From Daniel Boone to Captain America: Playing Indian in American Popular Culture

An exploration of whites posing as Native Americans from nineteenth-century literature to comic books

From nineteenth-century American art and literature to comic books of the twentieth century and afterwards, From Daniel Boone to Captain America: Playing Indian in American Popular Culture
(University Press of Mississippi) examines the transmission of the ideals and myths of the frontier and the concept of playing Indian in American culture. Author Chad Barbour American surveys the ways American art and literature developed and nurtured images of the Indian and the frontiersman. These images exemplified ideals of heroism, bravery, and manhood, as well as embodying fears of betrayal, loss of civilization, and weakness.

In the twentieth century, comic books, among other popular forms of media, would inherit these images. The Western genre of comic books participated fully in that genre’s conventions, replicating and perpetuating the myths and ideals long associated with the frontier in the United States. A fascination with Native Americans was also present in comic books devoted to depicting the Indian past of the U.S. In such stories, the Indian is always a figure of the past, romanticized as a lost segment of U.S. history, ignoring contemporary and actual Native peoples.

Playing Indian occupies a definite subgenre of the Western comics, especially during the postwar period when a host of comics featuring a “white Indian” as the hero were being published. Playing Indian migrates into superhero comics, a phenomenon that heightens and amplifies the notions of heroism, bravery, and manhood already attached to the white Indian trope. Instances of superheroes like Batman and Superman playing Indian correspond with the depictions found in the strictly Western comics. The superhero as Indian is revived in the twenty-first century via Captain America, attesting to the continuing power of this ideal and image.

From Daniel Boone to Captain America the only book-length study of the frontier and playing Indian in comics, an covers an area of comics history that has received very little scholarly attention.

Chad A. Barbour is associate professor in the School of Arts and Letters at Lake Superior State University. He teaches courses in American studies, Native American studies, children's literature, and comics and graphic novels. His work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture and the International Journal of Comic Art.

For more information contact Clint Kimberling, Publicist, ckimberling@mississippi.edu
Read more about From Daniel Boone to Captain America: Playing Indian in American Popular Culture at http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1904