For more than a hundred years, outsiders enamored of the perceived strengths of American Indigenous cultures have appropriated and distorted elements of them for their own purposes -- more often than not ignoring the impact of the process on the Indigenous Peoples themselves. This book contains eight original contributions that consider the selling of American Indigenous culture and how it affects the Native community.

Part I: Staging the Indian -- The "shy" Cocopa go to the fair / Nancy J. Parezo and John W. Troutman -- Command performances: staging Native Americans at Tillicum Village / Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner -- Savage desires: the gendered construction of the American Indian in popular media / S. Elizabeth Bird -- "Beyond feathers and beads": interlocking narratives in the music and dance of Tokeya Inajin (Kevin Locke) / Pauline Tuttle -- Part II: Marketing the Indian -- "The idea of help": white women reformers and the commercialization of Native American women's arts / Erik Trump -- Saving the Pueblos: commercialism and Indian reform in the 1920s / Carter Jones Meyer -- Marketing traditions: Cherokee basketry and tourist economies / Sarah H. Hill -- Crafts, tourism, and traditional life in Chiapas, Mexico: a tale related by a pillowcase / Chris Goertzen.