‘White’ gaze, ‘red’ people — Shadow visions: the disidentification of ‘Indians’ in cultural tourism

Abstract

Is tourism another round of Western colonialism? This paper considers tourism's role in introducing travellers to the supposed ‘Red Indians’ of North America, who in Foucaultian terms, are increasingly coming under the powerful objectifying gaze of the tourist system — essentially, a ‘White’ gaze. Travel practitioners and tourists tend to absorb sedimented historical explanations of indigenous culture, and the storylines conveyed about Native North Americans are prone to stale stereotypes and partial realities. The paper attempts to go beyond the ethnocentrisms and certitudes of the structural Western visions of indigenous North Americans by disidentifying them — that is by encouraging acceptance within the tourism industry of the validity and logic of Native North Americans' own alternative visions of the world instead. Accordingly, it draws out ten precepts about the First American world-order which are designed to help the inchoate tourism practitioner correctively comprehend the non-linear, indigenous pluriverse. The precepts are problematic, however, for the Indian world is not monolithic but highly variegated. Thus, the precepts are offered in dialectic form: fixed constants cannot cover the shadowy differentiations of the many Indian cultural worlds.

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