Journal Article

Currents in North American Indian Historiography

Ned Blackhawk

2011

Overview

Blackhawk discusses two of the most visible, recent moments in western North American history, the Games of the XIX and XXI Winter Olympiad that brought together tens of thousands of athletes, millions of visitors, and global audiences and regaled them with unprecedented displays of pageantry, festivity, and sponsorship. While three western cities--Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, and Calgary--had previously hosted the Games, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and Vancouver projected communal visions in which indigenous peoples remained integral to each host city's respective self-identity. For scholars of American Indian history, these twenty-first-century western Olympics provide opportunities to evaluate the relative historiographical currents animating these respective visions. As major urban cores within the ethnographic \"culture areas\" of the Great Basin and the Northwest Coast, Salt Lake City and Vancouver occupy the center of long-standing intellectual traditions in which Indian peoples have figured prominently. From a historiographical perspective, the inclusion of Native communities in the Olympic Games disrupted larger national teleologies of indigenous disappearance and cultural assimilation.

• Publisher: Western Historical Quarterly,Western History Association
• Subject: American history / Borderlands / Colonialism / Communities / Cultural history / History instruction / Indigenous peoples / Native Americans / Native North Americans / Native peoples / Olympic games / Teleology / The WHA at Fifty: Essays on the State of Western History Scholarship A Commemoration / United States history / Whaling