American Indian Identity and Indianness in Aboriginal Plays

Abstract

The quest of ‘Indian’ identity is the prime characteristic of the American literature. The period of colonization damaged the Indian identity, the way American Indian children were taken away from their parents with a strategy to make them “civilized’ individuals, sent to boarding school with Richard Henry Pratt’s slogan of ‘Kill the Indian and save the Man’. The American Indian writers strive hard to maintain their image if ‘indianness’ thus negate the stereotype image of the red Indians. This paper aims to analyze the American Indian identity in American Indian plays. The main focus of this paper is examine the identity construction and deconstruction in the American Indian plays. The American Indian Plays elucidate the ‘Indinness’ of the American Indian tribes and the dilemma of identity.