Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the “Good Indian” Michael Ray FitzGerald. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the "Good Indian" Michael Ray FitzGerald. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.There is a restaurant-bar in the town where this reviewer lives called "Chiefs, Wings and Firewater." The owners apparently do not comprehend the inappropriateness of the name. This reviewer guesses they think it is a clever name for a bar. It does lively business. Just north of where this reviewer lives, Gaffney High School, home of the state champion "Indians," plays its football games in a packed stadium called "the Reservation." Two hours south on Interstate 85 in Atlanta, Braves fans do "the chop" at home baseball games. In this reviewer's little corner of the world, stereotyping of American Indians-even in the present era-is alive, well, and carried out with impunity.For the past thirty years, this reviewer has spent considerable time trying to combat the dehumanizing impact of such stereotypes, especially as they affect pK-12 students. Therefore, it is not hard to imagine his enthusiastic anticipation of Michael Ray FitzGerald's Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths and the "Good Indian," a work which is focused on the portrayal of American Indians in network shows from TV's earliest days up to the present. Outside of The Lone Ranger, most of what has appeared on television regarding American Indians has escaped separate and detailed critical scrutiny. This reviewer anticipated that FitzGerald would add to the established body of critical analysis of American Indian stereotypes in films and in popular culture by examining the perpetuation of those stereotypes in network TV programming and their effects on viewers. This reviewer anticipated that when combined with analyses of films, songs on the radio, romance novels, school textbooks, advertising and other aspects of American popular culture, FitzGerald's analysis of stereotypes of American Indians on television would demonstrate that this reviewer's corner of the world is not unique in its continued, collective misunderstanding of American Indians and its disregard for contemporary American Indian peoples. His analysis would help this reviewer better understand why the misunderstanding and disregard persist.This book did not disappoint. Logically organized, clearly argued, and meticulously researched and documented, FitzGerald's book presents network television depictions of American Indians as the most recent set of portrayals in "...a four-hundred-year history of politically and ideologically tinged representations from Puritan 'captivity narratives' to western dime novels to films and finally to the airwaves (and cable)" (xiv). The author breaks new critical and analytical ground by applying interdisciplinary methods and by using transcontinental resources to achieve his purpose: One. Analysis of representations of American Indians in network television shows; Two. Description of the ways in which the Western genre's "tropes and narrative strategies serve to perpetuate the AngloAmerican 'foundation myth;'" and Three, "...deconstruct [ion of] representations of American Indians" and analysis of various intertwined histories-American Indian history, the conquest of North America by Europeans, history of World War Two and the Cold War, history of US network television, and history of the African American Civil Rights Movement (xiv-xv). …