When All the Cowboys Are Indians: The Nature of Race in All-Indian Rodeo

Penrose, Jan

doi:10.1111/1467-8306.9303009

Cited by 21 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Underpinning these policies were dominant perceptions of Indigenous peoples as a distinct and inferior race relative to European settlers. As Penrose (2003) has shown, ideas of nature and culture figured prominently in this assessment: First Nations were commonly portrayed as part of the very nature that settler farmers were to tame and exploit. Indigenous ontologies of nature were believed to make First Nations resistant to farming, even as they also modelled an ecologically attuned agriculture that settlers could usefully emulate (Carter 1990).…”

Section: The Troubled History Of First Nations Farming In the Canadiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Naturalising Finance, Financialising Natives: Indigeneity, Race, and “Responsible” Agricultural Investment in Canada

Sommerville

2018

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This article examines the racialised political ecologies inscribed by financial investments in a large‐scale corporate farm engaging Indigenous peoples in the Canadian prairies. Established in 2009, One Earth Farms (OEF) became one of Canada's largest farms by leasing First Nations’ farmland. I argue that OEF's early success hinged on its promise of “naturalising finance” by engaging agriculture as a purportedly more real and stable financial vehicle relative to traditional assets. Simultaneously, OEF claimed to facilitate First Nations’ participation in agriculture by integrating their land and labour with financial flows—effectively “financialising natives”. I document the specific opportunities for capital accumulation and valuation mobilised by the project's claims to be providing reparative historical redress to First Nations through investor and corporate ecological and social “responsibility”. Reflecting on colonisation and racialisation processes, I demonstrate the ways that Indigenous histories and subjectivities are mobilised and monetised in contemporary political ecological projects.

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Section: The Troubled History Of First Nations Farming In the Canadiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Naturalising Finance, Financialising Natives: Indigeneity, Race, and “Responsible” Agricultural Investment in Canada

Sommerville

2018

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“…Like all‐black rodeos and gay rodeos, all‐Indian rodeos flourished in the late twentieth century. Born out of Jim Crow segregation and Native people's desire to compete free from discrimination, all‐Indian rodeos offered a space where Indian and cowboy were not separate identities (Iverson, Riders of the West ; Penrose).…”

Section: Policing the Cowboy: Establishing The Border Of The New Fronmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Chaps and Scowls”: Play, Violence, and the Post‐1970s Urban Cowboy

Scofield¹

2017

J of American Culture

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“…10 This act, which matched the sentiment of the assimilationist Dawes Act of 1887, dissolved the tribal governments and divided the tribally held lands of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole in the eastern Indian Territory. 11 Taking another approach, Jan Penrose (2003), in her examination of all-Indian rodeos, suggests that the nature/culture binary influences conceptions of race and hence boosts the popularly accepted antagonism between cowboys and Indians. Using this lens, Indians were (and, I would argue, still are) considered wild and natural by many non-Natives; Natives provided a nonwhite contrast to the supposedly more socially and technologically advanced colonizers.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unexpected Cowboy, Unexpected Indian: The Case of Will Rogers

Ware¹

2009

Ethnohistory

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This brief examination of the early-twentieth-century United States expands academic interpretations of ethnic performance in the popular realm. The case of Will Rogers-Cherokee entertainer, writer, and political pundit-is particularly useful in understanding the representational conflicts, then and now, between cowboys and American Indians in the popular realm. Rogers himself was unexpected; he was both a cowboy and an Indian, a conflation that baffled and titillated his urban fan base. Throughout his early career, from approximately 1903 to 1919, Rogers and his audience grappled with these seemingly conflicting roles of cowboy and Indian, characters steeped in a seeming ethnic conflict yet embodied simultaneously by Rogers. The celebrity's strong ties to Cherokee ranching culture influenced the way he presented himself, yet such performances confounded his fans. In the end, Rogers's self-representation as a cowboy limited the public's recognition of him as an Indian. Around 1904 Will Rogers (1879 posed for a publicity shot that would begin a shockingly successful career in nearly all facets of American popular and political life. A brief examination of that photograph shows Rogers's self-manicured image and visually confirms his ties to cowboys, both real and imagined ( fig. 1). His classic western stance, fringed chaps, cowboy boots, and rope brand him as such. Rogers's citizenship in the Cherokee Nation, however, profoundly complicates this photograph. Is this an Indian or a cowboy? The question is an important one because it challenges outsiders' expectations-then and now-of who (and what) an Indian can be in the popular realm.In a short but provocative essay, Cherokee writer Thomas King explores the implications of Rogers's seemingly paradoxical public image.

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When All the Cowboys Are Indians: The Nature of Race in All-Indian Rodeo

Cited by 21 publications

References 16 publications

Naturalising Finance, Financialising Natives: Indigeneity, Race, and “Responsible” Agricultural Investment in Canada

Naturalising Finance, Financialising Natives: Indigeneity, Race, and “Responsible” Agricultural Investment in Canada

“Chaps and Scowls”: Play, Violence, and the Post‐1970s Urban Cowboy

Unexpected Cowboy, Unexpected Indian: The Case of Will Rogers

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