Countering the vanishing race myth through a Native American rhetoric of hybridit

This dissertation examines how certain Native American art employs a rhetoric of hybridity in an effort to critique the Vanishing Race Myth (VRM). As early as the eighteenth century, the VRM prophesized the eventual demise of North America's Native peoples and their cultures due to assimilation, removal, and death. While the continuing, active presence of Native Americans attests to the falsity of the VRM, particular Native art invites a more focused critique of this myth by questioning its validity and providing alternative narratives. In order to understand the influence of the VRM as hegemonic discourse and the possibility to critique it, I juxtapose popular cultural art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the heyday of the VRM's cultural traction and art that propagates the VRM) with Native-produced popular cultural art from the turn of the twenty-first century (art that challenges the VRM). For the latter, I focus on three art forms as the subject of my case studies: films, novels, and graphic T-shirts. Through a textual analysis of these artifacts, I identify three distinct hybrid rhetorics---appropriation/reinterpretation, cultural duality, and temporal hybridity---and how they are used as a means of subverting the VRM. It is through the adoption of a rhetoric of hybridity, or the simultaneous use of two (or more) cultural viewpoints within one discursive space, that these artifacts productively challenge the VRM. A rhetoric of hybridity allows for the invention of a counter-narrative, and it is these alternative narratives that allow for a criticism of the VRM and its doctrine of Aboriginal authenticity. In countering the hegemonic VRM, these counter-narratives are subversive in nature and provide a form of oppositional discourse to the dominant myth. Instead of passively accepting the VRM, these texts undermine its key tenets by making their own claims about Native identities and cultures that do not align with the hegemonic myth.