Seven Myths of Native American History

In 1958, a young Oscar Howe entered his painting Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance into a juried competition for Native American artists at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa. The jurors deemed Howe’s painting as unauthentic for Native American art, and disqualified the artist from the show. Howe’s sin, it seemed, was wanting to be a modern artist, not an artist trapped in a particular time period, serving a particular audience. Paul Jentz’s Seven Myths of Native American History suggests the practitioners of American pop culture continue to trap Indians in time and space fifty years after Oscar Howe’s experience at the Philbrook Art Center. Using film and literature primarily, the book aims to explore how dominant culture locked American Indians “into a set of stereotyped roles,” and in a “bygone era” (134). These myths, however, do more than freeze Native Americans in time; they also tend to obscure...