The White Men Are Coming! The White Men Are Coming!: Identifying Navajoness through Reservation Tourism in 30 Days, Jamie's American Road Trip, and Navajo Cops
Native Americans as a marginalized population within the United States are typically rendered invisible within contemporary culture and society. Often relegated to the past, within the American and global imagination, Natives are habitually characterized by homogenizing stereotypes, which only contributes to the erasure of tribes’ unique histories, cultures, and identities. In an attempt to illuminate one such tribe, this dissertation narrows the scholarly focus of Native American representations in media to examine the production and consumption of the Navajo tribe through three docuseries—30 Days (2008), Jamie’s American Road Trip (2009/2012), and Navajo Cops (2012). Situated at the intersection of Media Studies, American Indian Studies, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, this dissertation explores the ways in which Navajo identities are constructed by the shows’ white/non-Navajo hosts and producers for viewers’ cultural consumption. Interrogating a combined total of nine episodes, I seek to understand the ways in which Navajos are made (in)visible and represented through the shows’ touristic and ethnographic elements, reliance on Wild West imagery, disavowal of U.S. settler colonialism, and perpetuation of romantic Native tropes.
Navajos, Native Americans, media representations, reservation tourism, reality TV
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign