Ithaca College

Visiting Assistant Professor

Affiliated with the Center for the Study of Culture, Race,and Ethnicity, CSCRE
Coursework includes Intro to Cultural Anthropology, Intro to Native American Studies, Watching Race in America: Native and Indigenous Images on Film, Global Health and Healing: Medical Anthropology

Ithaca College

Visiting Professor

Michael worked at Ithaca College as a Visiting Professor

Colgate University

Assistant Professor

Joint-Appointment Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Native American Studies

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness

Lexington Books

Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Tiltes, 2013 Careful. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Nuanced. Revealing. Anthropologist and Native American studies scholar Taylor delivers an important contribution with this artfully crafted examination of Native American mascots. His analytical skill resituates the debate about how Native Americans are represented in the broader US culture in a multilayered discussion connecting gender, race, and place, noting how Native voices are opposed to, defend against, and are drowned out by a white majority intent on reinforcing the boundaries between the conquered and the conquerors. The mythic frontier serves as a backdrop, the dynamics of which are played out on football fields around the US. Taylor begins and ends his book with an account of sitting in his own high school bleachers watching a Seneca student don buckskin and headdress to dance as the team mascot, and sensing the shared confusion of other Seneca students amid a majority white crowd and their realization of the magnitude of self-betrayal in which they are being asked to participate. It is an arresting, haunting depiction of the painful and complicated pathways that young Native students travel in a white world, making choices that may appear to be their own but are actually those that others have set before them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. — CHOICE

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness

Lexington Books

Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Tiltes, 2013 Careful. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Nuanced. Revealing. Anthropologist and Native American studies scholar Taylor delivers an important contribution with this artfully crafted examination of Native American mascots. His analytical skill resituates the debate about how Native Americans are represented in the broader US culture in a multilayered discussion connecting gender, race, and place, noting how Native voices are opposed to, defend against, and are drowned out by a white majority intent on reinforcing the boundaries between the conquered and the conquerors. The mythic frontier serves as a backdrop, the dynamics of which are played out on football fields around the US. Taylor begins and ends his book with an account of sitting in his own high school bleachers watching a Seneca student don buckskin and headdress to dance as the team mascot, and sensing the shared confusion of other Seneca students amid a majority white crowd and their realization of the magnitude of self-betrayal in which they are being asked to participate. It is an arresting, haunting depiction of the painful and complicated pathways that young Native students travel in a white world, making choices that may appear to be their own but are actually those that others have set before them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. — CHOICE

Indian-Styled Mascots, Masculinity, and the Manipulated Indian Body

Ethnohistory

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness

Lexington Books

Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Tiltes, 2013 Careful. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Nuanced. Revealing. Anthropologist and Native American studies scholar Taylor delivers an important contribution with this artfully crafted examination of Native American mascots. His analytical skill resituates the debate about how Native Americans are represented in the broader US culture in a multilayered discussion connecting gender, race, and place, noting how Native voices are opposed to, defend against, and are drowned out by a white majority intent on reinforcing the boundaries between the conquered and the conquerors. The mythic frontier serves as a backdrop, the dynamics of which are played out on football fields around the US. Taylor begins and ends his book with an account of sitting in his own high school bleachers watching a Seneca student don buckskin and headdress to dance as the team mascot, and sensing the shared confusion of other Seneca students amid a majority white crowd and their realization of the magnitude of self-betrayal in which they are being asked to participate. It is an arresting, haunting depiction of the painful and complicated pathways that young Native students travel in a white world, making choices that may appear to be their own but are actually those that others have set before them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. — CHOICE

Indian-Styled Mascots, Masculinity, and the Manipulated Indian Body

Ethnohistory

The Salamanca Warriors: A Case Study of an "Exception to the Rule"

Journal of Anthropological Research

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness

Lexington Books

Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Tiltes, 2013 Careful. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Nuanced. Revealing. Anthropologist and Native American studies scholar Taylor delivers an important contribution with this artfully crafted examination of Native American mascots. His analytical skill resituates the debate about how Native Americans are represented in the broader US culture in a multilayered discussion connecting gender, race, and place, noting how Native voices are opposed to, defend against, and are drowned out by a white majority intent on reinforcing the boundaries between the conquered and the conquerors. The mythic frontier serves as a backdrop, the dynamics of which are played out on football fields around the US. Taylor begins and ends his book with an account of sitting in his own high school bleachers watching a Seneca student don buckskin and headdress to dance as the team mascot, and sensing the shared confusion of other Seneca students amid a majority white crowd and their realization of the magnitude of self-betrayal in which they are being asked to participate. It is an arresting, haunting depiction of the painful and complicated pathways that young Native students travel in a white world, making choices that may appear to be their own but are actually those that others have set before them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. — CHOICE

Indian-Styled Mascots, Masculinity, and the Manipulated Indian Body

Ethnohistory

The Salamanca Warriors: A Case Study of an "Exception to the Rule"

Journal of Anthropological Research

Loss of Voice at Oneida Nation: Use of Traditional Methods of Social Control in a Contemporary Native Commnity

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness

Lexington Books

Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Tiltes, 2013 Careful. Deliberate. Thoughtful. Nuanced. Revealing. Anthropologist and Native American studies scholar Taylor delivers an important contribution with this artfully crafted examination of Native American mascots. His analytical skill resituates the debate about how Native Americans are represented in the broader US culture in a multilayered discussion connecting gender, race, and place, noting how Native voices are opposed to, defend against, and are drowned out by a white majority intent on reinforcing the boundaries between the conquered and the conquerors. The mythic frontier serves as a backdrop, the dynamics of which are played out on football fields around the US. Taylor begins and ends his book with an account of sitting in his own high school bleachers watching a Seneca student don buckskin and headdress to dance as the team mascot, and sensing the shared confusion of other Seneca students amid a majority white crowd and their realization of the magnitude of self-betrayal in which they are being asked to participate. It is an arresting, haunting depiction of the painful and complicated pathways that young Native students travel in a white world, making choices that may appear to be their own but are actually those that others have set before them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. — CHOICE

Indian-Styled Mascots, Masculinity, and the Manipulated Indian Body

Ethnohistory

The Salamanca Warriors: A Case Study of an "Exception to the Rule"

Journal of Anthropological Research

Loss of Voice at Oneida Nation: Use of Traditional Methods of Social Control in a Contemporary Native Commnity

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Book Review: Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century by C. Richard King

Great Plains Quarterly

Review of author/educator C. Richard King's work on contemporary constructions of "Indian-ness" and its use as a vehicle for creating tensions between historic and modern mainstream ideas of who and what idealized "Indians" represent in modern society