What does it mean to be a "mixed-blood," and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending? Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, though too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness? In Injun Joe's Ghost, Harry J. Brown address these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of "hybridity" from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood's exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing. Because the myth of the demise of the Indian and the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxon is traditionally tied to America's national idea, nationalist literature depicts Indian-white hybrids in images of degeneracy, atavism, madness, even criminality. A competing tradition of popular writing, however, often created by mixed-blood writers themselves, contests these images of the outcast half-breed by envisioning "hybrid vigor," both biologically and linguistically, as a model for a culturally heterogeneous nation. Injun Joe's Ghost focuses on a significant part of American history and culture that has, until now, remained on the periphery of academic discourse. Brown offers an in-depth discussion of many texts, including dime novels and Depression-era magazine fiction, that have been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This volumes also covers texts suchas the historical romances of the 1820s and the novels of the twentieth-century "Native American Renaissance" from a fresh perspective, considering issues that have previously been ignored. This work represents a convergence of subjects that have traditionally remained separate--canonical literature, mass-market fiction, Native American writing, U.S. Indian policy, and postcolonial theory--presenting a new perspective on each. Because it investigates from a broad range of writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Injun Joe's Ghost will be useful to students and professionals in the fields of American literature, popular culture, and native studies.