Every picture tells a story -- pt. I. States of amnesia -- Lost in translation -- On romanticism -- After the gold rush -- Land of a thousand dances -- The big movie -- The ground beneath our feet -- Homeland insecurity -- pt. II. Everything we make is art -- Americans without tears -- Delta 150 -- Luna remembers -- Standoff in Lethbridge -- Struck by lightning -- Meaning of life -- States of amnesia -- pt. III. Jukebox spiritualism -- A place called irony -- Life during peacetime -- Last gang in town -- From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station -- Ghost in the machine -- Afterword : end of the line -- Acknowledgments -- Publication history
Summary
In this sweeping work of memoir and commentary, leading cultural critic Paul Chaat Smith illustrates with dry wit and brutal honesty the contradictions of life in "the Indian business."Raised in suburban Maryland and Oklahoma, Smith dove head first into the political radicalism of the 1970s, working with the American Indian Movement until it dissolved into dysfunction and infighting. Afterward he lived in New York, the city of choice for political exiles, and eventually arrived in Washington, D.C., at the newly minted National Museum of the American Indian ("a bad idea whose time has come") as a curator
