Representing Indians: The melodrama of Native citizenship in United States popular culture of the 1920s

This dissertation by Lori Lynn Muntz examines how the melodrama of Native citizenship shaped political advocacy related to Native Americans evident in the lectures, films, and literature of the 1920s authored or contributed to by Nipo T. Strongheart (adopted Yakama) and Mourning Dove (Okanogan). These creative works that incorporated advocacy positions offered experiments with strategic adaptation and the meaning of U.S. citizenship. Drawing on theory from cultural studies and Native American Studies, I conclude that the melodramatic mode lends itself to the melodramatic fallacy, which yields affective response from perceptions of Indigenous victims as virtuous and offers only a limited invitation to a praxis capable of challenging the mode's dehumanizing effects. The efforts by Strongheart and Mourning Dove to contribute to U.S. popular culture were experiments in claiming humanity and agency for Native peoples.;The Introduction of this dissertation examines the Piestewa family episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (ABC, KCRG, Cedar Rapids, 22 May 2005) as an example of the melodrama of Native citizenship. Chapter One examines the political and generic tensions Strongheart negotiated in his circuit lectures. Chapter Two assesses how the film Braveheart (Dir. Alan Hale, Producers Distributing Corp., 1925) depicts an early 20th century Yakama fishing rights conflict and incorporates an Indigenous cosmology by which the eponymous hero wins the legal battle for his people. Chapter Three investigates how Mourning Dove represents allotment as a perilous, but potentially productive, status in her fiction. The conclusion focuses upon Simon Ortiz's From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America (1981, Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000) as an invitation to emotion that invites understanding among his readers, as well as the need to take responsibility for our stories and the forms by which they are told in language that rejects the melodramatic fallacy.