so prominently in the news since Pontiac’s ornaments are among the most striking from the fl amboyant era of the American automobile. In the early 1930s they were shaped in the form of a Native American head adorned with feathered headdress, but by the 1950s they had morphed into the memorable confi guration of jet plane with the head of Chief Pontiac at the helm. These beautiful and iconic designs caught the public imagination then and now, but, when contextualized to their own day, their signifi cance expands. They can be understood as ciphers of industrial strength in the face of the complex and troubled situation for the Native American in postwar America. The fl ying mascot’s sleek body trailing behind the bold, simplifi ed features of Chief Pontiac is replete with glistening surface and tapering forms. Its swept wings were modeled after the jet aircraft of the period and in that regard symbolized the military might embodied in the Cold War fi ghters and bomber planes. In the words of one designer, “We liked jet airplanes, we liked fl ashiness, we liked power.”1 At work was a language of corporate power and machismo linked as much to planes as to tropes of the Native American male body.2 As the Indian body converts into its technological other, Pontiac’s ornament appropriates the raw power of the myth of the savage body so associated with the Indian warrior, and transforms it into a streamlined extension of the car’s force as moving energy. Indeed, the cultural stereotype of the Pontiac Hood Ornaments  Chief of the Sixes  By Mona Hadler General Motors’ recent announcement of the impending closing of its Pontiac division made a stir across America where the car had been a staple for generations. Historic photos of the automobile were legion in the press and key among them were images of the dramatic Pontiac hood ornaments such as the amber-headed chieftain that took center stage on the front page of The New York Times, May 4, 2009. It is not surprising that the mascot was featured

SCA Journal ———— 6 ———— Spring 2010 SCA Journal ———— ———— Spring 2010 Native American living freely in wide open space was in sync of the Indian sacrifice in the name of imperial progress the car’s characteristic silver-streak trim: parallel chrome lines Pontiac sales’ brochures used as a prime marketing strategy. with fifties notions of jet-age freedom. A comparable mascot according to the divine plan of Manifest Destiny.”7 To be that adorned the hood from 1935 to 1956 subtly evoked a The sleek mascot’s elegant streamlined forms tapering off at with other ethnicities no doubt would have been untenable. sure, American cultural identity and the fate of the Indian metaphorical railroad or runway. the edges of the wings echo the chrome embellishments on Many hood ornaments by carmakers in the fifties were have always been interconnected and mascots, like masks, World War II had a pivotal effect on General Motors car the car itself which sweep across the vehicle’s body tapering modeled after jet planes, but Pontiac retained recognizable allowed for the endless replay of the dynamics of imperial design as the company became a leading military contractor down towards the rear fenders and dipping beneath the rear features on its mascots, specifically that of the canonical power—or, the fiercer the enemy, the stronger the aggressor. making its mark with torpedoes launched from aircraft. window. Earl is credited with a total design concept where Indian head, making its pairing with the jet all the more As product signifiers, such mascots attested to the triumph Hence their 1940s torpedo series with an elongated hood all elements reinforce each other aesthetically, as seen in the suggestive. of America’s consumer culture, so identified with megalithic ornament that shot out from the front of a car whose body ornament’s aesthetic relationship to the overall car design. Roland Barthes, writing his Mythologies from 1954-56, at corporations such as General Motors. Indeed, advertising terminated gracefully in sloping, rear fender panels, as seen in No detail was too small for consideration. the apogee of the development of the hood ornament, images of the conquest serve as an implied affirmation of the the 1942 streamliner torpedo sedan coupe. At this time the described advertising and other signifying systems as civilized status of consumers.8 company also experimented with plastic, a material of choice Mona Hadler is a Professor of Art History at Brooklyn College practices that served to artificially resolve social contra- Prime exemplars of this critique, Pontiac hood for war equipment, and it began producing the Chief’s head and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. dictions by making them appear natural.3 General Motors ornaments existed as well in a specific historical moment out of red or clear plastic illuminated from inset bulbs, which may have wanted to cash in on the primitivist trope of raw, and had particular attributes. While different names appear became a common feature in the hood ornaments. Red or Page 6: A 1955 Pontiac hood ornament, General Motors savage energy and freedom, embodied in the conjunction of on the patents for these ornaments, they were the products amber plastic (or, sometimes glass), lit from behind, replaced Corp. Photograph from BRIGHTWORK by Ken Steacy © Indian body and jet plane, for its automobiles, but the car of Harley Earl’s famous Art and Color section of General the red copper of earlier decades, but continued to conjure 2000. Used with permission from Chronicle Books LLC, signified and sold much more. It captured and made Motors which expanded in 1938 into the Styling section.9 the pejorative epithet “redman” or “redskin.” San Francisco, www.ChronicleBooks.com/. “natural,” tensions in society during what was in reality a The designers (working together in a guild like tradition) In 1949 the feathers of the Native American’s headdress problematic historical moment. In its hybrid and complex and Earl above all, had the final say in the overall look of began to sprout stubby wings that grew into the wide Page 7: A c. 1930 Pontiac radiator cap, General Motors signification, the ornament speaks to the shifting identities of the new vehicles, but they avoided discussing specific design airplane wings of the 1950 mascot for the Chieftain Catalina Corp. Photograph by CSAndersen, Flickr. Native Americans in the postwar era when veterans returned issues with the press. In the numerous interviews compiled Hardtop, a luxurious Pontiac model fit for the postwar from the front, hobbyists played Indian, termination of by the Benson Ford Research Center, General Motors spending spree. This was the first of six flying chief designs.14 Below, Indian in a ring, Pontiac radiator ornament, General federal responsibility of Native American tribes became the and Ford designers skirted the issues of style, imagery, or The ornament, zinc die cast, and chrome plated, could be Motors Corp. Photograph by Andrew Larimer. official U.S. government policy, and the red power trademark branding. Nonetheless, the hood ornaments were ordered with an illuminated amber plastic face insert that movement of the sixties was soon to be a reality. By allowing carefully created with attention to design and signification. a difficult situation to seemingly be resolved within an The Art and Color section became known for introducing a elegant design, General Motors created a paradigm in this new model annually in the spirit of “dynamic obsolescence.” ornament of dissonant factions, and new cultural formations, Alfred Sloan, the chief executive officer of General Motors, being magically subsumed under the wings of corporate promoted this policy—a reflection of the company’s patronage. As Charlie Wilson, then the firm’s president, put realization during World War II that consumers ranked it in 1953 when he accepted the position of Secretary of styling as their primary consideration in purchasing cars.10 Defense, “I always thought that what was good for the David Gartman has outlined the steady usurpation of country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”4 power by the designers over market researchers and even Chief Pontiac was the inspiration for over 40 different engineers. By 1932 the GM sales division had surveyed over mascots from 1926 to 1955, the longest use of the same a million motorists and concluded that primarily practical symbol each year by any carmaker.5 Pontiac, the son of concerns led to their buying preferences. In deference an Ottawa father and Ojibway mother, lived from about to these results the company designed a tailored car with 1720 to 1769. As the chief of the Ottawa Tribe he united little chrome embellishment. It failed financially, thereby six tribes to assist the French against the British during the supporting Earl’s growing fantastical aspirations11 which Seven Years War. His legendary reputation derives from his led ultimately to the lavish fifties automobiles with enough fierce, but ultimately unsuccessful, six-month siege of Fort “brightwork” for designer Raymond Loewy to deem them Detroit, and his dream of building a united Native American “jukeboxes on wheels.”12 front against the European colonizers. Since production The head of Chief Pontiac first appeared on radiator of the Pontiac began in Pontiac, Michigan, the wily and caps in the 1920s. After 1935, when the radiator was strong leader became an apt, yet problematic, symbol for buried under the hood of the car, designers continued the General Motors. Chief Pontiac’s name was first aligned with motif on ornaments bolted to the hood which grew to be the car in 1926 when the new six-cylinder version went on called “hood ornaments” in common parlance.13 The initial the market and the company copyrighted a coin depicting mascots sported a realistically rendered if exaggerated zinc the Chief inscribed with the words “Chief of the Sixes.”6 die cast head of a Native American colored red by copper Native Americans, as is well known, became intertwined with plating, and marked by three feathers tailing behind. In consumer capitalism in America through the mass circulation the early 1930s General Motors had released the first of five of their imprint on coins, advertisements, and products from versions of the Indian head in a ring which remained the the late nineteenth century onward. prototype for Pontiac’s advertising logo. In keeping with That Chief Pontiac, a strong but defeated warrior, would prevailing design aesthetics of the time, by 1937 the head become the trademark for the Pontiac for decades to follow, had grown into a stylized long, low profile with streamlined exemplifies the ubiquity of mascots and other forms of feathers trailing behind resembling the elegant locomotives “playing Indian” in what has aptly been called a “celebration of the period. The ornaments sat perched on the hood of

SCA Journal ———— 8 ———— Spring 2010 SCA Journal ———— 9 ———— Spring 2010 The chrome on the Pontiac ornament complements advocated by the engineers and aesthetic streamlining, the the remainder of the car’s “brightwork.” Designers remark brainchild of the designers.16 The purely decorative and frequently about Earl’s love of the material that shined like semantic elements of the ornament place it in the latter and the ascent of a plane or the flash of money.15 The mascot “winning” camp. exploits the beauty of the metal while its edges round The era of these mascots had ended by 1956— aerodynamically. Gartman has described at length the significantly the same year the U.S. government decided to battle at General Motors between functional streamlining terminate its responsibility for the Ottawa tribe17—when

Left: Pontiac hood ornaments, 1937, 1939, 1940, General Motors Corp. Photograph from BRIGHTWORK by Ken Steacy © to D’Harnoncourt, could become an important factor 2000. Used with permission from Chief Pontiac’s face was replaced by the nose of the plane in building an America of the future, because they both Chronicle Books. just as the car’s distinctive tail fins began to grow in size and importance. With the extension of the tail fin in the late preserved tradition and used the resources of the present—a tantalizing construct when applied to the Pontiac mascot Below: Pontiac 1950 Pontiac hood 1950s, and the movement towards a lower, more simplified with its amalgam of the “primitive” and the modern. ornament, General Motors Corp. end, automobile designers focused more on the rear than the 18 During the war itself, the status of the Native American Photograph from BRIGHTWORK front of the car (Dagmar bumpers aside). For the purposes was complicated. It was no accident that Johnny Cloud by Ken Steacy © 2000. Used with of this discussion, the Pontiac of the late 1950s then, in its or Navaho Ace, the 1960s comic hero who inspired Roy permission from Chronicle Books. entirety, more than the retired mascot, was meant to conjure the jet plane. Lichtenstein’s 1963 painting Whaam!,23 was based on a fictionalized World War II pilot. Native Americans had Opposite: Pontiac hood ornament Through all its permutations, the Pontiac hood played an important role in the war and were touted as with amber insert, General Motors ornament’s head conjured the primitivist trope of “noble fierce fighters. Notwithstanding some resistance based on Corp. Photograph by Ed Coppola. savage” just as the Rolls Royce “Silver Lady” radiator cap was associated with English Romanticism and the grill religious beliefs, they enlisted en masse. Authors Alison with Palladium classicism in Erwin Panofsky’s well known Bernstein and Kenneth Townsend24 have recorded their article.19 With prominent brow and long nose the Pontiac contributions in great detail. Navajo Code Talkers and Ira hood ornament resembles the face on the Indian nickel Hamilton Hayes’s involvement at Iwo Jima have become more than a particular individual or a member of any specific legendary. Perhaps less well known is the number of Native tribe. The frequent use of amber elements heightens this Americans who served in the Air Force. General Clarence association and puts it in line with the primitivist discourse of Tinker, an Osage, the most prominent, served as commander the mythic Abstract Expressionist art of the 1940s. Writers of the army Air Corps based in Hawaii. Killed at Midway, such as John Graham and Carl Jung,20 classed Indians with he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Others other “primitives” as evolutionary children. Some writings, include Ensign Thomas Oxendine, a Cherokee, and Sergeant however, were more subtle such as the text for the Museum Gilbert Eaglefeather, a Sioux, who flew in the 8th Air Force of Modern Art’s popular exhibition, “Indian Art of the Division. By the end of the war Indians had received 71 United States,” held shortly before Pearl Harbor. air medals and 34 distinguished flying crosses, the highest Rene D’Harnoncourt’s essay veers away from adopting aviation honor. an entrenched primitivizing myth by pointing out the Native Americans were trained in aviation, commanded Native Americans’ ability to renew themselves by exploiting ships, earned commissions and rose to high-level ranks. resources and new technologies. He cites Navajo silversmiths Unlike African Americans, they were considered white and Plains horsemanship as examples.21 Co-author Frederic and were integrated into the armed forces. The media Douglas, initiated the first Indian fashion show in 1941 emphasized their bravery in battle, but this became a with a similar agenda. Women were encouraged to adopt double edged sword because it reinforced stereotypes Indian clothing as contemporary fashion, rather than as from the movies and other sources of American Indians as atavistic or folkloric attire.22 Native Americans, according blood thirsty savages. Native Americans were characterized

SCA Journal ———— 10 ———— Spring 2010 SCA Journal ———— 11 ———— Spring 2010 as having innate fighting abilities—better coordination, As early as 1944, Ella Deloria advocated a hybrid mixed items were legion.33 The 1952 Indian fashion show worked by indirection using symbolism and associational eyesight, survival skills honed from a putative closeness to position arguing for the rejection of both forced assimilation is a case in point. James Clifford further problematizes the language. Few authors today espouse MR’s notion of nature, etc. One magazine described Indians performing a and cultural separatism; instead, Native Americans should issue of pre-colonial authenticity in his well-known critique advertising’s effect on the naive viewer and tend to stress war dance prior to battle, with a “fury of drums and savage retain their own culture while also learning new skills.32 of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 primitivism exhibition the complicated relationship between the ad and consumers rhythm.” The article ends, “watch out Hitler—the Indians American Indian veterans, however, who were accustomed when he asks why there were “relatively few ‘impure’ objects but even with debates on reception, it is clear that 1950s are after your scalp.”25 As early as 1944 prominent Indian to being called “Chief” during the war, returned to school constructed from the debris of colonial culture contacts?” designers attended to their symbolism. Advertisers realized activist and writer Ella Deloria decried this stereotyping of under the GI Bill, became activists, and joined new Indian- or why no Samoan men wear wristwatches in the Hall of the need to associate their messages with the mind-set of Indian fighters as savages26 but stereotyping was ubiquitous. led groups such as the National Congress of American Pacific Peoples at the Museum of Natural History?34 He their audiences. Major Red Hawk, for example, was a 1940s comics Indians. They maintained that the government had a one- illustrates a photograph of a New Guinean girl adorned General Motors wanted to sell and Pontiac sales soared character who, even as a Native American aviation hero, sided approach to freeing itself of its responsibilities to the with photographers flash bulbs, in his section on affinities in the postwar era. The car with the Indian plane mascot at sported a headband, wore buckskin pants and remained Indian population. By 1958 the NCAI position that no tribe not included in the show. Its similarity to the Pontiac hood the helm was a marketing success story similar to the popular virtually naked to the waist.27 Indeed, like our Pontiac should be terminated without its permission became official ornament in at least one regard is compelling: both examples Indian motorcycle whose production ended in 1953. The mascot, Indian soldiers during the war were generally government policy. The decades from the end of the war to form binaries in which each part problematizes the other and Pontiac was a lower- to middle-priced vehicle designed to referred to as “chief” by their white comrades,28 a recalcitrant the sixties, with the rise of the Red Power movement, were questions the entrenched authority of modern. Yet in the last appeal to a general public. Pontiac advertisements stressed epithet. In 1960s comics, for example, Johnny Cloud is stormy interim years where debates on self determination analysis, the effectiveness of the photograph stems from the the lower priced car’s mass appeal reiterating the slogan called “chief” and praised for his keen Navajo eyesight. and assimilation abounded. disjunction, whereas the elegance of the corporate design “Dollar for dollar you can’t beat a Pontiac” or characterizing The period from the end of the war when John Collier This history, so eloquently put forth in Bernstein’s naturalizes and neutralizes its content. their clientele as populist: “From the North, East, South resigned as Indian Commissioner to 1953 when the U.S. book, underscores the ambiguous position of the Indians The discourse of hybridity relates as well to the American and West they came and from people in every walk of life.” government’s policy of termination began with the passage in postwar America—independent or protected, self- love of playing Indian which reached new heights in the Writing in 1961 about this era, Raymond Williams called of House Concurrent Resolution 108, was a period of determining or assimilated, rural or urban, traditional or hobbyist culture of the 1950s. Playing at “going native” advertising the “official art of the capitalist society.”39 ferment and change for Native Americans. Veterans who modern, “primitive” or advanced, savage or educated. It was allowed white Americans the freedom to partake in the General Motors was a sophisticated marketing entity had received fair pay in the war and fought as equals with in this hybrid context that the development of the Indian/ “authentic primitive” in the face of growing industrialization. and its designers were commercially and psychologically whites did not garner the same postwar opportunities as pilot hood ornaments occurred. The amalgam signified by In the postwar decades, during the period of termination, savvy. The Indian/airplane mascot topped a highly successful their comrades. By 1950 the unemployment rate for Indians the conjoining of the stereotypic “redman’s” face to the the notion of identity became increasingly unstable. product and the company chose to continue its use until was three times that of whites29 and dire conditions in the sleek, modern, technologically advanced jet planes captured Relocation helped to create inter-Indian communities in 1956 when it, like the Ottawa tribe, was terminated and reservations were exposed in the press.30 The situation among other things, the dilemma of the postwar Native urban centers that held powwows on the weekends open also notions of Red Power were waiting in the wings.40 As Dick became more complex with the implementation of the American in the quandary over tradition and assimilation. to white hobbyists.35 The Native Americans who sang at the Hebdige argues, dominant classes hegemonically frame the termination policy which took an assimilationist stance The graceful design, however, dulls the tension. powwow changed clothes to work at the factory alongside discourse, “so that subordinate groups are, if not controlled; with the Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged As a hybrid image, the Pontiac mascot of the 1950s the whites who changed clothes on the weekend to play then at least contained within an ideological space which Indians to leave the reservation and settle in the city. While engaged in various discourses central to the era and Indian. Along these lines we might ask who, in the Pontiac does not seem to be at all ‘ideological’: which appears instead some people saw termination as furthering the agenda of anticipated a more contemporary discourse on the blending mascot, is playing Indian? Who has removed his worker’s to be permanent and natural.”41 land-hungry whites others saw it as a positive step toward of cultures. For example, in its mixture of the industrial and garb to don the headdress and play Indian by conquering the General Motors captured and made “natural” a freeing Indians from paternalistic governmental policies.31 the preindustrial, it touched on issues of commodification “wide open spaces” in the new frontiers of the jet age? complexity of signification concerning Native Americans in central to the tourist production of the day, one dimension The symbolism of the fifties automobile and the the postwar era for consumers who watched “savages” on of which eschewed the industrial in a quest for the authentic. Madison Avenue strategies for selling it was a subject of television, donned Native American regalia on the weekend, Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein, acrylic and oil on canvas, 1963. As one critic wrote, essentialist discourses hate hybridity, but much speculation even in its own day. A car’s Freudian and played Indian in a carnivalesque mode, renewing myths © Tate, London 2010. associations, not surprisingly, were particularly newsworthy. of authenticity, replaying superiority over a conquered According to the well known adage of the fifties, put forth people, while at the same time accepting the language of by Ernst Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational termination which was soon to spawn a language of revolt. • Research, the car was a “she.” Men saw the convertibles as their mistress and the hardtop as their wife.36 In a chapter 1 Reminiscence from the 1981 and 1984 “Interviews with John called “The Ad and the Id” from a popular 1958 book, The Najjar,” Automotive Design Oral History Accession 1673, Benson Insolent Chariot, author John Keats lambasted the “penile” Ford Research Center, Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield ornaments of the period and concludes by asking, “How Village, Dearborn, Michigan. 2 Erika Doss has convincingly presented how the male worker most much of this is appreciated by the average conscious mind often shown in the nude in the 1930s and ’40s was the Indian. is open to serious question. What is not open to question “Toward an Iconography of American Labor: Work, Workers, and is the fact that Detroit believes, and operates on the theory the Work Ethic in American Art, l930-1945,” Design Issues 13, no. that Americans don’t buy automobiles, but instead buy 1 (Spring, l997): 64. dreams of sex, speed, power and wealth.”37 Consumers, as 3 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: we have seen, answered questions practically, but bought cars Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972). emotionally. 4 Charlie Wilson quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Madison Avenue was adept at catering to these Capital: Political Economy on Display,” in Visual Display, Culture emotional needs through their controversial use of Beyond Appearances, eds. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1995), 113. motivational research or MR. Vance Packard, who exposed 5 Walter W. Harris, Pontiac Mascots, Hood Ornaments, Trademarks this practice in his 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, cites (Toledo, Ohio: Walter R. Harris, 2000, 2d ed. 2005), 2. This self- General Motors as one of the large corporations to use published book is an act of love by the collector and engineer and MR by 1954.38 MR proponents argued that advertisement

SCA Journal ———— 12 ———— Spring 2010 SCA Journal ———— 13 ———— Spring 2010 Left: Ensign Thomas Oxendine (Cherokee). Courtesy Native American culture, see: Gail Stavitsky and Twig Johnson, Press, 1998), 142. See also his discussion of the carnivalesque of the National Archives II at College Park, Maryland. Roy Lichtenstein: American Indian Encounters, exhibit catalog tradition, 7. (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 2006), 7-36. 36 John Keats, The Insolent Chariot (Philadelphia, Lippincort, 24 Below: Sergeant Gilbert Eaglefeather (Sioux). Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II: Toward 1958), 72-75 discusses this idea and relates it to the writings of Courtesy of the National Archives II at College Park, a New Era in Indian Affairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Ernest Dichter, the president of the Institute for Motivational Press, 1991) and Kenneth William Townsend, World War II and the Research. See also Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Maryland.. American Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 2000). University Press, 1994), 356. Opposite: New Guinea girl with photographer’s flash 25 Townsend, 133-34, Indians at Work, 10 (July-August 1942): 17. 37 Keats, 71. bulbs, (included in the “Culture Contact” display at 26 Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians (New York: Friendship Press, 38 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Ig Publishing, the Hall of Pacific Peoples). Photograph by Margaret Inc, 1944), 141. 1957, 2007), 64. Gilliard, Neg. Number 336443. Courtesy Department 27 Major Red Hawk first appeared in Blazing Comics #1, Enwill 39 Raymond Williams, “Advertising the Magical System,” in The of Library Services, American Museum of Natural Publishing. His tribe is not named. Johnny Cloud first appeared in Cultural Studies Reader, Simon During, ed. (New York: Routledge, History, New York. DC Comics in 1960 as part of the All American Men of War series, 1993), 334. with Robert Kanigher as the writer and Irv Novik the artist. 40 According to John Sawruk, General Motors Pontiac Historian, 28 Townsend, 140, and Bernstein, 40. the last use of the Pontiac head was for the high beam indicator on 29 Bernstein, 150. the 1970 large Pontiacs: “After that, we had to use the international 30 Howard A. Rusk, M.D., “Death and Disease Reflect Neglect of symbol per the MVSS regulations. The current Pontiac red crest is American Indian,” New York Times (April 8, 1951): 43. in the form of an arrowhead; the star in the center is from the 1954 31 Bernstein, 175. Pontiac Star Chief.” Email communication to the author, July 17, 32 Bernstein, 128, and Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 144-63. 2007. 33 Ruth B. Philips and Christopher B. Steiner, eds., Unpacking 41 Dick Hebdige, Subculture and the Meaning of Style (London: Culture, 10 and Philips, “Nuns, Ladies, and the Queen of the Routledge, 1979), 16. Huron, Appropriating the Savage in Nineteenth-Century Huron Tourist Art” Unpacking Culture, 35. 34 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), 192, 202. 35 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University

has a wealth of information on the ornament. Pontiac’s ornaments 17 The 84th Congress (1956) passed legislation releasing federal were first cast by Ternstedt Manufacturing Company and from control of the Ottawa. See Arthur W. Watkins, “Termination of 1940 on, by the BLC Company. See Harris, 5, for casting numbers Federal Supervision: The Removal of Restrictions over Indian and logos. Property and Person,” Annals of the American Academy of Political 6 Ibid., 2. and Social Science, vol. 311 (May, 1957): 51. 7 C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood, Team Spirits: 18 Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 96. the Native American Mascots Controversy (Lincoln: University of 19 Erwin Panofsky, “The Ideological Antecedents for the Rolls- Nebraska Press, 2003), 9. Royce Radiator,” 1937, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin 8 Ellen J. Staurowsky, “Sockalexis and the Making of the Myth of (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). the Core of Cleveland’s ‘Indian’ image,” in Team Spirits, 91. 20 For Jung’s views see, for example, Carl J. Jung, “Your Negroid 9 Harley Earl’s Styling section has been the subject of much and Indian Behavior: The Primitive Elements in the American discussion. See for example, C. Edson Armi, The Art of American Mind,” Forum (April, 1930): 193-99. Car Design: The Profession and Personalities, “Not Simple Like 21 W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Simon,” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, Avant-Garde, A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University 1988). This section designed the 1948 Cadillac Coupe, the first car of Texas Press, 1995), 115. See his discussion of the Museum of to sprout rudimentary tail fins. Modern Art exhibition, 104-20. 10 Alfred P. Sloan Jr. My Years with General Motors (Garden City, 22 Nancy J. Parezo, “The Indian Fashion Show,” in Ruth B. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1964), 277. Philips and Christopher B Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture, Art 11 David Gartman, Auto Opium, A Social History of American and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley: Automotive Design (New York: Routledge, 1994), 108. University of California Press, 1999), 243-63. The fashion 12 Raymond Loewy, “Jukeboxes on Wheels,” Atlantic Monthly show was initiated by Dr. Frederic H. Douglas, curator of the (April 1955): 36. Department of Native Art in the Denver Art Museum. It was held 13 Harris, 7. over 180 times between 1947 and 1956, when he died. 14 Harris, 93. 23 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art 15 Gartman, 110, 129. and Popular Culture, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern 16 Gartman, 127. Art, 1990), 200-01. For Lichtenstein’s long-standing interest in

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