In this article, I examine an example of American Indian activism through the once‐dominant mass medium of the newspaper. I focus on Ho‐Chunk author Charles Round Low Cloud and his development of an “Indian News” column into a vehicle for activism against everyday forms of racial oppression in the 1930s and on the ways others involved in publishing his column used the medium to subvert his message. The analysis shows how nonindigenous actors can mute activist messages through practices designed to celebrate indigenous voices. I argue that both indigenous media activism and reactions against such activism rely on the “mediated imagination”: the mediation of the use and reception of media messages by cultural ideologies and by individual creativity. Recognition of the mediated imagination, therefore, complements efforts to understand how language and other semiotic ideologies shape interpretations of social reality. It also facilitates analysis of the potentials and limitations of indigenous activism that uses existing media technologies.

In the late 1930s a novice fieldworker from the University of Chicago wrote in his field notes that his collaboration with a Ho‐Chunk interpreter had failed because of the interpreter's “aggressions” in the struggle for “white class status.” The notes exhibit a pattern of perceptual failure that I call “settler agnosia,” elements of which have been noted in research on the obstacles facing Indigenous activists. The case shows that the tendency of older anthropological accounts of contemporary American Indian life to obscure evidence of both colonial oppression and Indigenous action may have originated as consequences of a form of functional ignorance triggered by interpersonal struggles over position in the everyday relations of settler society. An ethnographic investigation of the links between settler agnosia and the practice of settlerness connects perception in everyday interactions to larger issues of knowledge production in and of settler societies. [settler colonialism, field theory, Bourdieu, race, ignorance, indigeneity, Native North America]

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of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1872-1884 are given their due prominence. In his explanations, Eidenbach puts each map into its historical context and does not neglect some of the more important overarching themes such as the role of the military, Spanish and American, in the scientific mapping of die region. Another real plus of this volume, confirmed in its cartobibliography, is that all of its maps are online at various sites and readily downloadable for closer scrutiny.