Letter from Rogin to Deloria

Dear Philip J. Deloria,

I appreciate your work on the co-opting of the Native American culture in “Playing Indian.” It is quite iconic for the American dominant culture to borrow from Native Americans in its time of freefall from one historic period to the next, with revolution rhetoric flowing from the mouths of disguised rebels. I believe that the “white male hero of our classic literature” has historically been behind the ventriloquizing of the Blacks AND Indians of America. We see in The Jazz Singer that Blacks were the mouths of urban entertainment, but were not allowed to express it themselves in a way that truly reflected the prerogative of the race being imitated. Like I said in my paper, the blackface in Jazz Singer has done no favor to blacks and is equally as disingenuous as Birth of a Nation. We can both appreciate the fact that our nation has grown to a point where the minority subjects of this intense desire to define American identity can be steered in a desirable direction.

In Scholarship,
Michael Rogin

How did the “ventriloquized” races gain agency to Deloria in “Playing Indian”? Does Rogin offer some insight into how African-Americans did it?