Unsettling America explores the cultural politics of Indianness in the 21st century. It concerns itself with representations of Native Americans in popular culture, the news media, and political debate and the ways in which American Indians have interpreted, challenged, and reworked key ideas about them. It examines the means and meanings of competing uses and understandings of Indianness, unraveling their significance for broader understandings of race and racism, sovereignty and self-determination, and the possibilities of decolonization. To this end, it takes up four themes:

How Indianness Matters Now: An Introduction I. Old Battles1. George Bush May Not Like Black People, But No One Gives a Damn AboutIndigenous Peoples: Visibility and Indianness after the Hurricanes2. Embattled Images in the Marketplace: Commodity Racism, Media Literacy, and Struggles over Indianness II. Ongoing Wars3. On Being a Warrior: Race, Gender, and American Indian Imagery in Sport4. Defending Civilization from the Hostiles: Notes on the Ward Churchill Affair5. Always Enemy Combatants? The Killing of Osama bin Laden and the Native American Struggle for Humanity III. New Fronts6. Borrowing Power: Racial Metaphors and the Struggle Against American Indian Mascots7. Alter/native Heroes: Native American Books, and the Struggle for Self-Definition8. De/Scribing Squ*w: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United StatesReclaiming Indianness: Notes Toward a Conclusions