Indian Enough: Essays

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