Traces anthropology’s Native American roots.

In the early nineteenth century, the profession of American anthropology emerged as European Americans James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, among others, began to make a living by studying the “Indian.” Less well known are the AmerIndians who, at that time, were writing and publishing ethnographic accounts of their own people. By bringing to the fore this literature of autoethnography and revealing its role in the forming of anthropology as we know it, this book searches out—and shakes—the foundations of American cultural studies.