Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past

In Imagining Indians in the Southwest, Leah Dilworth examines the creation and enduring potency of the early twentieth-century myth of the primitive Indian. She demonstrates how visions of Indians — created by tour companies, anthropologists, collectors of Indian crafts, and modernist writers — have reflected white anxieties about complex racial and cultural issues.

Dilworth explores diverse expressions of mainstream society's primitivist impulse — from the Fred Harvey Company's guided…