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The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy Revised Edition
Contributor(s): Dippie, Brian W. (Author)
ISBN: 070060507X     ISBN-13: 9780700605071
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
OUR PRICE:   $29.69  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: October 1991
Qty:
Annotation: 'The unifying theme is the notion that the Native American is doomed, by radical constitution, by historical necessity, by the realities of Indian-white relations, to disappear from the face of the earth. Dipple is surely right in seeing the importance of this idea from the late eighteenth century on. He makes a convincing case that it was crucial in every intellectual and policy development in the succeeding decades. -New Mexico Historical review
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States - General
- History | Native American
Dewey: 973.049
LCCN: 91018772
Physical Information: 0.91" H x 6.11" W x 9.02" (1.39 lbs) 446 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Midwest
- Cultural Region - Plains
- Cultural Region - Southwest U.S.
- Cultural Region - Western U.S.
- Ethnic Orientation - Native American
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Not long after the white man stepped ashore in North America he began killing Indians and pushing those that survived farther and farther west. And what of his conscience? Well, he invented a convenient explanation: Indians are a vanishing race, doomed to extinction anyway.

That belief not only persisted, writes historian Brian Dippie, but it also spread throughout American culture. Soon the vanishing Indian appeared in science, literature, art, popular culture, and, most importantly, federal policy.

The assumption that the Indians are a vanishing race has about it the quality of self-fulfilling prophecy, Dippie writes. In this classic study, first published in 1982, he traces the origins of this assumption and documents its insidious effects on U.S. policy toward Indians from the beginning of the nation's history through the Indian New Deal of the 1930s. He describes its role in early attempts at civilization and education, segregation of Indians west of the Mississippi, post-Civil War reform, the Dawes Act and allotment, the gradualism of early twentieth-century policy, the reform movement of the 1920s, John Collier's Indian Reorganization Act, and into the 1970s.