“The Construction Of The Imaginary Indian” By Marcia Crosby Essay Examples

English

An Expanded Definitions
(200-250 words)
Marcia Crosby, in her analysis of the “Construction of the Imaginary Indian” (1991), speaks about the embracing of “difference” in the arts and sciences. She contrasts the difference between the effects of homogeneity of academic and political discourses and the hegemony of European “master narrative.” By “Imaginary Indian,” First Nations people’s national identity and cultural heritage have been made pseudo-Indian reconstruction and saleable commodities by Western civilization. Self-interest in the aboriginal peoples was done through domination and colonization by way of “salvaging, preserving and reinterpreting material fragments” (Construction of the Imaginary Indian 219). She questions who these imaginary Indians are as compared to the original and authentic ones. She cites various experts on the subject whose paintings, for instance, are questionably the hybridization of native and non-native cultures. She asks whether these literature and visual arts experts depict the real Indians who existed in the authentic past or are just the “nostalgic, textual remembrances?” (Construction of the Imaginary Indian 220). Behind these claimants’ works about these Indians is the invisibility that is evidenced by racial contamination, and cultural and moral decay. Crosby insists that the degrees of Indianness in terms of “land,” for instance, should not be the measuring stick to the exclusion of so much else (Bordering complexity 23). Thus, the meaning of national identity in terms of aboriginal rights and self-identity vis-à-vis Eurocentric beliefs concern the search for a Canadian identity and artistic intention that make the “Imaginary Indian” truly inclusive, but not altogether exclusive in “otherness.”

Works Cited

Crosby, M. "Bordering complexity." Nations in urban landscapes. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 1996. Print.
_________. "Construction of the Imaginary Indian." Beyond Wilderness. Eds. John O’Brian and Peter White. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Print.