Indian Kitsch: The Use and Misuse of Indian Images

Indian Kitsch: The Use and Misuse of Indian Images is a sharp and unexpected project from Fritz Scholder, one of the most influential Native American artists of the twentieth century. An enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, Scholder is famous for paintings that deconstructed the romantic cliché of the American Indian. Here he turns from the brush to the camera, photographing the flood of stereotyped Indian imagery in American commercial culture, from currency and cigar-store figures to roadside curios.

The photographs were first shown at the Heard Museum in Phoenix in the spring of 1979, with this book published the same year by Northland Press of Flagstaff in cooperation with the Heard, carrying a foreword by Patrick Houlihan. This copy is a first edition and is boldly signed by Scholder on the half-title in blue ink. Given Scholder's stature and his death in 2005, a signed first edition of one of his rarer publications is exactly the kind of artifact worth preserving and documenting.