Indigenous Celebrity speaks to the possibilities, challenges, and consequences of popular forms of recognition, critically recasting the lens through which we understand Indigenous people’s entanglements with celebrity. It presents a wide range of essays that explore the theoretical, material, social, cultural, and political impacts of celebrity on and for Indigenous people. It questions and critiques the whitestream concept of celebrity and the very juxtaposition of “Indigenous” and “celebrity” and casts a critical lens on celebrity culture’s impact on Indigenous people.
Indigenous people who willingly engage with celebrity culture, or are drawn up into it, enter into a complex terrain of social relations informed by layered dimensions of colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, and classism. Yet this reductive framing of celebrity does not account for the ways that Indigenous people’s own worldviews inform Indigenous engagement with celebrity culture––or rather, popular social and cultural forms of recognition.
Indigenous Celebrity reorients conversations on Indigenous celebrity towards understanding how Indigenous people draw from nation-specific processes of respect and recognition while at the same time navigating external assumptions and expectations. This collection examines the relationship of Indigenous people to the concept of celebrity in past, present, and ongoing contexts, identifying commonalities, tensions, and possibilities.
Introduction – Indigeneity, Celebrity, and Fame: Accounting for Colonialism
Ch. 1 Mino-Waawiindaganeziwin: What Does Indigenous Celebrity Mean within Anishinaabeg Contexts?
Ch. 2 Empowering Voices from the Past: The Playing Experiences of Retired Pasifika Rugby League Athletes in Australia
Ch. 3 My Mom, The ‘Military Mohawk Princess’: kahntinetha Horn through the lens of Indigenous female celebrity
Ch. 4 Indigenous activism and celebrity: negotiating access, expectation, and obligation
Ch. 5 Rags-to-Riches and Other Fairytales: Indigenous Celebrity in Australia 1950-1980
Ch. 6 “Pretty Boy” Trudeau vs. the “Algonquin Agitator”: Hitting the Ropes of Canadian Colonialist Masculinities
Ch. 7 Famous “Last” Speakers: Celebrity and Erasure in Media Coverage of Indigenous Language Endangerment
Ch. 8 Celebrity in Absentia: situating the Indigenous of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian social imaginary
Ch. 9 Marvin Rainwater and the Pale Faced Indian: How Cover Songs Appropriated a Story of Cultural Appropriation
Ch. 10 Collectivity as Indigenous Anti-Celebrity: Global Indigeneity and the Indigenous Rights Movement
Ch. 11 Makings, Meanings, and Recognitions: The Stuff of Anishinaabe Stars
