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By examining constructed dialogues with whiteness in everyday conversations, this article demonstrates how one group of Native Americans, the Lakhota, mark whiteness as rampant individualism. As such, whiteness is not an essential characteristic of white people, but shifts to different participants as it is negotiated in Lakhota discourse. In this context, the Lakhota values of community responsibility and service are juxtaposed to individualism associated with whiteness.R ecent literature on whiteness repeatedly cites bell hooks' exhortations to focus attention on "letting blacks know what's going on with whiteness" (1990:54) and to make the collective effects of whiteness more visible by exploring "representations of whiteness in the Black imagination" (1992:166). Though many researchers now pursue the invisible pervasiveness of whiteness, leading us to believe that its very invisibility makes their research all that much more difficult, thorny, and theoretically important, rarely do they take up hooks's second challenge (see Gaudio, this issue, for a notable exception). However, if we substitute Native American for Black in the second quotation above, significant historical work examining the Indian view of whites springs to mind (

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