The Last Resort: When Native Histories Become Tourist Performances
As the American tourism industry grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities across the country turned to Native histories to create tourist attractions. Drawing on what Phillips calls "salvage tourism"—a set of practices paralleling salvage ethnography—and linking the origins of these performances to their contemporary incarnations, this talk underscores how Indians and Indianness have been used as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development.
Dr. Katrina Phillips (Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is an assistant professor of History at Macalester College. She earned her BA and PhD from the University of Minnesota, and she teaches classes on Native and Indigenous histories and the history of the American West. Her first book, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. Her next book will examine activism, environmentalism, and tourism on and around Red Cliff from the 1920s to the present day.
This event is organized by Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa and co-sponsored by UCLA's American Indian Studies Center and the UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance.
Event Date: Thursday, Apr. 8, 3:30 p.m.
Platform: Online Event
Price: Free
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