Strongheart: The Absolutely (Almost) True Story of an American Indian Showman

My larger project is a critical biography of Nipo Strongheart (1891-1966), a “mixed-blood” Yakama from Washington State, who spent his lifetime representing Native Americans in the entertainment industry and in the pan-Indian movement for both civil rights and sovereignty. Like many Indian performers, Strongheart simultaneously affirmed, defied, and manipulated contemporary white expectations of Native people. Born a year after the supposed closing of the frontier and just five months after the Wounded Knee Massacre, he came of age at a time when most Euro-Americans assumed that Indians were doomed to disappear. His given name—George Mitchell, Jr.—bespoke his mixed heritage, and his claim to Yakama identity would be questioned even after his death. Show business gave him the chance to craft a chiefly persona, however, as well as the opportunity to challenge racial stereotypes and correct biased historical narratives. Using entertainment as a political tool, Strongheart sought to reach broad audiences with the truth of Native life in order to inspire demands for reform. At the same time, though, the willful exaggeration and fabrication of his own history reveals the deep imbrication of fact and fiction in one American Indian’s quest for employment, empowerment, and identity. My paper will consider the benefits of biography as a way of addressing broader themes in Native American history, but also the challenges of recovering and representing the life of someone who, to borrow a phrase from Phil Deloria, was “an ambiguous figure, with a shape-shifter’s identity and a hazy history.”