American Antiquarian Society
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Twenty-eight years after he published Playing Indian, Philip J. DeLoria reflects on the book in the context of current scholarship and events. His provocative 1998 work explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras—and how Indian people have reacted to these appropriations of their native dress, language, and ritual.
Deloria shows that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.
About the Robert C. Baron Lecture
The Robert C. Baron Lecture invites a distinguished AAS member who has written a seminal work of history to reflect on the book’s impact on scholarship and society in the years since its appearance. The lecture was endowed to honor Robert C. Baron (1934-2026), founder and president of Fulcrum Publishing and chairman of the AAS council from 1993-2003.
Philip J. Deloria (Yankton Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (1998); Indians in Unexpected Places (2004); American Studies: A User’s Guide (2017), with Alexander Olson; and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters. Deloria was a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and has served as president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for American History. He was elected to AAS membership in October 2000.