the groups themsel ves. Some of the groups that Raibmon looks at are the missionaries, Aboriginals, anthropologists and the government, and each have a different agenda. Together, they create the image of the â€Å"authentic† Indian and use this as a standard