Indian Enough : Essays

An acerbic, candid reckoning with Indigenous identity, visibility, and the messy realities of cultural change

In Indian Enough, curator and critic Paul Chaat Smith probes the paradox of contemporary Indigeneity: enormous, hard-won cultural visibility in museum exhibits, land acknowledgments, mascot removals, and more alongside persistent erasure in everyday life. Rejecting the easy comforts of identity politics (he was, he admits, a fan of the Land O'Lakes Butter Maiden), Smith brings "honest confusion" to his inquiry, using sharp wit and wry humor to confront the gap between symbolism and lived reality.

Both memoir and cultural critique, Indian Enough follows Smith from a suburban childhood in Washington, D.C., filled with Kurt Vonnegut and Vine Deloria Jr., through teenage years steeped in Native politics leading to a thrilling and eventually disillusioning stint with the American Indian Movement, to his pivotal role in creating the inaugural exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian. His insider account of NMAI exposes how well-meaning efforts to redress Native erasure can simply swap one set of stereotypes for another, and his candor shows how institutions and activists—himself included—all grapple with the tension between good intentions and political realities.

Irreverent and searching, Indian Enough tackles culture writ large—the rise of punk and the fall of AIM, pop culture as a battleground, Indigenous slaveowners and other histories we'd rather forget, MAGA Indians, and what it means to win when the ground keeps shifting—to reveal a truth that's hard to reconcile in an era of "progress": representation is everywhere, certainty is not.

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