“Vaudeville Indians†? on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s 9780300264906

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“vaud e vi ll e india ns” o n glo ba l c irc uit s , 18 8 0 s – 19 30s

the henry roe cloud series on american indians and modernity series editors: Ned Blackhawk, Yale University; Joshua L. Reid, University of Washington; Kate W. Shanley, University of Montana; and Kim TallBear, University of Alberta

series mission statement Named in honor of the pioneering Winnebago educational reformer and first known American Indian graduate of Yale College, Henry Roe Cloud (Class of 1910), this series showcases emergent and leading scholarship in the field of American Indian Studies. The series draws upon multiple disciplinary perspectives and organizes them around the place of Native Americans within the development of American and European modernity, emphasizing the shared, relational ties between indigenous and Euro-American societies. It seeks to broaden current historic, literary, and cultural approaches to American Studies by foregrounding the fraught but generative sites of inquiry provided by the study of indigenous communities.

christine bold

“Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s–1930s

new haven and london

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. All royalties from this book go to Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) and Spiderwoman Theater. Copyright © 2022 by Christine Bold. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-300-25705 2 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2021947375 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To Ric as ever, to the memory of my mother, and to welcome Blake Xun Bold.

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c o n te n ts

Note on Language  ix Note on List of Vaudeville Indian Acts, 1880s–1930s  x Acknowledgments  xi   Introduction  1 1 Vaudeville Under the Sign of “the Indian”  27

1st Vaudeville Number: Will Rogers Makes His Rope Speak  66 2 Go-won-go Mohawk, “Aboriginally Yours”  78

2nd Vaudeville Number: Princess Watahwaso and Young Chief Poolaw Sing “Indian Love Call”  121 3 Princess White Deer, Her Family, and Her Show Blanket  136

3rd Vaudeville Number: Molly Spotted Elk Does the Charleston with John Ford’s The Iron Horse  177 4 How Princess Chinquilla Found Herself in Montana  193

4th Vaudeville Number: Princess Wahletka Shifts Race and Reads Minds  217

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5 Chester Dieck, “Winnetou on a Bicycle”  237

  Conclusion  269 Notes  283 Bibliography  333 Index  355

n o te o n lan gu age

In naming Indigenous Nations, tribes, and communities, I follow the language and spelling of the historical period except when my reference also encompasses more recent times. To name the First Peoples of Turtle Island (North America), I use “Indigenous” or “Native.” To name stereotypes and masqueraded identities I use “Indian” and “Indianness.” Following period convention, I also use “Indian” to name stage acts, filmic representations, and other forms of cultural expression that may involve Indigenous performers working with culturally specific Indigenous forms as well as dominant expectations of Indianness. When I term a performer “self-identified” or “press-identified” as Indigenous, I do not mean to doubt or affirm the identification but to specify the sources and limits of my information about this figure. Please note that, especially in quotations from the non-Indigenous press of the period, there appear offensive terms that I have not expurgated in the interests of accurately representing some dominant attitudes with which these performers contended.

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 o te o n list of vau d e ville indian act s, n 18 8 0 s – 19 3 0s

During the course of this research, approximately 350 “vaudeville Indians” (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) were documented, to very different degrees of detail. They are listed, with as much information as the project can offer to facilitate further research, on The People and the Text, an Indigenous-centered openaccess website (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/ or https://cwrc.ca/islandora/ object/tpatt%253Atpattroot). The list provides name, Nation or other identification where known, the period in which the performer appeared in vaudeville, and the makeup of the act.

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My first acknowledgment is to the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit (Between the Lakes Purchase, Treaty 3), where I live and work, to the Dish with One Spoon Covenant, and to Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Métis neighbors as well as the many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples for whom today this gathering place is home. My second acknowledgment is to the Indigenous artists without whose generosity and guidance this project would not exist: Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) and Michelle St. John (Wampanoag Nation), the project’s Indigenous Research Consultants, and Gloria Miguel (Guna/Rappahannock Nations) and Muriel Miguel (Guna/ Rappahannock Nations) of Spiderwoman Theater. To Deborah Ratelle, too, I owe great thanks. All errors and shortcomings in documentation and interpretation are of course mine. This project would also have been impossible without the skilled support and generosity of numerous archival institutions and archivists. I am particularly indebted to Eric Colleary, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (also Cristina Meisner, Helen Baer, and Michael Gilmore); Angelika Ret, Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau (also Frau Machner); and Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer (Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke), Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center of Kahnawà:ke. I also give huge thanks to Dr. Peter Jammerthal, Theaterhistorische Sammlungen, Freie Universität Berlin; Kim Murphy Kohn, Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, Butte; xi

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Jessie Mullin, Northern Cheyenne Picture Museum, Lame Deer; Montana Historical Society, Helena; Tom L. Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University; Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library; Library of Congress Manuscripts Division (especially Jeffrey M. Flannery) and Rare Books and Special Collections Division LC (Amanda Zimmerman); David L GeorgeShongo Jr. (Seneca Nation), Seneca-Iroquois National Museum; Jim Gerencser, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center; Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph (Kathryn Harvey); Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, University of Rochester (Phyllis Andrews, Melinda Wallington); Valerie Boa, The McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Greenock; David Lintz, Director, Red Men Museum and Library, Waco; and Claire McKendrick, Special Collections Department, Library, University of Glasgow. And for key aid I thank the Department of Special Research Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara; Oklahoma Historical Society; Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries; Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University; NYC Municipal Archives; and Museum of the City of New York. I greatly appreciate assistance with archival images—especially during pandemic conditions—by Leon B. Aureus, Daryl Betenia, Scott Berwick, John Culme, Vernon Goodleaf (Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke), Adrien Hall, Sigbert Helle, Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin), Mary Linemann, Sadie McDonald, Meredith McDonough, Nicole McMonagle, Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache), Daisy Njoku, Linda S. Poolaw (Kiowa/Delaware), Thomas Poolaw (Kiowa/Delaware), Mimi Rohmursanto, Matthew Short, Laura E. Smith, and Tom Williamson. For research video recording, many thanks to Jordan O’Connor and Kimber Sider. The considerable resources required to support international archival research and building relations of research exchange across settler-Indigenous divides were generously provided by the following: Canada Council for the Arts Killam Research Fellowship; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (special thanks to Bridget Gayle Ground, Clare Donnelly, and Danielle Brune Sigler); Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (including for funding of excellent Graduate Research Assistants Stephanie Settle, Rachel Hunt, Alec Follett, Brian Lefresne, and Ian Jones); DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) (special thanks to Frank Kelleter, JFKI); John

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Topham and Susan Redd Butler Off-Campus Faculty Research Award and Charles Redd Fellowship Award in Western American History, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University (special thanks to Brian Cannon, Brenden W. Rensink, Amy Carlin); Research Associateship, John-F.Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität, Berlin (special thanks to Ulla Haselstein); Visiting Canadian Fellowship in North American Studies, Eccles Centre for North American Studies, British Library, London (special thanks to Philip Davies, Phil Hatfield, Cara Rodway, Jean Petrovic); College of Arts and Faculty Research Fund, University of Guelph (special thanks to Andrew Bailey, Sandy Sabatini). The book’s final stages were supported by a Fulbright Canada Scholar Award. This project has been so long in the making, and individual acts of generosity and support so overwhelming, that proper acknowledgment of them would take a book in itself. Among the colleagues and friends who passed on archival materials, organized conference opportunities, or patiently listened by the hour, sometimes the year, are Chad Allen (Chickasaw ancestry), Susan Bernardin, Kirby Brown (Cherokee Nation), Neil Campbell, Elijah Cobb, Nancy Cook, Margery Fee, Patricia O. Galperin, Melody Graulich, Roger A. Hall, Katy Halverson, Joanna Hearne, Michael K. Johnson, Susan Kollin, Karl Marcus Kreis, Victoria Lamont, Kristin Moriah, Susan Nance, Deanna Reder (CreeMétis), David Rio, Alix Shield, Lisa Schincariol McMurtry, Cheryl Suzack (Batchewana First Nations), Mary Swan, Lisa Tatonetti, and Mike Taylor. I also benefited greatly from key conversations, tips, and feedback from Philip Adams, Kim Anderson (Cree/Métis), Stephen Barber, Gregor Campbell, Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi), Bridget Cauthery, Boyd Cothran, Philip Deloria (Dakota descent), Burkart Encke, Rick Grassley, James Gregory, Falen Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora, Bear Clan, from Six Nations Grand River Territory), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Michelle La Flamme (African-Canadian, Métis, and Creek ancestry), Harry Lane, Jani Lauzon (Métis), Brittany Luby (Anishinaabe-kwe, atik totem), Bunny McBride, Louis Mofsie (Hopi and Winnebago), Rick Monture (Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory), Yvette Nolan (Algonquin/Irish), Francisca Fuentes Rettig, Tonya Robinson, Richard Slotkin, Barbara Strickland, Coll Thrush, Evgenia Timoshenkova, and William Walker. In the Western Literature Association, my long-time intellectual community, there are too many generous colleagues to thank by name—except for Sabine Barcatta, who keeps it all together. At Yale University Press, I owe great thanks to Adina Berk,

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Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Ash Lago, Kristy Leonard, Sarah Miller, Phillip King, Liz Casey, and the fabulously helpful anonymous manuscript readers. I know myself blessed with family—Lewis Bold Wark, Zi Zhang, Blake Xun Bold, and Ric Knowles, my first and best reader—to whom I owe too much to say. I’ve been honored with invitations to deliver keynote, plenary, and research papers from this project at the following institutions, and I thank their many hosts, organizers, and enthusiastic audiences: Centre for American Studies, Western University (hosted by Monda Halpern); Department of English, University of Texas at Austin (Kurt Heinzelman, Cole Hutchison); Center for Transnational American Studies, University of Copenhagen (Katy Halverson); John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität, Berlin (Ulla Haselstein and Florian Sedlmeier); Amerikanistik, Universität Mannheim (Johannes Fehrle); Global Theatre Histories, Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitätMüncheny (Nic Leonhardt); International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures,” Freie Universität, Berlin (Christel Weiler); The John Morton Center for North American Studies, Turku (Benita Heiskanen, Johanna Leinonen, Malla Lehtonen); Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis (Lynette Hunter); Eccles Centre, British Library (Cara Rodway); Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Conference, Calgary (Jason Haslam); Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming (Linda Clark, Jeremy Johnston, Mary Robinson, Doug Seefeldt); Doig Country Symposium, Montana State University (Susan Kollin, Mary Murphy, Jan Zauha, Nic Rae); Continuing Education Archaeology/History Lecture Series, Guelph (Ken Oldridge); Department of English Literature and Language, University of Waterloo (Danielle Deveau); Modernist Studies Association Conference, Toronto (Irene Gammel); Guelph-Wellington Men’s Club (Jonathan Webb). I have also learned a lot from presenting parts of this project at meetings of the following associations: Canadian Association for American Studies, Western Literature Association, European Association for American Studies, British Association for American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Indigenous Literary Studies Association, Modernist Studies Association. Earlier versions of some ideas presented here developed in the following publications, and I thank the editors very much for their input: A History of Western American Literature, ed. Susan Kollin (2015); America: Justice, Conflict, War, ed. Amanda Gilroy and Marietta Messmer (2016); New Directions in

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Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, ed. Ken Gelder (2016); Once upon a Time . . . The Western: A New Frontier in Art and Film, ed. Mary-Dailey Desmarais and Thomas Brent Smith (2017); “Indigenous Performance Networks: Media, Community, Activism,” In-Focus Dossier, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies/JCMS, ed. Joanna Hearne (2021); “Indigenous Modernities and Modernisms of North America,” Print Plus Cluster, Modernism/Modernity, ed. Kirby Brown and Stephen Ross (2021). Part of the introduction previously appeared as “Outbreak from the Vaudeville Archive,” with Monique Mojica, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel, Western American Literature, Special 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. Susan Bernardin and Krista Comer 53.1 (Spring 2018), 113–26; I thank the editors and University of Nebraska Press for permission to reprint. Part of Chapter 3 previously appeared as “Princess White Deer’s Show Blanket: Brokering Popular Indigenous Performance across International Borders,” Special Issue on Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands, ed. Colleen Kim Daniher and Katherine Zien, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada 41.1 (Spring 2020), 39–63; with thanks to the editors, reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (https://utpjournals.press), © University of Toronto Press, https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.41.1.a02.

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Introduction

We found ourselves in a vaudeville house; we found ourselves in the vaudeville era. —Monique Mojica, 2015

In 2002, Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations), Michelle St. John (Wampanoag Nation), and Jani Lauzon (Métis) premiered The Scrubbing Project, the flagship show of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble.1 A remarkable work, it takes on the double genocide of Indigenous and Jewish peoples that is the direct legacy of Mojica and St. John, in a performance style that AnishinaabeAshkenazi scholar Jill Carter characterizes as a “complex weave of classic comedy routines, hit-television iconography, popular music, and survivors’ testimony.”2 In the show, vaudeville functions as a transitional space through which winged warrior women pass in their journey from Starworld to Earthplane to succor three women traumatized by “living with genocide.”3 Mojica’s retrospective observation about the show’s collective creation—“We found ourselves in a vaudeville house; we found ourselves in the vaudeville era”—carries multiple meanings. The space of popular entertainment in which their identities had been reduced to caricature was repurposed by three Indigenous women artists as one resource for survivance, one space from which they generated resurgent performance technique.4 For me, sitting in the audience, something additional was unfolding in one strand of this complex weave. As I watched Indigenous artistry done vaudeville-style—at once painfully hilarious and deadly serious—it dawned on me that this was the continuance of a history I had stumbled on and puzzled over, off and on, for twenty-five years. This book is my contribution, as a non-Indigenous scholar of popular culture, with guidance from these and other Indigenous artists and scholars, to recovering a community of “vaudeville Indians” who played global circuits between the 1880s and 1930s. This period saw what is often characterized as the nadir of genocidal policies and practices against the People of Turtle Island (North America); it also saw the efflorescence of mass culture. That conjunction 1

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produced some of the most virulent and lasting caricatures of “Indians.” It also, as Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) has elaborated in his influential work, resulted in “unexpected places” that were seized by Indigenous peoples for the making of modernity—so many at the turn of the twentieth century, it turns out, that there is debate over whether “modernity,” even pluralized to “Indigenous modernities,” is too containing, too settler-oriented, a term for this cultural presence.5 Vaudeville was one of these places. The connections between vaudeville and Indigeneity are remembered by Indigenous communities, but they have largely passed under the scholarly radar. Such systematic forgetting can be traced to vaudeville’s central place in myths of Euro-modernity, to the “polite” ambitions of vaudeville’s first generation of impresarios, and to the distinctive uses made of the vaudeville stage by Indigenous performers—deft acts of “visual sovereignty,” to quote Michelle Raheja (Seneca descent), which showcased Indian spectacle while generating meanings and sustaining relations along National, community, and kinship networks only partly visible to the non-Indigenous gaze.6 Recovering some of these stories suggests the depth, diversity, and influence of Indigenous work in popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Cumulatively, they put a new lens on vaudeville as one of the “domains of entanglement”—to use Coll Thrush’s term—between western modernity and Indigenous survivance.7 It is a space in which the making of western modernity can be seen to both deny and rely on living Indigenous presence, Indigenous performers can be understood to repurpose the reductive constructions of dominant settler culture for resurgent ends, and Indigenous circuits and networks can be glimpsed as processes of change and continuance exceeding modernity’s contours.

vaudeville Vaudeville is widely considered one of the performance forms central to the generation and accommodation of mass modernity. It was the first transnational system of mass entertainment, forging interlocking systems of global management and labor networks that came to shape the modern entertainment industry. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, vaudeville in North America and its equivalents overseas—music hall, variety, and Variété—emphasized fast-paced rhythms of performance, novelty, and spectacle in atomized lineups that responded to the fast-changing environment of urban industrialization “at popular prices.” These forms fomented newly direct relationships between performers and mass audiences, training spectators into new modes of

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community and newly abbreviated attention spans. Vaudeville was central to the shift to cinema. From 1895, it incorporated early moving pictures into its offerings, shaping the presentation, rhythms, and reception of this new technology and laying the groundwork for later developments in radio and television. In Miriam Hansen’s words, “the variety format promised a short-term but incessant sensorial stimulation”; it was perceived as “a specifically modern form of subjectivity.”8 Both the economies of scale and the demand for vaudeville’s trademark novelty required embracing a multiplicity of difference— including by culture, nation, race, ethnicity, gender, and class—on stage and in the audience. Across the globe, publicity trumpeted a newly democratic inclusiveness, from the boasts about “polite vaudeville” by Tony Pastor in the United States—“A Family Entertainment for Ladies and Children, Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers. Pure, Chaste, Merry and Perfect”—to the celebration of the variety theater as “the Futurist marvellous” by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Italy—“the bubbling fusion of all the laughter, all the smiles, all the mocking grins, all the contortions and grimaces of future humanity . . . the healthiest of all spectacles . . . alone in seeking the audience’s collaboration.”9 Despite the claims to inclusiveness—then and now—this global cosmopolitanism and enmeshment in industrialized culture seem to have encouraged the assumption that vaudeville was beyond the reach of Indigenous performers.10 Numerous scholars have analyzed North American vaudeville as an important stage for negotiating stereotype and agency by ethnic and racialized groups, including Irish, German, Jewish, “new immigrant,” African American, and Asian performers and audiences.11 The almost exclusive association of the period’s popular performers native to Turtle Island, however, is with wild west shows and their promotion of a “Plains Indian” image. These were very important venues for Indigenous talent and its visibility on the world stage, and there is increasing evidence of ways in which Indigenous participants negotiated agency within the form’s coordinates.12 Nevertheless, the wild west show was strongly associated with mass displays of horsemanship and violence, distant across large arenas from audiences, typically choreographed and contained by white patriarchal figures—that is, with the image of Indian primitivism. The display of Indigenous primitivism and its containment by white impresarios were central to many popular forms burgeoning in the nineteenth century, from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in the United States to Carl Hagenbeck’s human zoos in Germany. The solo and small-group virtuoso acts on the vaudeville stage with their degrees of creative control, intimate

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address to the audience, and individual management of their own material conditions carried a different relationship to western modernity—one ostensibly unavailable to Indigenous peoples.

“only united states reservation indian in vaudeville” I was nonplussed, then, in 1978 when I stumbled on a letter in the private papers of Owen Wister, the Anglo-American best-selling author of The Virginian. Dated November 4, 1904, it was from Princess Chinquilla, whose letterhead, brightly bedecked with portraits of herself and her cowboy juggler partner, billed her as the “Only United States Reservation Indian in Vaudeville” (figure I.1). Chinquilla wrote with a commercial proposition: having secured financial backing and established herself in popular entertainment—“I have never been with any [of] the cheap price shows & always play the best Vaudeville shows”—she was approaching Wister to write a play about her. This communication did not fit the much whiter and more dominant story about the popularization of the West that I was currently tracing, or the received understanding of vaudeville’s cast of characters. Chinquilla seemed an anomaly, in her choice of entertainment venue, her management of her own performance career, and her chutzpah as a “Reservation Indian” pitching to one of the elite Anglo-American gatekeepers of modern popular culture.13 Intrigued, I set out in search of Princess Chinquilla. In those pre-internet days, however, she seemed beyond recovery. Wister’s archive held no further evidence of her; neither did the extensive papers of his fellow popularizers of the North American West or the published scholarship on popular performance. Molly Wister, his wife, editorialized about vaudeville, but only to condemn the influence of the “cheap amusements of Manhattan Island” on impressionable “children and immigrants.”14 For decades, Chinquilla remained a curio niggling at but not seriously disturbing my understanding of the period’s popular culture—until 2002, when I attended The Scrubbing Project and saw the stakes being exponentially raised. The play’s story line concerns three women (Branda, Blessed Ophelia, and Esperanza) who manifest the trauma of living with the double genocide of their Indigenous and Jewish peoples partly by trying to scrub their skin white. When three winged warrior women (Valkyrie, Dove, and Winged Victory) in Starworld are assigned to help these women live, they “are catapulted to Earthplane to embody their assignments. Along the way they fall through the world of Vaudeville: the world in-between.”15 From this space they derive familiar performance techniques, turned now to Indigenous ends. They use Marx Brothers’

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Figure I.1.  Letter from Princess Chinquilla to Owen Wister, November 4, 1904 (Owen Wister Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division)

slapstick to clear the space for ceremony to the lyrics of Al Jolson’s “Who Played Poker with Pocahontas When John Smith Went Away.” In their version of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” she is an Indigenous body, bearing on her back “the Battlefield of Batoche, . . . Dudley at Ipperwash”; “For a dime you can see Wounded Knee.”16

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These popular cultural references and “over-the-top” performance moves are woven together with personal and cultural histories of violence, survivor testimony, poetic memory-making, and political resistance.17 They are often juxtaposed to disturbingly comic effect, as when Branda (played by Jani Lauzon) launches into an increasingly exaggerated minstrelsy routine—“Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones”—upstaging Esperanza (played by Monique Mojica) who is keening over the bones of her murdered ancestors. As they build a dead feast ceremonial altar in “an abandoned Vaudeville house,” it becomes, again in the words of Carter, “an erstwhile commercial site of spectacle, newly transformed into a space of sacristy and action.”18 In this space they move from vaudeville “bits” to the “vocables of Flying Eagle woman song, a traditional Native honour song,” make over “Over the Rainbow” “powwow style,” and triumphantly forge healing and survivance.19 Among all its illuminations, The Scrubbing Project showed how vaudeville’s central effect—Marinetti’s “imaginative astonishment” produced in an audience by what they had assumed were impossible combinations—could become an inventive political tool. Whereas, for example, an audience in 1916 could have seen “Canadian Mohawk” Tendehoa clinging to a rope in midair with his teeth while singing high opera, now we were confounded by Turtle Gals communicating the trauma of genocide through slapstick routine. They showed that vaudeville could be made a carrier of Indigenous resurgence, could figure as a moment in ongoing histories, protests, and conversations among Indigenous people. Whatever Chinquilla had personally been up to, the performance landscape that she claimed suddenly looked more expansive, more challenging, more consequential from this perspective. Two years later, the Turtle Gals took on vaudeville’s historical moment more directly when they staged a development workshop of The Only Good Indian . . . This show was dedicated to recovering and reembodying turn-of-the-twentiethcentury Native entertainers—particularly Indigenous women performers—“from the Wild West Shows, through vaudeville, burlesque and silent film.”20 Through archival and scholarly research, family histories, and deep improvisation techniques, the Turtle Gals recovered their “unsung predecessors from over a century ago,” honoring their complex legacy with the risks, compromises, humiliations, abuse, creativity, innovation, virtuosity, and resilience that it entailed.21 Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) has discussed the power of The Only Good Indian . . . in staging Indigenous women performers’ community across space and time, with “multi-vocal criss-crossings of eras, narratives, even personas,” as

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well as in giving visibility to Indigenous women writers of that era—in one instance, in a poetry slam between Tekahionwake/E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River) and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux): “to have two of the leading literary lights of nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Indigenous literature sharing the same space, speaking their own lines, represented as strong-willed, strategic, vibrant, even flawed women is to my knowledge entirely unique to this production.”22 As the show’s publicity put it: “who knew there were so many that came before?”23 That vision of community emboldened me to approach the company with Princess Chinquilla’s letter. If they did not already know of her, I wanted to offer the letter for their performance archive; if they did, I wanted to know who she was. The question uppermost in my mind: had I stumbled on a “wannabee Indian” using vaudeville to fake her identity, an intriguing footnote to vaudeville scholarship?24 Or was she an Indigenous vaudevillian—her letter tells Wister, “I am just what I claim to be”—whose story carried a larger correction to the history of popular performance? During that first trip to the Turtle Gals’ Toronto office several things happened that were harbingers of challenges and processes to come. When I handed over a photocopy of Chinquilla’s letter, Michelle St. John looked at the letterhead and simply said, “She’s beautiful.”25 With the gentlest of gestures—I heard it as both a protective and a provisional embrace—she acknowledged Chinquilla; and The Only Good Indian . . . later made a similar gesture when it included her name in the roll call of Indigenous entertainers ballyhooed by Buffalo Bill.26 This embrace, however provisional, was obviously not mine to make, as a non-Indigenous scholar, but it signaled that I needed to learn to look differently, beyond the binary set in motion by colonization. Although the Turtle Gals did not know Chinquilla, in response they shared images from their own, considerably larger archive of turn-of-the-century Indigenous performers, at least one of whom—Molly Spotted Elk (Penobscot Nation)—was a major figure in vaudeville. In that moment, what I had been conceptualizing as a search morphed into an exchange. And, when it emerged that Chinquilla had lived her adult life in Queens until her death in 1938, Monique Mojica expanded the terms of that exchange. Realizing that her mother, Gloria Miguel, who was born in Brooklyn and performed with her family in popular venues until about 1940, might have known Chinquilla, Mojica gave me the gift of family contact with an introduction to her mother. Gloria Miguel is one of the three sisters of the Guna and Rappahannock Nations, distinguished and much decorated theater artists, who in 1976 founded New York’s Spiderwoman Theater. The Miguel sisters—Gloria, her older sister

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Elizabeth, whose stage name was Lisa Mayo, and her younger sister Muriel Miguel—grew up in a “show Indian” family in Red Hook, Brooklyn.27 Their father, Antonio Miguel, was a Guna sailor from Guna Yala, in the San Blas Islands of Panama, who turned his skills to popular performance in the face of poverty and racism. As Chief Eagle Eye, he played venues such as Golden City amusement park in Canarsie, Brooklyn, invented snake oil tricks, choreographed hunter’s dances, developed Mohica medicine shows, and ballyhooed for movies.28 His wife—Elmira, a Rappahannock seer—was part of his show troupe, as were his young daughters. As adults, the daughters formed Spiderwoman Theater, which became “North America’s longest running Native theatre company and the world’s longest running feminist collective.”29 Its “storyweaving” techniques—“a distinct dramaturgical and performative methodology authored by Muriel Miguel and developed by Spiderwoman Theater”—brought together their personal histories, traditional cultures, social critiques, play with popular culture references, and vaudeville tomfoolery.30 They are a key part of Turtle Gals’ familial and performance inheritance; together, the work of these companies makes visible a kind of Indigenous vaudeville joining past and future.31 The first thing that happened when I met Gloria Miguel was that it happened again. On seeing Chinquilla’s photograph—this time in a cabinet card with her partner A. B. Newell—Gloria simply said: “She’s a good-looking woman.”32 I soon realized that, if I had begun to learn something about needing to look differently, I had a long way to go in learning to listen. Gloria couldn’t quite recall Chinquilla and kept veering off-topic, I thought, as I kept trying to nudge her back to the main question. As we looked at Chinquilla’s cabinet card, Gloria began to talk about her father and the “sell cards” that he produced and distributed—a comment that I talked right over, I’m embarrassed to say. She wandered into stories about other “show Indians” in Brooklyn, about high times at the Cowboy and Indian clubs, about popular Indigenous performers and non-Indigenous wannabees on whose sponsorship they sometimes depended, as I fretted to myself: “she’s talking about all these other Native performers in New York City.” And then I started to hear what Gloria Miguel was telling me: there were all these other Native performers in New York City, working popular stages of many kinds. Perhaps Gloria could not recall Chinquilla specifically, but she was revealing a large Indigenous community making urban popular culture in the early twentieth century. What this revelation meant for the reconstruction of Princess Chinquilla’s story is the subject of chapter 4. What it meant more generally was that, from a

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combination of Indigenous memories and archival remains, there is emerging a long list of vaudeville Indians on the stage between the 1880s and 1930s: in this book’s reckoning, more than three hundred and counting.33 I first encountered the term “vaudeville Indian” in 1916 press coverage of Tendehoa, the “Aerial Indian” opera singer who self-identified as Mohawk. For me, it designates the range and scale of “Indianness” produced at the site of North American vaudeville and its overseas equivalents. First and most formatively the term applies to the many Indigenous performers on vaudeville who were recognized by their communities. Some of them belonged to families and Nations with long histories of working with mass entertainment; others forged ahead alone, making it up as they went along. Some sustained powerful relations within their tribes and Nations on their homelands; others lived within trans-Indigenous urban communities; many moved between the two.34 Most of the Indigenous vaudevillians whom I have been able to trace made their Indigeneity visible to the press and audiences through their clothing, advertising, and cultural reference points. There were additional Indigenous performers in vaudeville who were not labeled “Indian” in the press but Indigenized the space of performance no less for that. Take Mildred Bailey, one of the first women jazz vocalists. According to Chad Hamill (Spokane descent), Bailey credited her Coeur d’Alene upbringing and familial legacy for her distinctive musical talents, she spoke proudly of her Indigenous identity, yet the jazz context in which she performed on vaudeville and other stages occluded public acknowledgment of that.35 Her example points to many more Indigenous artists—including those Indigenous to lands beyond Turtle Island—on vaudeville circuits, beyond the hundreds acknowledged here. Many vaudeville Indians self-identified as Indigenous on and off stage but seem to have been without ties to community.36 In some cases, their identity claims were publicly debated or challenged; they belong to the slippery category of performers termed “Indian ghosts” by Raheja: “the uncanny, destabilizing sparks that flare up in the tension between vanishing Indian rhetoric and Indigenous resistance and self-representation.”37 Others seem more clearly to have been members of what Cherokee scholar Rayna Green dubs “The Tribe Called Wannabee”: non-Indigenous performers who appropriated Indianness for their lives and performances. Additionally, there were uncountable vaudevillians who briefly or habitually appeared in “redface”: non-Native performers who forged acts and roles on stage from the caricatures by which dominant culture appropriated Indigeneity for the national imaginaries of North America,

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who sometimes appeared cheek by jowl with Indigenous entertainers on vaudeville bills but who did not pretend to Indigeneity off stage.38 In some Indigenous entertainment careers, vaudeville was key to the blossoming of talent and celebrity; in others, it was a more temporary way station on the ascent to or descent from other cultural achievements. I would argue, however, that cumulatively Indigenous performers shaped vaudeville into a transitional space—not quite as dramatic as in Turtle Gals’ The Scrubbing Project, perhaps, but important in the making of public Indigenous voice and presence at the individual, community, and transnational levels. This recovery effort also has implications for the history of motion pictures. Much illuminating scholarship has established the importance of vaudeville to early moving pictures and of Indigenous creativity to the early film industry.39 Vaudeville Indians bring attention to the space between: the role of Indigenous performers in bridging vaudeville and early moving pictures, in acclimatizing spectators to the shift from live presentation to cinematic representation. Cinematic space is not the central focus of this book, but its Indigenous dimensions from The Great Train Robbery in 1903 onward are touched on in subsequent chapters. As they performed virtuoso vaudeville acts between reel changes, accompanied showings of early westerns, and ballyhooed for audiences, what kinds of community did vaudeville Indians make and how did they contribute to training spectators in another central entertainment technology of western modernity? Indigenous virtuosity in vaudeville seems consistent with practices of Indigenous bricolage that cluster around this period. When Indigenous artists play with turn-of-the-twentieth-century popular culture, they often create new unities out of scraps and fragments. In literature, Okanogan author Mourning Dove combined fragments of the formulaic western to confound the logic of the genre and empower her “half-blood” heroine in Cogewea (1927). Nearly one hundred years later, Nisga′a author Jordan Abel pursued the illuminating fragmentation of the western formula to a much greater, digitally enhanced degree. Isolating each sentence containing the word “injun” in ninety-one popular westerns published between 1840 and 1950, Abel reworked the language of appropriation, colonization, and racism into Indigenous-centered creativity with his long poem Injun (2016). In visual art, the collages of Oglala Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte combine fragments of historical and contemporary photographs and material culture to re-represent “Sioux life,” 1880s to 1930s—“a period of drastic cultural changes and adaptations in technology, print media, language, fashion,

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education, and social and sacred traditions”; he dedicates one series to the experiences of his great-grandfather Standing Bear with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.40 Spiderwoman Theater weaves moments from the performers’ youthful encounters with popular culture into the healing structures of their “storyweaving,” played out against the backdrop of an ever-growing patchwork quilt that Muriel Miguel has called “our history.”41 Fragmentation and recombination were vividly embodied in the first public workshop of The Only Good Indian. . . . Turtle Gals wove together moments from their own memories with the voices of Geronimo on display at the St. Louis exposition in 1904; Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, her head atop a dressmaker’s dummy, bowing without a violin; and the armless, legless Tecumseh Stubbs delivering rapid-fire caricatures—the shaman, the rez kid, the stoic Indian.42 More recently still, Monique Mojica’s son Bear Witness (Cayuga Nation and part of the third generation “spun directly from the web of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater”) has raised the art of remixing clips from early Hollywood and other media representations of Native peoples to new heights.43 Bear Witness has spoken about “finding points of pride” within stereotypical representations: selecting, repurposing, and remixing fragments that become declarations of empowerment in his own work as a video artist and as co-founder of the Indigenous DJ collective A Tribe Called Red.44 Vaudeville itself has been understood as a collage of novelty bits. When Indigenous performers seized this form historically, their artistry can be understood as an instance of Indigenous bricolage-cum-modernist resurgence. And how, framed within this bricolage of imaginative astonishment, might these performers have been seen by audiences? Henry Jenkins argues that “the vaudeville aesthetic” put “emphasis upon performance, affective immediacy and atomistic spectacle”; spectacle’s disruption of narrative was one of vaudeville’s significant influences on early moving pictures.45 Indigenous creation of spectacle on the vaudeville stage—whether the disciplinary formations of the Carlisle Indian School band, Cherokee Will Rogers circling his rope above audiences’ heads, or Mohawk performer Princess White Deer choreographing her cousins from Caughnawaga in counterpoint to a white Pocahontas—took that disruption to another level. The period’s press coverage suggests that the nonlinear context of vaudeville made it harder to slot Indigenous performance into the usual evolutionary paradigm. Their virtuoso acts, especially those involving feats of athleticism, challenged ideologies of “vanishing Indians” in which public culture of the period was steeped. Their mobility on global vaudeville circuits defied the containment imposed by reservation, incarceration, and

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allotment policies. In the direct address between performer and audience in the vaudeville auditorium, what might have been the stakes in Indigenous performers, subjected to “unrelenting surveillance” in residential schools and on reservations, returning so closely the spectators’ gaze?46 And what might vaudevillian humor reveal about cultural power? According to Vine Deloria Jr., Standing Rock Sioux author and activist, “One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. . . . In humor life is redefined and accepted.”47 There is also a sense in which, by making something funny, you own it. Indigenous vaudevillians worked in a time when traditional Indigenous creative expression was prohibited by the governments of Canada and the United States, one of the ways in which, in the words of Kim Tallbear (Enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), Native peoples were “viciously restrained both conceptually and physically inside colonial borders and institutions.”48 In vaudeville and other popular venues many seemed to burst out of those restraints, cumulatively producing a riot of stage action and a cornucopia of possible meanings and impacts on diverse audience members. On vaudeville and variety stages, Indigenous performers juggled Indian stereotypes as dexterously as Indian Clubs; some described their acts as combining traditional and modern numbers, sometimes to comic effect. How might jokes have been recognized and received by Indigenous audience members—who were, contrary to dominant assumptions, sometimes also present in the vaudeville auditorium? When a member of Princess White Deer’s troupe conducted the orchestra with an arrow in 1917, it seemed like a joke. When the Pawnee-Otoe leader of the U.S. Indian Reservation Orchestra, Joe Shunatona, did the same with “a large single feather” a dozen years later, is it so obviously a joke?49 To whom? What if it was an eagle feather? Could some people in the auditorium experience it as sacrilege, others as self-empowerment, particularly given Shunatona’s standing in the community? Ultimately, many of these questions may be unanswerable, especially by the settler scholar. What they affirm, however, is that vaudevillian novelty—perhaps the central tenet of this entertainment form—became complicated, diversified, and redefined at the hands of Indigenous creativity.

building relations of research exchange It is more than fifteen years since I approached the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble with Chinquilla’s letter, and the archival scope of my project has expanded exponentially. I have followed the performance circuits of vaudeville

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Indians at the turn of the twentieth century in physical archives across North America, the United Kingdom and Germany, to Aotearoa New Zealand and in digital databases and archives with global reach. My aim is to piece together popular performance careers that have been suppressed in the dominant scholarly account of the period’s popular culture. Individually, they are fascinating lives and careers; cumulatively, they change the story on who made popular culture in a formative period, and they contribute a still-missing piece to the growing revisionist scholarship on Indigenous agency and legacies in the making of mass media. Given the long fetch of settler appropriation of Indigeneity, especially in the sphere of popular culture, the non-Indigenous researcher must take care in pursuing and presenting such archival gathering.50 Australian Aboriginal scholar Henrietta Fourmile (Yidinji) has identified the unequal power relations when the non-Aboriginal broker enjoys access to official archives and resources, while “the historical Indian [remains] the captive of the archives.”51 Philip Deloria has analyzed how Bill Cody positioned himself in and beyond the wild west arena as orchestrator of Indigenous display by exploiting the perceived threat of Indigenous “outbreak.”52 These critiques set the challenge. How to reshape brokerage into exchange—discursive exchange grounded in material exchange (what Indigenous Research Methodologies call “relational accountability”)?53 How to present archival recovery without showcasing or hiding the role of the settler scholar? How not to become the Buffalo Bill of Indigenous archives? This project aims to follow the principles that first emerged, for me, in the meeting with Turtle Gals and further unfolded in conversation with members of the Miguel family staged around archival recoveries.54 To give a sense of this process in action, I will quote (with permission) a few snippets from the ongoing conversation. On the page, they lose the richness of these artists’ voices—their Brooklyn accents, emphases and hesitations, laughter along the spectrum from anger to joy. Nevertheless, they trace a significant arc, as the Miguel family’s responses go from showing how to read archival photographs to breaking them out of archival captivity through profound acts of kinship reclamation. Here is one case in which I asked for help—of Monique Mojica—in reading signs of Indianness on the face in an early-twentieth-century publicity portrait whose subject I had not yet managed to identify (figure I.2): cb : Who would paint like that? mm : [soft laughter] That’s not on his face, that’s not on his face . . .

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cb : You’re right. mm : . . . it’s on the photograph. cb : You’re absolutely right. That’s amazing. I can see it now. It doesn’t

curve round on his face. [Laughter] (June 17, 2013) This instance embodies with peculiar directness the overwriting of Indigeneity with colonialist fantasy and the inclination of the settler scholar (or at least this settler scholar) to be distracted by that layer of fantasy—a more graphic instance of my blinkered reading of Chinquilla. Being guided to read past or through the imposed markings on this cabinet card enabled me to attend more closely to details of costume, physiognomy, and archival provenance. They ultimately led to the tentative identification of this performer as Frank Howling Wolf, a violinist and singer who survived the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California; toured the Western Vaudeville Managers’ Association circuit with Joe Shunatona in their younger days; and headed up an Indian jazz revue in the 1920s. He primarily identified as Coahuilla Indian of Southern California.55 He also belonged to a distinct entertainment lineage in being labeled “the Versatile Indian.”56 The press used this as a term of distinction for Indigenous athletes, especially Jim Thorpe of the Sac and Fox Nations, and elite performers such as Mohawk poet and orator Tekahionwake/E. Pauline Johnson, Seneca playwright and performer Go-won-go Mohawk, and PawneeOtoe bandleader and musician Joe Shunatona. The label, of course, suggests the opposite of the containment and reification attempted by the photographer’s imposition of painted lines on Howling Wolf’s face. In a later conversation, Mojica puzzled over the inscription on a cabinet card from the 1890s signed by Go-won-go Mohawk (figure I.3): mm : What does that say? “Aboriginally . . . cb : . . . yours” mm : [laughter] That’s really funny. “Aboriginally yours.” Sounds

like a good name for a . . . a show. (November 9, 2015) Mojica’s reaction provides a glimpse into the creative process whose methods I had witnessed in the Turtle Gals’ The Only Good Indian . . . and which have been continued in the artists’ diverse projects since the company disbanded in

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Figure I.2.  Unidentified performer [Frank Howling Wolf?] (Theater Biography Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

2008. That is the regeneration of archive through performance—relational, embodied, deep improvisation that joins documentary research to what she calls “blood memory” work.57 Mojica’s initial reaction to Go-won-go Mohawk’s sign-off points to one way in which materials held by colonial archives can be recovered, revived, and re-membered through contemporary Indigenous artistic embodiment. Monique Mojica changed the dynamics of this research when she again introduced family connections. She showed me a photograph from her own family archive in which her grandfather—Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel’s father, who performed as Eagle Eye—strikes a stock pose, barechested save for strands of beads, his brow shaded with one hand, his other

Figure I.3.  Cabinet card for Go-won-go Mohawk as Wep-ton-no-mah, undated, signed “Aboriginally Yours” (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution   [INV 00785900])

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gesturing ahead. Among other points, she reflected on his costume, including the traditional Guna fabric—the Mola: But, what I do see when I look at those older photographs, the family photographs of my grampa doing snake oil shows or posing for tourists, what I see that here he is a Guna man in a big Plains headdress with again a lot of Lakota beadwork on him, but he always wore Molas even if he was in the style of breechcloth which Molas would never be worn as. There was something, there was some way where he subverted the template to say, “Well, maybe you won’t notice, but this is who I really am.” (November 9, 2015) What Mojica makes visible, through her familial kinship, is a relationship between culturally specific details of costume and interiority. In the chapters that follow, I try not to speculate about the interiority of members of a community of which I’m not part. Mojica’s analysis, however, guided me toward attending closely to the significance of specificities in costuming, which is sometimes dismissed as a wash of pan-Indian stereotypes. Unexpectedly, Monique Mojica’s family photograph triggered another phase in the outbreak from the archive. Several months on, I was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, at the end of a long, unproductive day, flipping aimlessly through a collection named the New York Journal-American Photographic Morgue. What a waste of time, I thought, opening a folder labeled “Indian sign-language” . . . and, with a shock of recognition, I found myself looking at a photograph of Mojica’s grandfather. What I had considered two research paths—archive and exchange—had converged: her grandfather was in “my” archive. I immediately emailed her with a snapshot; just as quickly, she responded: “OMG!! I’ve never seen it before! Please get a copy, yes!”58 There turned out to be over thirty photographs of what another folder labeled “Brooklyn Indians.” They were mainly group photographs staged and captioned by the newspaper: exhibitions at Coney Island, American Indian Day celebrations, social and educational dances, hospital visits, Thanksgiving Day advertising, powwows marking the right to vote, one family accompanying their son to an army recruiting station. Many types of regalia were on display and many different Nations identified. The captions flattened those specificities, repeatedly tethering them to facetious formulas of war paths, tomahawks, and broken English. Seeing Eagle Eye/Antonio Miguel reappear more than once

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within the gathering, I decided to copy and return them all to Monique Mojica, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel. In the ensuing exchanges, all three, in their different ways, broke the bonds of archival captivity. The family’s comments on these photographs took them out of the morgue and reattached them to lived community, transforming their focus and framing, zeroing in on details of costume, performance technique, inventiveness and virtuosity, relationship and identity. They broke the images out of the discursive frame that sought to contain them, speaking back to the newspaper captions that repetitively sought to reduce these portraits of human community to instances of Indian stereotype. The meeting in which I took the electronic folder of photographs to Monique Mojica took place, for the first time, in her home. As I clicked through the images of “Brooklyn Indians,” from every wall and surface, photographs of her relatives from many decades, sometimes in performance costume, sometimes not, looked down. Their collective gaze reframed the press images, lending the weight of their lived presence to the identifications, reactions, and insights that Mojica voiced. Here is some of the analysis that she brought to the most beautiful photograph in the gathering, an image from 1936 in which her grandfather, as a young man, is demonstrating a hand signal to a young boy; the New York Journal-American has captioned it “Eagle Eye Shows Daybreak How to Tell the World He’s Riding a Horse” (figure I.4): That’s Plains sign language. He’s “playing Indian” because that sign language has nothing to do with Guna anything. It’s what he has learned to do as the act of playing Indian. . . . But it’s layered, isn’t it, because he’s performing and performing for the camera but at the same time he’s engaged with that child and that’s what’s beautiful about it is the engagement with the child and the child’s engagement with him and on that level it’s totally real. But it’s like the struggle to have that within all the accoutrements, the prerequisite accoutrements . . . and it’s staged. That part, the way that they are interacting, their engagement with each other, isn’t staged, it’s real. (April 15, 2017) The forging of real relationship was also the dominant refrain in Gloria Miguel’s response to the Journal-American photographs as I sat clicking through them in her Manhattan apartment. As she scrutinized the myriad group photographs of Brooklyn Indian dances, performances, and get-togethers, she identified names and faces, remembering events and relations both visible in and

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Figure I.4.  Antonio Miguel/Chief Eagle Eye and Daybreak [ca. July 21, 1936] (New York JournalAmerican Photograph Morgue, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

existing beyond these photographs—Brooklyn as the home of Mohawk ironworkers, Indigenous performers, her Guna and Rappahannock relatives, and more. The word Gloria Miguel repeated over and over was “connection”— between present and past, among the participants in the photographs, and between herself and her community: And it’s so nice, you know, to make that kind of connection . . . there was such a nice connection. . . . That’s the nice thing about connections. I have a lot of enjoyment nowadays in that realm. So it’s

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fun doing this, looking back at the old life, that I was connected in some way, not to everybody . . . Back there, in the Thirties, . . . My father was a song-and-dance man; . . . he was really interested in the people. . . . He rescued [people who] were isolated. They had no money, they were abandoned, and several families stayed at our house. And I guess my father, while he sang and danced with those groups too—the social, the powwow groups—they all came to our house and we all went out. We worked at Canarsie, we worked on Coney Island, did John Wayne ballyhooing for the John Wayne movies. It was in Brooklyn, we were on a big float, and the whole family was on the float, and the family posing and saying, “Go to see John Wayne . . .!” [laughter] Ah, we did crazy things—we used to have Indian Day celebrations and the social clubs and the Cowboy and Indian Club— we all really knew each other. (May 9, 2017) The knowing and remembering each other were most vivid in Muriel Miguel’s reactions. When she looked at the photographs, names and Nations spilled out in a cornucopia of specificity: he’s Mohawk, she’s Cherokee from Oklahoma, that family was Hopi and Ho-Chunk. . . . She evoked a world brimming with desire, fun, talent, daring all played out within the bonds of intergenerational community. Rather than transcribe her innumerable stories, I’ll record what I think of as the sound of Muriel Miguel’s memory, as triggered by these photographs: mm : Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god . . . cb : [laughter] Is that good or bad? mm : . . . oh my god. [full-throated laughter]

Isn’t this amazing? [more laughter] That it? Oh, this is so much fun. (May 4, 2017) Later, in the same conversation, Muriel Miguel spoke more hauntingly. The night before, in a celebration at La MaMa honoring her as a “Legacy Leader of Color,” Miguel had voiced a long list of Indigenous women performers who had gone out into the world and come back, making Spiderwoman and later generations of Indigenous artistry possible. Now, in a noisy restaurant in Lower

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Manhattan, she mulled over these names again, including three who passed through vaudeville: Molly Spotted Elk. And Lucy Nicolar Poolaw. Lily St. Cyr, which is Red Wing. Yah, when I said these names out loud I really meant it you know, that I felt like, yah you can honor me, but there’s so many that came before me and at the same time as me that were on the front lines. I just want to hear their names out loud, hear the sound of their names in the room. That to me is really important in acknowledging them. Just, you know, the names should be on the air, echoing back to another generation. That’s how I feel. You say the name, you acknowledge it and you send it out. And it’s going to come back, and my grandchild will maybe, you know, know these names. (May 4, 2017) Muriel Miguel’s granddaughter, Henu Josephine Tarrant (Rappahannock, Ho-Chunk, Kuna, and Hopi Nations), does indeed carry forward this legacy as a prize-winning traditional dancer and innovative theater artist, often performing alongside her mother, Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock Nations), and father, Kevin Tarrant (Ho-Chunk and Hopi Nations).59 Later in 2017, the three appeared together at La MaMa in a company of Indigenous actors performing Murielle Borst-Tarrant’s Don’t Feed the Indians: A Divine Comedy Pageant—“Watch what happens when the Doctrine of Discovery meets vaudeville, musical comedy, and Native American pageantry.”60 The Miguel family’s responses to these photographs reaffirmed relationality across historical time and the fissures of commercial culture. Breaking images out of the archive, bringing back to life that which had been consigned—literally, in this case—to the archival morgue, their work models Indigenous resurgence. This book strives to follow the principles that they emphasized in these archival exchanges—relationality, connection, kinship making—in its telling of Indian vaudeville history. Also learning from them, I pay attention to Indigenous women and family in the archival stories that emerge. Families are significant units in the world of itinerant entertainment generally, but they have a particular force in the context articulated by Cree/Métis scholar Kim Anderson: “I learned that one of the biggest targets of colonialism was the Indigenous family and that our traditional societies had been sustained by strong kin relations in which women had significant authority.”61

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There are, of course, stories of humiliation, violence, and exploitation in the history of Indigenous artists in popular entertainment. I do not mean to play down how fine a line many at-risk vaudevillians walked, as detailed, for example, in John Troutman’s and Karen Sotiropoulos’s accounts of, respectively, Native Hawaiian and African American performers’ experiences.62 Among the Indigenous voices telling cautionary stories is Osage author John Joseph Mathews, in his novel Sundown (1934), where he referenced the desecration of ceremony by a survivor of the popular stage: “The Ponca had been on the vaudeville stage, and he knew how to please white people.”63 In 1998, Philip Deloria limned the danger to Indigenous peoples of being forced to play Indian: “Mimetic imitations could alter political, cultural, and personal identities in unanticipated ways.”64 Gloria Miguel herself, in an interview with her daughter Monique Mojica in 2010, spoke searingly of the humiliation of being exposed to intrusive gazes as a young “show Indian” at the Canarsie Carnival in Brooklyn. On her lunch break in her performance regalia, she found herself under scrutiny by a gawping crowd who found the sight of her eating spaghetti a spectacular novelty: “Oh! Look at the Indians! Look at the Indians! They’re eating spaghetti! The Indians are eating spaghetti!” Gloria’s shrinking response, four decades later, reminds us to take care how and at whom we look: “I don’t remember all of the looks on the faces; I just remember the crowd and the feeling I had, the feeling I had as a little kid eating spaghetti. I just wanted to disappear. . . . I went into myself . . . I didn’t like the idea of people looking at me eating spaghetti.” Her words became part of the Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns project, co-written by Monique Mojica and LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), and of Monique Mojica’s Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment.65 But these are not the stories that the artists chose to emphasize to me, the non-Indigenous researcher, and those wounds are not mine to probe. When these Indigenous performers controlled the narrative, what was visited on them as trivialization, exposure, and commodification became transformed into community-building, solidarity, and celebration—an archive of achievement against all odds.

giving back If I place myself in this space of performance, my lineage is with the audience. At moments, that connection has become historically specific. For example, reading the papers of Princess White Deer in the Kanien′kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center of Kahnawà:ke, I realized that my

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grandfather could well have been in her audience when she and her family played Glasgow, Scotland, in 1907—what might he have seen when he looked at these Mohawk performers? When Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer (Kanien′kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke), cultural liaison and archivist for the center, brought my attention to costume details and explained meanings otherwise invisible to me, this was a descendant of the performer teaching a descendant of the audience, again, how to look. From this position, I piece together the public face of Indigenous performance, most often from archives not under Indigenous control—theater records, newspaper coverage, performers’ writings held in colonial archives, documents of their negotiations with federal governments, census and genealogical records. Lucy Maddox has written about how, in this period, performance was the main way in which “the general public” would encounter Indigenous peoples.66 In piecing together vaudeville circuits and acts from archival sources, one part of my purpose is to fill out what was visible to that audience then and how it might be read now.67 These archival resources also form the means by which I aim to fulfill one of the responsibilities of the settler scholar working with Indigenous cultures: to give back to the communities to whom her work is accountable.68 Giving back is its own journey. Returning archived photographs to the Miguel and Mojica family has modeled, for me, some of the reciprocal relations necessary to this process. I have learned that there is no straightforward scaling up of research relations. So many historical performers emerged from the archives; developing trust across the terrain of popular culture, freighted as it is with histories of settler exploitation and trivialization, is so intricate a challenge; and the line between being a responsible researcher and making demands on communities with their own priorities is so fine that I have not found it possible to build research relationships with all the Nations and communities to whom these performers belong. And yet to omit such figures from this project to honor a performance lineage would seem more disrespectful and contribute to a bigger loss. Ultimately, I am following several routes to return. In some cases, Indigenous cultural liaison and archival officers authorized to speak for communities have facilitated and guided the restoration of settler and settlerheld materials to their own archives. In others, Indigenous artists are reanimating the archive through discussion and performance, opening the way for sharing with communities to whom the materials carry kinship connections. Expanding the circulation of archival traces beyond colonial institutions is

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greatly enabled by Indigenous-centered digital sites of recovery, gathering, and recirculation guided by Indigenous protocols.69 By these means, the archives on which this book relies are gradually rejoining communities of Indigenous creative expression and cultural care, a process deeply dependent on the generosity of Indigenous scholars, archivists, and artists and a necessary counterweight to the colonialist impulse to extract and take ownership of knowledge. One of the clearest lessons from such exchanges is that it is in the moment of giving back—not piously, but literally giving back—that the settler scholar learns most.

chapter overview When vaudevillians traveled entertainment circuits, they were said to be playing on the circuit owner’s or manager’s time—doing vaudeville “on Keith time,” “on Loews’ time,” “on Pan time” (for Pantages), and so on. This book asks what it might mean to play vaudeville on Indigenous time—an expression signifying, in the words of Ojibwe/Dakota scholar Scott Richard Lyons, a distinctive “history of temporal multiplicity.”70 The following chapters focus on the ways in which, repeatedly and variously, Indigenous performers seized vaudeville for their own purposes. The conditions of vaudeville employment were hard, especially in the English-speaking world and especially at the smaller-time end of the entertainment hierarchy. Nevertheless, within its structures, Indigenous entertainers could negotiate more artistic control, more contractual leverage, and more direct audience relations than in any other form of cultural employment available to them between the 1880s and 1930s. One Indigenous vaudevillian, Cherokee Will Rogers, reflected early in his career on the novelty of managing his own bookings, while another, the much less famous Oneida Joe Morris, documented that his vaudeville earnings were twice his pay as an iron worker.71 With these material and structural conditions, Indigenous performers sustained kinship relations and trans-Indigenous community, weaving these processes into the fabric of mass modernity while globe-hopping from New York to Petersburg, London to Wellington. They also found themselves shadowed by a substantial cohort of non-Indigenous vaudevillians who played Indian in imitation of, desire for, and competition with the popularity accruing to Indigeneity. Chapter 1 considers the impact of these archival recoveries on the received history of vaudeville and its most immediate offshoot, revue. It traces how the rise of polite vaudeville was entangled with Indigeneity in ways at once deeply extractive and fundamental. It also provides an overview of hundreds of

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Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying vaudevillians, tracing networks and patterns of performance. This overview begins with Indigenous performers recognized by their communities, moves into the slippery terrain of Indigenousidentifying performers without community ties, some of whom were nonIndigenous wannabees, and ends with redface acts by performers who played Indian only on stage. That sequence also shapes the rest of the book as it traces the careers, communities, and popular productions of selected Indigenous performers; pivots to the thorny case of an Indigenous-identifying performer in search of community; then moves to a non-Indigenous masquerader and a redface performer. Chapter 2 traces the career of Seneca playwright and performer Go-won-go Mohawk. Writing and starring in melodrama from the 1880s onward, she led her theatrical troupe to success on both sides of the Atlantic. She became one of the first performers to make space in polite vaudeville for Indigenous presence while also taking on the primary engine of popular print production, dime-novel publishers Beadle and Adams, in the process opening up queer spaces of Indigenous possibility. Part of this chapter’s recovery work involves documenting the responses of two senior Indigenous artists and researchers, Monique Mojica and Michelle St. John, whose reading of Mohawk’s archive turns out to be illuminatingly different from my own. Chapter 3 looks to a multi-generational family of Mohawk entertainers, the Deers of Caughnawaga and St. Regis (now Kahnawà:ke and Ahkwesáhsne), whose performance circuits took them from North America to South Africa to western and eastern Europe, back to North America. In European music hall and Variété, they crystallized the genre of Indian vaudeville as a form of cultural brokerage, navigating borders and sustaining relations with a resilience that Esther Deer/Princess White Deer subsequently staged on Broadway. Something of the larger networks across geographies and generations that they carried with them remains visible in the material details of dress and their choreography of space on and beyond vaudeville stages. Chapter 4 pivots to another kind of vaudeville Indian by returning to Princess Chinquilla, the figure who launched this study. It puts together fragments of evidence to understand how this self-identified Southern Cheyenne performer found herself, in several senses, in vaudeville performances that took her from Manhattan to Montana to Oceania. And it asks what this “slippery character”—her claim to Indigeneity doubted by Yankton Sioux author and activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša among others—might

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suggest about the connections among colonial violence, Indigenous traumas, and the popular stage.72 Chapter 5 travels to the epicenter of European “Indians”: Germany. It considers the career of Chester Dieck, a German redface trick cyclist who played Indian for more than six decades in European Variété and Zirkus-Variété. Reconstructing how his self-presentation changed through four regimes of German power results less in the familiar story about weiße Indianer (white Indians) desiring a primitivist notion of Indigenous authenticity and more a story about the voracious appetite to enter the space of what was seen as Indigenous modernity on the global stage. Interspersed among these chapters are four “Vaudeville Numbers.” Each of these shorter pieces opens with an on-stage act, reconstructed as an audience would have seen it, and then, by reattaching the performance to some part of the history of its making that is now publicly available, reads larger connections and cultural meanings encoded in this vaudeville bit. The 1st Vaudeville Number focuses on the roping act of Will Rogers (Cherokee Nation), pursuing what it illuminates about Indigenous engagement with the conditions of vaudeville employment and the larger Indigenization of vaudeville history. The 2nd Number begins with a duet by Lucy Nicolar Poolaw/Princess Watahwaso (Penobscot Nation) and Bruce Poolaw/Young Chief Poolaw (Kiowa Nation), following its implications for intergenerational and trans-Indigenous community on and beyond the vaudeville stage. The 3rd opens in a vaudeville-film house, zeroing in on the work of Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud/Molly Spotted Elk (Penobscot Nation) to trace the role of live Indigenous performance in the making of cinematic space and of healing relations of remembrance. The 4th begins with a guest spot by the Cherokee wannabee Princess Wahletka in an Indian revue led by Joe Shunatona (Pawnee-Otoe), probing “pretindian” processes of extraction from and dependence on Indigenous performance communities in the making of transatlantic western modernity. In reflecting on the combined impact of these stories, the conclusion travels from the international geography of mobility traced in entertainment circuits—revisiting it as “Vaudeville Indian Country”—to the trans-Indigenous urban configurations that Renya K. Ramirez (Winnebago/Ojibwe) terms “Native hubs,” specifically gatherings in cinematic spaces and in observances of American Indian Day in New York City.73 Through this journey, the connections between Indian vaudeville and Indigenous spaces of gathering, kinship, community, and continuance are once more traced.

ch a p te r o ne

Vaudeville Under the Sign of “the Indian”

often called the birthplace of “polite vaudeville” stood a clear pointer to pay attention to vaudeville Indians. This was a statue of Saint Tammany, the seventeenth-century Lenni-Lenape leader Tamanend, who was made over into a figurehead for white American political fraternities finding national identities through “playing Indian” (in Rayna Green’s and Philip Deloria’s terminology) and whose likeness was here positioned to benignly oversee the headquarters of New York’s Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall.1 In this building on Fourteenth Street, Tony Pastor, “father of polite vaudeville,” opened his first fully family-friendly house in 1881.2 Every audience member entered Pastor’s theater under the benign outstretched hand of the Indian chief; many of them also exited through the vestibule of the building popularly known as “the Wigwam” after the performance. This discourse of Indianness also seeped into Pastor’s publicity. His annual Christmas party for child entertainers was covered as “a big pow-wow.”3 For his prowess in discovering new talent he was labeled “The Christopher Columbus of the stage”—a nickname that, carried to its logical conclusion, positions all his vaudeville performers as Indians.4 Tammany’s statue is an apt guide to approaching vaudeville as a kind of “Indian Country.” It gestures not only to Indigenous presence in a theatrical space widely assumed to be absent of it but also to the white constructions fastening on Indigeneity at every touch and turn, to the layers and structures and regimes that had to be navigated by performers then and scholars now. ATOP THE BUILDING IN LOWER MANHATTAN

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The story of vaudeville Indians is not about predominant numbers. There were more Black, Jewish, and Irish acts on the vaudeville stage. It is not about owning the means of production, in the conventional meaning of that phrase: as far as I know, there were no Indigenous-run vaudeville houses and circuits on the scale of Jewish vaudeville, nor was there a separate circuit, such as the Theatre Owners Booking Association for African American performers and audiences. The significance of attending to vaudeville Indians is twofold. They make visible the ways in which vaudeville managers repeatedly resorted to Indianness as a touchstone at moments of change (often involving cultural anxiety and financial risk) and the distinctive uses of the vaudeville stage made by Indigenous performers. They particularly bring home the ways in which networks of Indigenous performers exceeded the contours of the vaudeville industry at the same time as vaudeville’s emergence relied on stereotypes of Indianness. In order to tell that story, this chapter begins before the rise of polite vaudeville. It traces some geographies of itinerant entertainment traveled by popular Indigenous performers in the mid-nineteenth century, following paths that carried within them longer histories of Indigenous relations and connections that endured through the development of commercialized mass culture. It then moves to the making of polite vaudeville at the hands of Tony Pastor, marking how, as he moved out of itinerant entertainment, he lifted the language and stereotypes of Indianness while removing Indigenous performers from his stage. When vaudeville subsequently scaled up to industrial proportions with national and international syndicates and circuits, Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying performers were once more in demand, and they participated in the hundreds. In charting this largely unacknowledged presence, this section of the chapter is particularly interested in how Indigenous performers used vaudeville to reinforce networks of relations, how they continued Indigenous geographies of entertainment on vaudeville circuits, and how their shadowing by non-Indigenous performers playing Indian is additional evidence of the power of the public space opened by Indigenous vaudevillians. Attending to these acts and patterns brings a different perspective to vaudeville history, a matter that the chapter turns to next by considering how industry structures and employment conditions were engaged by Indigenous performers. Finally, the chapter addresses vaudeville’s most immediate live-performance offshoot, revue. This section traces a similar story of

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white entrepreneurs—Florenz Ziegfeld in particular—denying and relying on Indigeneity by foregrounding comically reductive constructions of Indianness. And it pauses over one performer in a Ziegfeld production, Mapuche baritone Chief Caupolican, to consider how he continued the repurposing of such reductions as sources of Indigenous resurgence. In a period when U.S. and Canadian governments banned Indigenous expressive acts—dancing, ceremony, potlatch—vaudeville became one of several performance spaces in which the People sustained their creativity in old and new forms.5

popular indigenous performers before polite vaudeville Popular Indigenous performers did not make the conditions of the cash entertainment economy that took off in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were important players in constituting what could be made of it. Medicine shows, wild west shows, circuses, dime museums, amusement parks, concert saloons, and other variety houses included Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying jugglers, orators, dancers, trick riders, theatrical and performance troupes; some entire shows were Indigenous-owned and -run. Very often, their display of performance skills was part of a larger trade in Native people’s artistic work, selling beadwork, basketry, carvings, quilled bark artifacts, moosehair embroidery, and custom-made souvenirs in spaces adjacent to the stage.6 This work was, by definition, peripatetic, as traveling outfits moved around the country, seeking new audiences and customers for their wares, while urban venues’ changing lineups kept performers on the move. When popular Indigenous entertainers went on the road, they tended to follow long-established trails, paths, and waterways developed for trade, diplomacy and war, hunting, and seasonal working of the land before and in response to European invasion; along the way they were supported by geographically dispersed kinship networks. This was movement through what Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) has mapped in an earlier period as “Native space.”7 Even a glance at Indigenous entertainment careers before the rise of polite vaudeville detects the survival of these geographical and cultural webs of connection. Overlaid, cut across, and damaged by settler industrial development as they were, such Indigenous connections continued to hold their own meanings, resurfacing in different forms on burgeoning vaudeville circuits. Take James Beaver (1845–1925), Cayuga member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, on the Canadian side of the border, who became widely known as

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“Uncle Beaver, Indian Juggler” and also as a magician, storyteller, reenactor, carver, carpenter, and highly regarded visual artist.8 Beaver belonged to the first generation of the Cayuga Nation to be born within the Grand River Reserve. This space was much diminished from the tract of land originally negotiated by Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant/Thayendanegea with the British government on behalf of the Haudenosaunee who had been loyal to the British during the American Revolution and lost their homelands in New York State. When Rick Monture (Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory) describes the focus of the 1784 land negotiation, he emphasizes land as connectivity among the Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations Confederacy), which predated European invasion by several hundred years: Brant was intent on gaining lands in Upper Canada that were in close proximity to the other nations of the Confederacy who chose to remain in New York State, particularly the Seneca. After some negotiation, Brant was able to secure a tract of land six miles wide on each side of the Grand River, which flowed into Lake Erie approximately 40 miles from Niagara Falls. Such a location would allow relatively easy access and communication between the Haudenosaunee nations in the event of further troubles with the Americans.9 As told by James Beaver’s descendant, Penny L. Warner, Beaver hit the road about 1868, traveling seasonally along Native footpaths to enhance the family farm’s income as an itinerant entertainer, pursuing opportunities with medicine shows, wild west shows, and his own street performances.10 A Cayuga speaker who seems, initially, to have struck out alone, Beaver’s travel was shaped and supported by the network of Cayuga relatives and clan relations spread across what is now New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Beaver had family on Cattaraugus Reservation and around the city of Buffalo, as well as links through his Mohawk wife, Lydia Bay, whom he married in 1873, with St. Regis and Caughnawaga; as Warner says, “What an ideal travelling environment—people who knew people, who knew people.”11 Among these people would have been Chief Running Deer, Mohawk of St. Regis and Caughnawaga (circa 1839–1924), whose performance career Patricia Galperin has dated to the early 1860s, when “he had an all-Indian troupe that performed in the William Washburn shows.”12 Beaver depended on and extended the geographical connectivity described by Monture; as Indigenous itinerant

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entertainers encountered, hosted, and performed with each other, they reinforced the making of shared Native space on the move. Later, James Beaver participated in enlarging these geographical entertainment networks when he joined what became the Red Cloud Dance Troupe, led by Onondaga and Cayuga singer and showman William Bill, one of many performance groups from Six Nations. They traveled train routes across North America and then, under the leadership of William Bill’s grandson, Fred Williams Sr., sailed across the Atlantic with Indigenous performers from the western plains employed by the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show. Uncle Beaver always returned to his home territory. He brought back what he had learned about commercial entertainment, offering a variety bill—“complete with can-can girls”—in his hotel on the reserve, somewhat in competition with the opera house in the nearby settler town, Caledonia.13 Told from within the family lineage, the relations sustained and extended by these performers on commercial entertainment routes, themselves layered over Indigenous travel patterns, sound like ground supporting them beneath the constant thrum of governmental atrocities, social humiliations, and physical violence. The traveling road shows from Caughnawaga with which Beaver intersected also point to connections further east and south. David Blanchard has traced some troupes moving southeast from the banks of the St. Lawrence River by way of “old, familiar reservations, seeking hospitality and a place to rest,” remembered at what were then named “St. Francis, Passamoquoddy, Oldtown, and the southern New England settlements of Schagticokes, Housatonics, and Mohicans.”14 These routes shadow waterways and pathways of the Native space of the U.S. Northeast and on them, among the entertainers with whom Caughnawaga Mohawks would have crossed paths, one of the most famous was Frank Loring (1827–1906) of the Penobscot Nation. Performing as Big Thunder, this physically imposing and inventive showman in ostrichplumed headdress and feather skirt traveled throughout New England and beyond staging “Indian entertainments” for road companies while also working as a hunting guide and basket seller.15 His multitasking was multifaceted: as Bunny McBride and Harald Prins point out, he both worked as a hunter and performed the role of Indian hunter on stage; the difference was in the wig.16 He also produced and directed shows and, in older age, wrote a play. In the 1850s, as a circus agent, he assembled a troupe of mainly Wabanaki performers, along with two black bears, and managed their relationship to the circus proprietor throughout the run across several northeastern states. His

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gigs also took him to metropolitan centers: in 1860, he and his wife, Mary, headlined an “Indian Exhibition” at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway in New York City for eight months.17 The “Grand Entertainment” that Loring staged with five members of his family in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1884 suggests his vision of “Indian vaudeville”: the eight numbers went from “Indian funeral Ceremonies” to a Pocahontas bit, “Saving the Life of Captain John Smith” (in which Loring sometimes played Smith), to “Electing a Chief.”18 Again, the ties with homeland remained strong. Throughout and after his show career, he returned to the Penobscot Nation on Indian Island, Maine, his attachment to the community ultimately issuing in his election as vice chief (lieutenant governor) of the Penobscot Nation. Beaver and Loring were two of hundreds of Indigenous show people on the popular entertainment scene prior to the development of polite vaudeville.19 Not all Indigenous routes to commercial performance can be celebrated as continuations of kinship networks: from the death of eighteen-year-old Do-Hum-Me (Sac and Fox Nation) in P. T. Barnum’s Museum in 1843 to the choice between prison and performing for Bill Cody presented to Lakota Ghost Dancers in the 1890s, the unequal power relations are stark. And not all Indigenous performers approved of taking the variety route. Popular Seneca playwright-performer Go-won-go Mohawk was openly critical of the form, declaring: “People used to want me to dance—to play the banjo and do fancy steps. I said ‘No—that is no fit thing for an Indian.’ It is beneath his dignity— dancing like a common street player. I saw an Indian dancing in variety once, and it was a shameful sight. . . . He wasn’t sticking to the Indian.”20 When Go-won-go Mohawk had success in a different genre—theatrical melodrama— she in turn was criticized by Luiseño artist (and, briefly, vaudeville performer) Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nuñez, who suspected that Mohawk was in popular theater only for the money and did not sufficiently support other Native performers.21 And some Indigenous leaders criticized their people for performing in any capitalist entertainment economy. Yavapai Indian rights leader Carlos Montezuma, for example, wrote: “If freedom and citizenship is gained by the Indian race it will not be by the road of commercialism.”22 Nevertheless, the power of persistent Indigenous community remains evident in the patterns of mobility and performance sustained through the mid-nineteenth century. They were part of a much larger story of Indigenous peoples’ agency in selectively absorbing and adapting newly encountered cultures to their own purposes, across and beyond Turtle Island, including in

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what Laura L. Mielke calls “the intercultural performative contexts of the colonial Americas” from 1603.23 As Donna M. Loring, former representative of the Penobscot Nation in the Maine State Legislature and senior adviser on tribal affairs to the governor of Maine, said of her great-great-grandfather Frank Loring/Big Thunder: “He figured out what he could hold on to and what he could let go of. I believe that was his secret and his legacy to us.”24 In that statement of lineage and survivance, what I hear is the power and pride attached to Indigenous popular performance.

tony pastor and polite vaudeville Indigenous performers were part of the entertainment world that Irish American performer Tony Pastor (1837–1908) entered in the 1840s. His early career—as blackface minstrel, trick rider, acrobat, clown, comic singer, and ringmaster—took him into minstrel shows and dime museums in the Manhattan Bowery as well as traveling circuses and menageries across New England, the Atlantic states, into the midwest, and down south. He would have encountered both Indigenous entertainers and redface Indians.25 Pastor performed in P. T. Barnum’s Museum in the same years that Frank Loring made an early appearance, and Barnum displayed Sauk and Iowa dancing as part of his “freak” show.26 Pastor and his brother Frank worked for Mabie’s Menagerie during the period when it intermittently teamed up with Tyler Indian Exhibition United, which boasted its parade of Seneca “chiefs, braves, and sages.”27 In working the circus and sideshow, Tony Pastor would have seen close up the draw of wild west Indianness, including, for example, Charles Sherwood’s “famous Indian riding act” about which he fondly reminisced.28 In 1860, Pastor began to carve out his career on the variety stage as a singer of comic, topical, and patriotic songs as well as an actor in the “afterpiece” skits at the end of playbills. Variety drew on the full range of traveling acts, organizing them into a series of twelve- to fifteen-minute turns on a playbill that could last three hours and whose lineup changed regularly: “singers, dancers, comedians, contortionists, trapeze and acrobatic artists and animal acts.”29 Initially, the main venue for variety was the concert saloon, but during the years of Pastor’s engagement, variety pulled away from the associations with working-class men, drinking, smoking, and sexual encounters with female servers, beginning to establish itself as respectable and family-friendly. This was Pastor’s central project when he moved into variety management in 1865: to attract families and so expand the audience base by gender, generation,

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and class.30 He was not the first or the only impresario working toward that goal—this story could begin with Benjamin Franklin Keith in Boston or Gustav Walter in San Francisco (with his own Wigwam theater)—but Pastor is seen as the most influential, working his way up the Manhattan hierarchy of popular entertainment from the Bowery to Broadway, spearheading what came to be called polite vaudeville. Evidently he, like many of his peers, believed that neither Black nor Indigenous performers belonged in this venue but that blackface and redface would be a draw. Indianness figured as a strand of identity woven around the Irish, German, and other European immigrant characters that were his main bill of fare. In an era in which purist primitivism, military onslaught, and governmental segregation were intent on “defining Indians out of existence,” in the words of Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), an on-stage hybridity that merged European and Indian identities was treated as both self-evidently comedic and part of the cultural glue bonding immigrant communities to a national polity.31 This strand is visible in his first managerial stint, with his touring Tony Pastor’s Variety Show and his bricks-and-mortar Tony Pastor’s Opera House in the Bowery.32 He reached into his stock of wild west stereotypes for variety turns and, in most elaborate form, afterpieces. Burlesques combined Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and other “new immigrant” caricatures with redface performance. In the Bowery years, Pastor staged versions of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, with its vanishing Indian tale featuring English captive Hope Gough turned Narragansett wife and mother, Narramattah, and of Last of the Mohicans, with a comic Indian O’Kokowokomee (“cock of the walk”). Pastor’s Burlesque Macbeth, commissioned in 1870, parodied Edwin Forrest, the Euro-American actor famous for his redface title role in John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. In Pastor’s staging, Macbeth’s 2nd Murderer was “made up very Forrestian,” and he repeated many lines from Metamora and generally conducted himself “in the stereotype of a Native American as presented in Stone’s play” (while the 1st Murderer spoke in Irish brogue).33 Pastor’s version of The Live Indian, John Edward Owens’s “jolly Aboriginal specialty,” with “the Noble Savage, alias, O-by-jingo,” appeared in those years.34 Pastor also worked his connection with the dime-novel industry, apparently authoring, then adapting for his stage, the dime-novel western Dare Devil Pat, The Dashing Rider of the Western Plains (1872–73) with an Irish hero in the Indian-infested wilderness.35 When, in 1875, Pastor made his first move north in Manhattan, inching up the entertainment hierarchy to his New Theatre on Broadway, he headlined the

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theater’s renaming with “The Laughable Indian Border Sketch, entitled MINNIE HA HA!” The play on Indianness remained part of his variety fare. In 1878, he staged The Capture of Sitting Bull, capitalizing on public fascination with the Sioux leader’s whereabouts after what they knew as the Battle of Little Bighorn two years earlier. In another playlet, Marked for Life, audiences would have seen Indian villains Crawling Snake and Fired Cloud. Stage Indian maidens included “Little White Crow,” a broken-English-speaking Indian wife betrayed by the white villain in the melodrama Life on the Prairie, and Lucy Brownbecome-Manitobe in Our Indian Affairs. All Indian figures were played by Pastor’s stock company of Euro-American actors. Most elaborately, two of Pastor’s longest-running sketches comically peeled back the American fascination with playing Indian. The first, The Three Chiefs by J. C. Stewart, played throughout the 1870s.36 An Irish and a German greenhorn in the West, unbeknownst to each other, are persuaded to masquerade as Black Foot of the Shawnees, for whose capture there is a $3,000 award. Unexpectedly brought face-to-face, the immigrants are convinced and terrified by each other’s performance, exposing the spectacle of playing Indian from the inside, to show its vaudevillian heart—pulling out tomahawks, giving war whoops, executing war dances—finally to be exposed as white Indians and “scalped” by the Black servant who plays Indian most convincingly of all. Go West; or, The Emigrant Car, written by William Carleton for Tony Pastor, ran throughout 1880 and briefly, in excerpted form, in 1881.37 As George Odell put it: “in one emigrant train were herded all sorts of dialect comedians that might be expected to appear in any ‘Variety’ bill.”38 In search, variously, of liberty, property, revenge, escape from the law, and enforcement of the law, they all decide to “go Vest” (as the German Hans Munchausen puts it; “go Westa,” in the words of the Italian villain Ignacio Cespedes). The scene becomes thick with Indian caricatures, from Bridget Mulvany’s characterization of the West— “They say it’s full of Injuns that scalp ye”—to demeaning jokes and songs about Indians lustily performed by Irish and German couples just off the boat, to a full-scale Indian attack on the train.39 With a great “Indian yell,” Indian heads pop through car windows; Hans shrieks, “We are surrounded by Indians! Look to your bistols!” According to the stage directions, “Indians rush into car and each Indian seizes a passenger. Picture.”40 For reasons not clear in the plot, the Irish immigrant Heffernan Mulvany enters dressed as an Indian chief: “My name is Scrip-scrap wing ding gallootsa, or Old man fond of his budge

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[bridge?].”41 Cespedes yells, “Death to ze Indian!”; Heffernan counters, “Death to all the white race!”; somehow the Italian murderer is captured; the U.S. army thunders in to surround the car; and the riotous spectacle ends with the full cast singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” beside an American flag. The comic rendition of playing Indian, and its association with patriotic Americanness, was a joke that audiences—including immigrant audiences learning how to “see” Indians—were not expected to tire of, it seems. When Pastor moved north again and culminated his efforts at polite vaudeville, almost all this material was scrubbed from his playbills and programs. On October 21, 1881, Pastor opened his Fourteenth Street Theatre with a great flourish of respectability: “a first-class variety theatre without liquor attachment.”42 In crafting popular politeness, Pastor pruned away not just liquor, saloon girls, and spitting, but stage Indians—except, of course, for the statue of Tammany standing in plain sight above the theater. In excluding Indianness, Pastor not only distinguished his new venue from his previous houses; he also marked out the difference between his vaudeville on the “Rialto” of Fourteenth Street and the cheap entertainment on all sides. Huber’s dime museum, for example, a few doors away, starred “Sioux Chief, Rolling Thunder and Wife, With scalp, outfit and war implements, just arrived from Rose Bud Agency, with pony on which Sitting Bull was shot,” along with “Sioux Indian Messiah Dancers” (“in life-size photographs,” the small print reveals), and “A New Collection of Indian Curios.”43 In contrast, Pastor increasingly emphasized overseas internationalism. The press celebrated him as “the first to bring European vaudeville talent to this country” and closely followed his sailings from Liverpool in advance of each vaudeville season from 1887 to 1897.44 Whether it was the English male impersonator Vesta Tilley (“The London Idol”), the French comic Mlle. Paquerette “the wonder from Paris,” or Satsuma, “The Most wonderful of Japanese, The wonder of the Orient,” foreign nationalities were splashed across Fourteenth Street Theatre playbills and programs. American performers were frequently advertised as “just returned from a successful European engagement.” By 1893, it was said that Pastor’s “annual trips to Europe for the best novelties are a part of theatrical history.”45 It was in exactly this moment that Pastor’s playbills also emphasized “A Family Entertainment for Ladies and Children, Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers. Pure, Chaste, Merry and Perfect.”46 What was, in fact, the makeup of Pastor’s vaudeville audience? If the Tammany statue above the Fourteenth Street Theatre directs the gaze to

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Indianness on stage—and to processes that begin to look more like extraction and exclusion than absence—what questions might it raise about audience? The dominant scholarly understanding is that, at least in his most successful years, Pastor built an audience inclusive by gender, class, and ethnicity. David Monod argues that the success of the Fourteenth Street Theatre was partly demographics, since the location near Union Square “was not only frequented by middling-class theatregoers, it was also just a few blocks north of his original Bowery playhouse. Here Pastor’s would finally begin to pull in more affluent men and women while keeping his gallery filled with exuberant messenger boys and bootblacks.”47 Susan Kattwinkel goes further, arguing that “Pastor’s audience serves as a microcosm of New York society at the beginning of the twentieth century.”48 Again, however, the ruling assumption seems to be that Indigenous people did not figure in this inclusive audience. Yet there were documented pockets of Indigenous community across the boroughs of New York City in that period. One ethnologist, Allen Samuels Williams, estimated that there had been a pan-tribal urban community in the city since 1860.49 In 1906, the district nicknamed “Indian Village” in Greenwich, Manhattan, abutted right upon Tony Pastor’s Fourteenth Street Theatre.50 In Lower Manhattan, there was “a little colony of red women,” including Iroquois and Mohawk from St. Regis who lived by beadwork and sewing and who were part of the Indigenous performance community.51 They too can be considered “New York working girls,” although they are not typically included in this demographic that was key to the period’s popular entertainment culture.52 The community that came to be known as “Little Caughnawaga” in Brooklyn began to form at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1891, the Deer family—the Mohawk entertainers from St. Regis and Caughnawaga—gathered extended family around themselves in the Bronx. From at least 1900, Princess Chinquilla, who self-identified as Southern Cheyenne, fostered Indian community in Queens; Williams noted Queens, along with Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Richmond as boroughs with Native communities. The under-reporting of Indigenous people living in cities was endemic in census taking. Given virulent racism, some Indigenous people chose to self-identify as white; some were mistakenly identified as such by census takers. People of both Black and Indigenous descent were categorized as Black. Some Indigenous presence was seasonal as workers, including entertainment workers, moved back and forth between city and reservation. There are good grounds, therefore, to assume that the Indigenous population of New York City (and many other cities) was considerably larger than documented.

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Surely some of these urban Natives were in vaudeville audiences. There is a long record of Indigenous spectatorship for commercial entertainment: Indigenous delegates to Washington, D.C., in the early 1800s attended performances of Indian plays; Indigenous performers in dime museums in the 1840s watched the other acts; Lakota performers attended theater in Chicago and “light opera” in Washington, D.C., in 1891; Indigenous visitors abroad at the turn of the twentieth century, many of them performers on entertainment circuits, attended European houses, including West End theater in London, Ronacher’s vaudeville theater in Vienna, the Orpheum in Munich, the Concertgarten von Bail in Dresden, and nightclubs in Hamburg.53 Even on transatlantic crossings, Indigenous performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were reported to enjoy the on-board vaudeville routines staged by Cody’s partner Nate Salsbury, a former vaudeville manager.54 However much Pastor had removed representations of Indianness from his Fourteenth Street stage, there may well have been Indigenous meaning-making at work in his auditorium. As the 1890s unfolded, competition from other polite vaudeville houses began to heat up, breaking Pastor’s monopoly on Fourteenth Street.55 In 1893 B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albee brought continuous vaudeville to Pastor’s neighborhood when they opened the Union Square Theatre. Keith and Albee’s partnership typified the new generation of North American entertainment entrepreneurs. Like Pastor, they had come to vaudeville from dime museum, circus, and sideshow, but their sense of scale was much greater. They changed the model from an actor-manager nurturing a single vaudeville house to circuits and syndicates with national and international reach controlled by centralized managerial systems. In 1885, Keith introduced continuous vaudeville in Boston—three or more shows run back-to-back to create a twelve-hour event— an initiative that F. F. Proctor, another major vaudeville manager (and former circus performer) brought to New York City in 1893. This pace was hard on entertainers, who had to perform four times every twenty-four hours, but it captured the family market, coordinating with women’s shopping plans and child-care needs, as well as the evening crowd (“AFTER BREAKFAST GO TO PROCTOR’S / AFTER PROCTOR’S GO TO BED”).56 This generation of entrepreneurs built vaudeville palaces, larger and more lavish than Pastor’s theater by far, combining cheap seats with higher-priced luxury options and luring away Pastor’s European stars with bigger, better-heeled audiences and bigger salaries. Faced with this competition, Pastor—among other strategies—worked his way back to Indians. Reconstructing his sequence of playbills for this decade, day

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by day and week by week, reveals the gradual return to Indianness. First, wild west scenes began to reappear on the Fourteenth Street Theatre stage in ways that navigate the combination of western spectacle and European gentility. In 1893, for example, he announced the appearance of Annie Oakley, the famed lady sharpshooter lately of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Oakley was already framed by a rhetoric of virginal girlishness; on Pastor’s playbill, she connected America and Europe, sharpshooting and politeness. Announced to have just returned from four years of touring Europe, Oakley and her “remarkable performances with the rifle are matters of wonder on both sides of the Atlantic.” She was “America’s Representative lady shot” whose rifle skills produce “NO NOISE. NO SMOKE.”57 Pastor increasingly reached into his pre-polite entertainment world for new novelties, drawing on circus and dime museum acts—such as the circus acrobats the Ali Brothers, “The First and Only Arabian Boxers,” “Late of P. T. Barnum’s Show”—and ultimately, in 1899, introducing Indian numbers that purported to be genuine.58 That year he hired from the dime museum circuit—recently, from Huber’s Museum down the street—“Running Elk & Wanna, Experts in Acrobatics and Mirror Rifle Shooting.”59 This male and female act typically appeared in conjunction with Indian collections and Indian museums, and Running Elk presented as Indigenous; whether accurate or not, such an identification had not previously appeared on Pastor’s vaudeville playbill. A few years later, Princess Chinquilla, the musician and orator who self-identified as Southern Cheyenne, appeared on Pastor’s stage.60 In 1906, Pastor staged Hathaway’s Indian Tableaux, “Artistically Presented, Historically Correct.”61 These and other staging changes were not enough to save Pastor; in 1908, his house turned from vaudeville to movies. Later that year he died. His return to stage Indians was, however, a harbinger of things to come.

vaudeville indians Two developments, of different scales, took off with increasing rapidity from the mid-1890s. First, the competition Tony Pastor struggled with soon mushroomed into a vast, interlocking network of cheap vaudeville theaters in the United States and Canada, further linked to their overseas close equivalents, music hall, variety, and Variété, constituting what is often considered the first international system of mass entertainment. During the same period, the term “Indian vaudeville” and the presence of Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying vaudevillians took hold. In the United States, the number of theaters dedicated to vaudeville soared from about nine hundred in 1900 to fifteen hundred twenty-odd years later.62

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These operations required an enormous pool of labor: U.S. vaudeville houses required about one thousand acts a week in 1895, rising to more than three thousand a week by 1906.63 By 1911, a European commentator said of New York’s vaudeville scene: “The field is so vast that you practically can’t count the shops, let alone the circuits. But still less can you count the showboys and girls who are hustling for this work; they are thicker than the locusts of Egypt.”64 Audience numbers were also huge: in the United States a weekly national audience of around one million in the early days rose to two million a day.65 Comparable estimations were made across Europe and Australasia.66 The rapid growth in vaudeville operations produced a combination of structural standardization and performance eccentricity. Playbills’ organization became increasingly uniform, stretching from seven to fifteen acts with nine acts most common. Timing went from seven to ten minutes for an act to twenty minutes for a playlet. The positioning of acts developed a predictable rhythm: vaudeville programs opened with a “dumb” act (one without speech) that could be enjoyed even amid the commotion of late audience arrivals. Immediately before intermission—usually the fifth spot—a high-profile performer ensured that the audience would not drift off. The next-to-closing spot featured the headliner who would provide a climax to the entire offering. As audiences began to leave, the closing act, “playing to the haircuts” in vaudeville slang, would be another dumb act or silent photoplay. According to Arthur Frank Wertheim, “The entire show was packaged to achieve maximum efficiency and momentum from beginning to end.”67 In contrast to this predictable structure, content was designed to be as unpredictable as possible: the watchword was “novelty”—nouveauté, Neuheit, новинка—across the English-, French-, German-, and Russian-speaking worlds.68 Alongside these developments, from about 1894, then at increasing pace through the 1900s, the term “Indian vaudeville” appeared in North American newspapers.69 In 1900, for example, the “Port Simpson Indians” (now the Lax Kw’alaams Band, on the northwest coast of British Columbia) received positive reviews for their staging of Indian vaudeville in Vancouver.70 The term was also a recognized draw across the Atlantic: in 1903, two families from the Winnebago Reservation—A. Hensel, Frank T. Thunder, and their families— were the centerpiece of an “American Indian vaudeville” traveling to Paris, where they would be joined on stage by “eighty English girls dressed as Indian squaws.”71 The term was one indication of the throng of Indians—Indigenous and not—on burgeoning vaudeville circuits.

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Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying performers appeared at all points on the hierarchy from big- to small-time houses and on global routes from North America to Oceania, some fleetingly and others for long stretches of their careers. Some performers accessed vaudeville through long-standing kinship networks that had supported participation in earlier entertainment forms—visible, as noted earlier, in geographical routes and troupe formations that were themselves continuations, adaptations, and expansions of longestablished bonds. Other performers came together through colonially enforced communities, especially residential and boarding schools. The following selective overview emphasizes Indigenous sustenance of networks around vaudeville as well as documenting “Indian ghosts” and wannabees performing at the edges and in search of such community. Collectively they demonstrate the debt of a central entertainment economy of western modernity to Indigeneity and Indianness. Indigenous Networks Family and kinship networks continued to be a primary way in which Indigenous performers arrived on vaudeville stages, developing troupes and acts that are testimony to the power of intergenerational relations. Large numbers of Mohawk performers from Caughnawaga and St. Regis went on vaudeville circuits as singers, dancers, acrobats, strong men, jugglers, trick riders, orators, and actors in dramatic sketches. Chief Running Deer, who traveled some of the same paths as Uncle Beaver in the 1860s, continued to grow his troupe. In 1891, it consisted of about a half dozen members; when in the early twentieth century they began to hit Variété and vaudeville circuits across Europe and North America, this Mohawk-centered network grew closer to twenty, including Chief Running Deer’s three sons, a daughter, two of his sons’ wives, his granddaughter, cousins and other relatives from Caughnawaga and St. Regis, and performers who identified with other Nations. Around 1908–10, while the Abenaki family Chief Dark Cloud/Elijah Tahamont and his wife, Dove Eye/Margaret Camp, were performing in the playlet “The Indian” at The Garrick in Wilmington, Delaware, one of the Mohawk families resident in New York City—Red Eagle, White Fawn, and their child—was on tour in mid-level vaudeville houses around the Northeast in the playlet “A Texas Wooing.”72 Part of Frank Loring’s legacy, as Penobscot performer Big Thunder, can be seen in the cluster of popular performers from subsequent generations of the Penobscot Nation on Indian Island. In the 1920s, Lucy Nicolar Poolaw/Princess Watahwaso

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and Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud/Molly Spotted Elk sang and danced separately and together in vaudeville—big-time, small-time, and vaudeville-film houses included. They drew around them Kiowa, Cherokee, Penobscot, and other First Peoples to craft routines that embodied intergenerational solidarity on urban stages and contributed to political solidarity in the Penobscot Nation. The breadth and complexity of kinship-making woven through entertainment-making can be glimpsed in the career of Ho-Chunk actor Lilian St. Cyr/Red Wing. St. Cyr is best known as Hollywood’s first Native American movie star, but Linda Waggoner’s closely traced biography shows that she performed in dime museums around 1908 on her way up to cinematic fame and in vaudeville around 1920 as her star faded. In both live-performance arenas, she developed family relations. The dime museum group included her husband, at that point named James Young Johnson, later known as James Young Deer, the other half of this Hollywood power couple, who became a film producer and director. He came to self-identify as Ho-Chunk, but his ancestry is now understood to include African American and Nanticoke or Delaware.73 The third member of the dime museum group was Luther Standing Bear, who became a major Lakota author and activist, at that point performing as Chief Charging Hawk. Waggoner records that St. Cyr told of Standing Bear adopting her as his niece and giving her the name Red Wing.74 Together, the three lectured and sang as Sioux from Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, sometimes along with Sioux who actually were from there.75 Later, on the vaudeville circuit, Red Wing developed her own show, often performing in conjunction with film showings. She worked with Indian vaudeville entertainer Indian Joe Davis, who performed as White Eagle Jr. and self-identified as Indigenous but was probably not.76 Toward the end of the vaudeville phase of her career, she performed with Norman Tyndall, a relative from an Omaha family, singing and dancing as “Princess Red Wing Indian Motion Picture Star and her Indian warrior.”77 Red Wing is one of many Indigenous performers whose presence contributed to Indigenizing cinematic space. Not only did she bridge the two media; when she lectured alongside films in which she appeared, Red Wing provided the lens through which spectators were invited to read her image, the embodied voice and live presentation whose rhythms taught audiences how to see the on-screen acting and artistry. Many Indigenous performers ended up in vaudeville as a consequence of networks violently enforced by colonization. They included students at Carlisle

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Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first off-reservation U.S. boarding school, infamous for the determination of its founder, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, to “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man.”78 Pratt’s method—which would be extended by hundreds of boarding and residential schools across the United States and Canada—was to tear young Indigenous people from their parents, communities, language, clothing, and cultural, spiritual, and bodily practices. It is well documented that Indigenous students were subjected to militaristic regimes; physical, psychological, and sexual abuse; exploitation as cheap labor; and inadequate diets and housing that produced malnutrition, tuberculosis, trachoma, and other diseases. Child fatalities were in the thousands. In 2015, the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada named this treatment “cultural genocide.”79 Forbidden to speak their own languages, students were forced into Englishlanguage learning and into European forms of musical training. Carlisle taught students how to play Indian according to white agendas. Louellyn White (Mohawk of Akwesasne) has written about the experience of her grandfather and his Carlisle schoolmates, cast in 1909 as both settlers and painted Indians in The Captain of Plymouth, a comic opera based on Longfellow’s poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” They performed for the school community and large non-Indigenous audiences, many of them donors: “Carlisle students were ‘performing whiteness’ not only when learning English and reading Longfellow or laboring in white homes and industries, but also on stage when they were acting the parts of settlers and savages for both Indian and white audiences.”80 Earlier, in 1901, a group of Carlisle students, including Lilian St. Cyr, performed tableaux of “female literary figures, including Minnehaha and Pocahontas.”81 Even in the face of boarding schools’ genocidal practices and master narratives, students persisted in their resourcefulness, resilience, and ingenuity. Brenda J. Child (Red Lake Ojibwe Nation) and Tsianina K. Lomawaima (Mvskoke/Creek Nation, not enrolled), among others, have stressed: “they found ways and means, times and places, to speak their own languages, eat their own foods, and exercise religious practices.”82 Together, they created trans-Indigenous solidarities, communities, and cultures. Some of this creativity turned into vaudeville performances. For some of the hundreds who ran away from boarding schools, vaudeville was one route out. Among those fleeing Carlisle was Harry Cole (a Southern Cheyenne who figures in Princess Chinquilla’s story), who ran away in 1901. He developed a vaudeville song-and-dance act with his part-Apache wife, performing as Cole

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and Hastings and as White Hawk and Red Feather on mid-level vaudeville circuits across eastern North America. Ten years later, Richard Eugene Holmes followed suit. Holmes belonged to a Chippewa family at La Pointe Agency, Wisconsin, and had already survived Hayward Indian School in Wisconsin, graduating from there in 1906. However, he could not stomach his five-year term at Carlisle; after just over two years, he became what his official papers call a “Deserter,” one who “Ran”—in this case to the vaudeville stage. In 1912, he reported his act in some detail to superintendent Moses Friedman, Pratt’s successor, who was surveying former students to promote the school’s successes.83 In Holmes’s description are legible both his attempt to restore his reputation at the school and some features of his act: The act I have on feature over the different Vaudeville circuits is truly Indian. It consists of four High Class songs, and the Chippewa War dance. It shows how the Indian family lived, and the superstitions that existed in the different departments of Indian Livelihood. I do not exaggerate the ways of the Indians, in the least, and for that reason I am heavily criticized, some people think, that an Indian act should be closed with a kicking, but my Indian does do nothing of the kind, and that is why managers will not give me work some times. My act is strictly right it could be shown in a church. Friedman congratulated him “on the way in which you are placing the Indian before the public.”84 Other acts suggest how vaudeville could bring together, after graduation, those whom Carlisle Indian School kept apart. In 1910, the unlikely-named troupe Mlle. Toona’s Indian Novelty Co. began to appear on big-time circuits. Mlle. Toona (legally known as Mathilde A. Coutts-Johnstone) ran several troupes whose combined total, she claimed, was forty-five Indigenous singers and musicians, variously identified as Hopi, Klinket, Apache, and some less precise designations.85 While the public representation of the group may have sounded dubiously formulaic, it included real Indigenous relations performing with real Indigenous talent. Two of the performers were Oneida sister and brother Mary Morris (later, Mary Morris Rice) and Joseph H. Morris, both graduates of Carlisle, where the fundamental principle of family separation along with gendered regimes would have kept them apart. As vaudevillians, they toured together, performed together on stage, and lived together in Chicago,

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Figure 1.1.  Postcard of the Toona Indian Company, ca. 1911 (Mary Morris Student File, Carlisle Indian School Records, National Archives and Records Administration, RG75; courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

where there was an Indigenous network. They shared their Chicago apartment with a third member of the troupe, Lawrence Rice, Mary Morris’s husband, whom she identified to the Carlisle superintendent as “a Canadian Indian.”86 Joe Morris was the Carlisle graduate who said he made much better money on vaudeville ($35 to $100 per week) than as an ironworker.87 (Another of the Morris family, John C. Morris, had been one of the ironworkers killed by the collapse of the Quebec bridge in 1907.) The group’s signature turn was singing grand opera in the original Italian, intermingled with traditional Indigenous dances and songs. When the Rices and Morris performed as part of the quartet in a strong fourth spot at the Star theater in Chicago, they received a rave review in Variety: ranging from Rigoletto to the sacred “call of the hungry wolf,” they “sing grand opera and sing it in a way that would make even Caruso sit up and rub his eyes.”88 Their turn can be understood as an extension, survival, and transcendence of Carlisle regimes (figure 1.1).

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Mlle. Toona may have been trying to replicate the success of another graduate of Carlisle and of Yale School of Medicine, Carlisle Kawbawgam (Ojibwe/ Chippewa) who took his first name from his alma mater. Kawbawgam sang grand opera in Berlin and Vienna Variété houses before developing his opera career as the “Red Caruso.”89 Nagiyanpe (Robert Bruce) was a Sioux musician from Montana, who played trombone in Salt Lake City and Cheyenne vaudeville before enrolling at Carlisle. He was one of the fifty-five members of the Carlisle Indian Band, led by Oneida conductor Dennison Wheelock, who had himself graduated from the school in 1892. The Carlisle band’s preparation for their European tour of 1900 included the big-time vaudeville stage, at Keith’s Theatre in Boston, second to the headliner, Dutch light opera singer Camille d’Arville. The publicity for this performance quoted Commissioner Harris of the Department of the Interior on his astonishment at the band’s facility with the European classics: I had made up my mind deliberately that German and other classic music could not be addressed successfully to the minds of people belonging to the tribal civilization and to the other civilizations below the horizon of Europe. Judge of my great astonishment, therefore, at finding that compositions of Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, SaintSaens and others were played not merely with technical character . . . but with technical correctness joined to real feeling and such true coloring as shows an appreciation of the deeper meaning of music.90 In the event, what was more unexpected was, as with the Toona quartet, the band’s range: “the band is original and up-to-date in its selections and the precision, enthusiasm and spirit of their playing was admirable. Among their selections were the ‘Jubel’ overture, ‘Liberty’ march and ‘The Indian Pow-Wow,’ with ‘Star Spangled Banner’ as an encore. . . . During the week several changes will be made, as their repertory is a large one.”91 It sounds as though they played the spectrum, from the German Romantic Carl Maria von Weber to John Philip Sousa’s American military march to Dennison Wheelock’s own symphonic composition, “Suite Aboriginal”—an expression of the “complicated fusions and repertoires of identity” that Amelia V. Katanski has read in Wheelock’s work.92 Within the riotous, quirky lineup of vaudeville, these Indigenous acts carried their own inventiveness—what one reviewer called “sleight of hand” in response to the Port Simpson Indians’ vaudeville in 1900.93 Despite emerging

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from the same educational environment, these performances were visually different, from the wild west headdresses of Mlle. Toona’s company to the paramilitary outfits of Wheelock’s Carlisle band; they covered a sonic range, from the operatic to the marching band to traditional forms to inventive hybrids and variants; and they operated in different registers, from the disciplined dignity of the Carlisle band, to the oratorical solemnity of Holmes, to the unexpected versatility of Toona’s company, to breakout comic interludes by Cole and Hastings. The power of vaudeville was such that, by 1911, Carlisle Indian School was positively boasting about their students’ successes. When the famous Ojibwe baseball player Charles Bender appeared in a vaudeville act, the school’s newspaper announced: “Mr. Charles Bender, a Carlisle graduate, and the world’s greatest living pitcher, is covering himself with glory on the vaudeville stage.”94 In 1912 the Carlisle Arrow printed an excerpt from the New York Herald, reporting on jobs done by Indigenous residents of the city, including the observation that “many of them get chances to do special vaudeville acts.”95 By 1916, the school was mounting its own annual vaudeville show.96 By the 1920s, Indigenous marching bands, jazz bands, dancing groups, and theatrical troupes were coming thick and fast on vaudeville stages, many with identifiable roots in Pawnee, Winnebago, Penobscot, Mohawk, and other Indigenous communities. One of the savviest musicians to identify the appetite for Indian music was Joseph Bayhylle Shunatona (Pawnee-Otoe). Shunatona became a skilled classical musician (on horns, piano, and other instruments) during his time at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School and a nearby music conservatory.97 At some point, most likely because of racism, in John Troutman’s analysis, he left the “art music world” for the popular stage.98 Shunatona took an all-male dancing and singing troupe, “The Four Americans,” onto the Western Vaudeville Managers’ Association circuit (figure 1.2)—by that time tightly sewn into the big-time Orpheum Circuit—then developed an “all Indian jazz band” that, as well as succeeding in vaudeville, performed by invitation at the 1929 inauguration of President Herbert Hoover and Kaw VicePresident Charles Curtis. He took the U.S. Indian Reservation Orchestra—whose numbers of Indigenous musicians fluctuated between thirty-five and twelve—onto U.S. vaudeville and other circuits, the Paris Exposition of 1931 with Penobscot vaudeville star Molly Spotted Elk, and a stint in the Paris Empire Music Hall.99 Shunatona understood the international appeal of Indigenous talent, particularly in conjoining spectacle and virtuoso skill; his band was decked out in regalia closer to that of Russell Hill’s Onondaga

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Figure 1.2.  Quartet from “10 Real Americans.” Joe Shunatona is second from left. (Theater Biography Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

band that had toured Europe in 1910 than to the starchy uniforms of Dennison Wheelock’s band. Shunatona and Molly Spotted Elk performed intricate dances to the band’s music, creating a spectacular show. Sac and Fox performer Walter Battice/Chief Sheet Lightning points to another kind of networking that linked Indigenous performance, urban community, and civil rights. Throughout his career, Sheet Lightning sustained entertainment and activist work side by side. Secretary to the Sac and Fox Nation, organizer for pan-Indian unity, and a leader among New York City and Chicago Indigenous communities, he also performed in the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show, on Broadway, in vaudeville, and, in the depths of the Depression, at Coney Island.100 In the 1920s, as he performed on the vaudevillefilm circuit, he also served as an officer of the Indian Fellowship League, a Chicago-based organization that, at least initially, aimed at collaboration between white and Indigenous activists.101 In contrast to Carlos Montezuma, Battice was

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sympathetic to Indigenous people working as popular entertainers “to make or supplement their living as active members of the wage-labor economy.”102 Some popular Indigenous performers were promoted as soloists or exceptions, as in “the only full-blooded Indian in vaudeville” and “the only real Indian in vaudeville.”103 Such terms, though formulaic in show-business puffery, chillingly extend what Jean O’Brien calls “the extinction narrative” of “firsting and lasting” into the entertainment sphere.104 Evidence suggests, however, that such performers often used vaudeville generatively, sometimes building or sustaining family, sometimes opening or reinforcing Indigenous access to other artistic venues. Seneca playwright-performer Go-won-go Mohawk made her name with her transatlantic hit melodrama Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier, first copyrighted in 1889. Although she was often advertised in sweeping exceptionalist terms—“The Only American Indian Actress”—she not only employed members of her immediate family and some performers from Cattaraugus Reservation in her entertainment troupes, but she also arguably opened polite vaudeville to Indigeneity with her on-stage bareback riding and virtuoso lassoing. Mapuche singer Chief Caupolican/Emile Barrangon was one of several male singers who helped to make imaginable sites of high culture as spaces of Indigenous talent. Yakama singer and actor Chief Yowlache, “America’s Greatest Indian Baritone,” went from a brief stint on the Pantages vaudeville stage to a distinguished film career.105 Perhaps most famously of all, Cherokee performer, film star, and writer Will Rogers found his performance voice on the vaudeville stage.106 In all these cases, vaudeville functioned as a significant crossroads in Indigenous performance careers and the diverse making of Indigenous public presence. At the furthest reaches of these networks were famous Indigenous performers who seem never to have appeared in vaudeville but were touched by its influence. E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River), well-known author and orator, toured from 1892 to 1897 with Owen Smily, “a veteran of the British music halls,” whose effect seemed to rub off somewhat on her performance.107 One reviewer judged that, “in her buckskin apparel,” she “began to bustle around after the manner of a monologue artist in a vaudeville entertainment.”108 By December 1900, she openly contemplated “going into vaudeville in New York. Vaudeville represented a hideous drop in status, but at least her income might rise”; faced with the shock of her white middle-class hostess at the idea, Johnson responded, “My clergyman urges me not to do this, but what shall I do? I must live.”109 Yankton Sioux

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violinist, author, and activist Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša also had at least one close brush with the vaudeville stage, on the U.S. tour with Dennison Wheelock’s Carlisle Indian Band; she seems to have ducked out of the appearance at Keith’s Theatre in Boston. “Indian Ghosts,” Wannabees, and Redface Vaudevillians The popularity of Indian vaudeville also attracted large numbers of performers whose claimed Indigenous identities were less clearly grounded. Playing Indian on stage and off, they variously self-identified as Yaqui, Sioux, Cheyenne, Winnebago, Chippewa, Iroquois, Cherokee, Apache, Hopi, Navajo, Yakima, and Onondaga. This slipperiest of categories, for which I’m adapting Michelle Raheja’s careful label “Indian ghosts,” is fiendishly difficult to map.110 Pitfalls include disrespecting an Indigenous person by assuming that someone who had lost community ties through colonial trauma was a non-Indigenous member of Green’s “tribe called wannabee.” On the other hand, being duped by “pretindian” practices and genealogies expands the reach of cultural theft and trivialization. Yet these individuals are significant as part of the lived complexities of vaudeville, as a contribution to the genealogy of “playing Indian” studies, and as confirmation of the power of Indigenous vaudeville networks that they tried to enter or emulate. Some were vulnerable women. Princess Chinquilla, who emerged from a hard past—whether or not it was the Southern Cheyenne origins that she claimed—vigorously used the geographical reach and cultural hierarchy of vaudeville as a route to family and community. Zintkála Nuni (also known as Margaret Elizabeth “Zintka” Colby) also sought Indigenous recognition and survival partly through vaudeville. Zintkála Nuni lived as Lost Bird of Wounded Knee, the Lakota baby who survived the 1890 massacre and was brought up by a white American family. Around 1915 she tried to climb out of abject poverty by creating a vaudeville act with her husband, Dick Allen, who attempted to emulate Will Rogers’s lariat work. They never made it beyond the saloon culture of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast; by 1920, at age twenty-nine, she was dead.111 It is an uncomfortable truth that the “Indian Princess” caricature that so endangered Indigenous women in the sexualized binaries it set in motion was sought as a refuge by some non-Indigenous women living close to the social and economic edge, and sometimes to violence.112 Vaudeville performer Princess White Cloud/Margaret Ruby Kels fled a violent husband, while one of the innumerable vaudevillians named “Princess Winona”—Alexandrina

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Marjorie Fernandez—was abandoned by hers.113 A Creole from British Guiana, she married an American vice-consul who subsequently left her penniless in the United States. Initiating divorce proceedings for cruelty, she took to the vaudeville stage, performing as a soprano in buckskin, beads, and a combination headband and full-feather headdress, identifying as part-Seneca, and on occasion appearing with Joe Shunatona.114 Most adept at using vaudevillian incongruity to change her race and circumstances was Princess Wahletka, a white woman who went on the road and apparently on the run as a “Cherokee Princess Psychic.”115 However outlandish her masquerade, she managed through vaudeville contacts to attach herself to Indigenous performance and political communities in New York City. Several performers sought vaudeville Indian community as a counterweight to other racial and national designations. Aaron Greenwald brought a comedic touch by turning an anti-Semitic slur into a “Florida Indian” identity as Chief Shee-Noo.116 Charlie Oskomon first appeared as part of a Mi′kmaq community of vaudevillians in Boston, later self-identified as Yakima, but was suspected by Molly Spotted Elk of having African American parentage.117 As Chief Os-Ko-Mon, he worked his way into several performance communities and came to claim kinship with Chinquilla. Among the many vaudeville Indians whom the census classified as “Black,” and later “mulatto,” was Chief Hailstorm, “The Globe-Trotting Cherokee,” otherwise known as Jarrette Talmadge Van Noy, born in Tennessee in 1890 or 1891, possibly of Indigenous ancestry.118 By 1915, he had made himself over, on stage and off, as American Indian born Muskogee, Indian Territory, performing across the United States, Canada, Hawaii, Japan, China, Siberia, the Philippines, and England before landing in German Variété in the 1920s and there developing a family act.119 Family groupings also developed around German weiße Indianer (white Indian) Variété performers (not unlike their better-known Indian hobbyist counterparts). The largest was Melencia’s Indian Family, who extended their on-stage performance into their daily life in a working-class suburb of Berlin. Even among redface performers—those who played Indian only on stage— the desire for Indigenous networks intermittently surfaces. Sometimes it was clearly appropriative, as when the Improved Order of Red Men and other fraternity and sorority groups mounted what they called “Indian vaudeville” to act out in light-hearted vein their deep-seated desires for Indianness. When Indigenous performers proffered the invitation, the result sounds more joyous. Chief Blue Cloud and his Indian Syncopators was led by Sioux trombone player Chief Blue

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Cloud and jazz singer Princess Blue Cloud.120 The power of their stage presence can be derived from a later description by jazz trumpeter Wingy Manone: The Chief and his wife were the only real Indians in the band, and the rest of us had to wear wigs with long, black, plaited hair. We wore feathers in our hair, had on beaded costumes, with tomahawks in the belt, and moccasins for shoes. When the curtain went up we’d be sitting in front of a tepee, with one guy playing a tom-tom. Everybody would give an Indian call: “Woo-woo-woo-woo,” and then we would jump up with a big war whoop and bust into some hot jazz.121 One lesson from such combinations is not to make too-easy assumptions about who was and who was not a fake Indian. Many troupes had apparently inauthentic names, such as Chief White Moon’s Indians playing ten-cent continuous vaudeville in Philadelphia in 1898.122 This, however, seems to have been Louis White Moon, Iroquois of St. Regis, who went on vaudeville circuits for years, struggling to support his family, as he later explained to the Department of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., desperately looking for help in educating his children (which was denied).123 H. A. Brunswick’s Wild West Indian Vaudeville and Western Picture Show, performing Indian dances, exhibiting beadwork, and lecturing in Coshocton, Ohio, in 1909, included (as Linda Waggoner has documented) Luther Standing Bear as Charging Hawk.124 In such unexpected places—sites of Indianness so layered over with reduction, caricature, and appropriation—it would seem impossible for Indigenous relations to live and thrive, and yet they sometimes did. Vaudeville Wars and Employment Conditions To travel vaudeville circuits was to be enmeshed in syndication and systematization. The competition that ultimately engulfed Pastor was the network of bigtime vaudeville houses whose fierce competition and combinations had, by 1907, culminated in a virtual monopoly called the United Booking Offices (UBO) stretching up and down the East Coast, west to Chicago, and up into Canada. The syndication was led by Keith and Albee, and it came to incorporate other polite vaudeville entrepreneurs such as Proctor, Sylvester A. Poli, Oscar Hammerstein, and Percy Williams.125 The UBO dominated vaudeville hiring east of Chicago, leaving the west to be dominated by the Orpheum Circuit, headed by Martin Beck. A stratum of small-time circuits—with lower ticket

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prices, less ornate houses, and less-well-known performers—became organized under the likes of Pantages, Sullivan and Considine, Marcus Loew, and Gus Sun. This zeal for consolidation and monopoly was far-flung: from Moss Empires in Britain, one of the world’s largest national chains of variety theaters and music halls; to Beck’s attempted combine stretching eastward from San Francisco to Berlin; to Harry Rickards’s Tivoli circuit with its near-monopoly over Australia until challenged by the Fuller family network’s expansion from New Zealand; to H. B. Marinelli, the international vaudeville agent with offices in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York booking acts all over Europe, North America, South America, and Australia.126 By 1911, one Variété trade journal editor in Berlin declared: “variety business is one of the most international forms of business in existence.”127 Especially when framed by Indigenous presence, the violence of this voracious incorporation is stark. Mapping out huge swaths of Turtle Island and trans-oceanic spaces, entrepreneurs spoke of “territory” and “invasion”; they “carved up the country.” In the midst of what were called “vaudeville wars,” Albee described acts’ precision and speed “like cartridges in a rifle, and there can be no miss-fire.”128 The echoes from military onslaught on Native peoples, ongoing in some of the same times and places, are all too resonant. International agreements brought international surveillance systems, as big-time managers regulated performers’ working conditions and wider spheres of behavior— from North America (Harpo Marx said of his time on the Keith-Albee circuit: “Everything I did was watched and reported on”) to New Zealand (where impresario Percy Dix required performers “to sign a code of conduct outlining acceptable on- and off-stage behaviour”).129 Again, there are disturbing resonances with surveillance systems endured by Indigenous performers who had survived residential and boarding schools, reserve and reservation regimes. When reports on Indigenous vaudevillians—among others—ended up in the UBO’s vast filing system, here was an extension of the genocidal bureaucracy that Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) has her Anishinaabe narrator, Nanapush, protest in the same period, in the novel Tracks: attempts to turn his people into “a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy.”130 Indigenous performance networks—like Nanapush and his community— generated their own means for survivance. While they traveled circuits of the combines’ making, they also sustained their own geographical connections. The road between Caughnawaga on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River in

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Mohawk Nation territory and Little Caughnawaga in Brooklyn, for example, was a seasonally traveled route between the two communities, shared by Mohawk ironworkers and entertainment families and groups headed to vaudeville in the five boroughs. Indigenous vaudevillians traveling circuits further west made relations en route—Esther Deer teaching Seminole women in Florida how to cha-cha; Chinquilla among the Paiutes of Nevada—expanding commercial circuitry into community.131 The sell card of Mlle. Toona’s Indian Novelty Co.—six regalia’d figures packed into and around a Model T—reads like an image of trans-Indigenous mobile community, especially in light of the boarding school incarceration that these performers had recently endured. Far from Turtle Island, out on global circuits, Indigenous vaudevillian voices invoked family connections across geographical space: Esther Deer, performing in Budapest, published a full-page publicity sheet in which she honored her grandfather, Chief Running Deer, in St. Regis; Os-Ko-Mon, performing in Melbourne, Australia, spoke in press interviews of Chinquilla in New York as his aunt; They-Yan-Da, playing vaudeville and giving interviews in Montana, self-identifying as Sioux and Tuscarora, gave respect to Go-won-go Mohawk in New Jersey as his aunt.132 One of the most joyous scenes in Indian vaudeville history rests in the records of the commission representing the United States at the International Colonial and Overseas Exposition at Paris, 1931: a photograph shows Joe Shunatona and Molly Spotted Elk dancing with joyful vigor on the deck of the Ile de France en route from New York to Paris, accompanied by the U.S. Indian Reservation Band and watched by other passengers.133 For all that Molly Spotted Elk endured subsequently—her flight from France with her daughter at the outbreak of World War II, the death of her French husband, her breakdown in the face of commercial exploitation—in the moment memorialized on camera she and Shunatona dance networks of relations across the ocean, joining with those who come before and after in the making of what Indigenous scholar Jace Weaver has trenchantly dubbed “the Red Atlantic.” When it came to surveillance systems, Indigenous vaudevillians could draw on their collective experience of resistance. Historically, Indigenous peoples have been judged naive in the face of capitalist forces. Yet I understand their work on the vaudeville stage as a highly skilled navigation from one zone of surveillance to another. What they had to work with in vaudeville was a contract different from that of ethnological display and sideshow in which they were positioned as objects to look at, or from pageantry parade floats in which

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they were frozen into static images of history, or from wild west shows in which they were spectacular performers distant from audiences. Vaudeville encouraged an audience expectation that this would be a two-way relationship with performers: the Italian Marinetti celebrated it as collaboration, the American Studs Terkel remembered it as intensely personal contact, and for the British poet John Betjeman it provided “an intimacy and understanding which we remember all our lives.”134 Performers were directors of their own look—toward the audience and each other. The audience itself was under managerial surveillance, trained by instructions in playbills, programs, and impresarios’ addresses before the curtain—again, across the globe—into the rhythms of this new entertainment form and the requirement not only to adhere to codes of gentility but to report on others—employees and fellow spectators—who did not.135 On occasion, police were brought in to enforce behavior, as when Keith and Albee had unruly audience members in Philadelphia arrested and fined for disorderly conduct.136 A relatively docile audience might have been something Indigenous performers could work with. Among the horrors in Indigenous accounts of being subject to aggressive, invasive stares are the slurs and touching that often follow. When Zitkala-Ša describes the trauma of a girl on her way to boarding school being seized and thrown in the air, then meeting with loud racism as a public speaker, she is referencing the same period and the same boarding-school environment experienced by a good number of these performers.137 Managers aimed to reform vaudeville audience behavior from “a chorus of boos, jeers, and whistling accompanied by the throwing of objects from rotten eggs to peanut shells” to a more restrained response.138 The newly elaborate architecture created physical distance—spectators could not touch performers on proscenium stages— while auditoriums’ curves and tiers brought audiences into a sense of intimacy and, with no imaginary fourth wall, performers could look back at them and make choices about whether to get closer still for dramatic effect. There were other safeguards used by Indigenous vaudevillians to negotiate their own relationships. Vaudeville performers unionized on an international front to push back against combines’ consolidation and control: around 1900, the White Rats organized in the United States, the Variety Artistes’ Federation in England, and l’Union Syndicale des Artistes Lyriques in France. By 1902, there was a full-scale effort to coordinate these groups internationally under the Internationale Artisten Loge (IAL), headquartered in Berlin; it also provided

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advice, protection, and employment opportunities across the global landscape of vaudeville through its official multilingual organ, Das Programm. A few Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying performers were involved in these efforts. Alison Kibler documents one quite prominent member of the White Rats, Cora Youngblood Corson, who self-identified as Cherokee. Famous for her lung capacity as a tuba player and leader of an all-women troupe, she was well known as a district organizer on picket lines during the Oklahoma City strike of 1916–17.139 In Boston, a group who identified as Mi′kmaq vaudevillians spoke of their pride in belonging to the White Rats.140 Chief Caupolican participated in several actors’ unions and publicly challenged the National Vaudeville Artists, the “company union” created by Albee to bring artists under managers’ control.141 And when Esther Deer went solo on tour across eastern Europe, she relied on some services of Das Programm. By and large, however, Indigenous performers seem to have trusted more in a combination of kinship networks and urban “Native hubs.”142 The point of closest interaction between Indigenous performers and the vaudeville industry lay in the booking, contracting, and publicizing of acts. Nicholas Gebhardt, in his study of non-Indigenous popular musicians in vaudeville, argues that “the corporate restructuring of vaudeville,” especially as it eventuated in national circuits, centralized booking systems, and new managerial relations, reshaped performers’ “consciousness of themselves as artists.”143 Inside that larger set of power relations, Indigenous performers faced particular challenges but also worked within distinct, and distinctly empowering, cultural matrices. Their handling of the managerial relationship suggests a delicate balance between self-determination and exploitation. Many stories of managerial exploitation circulated the itinerant entertainment world—performers from Hawaii to Germany, and many points between, left stranded and unpaid.144 The most systematic gouging was by the UBO, whose mandatory booking agents took a cut of five to ten percent. Overseas, too, the IAL frequently protested “parasite agents.”145 Some of that managerial power rested on cultural dependency on and wannabee desires for Indigeneity: from Mlle. Toona, who managed the Indian Novelty Co. and whose backstory vacillated among “full-blood,” “Scotch nobility,” and “French Indian,” to entertainment agent Robert Wilschke, who contracted Indigenous performers for Germany and seems only half-joking in writing: “Im Laufe eines langen Agentenlebens habe ich es zu einer besonderen Auszeichnung gebracht: ich bin Chief einer Indianer-Reservation geworden.” (In the course of a long

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agent’s life, I have won a special award: I have become chief of an Indian reservation.)146 Some performers took management into their own hands: James Deer, for example, long made it known on his letterhead that he was manager and publicist for his family’s acts. But he seems to have been conscious of shifting challenges and optics overseas. When the Deer family went on the British music hall circuit, he hired an established agent, Fred Neiman—known for supporting variety performers in the face of theatrical combines—and worked with him to manage their self-representation. Presumably to meet expectations of primitivism and play down Indigenous managerial (and other) competences, they temporarily floated a story that the Deers’ status as “genuine Indians” meant that they were controlled by an impresario “under bond of guarantee to the U.S. government to take them back to their settlements at the conclusion of the tour.”147 Similar myths of dependency, designed to increase audience thrill, seem to have been at work back in New York City: when Red Eagle, Mohawk resident of the city, appeared in the Fulton Theatre, Brooklyn, newspapers reported that “Red Eagle had to secure permission from the United States Government in order to appear in this playlet.”148 Another way of influencing the managerial relationship without going public about it was to work through non-Indigenous contacts, as when Harry Lauder, the Scottish vaudevillian star who had forged a relationship with the Deer family, acted as manager for James Deer’s daughter Esther Deer until she was secure in the big-time. Sometimes, the answer to putting a white face on the managerial position lay in choosing a non-Indigenous family member: both Go-won-go Mohawk and Lucy Nicolar (when she was married to a Euro-American man) named their white husbands as their managers, although both women seem to have exercised considerable authority in forming their own troupes, shaping their own careers, and calculating their own self-presentation. How such negotiations and conditions of employment could devolve upon the details of an individual act is a subject to which I return in the 1st Vaudeville Number, focused on Will Rogers.

revue, florenz ziegfeld, and chief caupolican The musical revue that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s emerged from and played alongside vaudeville. It took the fast-paced variety format, reduced the eccentric acts, glamorized the sexualized dance and song numbers, pulled the component parts together with light thematic and narrative threads that brought performers into closer on-stage interaction, and mounted the result in

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a yet more lavish setting than even big-time vaudeville. It is an important part of the Indian vaudeville story because, in upping the claim to quintessential modernity, revue also showed itself to be saturated with notions of and desire for Indianness. Revue built on the implicit ironies at work in vaudeville to develop a more explicit parodic style. When Indigenous performers moved onto the revue stage, sometimes alongside redface performance, they seized the form’s trademark tone of modernist irony and turned it into Indigenous irony. Florenz Ziegfeld was the first and paradigmatic revue impresario. His story, as he told it, was again suffused with Indian desire: it began with a fascination with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (he claimed that his entertainment career began with him running away with Cody’s troupe) and ended with a great efflorescence of Indianness in his only film, Whoopee! (1930).149 Ziegfeld led the charge on musical revue with his 1907 edition of Follies, staged in the Jardin de Paris, a small variety house on the roof of the New York Theatre on Broadway near Times Square.150 Like so many of this history’s key players, he came to the stage from circus, then vaudeville, and he continued vaudeville’s trademark features in his extravagant revues. His title echoed the Parisian sophistication of Folies Bergère, and he sought in his pricing, publicity, and accoutrements to develop a more refined audience than vaudeville’s, one conscious of its own urban sophistication.151 These elements coalesced in the trademark tone of musical revue—modernist metropolitan irony combined with patriotic sentimentalism. The introduction of this new admixture touched base, once again, in a figure of Indianness: in this case, Pocahontas, the seventeenth-century young Powhatan, perennially made over by U.S. popular culture, most recently at that point in the song hit of 1905, “Pocahontas, Tammany’s sister.” Masters of Ceremony for the Follies of 1907 were John Smith and “Pocahontas, in the cigar business.”152 She was played by Grace LaRue, a Euro-American actor and singer who was big in vaudeville, dressed in feathers, headband, braids, vaguely Indianized skirt and top with bare midriff, and café au lait makeup.153 Throughout this first edition of the Follies, she and John Smith (played by William Powers) reappeared to punctuate the new rhythms and transitions of this form. The formula was successful enough for Ziegfeld to spin off several arenas—the Nine O’Clock Follies, the Midnight Frolic, along with his annual Follies revue—all of which saw a steady stream of Indians, from redface to Indian ghosts to Indigenous performers.

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The invocation of Pocahontas brings attention to some of the recuperative work done by Indigenous women performers on the revue stage. Like Tamanend, Pocahontas has long served as a touchstone of Americanness—the authentic foundation of the modern nation. She also has been used to justify sexualized access to Indigenous women’s bodies, a chillingly apt function for a show trading in female chorus lines and “Ziegfeld’s girls.”154 The use of Pocahontas to access white entitlement is doubled when the figure is played by a white woman. This operation would later be challenged on the revue stage by Esther Deer/Princess White Deer and her Indian ballet of her Caughnawaga cousins. Princess White Deer also disrupted dominant assumptions about another female figure with whom the revue made great play: the flapper, heralded in the 1920s as the quintessentially modern woman.155 Around 1917, Esther Deer posed for studio portraits in which she displays items of flapper fashion emerging from Indigenous attire. In rolled-down socks and button shoes, in one photograph she holds out a short skirt or petticoat from a gape in the side of her buckskin fringed dress. In another, she wears a short dress with a show blanket draped down her back, held by one finger; standing sideways to the camera, she plays up the combination, her head tipped quizzically in a headband that could be Mohawk, flapper, or both.156 The hybrid image suggests a kind of flapper blanket—laughing at notions of “blanket Indians,” suggesting the little distance between flapper and Mohawk, indicating, as with her other performative gestures and comments, that the modern depended on the Indigenous.157 A few years later, in a similarly playful but meaningful mode, she extended this bodily connection beyond the stage, teaching the Charleston to Seminole women in Florida—“as up-to-date as any Broadway flapper,” as the reporter put it.158 Where Esther Deer went, others followed. In 1921, Jewish comedic singer and vaudeville headliner Fanny Brice put her own spin on the same connection on the revue stage. Among Ziegfeld’s various Hawkeyes and Frightened Fawns played by white performers, in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1921 Brice debuted the ur-song for her identity impersonations, “I’m an Indian,” to stereotypical “tomtom” rhythms—“Oi, oi, oi, oi, I’m a Yiddishe squaw.” Her getup was almost entirely flapper-style, with its dropped waist, pointed high heels, bobbed hair; even the headband and feathers look more Charleston than Indian maiden. The one visual signifier of Indianness is Brice’s pose, hand shading brow, as— singing as little Rosie Rosenstein, Yiddish and English together—she declared

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herself “a terrible Indian now.”159 (Brice would go on to produce a string of such songs, including “I’m a Hieland Lassie,” “I’m a Little Butterfly,” and “I’m a Russian.”)160 Peter Antelyes has discussed this song in the context of Jewish women vaudevillians making subjectivities on stage and the long tradition of creating “a viable American Jewish identity by identifying with, parodying, and distancing themselves from the imagined figure of the Indian.”161 On the Ziegfeld stage, he says, “Brice is turning the sanctified Indian princess into an ethnic vamp.”162 How might the precedent of an Indigenous woman performer doing her own version of vamping on the same stage affect that dynamic? The juxtaposition of Esther Deer with Fanny Brice (Brice debuted “I’m an Indian” in the same season that Princess White Deer appeared in Ziegfeld’s 9 O’Clock, and the two performers appeared on at least one Ziegfeld lineup together) raises the question of who is playing with whose cultural markers and what comedic revue suggests about the logic of modernist claims. This point came full circle when the flapper’s origins in Indigeneity were made into a comic sketch for revue by the playwright Maurice Marks, another Jewish American, in 1925. He described “Our American Language” as “a satire entirely without words. . . . The ‘dialogue’ is expressed in grunts, nods, grins, and various exclamations, such as used by the American Indians when speaking their native tongue.”163 It is basically a vaudeville bit, anchored to the current fascination with flapperism. The first half of the scene, “1495,” consists of “Brave” and “Squaw,” the latter “a very pert, smart American Indian girl. Her bright, beaded blanket is wrapped around her coquettishly. Her black hair is plastered true Indian fashion, and decorated with a red forehead ribbon that sports a brilliant feather at the back. She has big ear-rings and a necklace of heavy beads. Three big bracelets on her arm.”164 They proceed to flirt, share a pipe, then a drink, and finally exit “prancing, jazz fashion” to “tom-tom music,” all expressed in guttural sounds.165 In the second part, “1925,” the same actors as “Mr. Brave” and “Miss Squab” go through nearly identical actions and sounds—this time sharing a cigarette, a drink, and a “prance, same as the Indians in the first half,” but now to jazz music.166 The flapper’s dress has identifiably grown out of the Indian’s: “She is a very pert, smart society girl. Her bright, richlyembroidered silk shawl, with long fringe, is wrapped coquettishly about her, just as the Indian girl wore her blanket. Her black hair is plastered like the other’s, only her hair ornament is modern. But it carries out, exactly, the style of the Squaw, big earrings, necklace of heavy beads, three bracelets.” 167

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Figure 1.3.  Chief Caupolican in Ziegfeld’s Whoopee! Ohio Theatre. Rayhuff-Richter Chicago. (Florenz Ziegfeld Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

This turn-and-turn-again alternation between affirmation and appropriation of Indigeneity within the contours of modernism as played out on the revue stage culminated in the performance of Mapuche baritone Chief Caupolican/Emile Barrangon. Caupolican had headlined in vaudeville and Chautauqua as well as appearing in Indianist and classic opera before being hired by Ziegfeld.168 In December 1928, he appeared in the premier of

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Ziegfeld’s stageplay Whoopee! alongside Eddie Cantor, another famous Jewish American comedic actor, and several other redface performers (figure 1.3).169 After more than four hundred performances, the show was adapted as a Samuel Goldwyn film in 1930, for which Caupolican reprised his performance, again with Eddie Cantor and now also Chickasaw actor Lou Scha Enya. Whoopee! is probably best known in its film version for its spectacle of Indian caricature, in the parodic, skimpy outfits and gigantic headdresses, originally designed by John Harkrider for the stageplay, and in Busby Berkeley’s lockstep ensembles, the choreographer’s first outing on the movie screen.170 In the arc of Ziegfeld’s career, these outsize gestures read like the efflorescence of his Indianist desires, forged in his boyhood, hinted at in the Pocahontas framing of his first Follies, and now emerging in full-blown camp. But Caupolican, too, had learned how to make big gestures during his vaudeville career. In 1914, he increased the impact of a massive electric billboard with his name in lights on New York’s most prestigious vaudeville venue, the Palace Theatre, by captioning a photograph of it in the Dramatic Mirror: I have placed the name of my ancestor—Caupolican, the most glorious aboriginal American—upon one of the highest pinnacles in the greatest American city. I HAVE NOT LIVED IN VAIN!! EMILE BARRANGON, THE CHIEFTAIN CAUPOLICAN.171

When he left vaudeville three years later, he took out a full-page advertisement in Variety: “Chief Caupolican Bids Farewell to Vaudeville” with a large photographic portrait and an announcement of his plans “to go into a larger field—that of Chautauqua and Lyceum.” In the event, his career continued to be more tied to vaudeville than this announcement foresees, but it exemplifies his fluency with big theatrical gestures. The language of his advertisement moves among multiple registers that he had perfected in vaudeville: Have had heap much good time and made many friends and a few enemies. I wish them all well. To Harry Weber especially do I extend the cordial hand grasp of good fellowship. May your tepee be warm against Kabibonoka (the north wind)—may you have many blankets, plenty buffalo meat and much wampums; and in all things may you have your Heart’s

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Desire. I have spoken.172 Caupolican’s comedic range was something that vaudeville managers recurrently tried to rein in. One B. F. Keith manager in Boston, while reporting that his singing “scored a positive hit,” required him to “eliminate King Edward 7th gag.”173 Another, in Providence, Rhode Island, noted “Splendid baritone voice with a very good program. A distinct hit” but clearly found provocative the performer’s visible play with redface conventions. He reported urging Caupolican to “Make up hands to correspond with face. Also a suggestion that he carry himself with more dignity. Less bowing and scraping and smurking [sic].”174 In Whoopee!, Caupolican extended that range onto the stage and into the auditorium. He played Black Eagle, a Mojave who speaks comic, cigar-store Indian—guttural, monosyllabic, staccato—in contradistinction to the fluent speeches of Wanenis, the younger Indian, the white heroine’s secret love interest, who has gone east for education (played by non-Indigenous actor Paul Gregory, in stageplay and film).175 While this language was being spoken and sung on stage, another register attached to Caupolican circulated among the audience, in their programs for the show. The entry on Caupolican in “Who’s Who in the Cast” tells many stories. The program note begins conventionally, with his birth in Temuco, Chile, his early singing career, and his time headlining vaudeville. Audiences might have been more surprised to read of his move into the Metropolitan Opera company, then a long list of roles in The Polish Jew, Aida, Carmen, Othello, and La Tosca, as well as the Indianist role of Matosofa in Winona, immediately followed by his credentials as “an expert in marine navigation and . . . a chief Mate in the American Merchant Marine.” The punchline comes in the final short sentence of his program entry. Just as audience members might be hearing Caupolican as Black Eagle performing his comic bit with Cantor as the eastern tenderfoot on stage—“Black Eagle no can have, two, three women? . . . Got heap nice squaw”—they could be reading in the program: “He is married to Lucy Lord, Professor of Art at Smith College.”176 The relationship between performer and audience, stage and auditorium— mediated, as ever, by the program’s cultural work—illuminates the power of Indigenous artistry. It publicly confirms that the performance is an act of artistry, that it emerges from a multifaceted and multitalented identity, and that the joke—the Indigenous irony—is in the performer’s hands. The power of

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Caupolican’s sonic performance also gave the lie to vanishing Indian myths in the very moment of mouthing them. The climactic production number in the live show and the movie is set in a desert canyon with towering rock faces. After the extravagantly camped-up Indian maidens are led in on horseback by barechested “braves,” the “girls’ ” feathered headdresses reaching to the ground and skimpy bikinis revealed beneath their blankets, Caupolican, as Black Eagle, appears on the cliff above. In “Full Indian Chiefs costume (Feather headdress reaching to floor),” arms outstretched, he sings his people into extinction in “Song of the Setting Sun,” its lyrics repeatedly linking natural images of nightfall, shadows, and setting sun with the hopelessness, sorrow, and regret of “Red Men” inevitably on their way out.177 Yet as he sings Black Eagle’s song of endings, Caupolican’s richly baritone embodiment of that voice defies its message of vanishing, a vocal power extended into futurity by the 1930 film. This medium makes the Indigenous performer’s embodied richness manifest, as it does the version of modernity from which he is ostensibly vanishing—that is, the white camp appropriation of Indianness, seen in the dancers below him arrayed in Busby Berkeley formation, hands shading brows Indian-style. From the cliff above, Caupolican lays a benignant hand on the signifiers of modernity below, echoing and extending Tamanend’s gesture atop Tony Pastor’s theater half a century earlier. Together, they signal a lineage of Indigenous virtuosity framing and overshadowing the cultural appropriations of vaudeville, using its stage as a platform to voice their own powerful relations and sustaining the work of survivance.

conclusion Even the Indian tropes and caricatures that run through vaudeville and revue— used as entertainment resources to attract audiences and accommodate them to notions of nation, democracy, and modernity—have been little noted, never mind the rich Indigenous performance networks on which they drew. This chapter has aimed to repopulate vaudeville circuits with Indigenous presence and to suggest how these commercial circuits were made over by Indigenous forms of mobility, community, and continuance. From Uncle Beaver walking Native space in the 1860s to Joe Shunatona and Molly Spotted Elk dancing the Red Atlantic in 1931, larger geographies of Indigenous connection frame this vaudeville story. Those spatial relations also suggest the multiplicity of time, generation, and meaning at work on stage in the myriad Indian acts created with Indigenous talent and ingenuity.

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What this chapter painstakingly puts together from fragments of evidence is an everyday memory for some Indigenous communities. When Johnny Beauvais, Mohawk of Kahnawake, talks about his people’s involvement in vaudeville, he takes the connection for granted: “Those performers who outlasted the wild west genre went on to vaudeville. Vaudeville itself was one step away from the Broadway stage shows where some of our young lady dancers found some success.”178 Together, archival remains, reconstructed acts, and community memories point to intergenerational networks of family, kinship, and community joining past, present, and future: networks of performers who turned commercial conditions not of their own making— here, in the form of vaudeville—into a relational space of Indigenous resilience.

1st Vaudeville Number Wi ll Ro gers M a kes His Ro pe Sp e a k

ON JULY 3, 1905, at the palatial Keith’s Theatre in Boston, Will Rogers of the Cherokee Nation (1879–1935)—dressed in chaps, cowboy boots, flannel shirt, and neckerchief, with his Stetson tipped back and his coiled rope in hand— rode onto the stage astride his pony, Teddy. He proceeded to “lasso his audience” in more ways than one. One of thirteen acts on the vaudeville playbill, he had thirteen minutes full-stage to connect with an auditorium seating more than three thousand. He threw a series of complicated loops, one involving two lassos that simultaneously roped his partner, Buck McKee, and the horse he was mounted on; he “gave an exhibition of real cowboy dancing” in and out of his spinning rope; and throughout he sustained a stream of wry asides that received as much laughing applause as his rope tricks. As the clock ticked down, Rogers called for another rope. An usher carried an eighty-foot length through the audience. Rogers mounted Teddy “and started twirling the rope, until it was a giant crinoline spinning and hissing just over the heads of the patrons.” Known, on occasion, to rope and drag a spectator onto the stage, he held the audience transfixed by his skill and their own frisson of vulnerability and anticipation. As Ben Yagoda says, “It was, in vaudeville parlance, a wow finish.”1 Reviewers loved the combination of physical and verbal dexterity, not least because of the opportunity it provided for their own punning wit: “Without betraying the slightest effort he ‘roped’ the house.”2

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Figure 1VN.1.  Will Rogers, vaudeville entertainer, Apeda, 1912 (J. Willis Sayre Photograph Collection, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, JWS13720 [negative   number UW 29232z])

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Will Rogers was not the first Indigenous performer in vaudeville, but he is the most widely remembered (figure 1VN.1). His numerous published papers make it possible to reconnect the details of his performance with the industry structures and employment conditions described in the previous chapter. Together, the combination suggests how Indigenous engagement with the entertainment industry could Indigenize the vaudeville stage. It deepens the double meanings that were a defining feature of Rogers’s act to see how he wove together the conditions of his life as an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation with the conditions of his employment as a vaudevillian, neither entirely of his own making. Repositioning Rogers’s act within his decade-long journey through vaudeville also brings attention to how he encountered, redirected, and took ownership of Indian play, beginning to develop what Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) has called “the Cherokee voice of America.”3 Like so many Native performers, Rogers came to popular performance via a wild west show. Son of a Cherokee rancher who was also prominent in Cherokee Nation politics, Rogers went seeking frontier adventure abroad, cowboying his way into South America then across to South Africa. There, he found that he could make a better living as a lassoist on stage than off. In December 1902, he joined Texas Jack’s Wild West Show and Dramatic Company, explaining later: “I thought to be a regular wild Wester I had to have a name so I christened myself The Cherokee Kid and had [letter]heads made”; his business card described him as “Fancy Lasso Artist and Rough Rider.”4 On his successful tour through South Africa, Rogers essentially played himself—a Cherokee cowboy—but he also participated in the show’s dramatic sketches. He called them “blood curdling scenes of western life in America” in which he was assigned to play both “Indian” and “Negro”—“do a cake walk and sing a coon song”—alongside Zulus and South Asians whom Texas Jack “painted as North American Indians.”5 When Rogers moved on to employment in Wirth Brothers’ Circus in New Zealand and Australia (to be replaced by the Deer family in Texas Jack’s Wild West Show), he played Mexican too. His introduction to show business involved immediate co-optation into racial play, including the construction of caricatured Indianness, a motif that would run through his stage career but whose meanings changed as he exerted performative agency over the process. When Rogers returned to the United States in 1904, after a stint with Frederick T. Cummins’s Wild West Indian Congress and Rough Riders of the World at the St. Louis World’s Fair, he got his first chance at the vaudeville

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stage, in St. Louis. His roping act, a family affair “with his cousin and fellow Wild West performer, Theodore McSpadden,” went over so well that by 1905 Rogers had vaulted into big-time vaudeville, mainly on the Keith and Orpheum circuits.6 From that point, he was navigating two regimes: vaudeville impresarios’ policies and requirements along with the U.S. government’s impositions on the Cherokee Nation, which he continued to experience in his ongoing relationships with home. The intersection is legible in his act, from his publicity to his on-stage patter, offering a close-up example of the interplay between land dispossession and vaudeville circuitry. Rogers grappled with regulatory structures very soon after his entrance into vaudeville. At first attempting to manage his own act, he had a bumpy start, missing out on a prime gig, and he soon turned to booking agencies in New York City. There he was taken up by a booking agent for the Keith circuit, who secured him what turned out to be a successful tryout at the very house with which Keith and Albee had first horned in on Pastor’s territory: Union Square Theatre on Fourteenth Street. Rogers had hit the jackpot, but he also faced a high commission cut and the most stringent contracts in the business: the Keith syndicate demanded moral cleanliness, full satisfaction, and exclusive employment without protection for the performer. From then on, Rogers employed several high-profile agents to help him negotiate the business— William Morris, Mort Shea, Pat Casey, Max Hart—and found himself wooed by international agent Marinelli. The involvement of such professional intermediaries makes it challenging to calculate the degree of Rogers’s involvement in publicity strategies. On occasion, however, some revealing differences opened up between performer and agent. Rogers’s great success made for a grueling schedule. He traveled big-time circuits east, west, up into Canada, and to the southern U.S. states, with a few visits to Berlin and London. For some years, he found himself on what vaudevillians called the “death trail” created by the small-time circuits crossing vast distances in the North American west. He got caught in the vaudeville wars a couple of times, by booking with one of Keith’s competitors, and he was briefly blacklisted. He had friendly relations with the White Rats and availed himself of some of their services, but he seems not to have joined the union—or, if he did, not to have been a militant member. Despite his ups and downs, he wrote to Betty Blake, his wife-to-be, in 1908, during his western tour: “Yes it is very lonesome sometimes but as for hating the work and wanting to give it up, No not as long as you can get booked and get a good salary for there is no work in

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the world as nice and easy as this business when things are coming right. it beats that old farm and ranch and Store thing.”7 In financial terms, this journey took Rogers from $20 a week in Texas Jack’s Wild West—of which, he complained, there was little left after paying for high-priced South African food—to $350 a week just over a decade later at New York City’s Palace, the pinnacle of U.S. vaudeville houses. When he played a record three different houses a night in 1914, his week’s earnings rose to $1,000.8 This was the period in which the Cherokee Nation was dealing with fullscale land theft by the federal government under the Dawes Act of 1887. Applied to Indigenous tribes and Nations across the United States, it shattered communally held land into alien nuclear-family allotments and removed the so-called surplus to sell to others. While Rogers was performing in South Africa, he corresponded constantly with his father in Indian Territory, who was working—successfully—to have them both enrolled and thereby each receive an allotment. Rogers sent some of his performance earnings home for his father to recover lands taken by the Dawes Act, information that he made public. One much syndicated interview he gave in the midst of a Keith circuit in 1906 reported: “All the money which Will earns in the show business, and it is a little fortune every week, for he is one of the star attractions in vaudeville, goes home to the banker father and is invested in land.”9 As worded, that capitalist language masks the Cherokee values—and the context of dispossession— involved in this linkage to home. During Rogers’s run at the Brooklyn Orpheum, he was also busy applying—again successfully—to the Interior Department to be recognized as Eastern Cherokee and entitled to federal money on which the government had reneged when the Eastern Cherokee had been violently removed to the Cherokee Nation West. Preoccupation with his people’s land remained with Rogers, even once his wife and he made New York City their home as the center of the vaudeville industry. He continued to correspond with family about managing the home farm and, after his father’s death in 1911, to use vaudeville earnings to buy back allotted land. There was, then, for Will Rogers this convergence between governing regimes. At the same time as vaudeville managers’ reports on his on-stage act and off-stage conduct were being sent around the country, determining his fate in vaudeville, U.S. government officials were sending in reports determining his inclusion in the Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes. Cherokee pride deeply informed both his family relations and his performance persona. During his early years on vaudeville stages, going under his

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chosen heading of “The Cherokee Kid,” his publicity, press coverage, and interviews emphasized that he was not playing cowboy but showcasing the skills that he had learned as a Cherokee cowboy—as “a real Indian cowboy,” “nearly a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, born and raised on a ranch in the Indian Territory.”10 During the vaudeville wars, his identity as “Pure Cherokee” was a “novelty” to be played up, in newspaper stories and the Keith circuit’s own Keith Theatre News.11 Even when Rogers was being equated with Owen Wister’s bestselling (and emphatically white) cowboy, the Virginian, there was no sense of contradiction in the same story identifying him as Cherokee.12 The shift to publicity emphasizing Rogers’s western identity to the exclusion of his Indigeneity took hold around 1907—another significant point of convergence between Rogers’s homeland and his stage career. In both cases, the year represents the culmination of a series of territorial acquisitions, or land grabs. In vaudeville history, 1907 marked the consolidation of the UBO and Keith-Albee’s monopoly. In Cherokee Nation history, 1907 is noted as the year when Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma. When Pat Casey became Rogers’s new agent, about a year after statehood, he seems to have noted the potential here, beginning to bill him as “The Oklahoma Cowboy,” a title that stuck right up to Rogers’s entrance into films in 1918. The name was launched on Rogers’s first western vaudeville tour, also arranged by Casey. The reference to the newest western state presumably drew on national boosterism, but there may also have been concern that popular culture in the West was particularly virulent in its caricatures of Indians. Certainly, except when Rogers was performing in Vancouver, Canada—a quite different environment from most of his stops in the West—his Cherokee identity disappeared from all forms of publicity: advertising, interviews, and programs.13 When Max Hart became the agent for Rogers’s newly solo act in 1911, that policy continued. Rogers himself, in writing about his life for Variety in late 1910 (a piece that was never published), continued to emphasize his heritage: “I’m more sure proud of my Cherokee Blood cause they are some tribe.”14 His friends in the entertainment world recognized him as what Fred Stone called “the Indian cowboy.”15 But the agent- and house-controlled publicity no longer included this identification. When, in 1915, it emerged in print, the sense, however jokingly phrased, was of a suppressed detail surfacing: in a piece in the Atlanta Journal accompanying Rogers’s first stop in his tour of the South, titled “Little Chat in Club Room Brings Out Secrets of Actors,” the journalist wrote that Rogers “ow[n]ed up to the fact that he is a Cherokee Indian.”16

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The stage act that Rogers developed both sustained a strong material connection to his Cherokee homeland and played on the conditions of his vaudeville employment. The early version of his act, as in his wild west routines, focused on his virtuoso roping skills and included his horse Teddy, brought from Oklahoma Territory, and his assistant Buck McKee, a cowboy who had worked on the Rogers family ranch—both figuring in Rogers’s trademark double-roping trick. Rogers required that his equipment come, as it always had, from the Cherokee Nation, writing home to Indian Territory for his Osage horse blanket, his rope, preferably already broken in by “the boys” down there, and his flannel shirts.17 What Justice has called Rogers’s “geographic connectedness” was alive, symbolically and actually, in the clothing, physical materials, and lasso artistry with which he entertained his audiences.18 At the same time, faced with a vaudeville auditorium, Rogers added a new performance element: he began to talk to his audience. The patter that he developed—and surviving notes show that it was his initiative and creation— played precisely on the conditions and structures of the vaudeville industry shared by performers and audiences. A favorite one-liner referenced managerial surveillance and censorship while converting the vaudeville stage into the western space from which Rogers derived: “Im a bit handicapped up here the boss of this Ranch dont even allow a fellow to swear or cuss a little even . . . if he misses out loud.”19 His gags about polite vaudeville’s insistence on respectability and moral rectitude went over well enough that he used them for years. If his contract with his employer was on the table, so was his contract with the audience in his references to ticket prices and audience expectations: “He opined that while he felt certain of himself in a fifty-cent show, he was not so sure in a two-dollar entertainment.”20 He touched on his own standing in the employment stakes: from “Ain’t this a silly way to make a living?” to “My act is getting too big for this circuit anyway.”21 He pointed to the distinctive rhythms of vaudeville bits: “I’ve got a song that goes with this act but the manager asked me to cut it out because it interfered with the jugglers”; on the other hand, “If I don’t stay out here long enough I don’t collect—.”22 In other words, the structures he had initially struggled with and which continued to impact his selfpresentation became material for the humorous asides he delivered while he spun his roping craft. What Rogers called “the talk” came to be as big a draw as his rope tricks.23 When he went solo in 1911, dispensing with both his horse and his assistant, his patter expanded, now a droll running commentary punctuated with

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lariat tricks. Off stage, Rogers said: “it’s my line of talk, and it’s all the line of talk I know; just Oklahoma talk and ranch talk.”24 That it was unusual even amid the novelties of vaudeville was signaled by one newspaper commentator: “The peculiar thing about the cowboy act at Keith’s last week was that you couldn’t make out whether he was in earnest or was just ‘kiddin’.”25 In time, Rogers added political commentary, initially on Theodore Roosevelt, to his Oklahoma references and industry meta-commentary. This was the public beginning of what Amy Ware calls Rogers’s “impromptu style” and Justice calls “the unofficial voice of the idealized United States.”26 The more extensive and explicit political commentary and self-positioning as Cherokee that he developed on radio, in newspaper columns, and in book publications began on the vaudeville stage. By this reading, Rogers’s act was invested with double meanings well beyond the control of the vaudeville censors as he tapped into the deep structural connections between the injustices of state-sanctioned Indigenous land dispossession and the commercial profits of the entertainment industry, all in the lightest of terms. These strands converged most powerfully in his Cherokee rope, a constant accompaniment to his patter and reminder of his place-based identity. The more deftly he wielded it, the more he extended his mastery over the space of performance, including, as in the crinoline-rope trick, bridging the gap between performer and audience by lassoing them where they sat. Rogers’s attention to audience is also a reminder of Indigenous presence in the auditorium. His father and other members of the Cherokee Nation came to watch his performances, just as Rogers attended other vaudeville shows, including in Paris and New York. The diversity of Indigenous participation in the space of entertainment is nicely embodied in Rogers’s attendance at the New York Hippodrome in 1906 where, in a brief break between his own gigs, he went to see performances by 100 Sioux from the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota. Would he have recognized Red Wing, James Young Deer, and Luther Standing Bear in the cast?27 What understandings, codes, and in-jokes might have passed between those vaudeville Indians on stage and this one (and who knows how many others) in the audience? As Rogers developed his vaudeville voice, he began to shape from the performance lineups around him the cross-race play that had been part of his entertainment experience from the beginning. Given the atomized nature of vaudeville playbills, he did not have the opportunity to enact publicly the kind of narrative relationships with other performers that Ware documents in his later

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work in silent film.28 He did, however, lend a degree of cohesion to the lineup by including “humorous comments about other performers on the bill” in his patter, sometimes generating an entire segment with reflections on a star act such as Harry Houdini.29 On bills including “Hebrew” comedians, Rogers included what he called a “Yiddisher” dance executed inside the circle of his lariat, and he told “Yiddisher cowboy” jokes.30 He also poked fun at the German and Irish dialect comedians who flanked his act. Throughout his time on vaudeville, Rogers’s act was contiguous to a host of Indian-themed songs, playlets, and performances by Indigenous and nonIndigenous actors.31 At Keith and Albee’s Union Square Theatre, he was on the same bill as “Mayme Remington & Her Pickaninnies” doing Japanese and Indian Village scenes.32 He often appeared in big-time lineups with “The Navajo Girls,” twelve white women performers who, the press said in 1906, “appear in all the glory of bedecked and beaded Indian costumes, and, in the midst of a scenic environment representing a village of wigwams, go through typical aboriginal fandangos. The Navajo Girls have helped to bring about the present public vogue for the Indian, the warpath, and the war whoop, which is being gratified as fast as authors, composers, playwrights, and producers can evolve anything with Indian atmosphere, action, and characters.”33 Rogers had been in this kind of company before, performing next to Zulu and South Asian performers painted as American Indians in Texas Jack’s Wild West. Unlike such shows, however, where he was required to don redface (among other racialized disguises), he had more creative agency in vaudeville to stake out his own relationship to such acts. Sometimes he used his vaudeville voice to express his “strong streak of Cherokee superiority”—which is to say, pride in his Nation.34 At Proctor’s Pleasure Palace in 1905, he appeared as the eighth number on a bill in which Dennison Wheelock’s U.S. Indian Band of Carlisle students was sixth. Rogers was careful to distinguish his own Indigeneity from the boarding school model, saying in a subsequent interview, “I’m a quarter-breed, . . . and it’s the thing above all others that I’m proud of. I’m a Cherokee and they’re the finest Indians in the world. No ‘blanket Indians’ about them. We are civilized and educated. Why, the government don’t allow the Cherokees to go to Carlisle and the other big schools for Indians. They’re for the ignorant kind. We have our own schools, and the boys’ and girls’ seminaries in the Territory are just as fine as any in the country.”35 Sometimes he used his rope to imply a point about Indigenous superiority. On several occasions, he appeared on the playbill right after the Meredith

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Sisters—“The Maids Who Made ‘Hiawatha’ Famous.”36 The Merediths were African American singing and dancing comedians who countered severe racism abroad by billing themselves as Native Americans in South Africa and England.37 In 1905, touring “South Africa as the American Indian Squaws and sometimes the Hiawatha Girls,” they were advertised as the “originators of the Indian character in vaudeville and the first to popularize Indian music”—a piece of puffery that surely was a bit galling to the wealth of talented Indigenous vaudevillians and musicians.38 Minnie Meredith, one of the trio, told laughingly of an occasion when, having performed immediately before Rogers, she ran back from her dressing room “in the transition stage between the stage makeup and the simplicity of her street appearance” to watch his act from the wings with other performers. Joining in the general badinage, she suddenly heard him call out from the stage: “Say, miss, if you keep on joshing me I’ll just nacherally have to rope you and drag you out.”39 Perhaps the joke was partly that he was teasingly threatening to drag out, to juxtapose on stage, to show his effortless control over, the contrast between Indigeneity and Indianness— neither, as Cherokee author Thomas King might say, the Indian the audience had in mind.40 Tracing the lineaments of Will Rogers’s vaudeville career suggests one way in which Indigenous land and identity could inform the making of a public entertainment voice and presence. His case also clarifies the possibility of cross-racial play functioning as a network of understanding among performers when they controlled its terms and its possibilities for relationality. What remained unspoken in those juxtapositions on the vaudeville stage became more articulated—though still coded—in the live entertainment form that most immediately emerged from vaudeville and replicated its debt to Indianness and Indigeneity: the musical revue. Will Rogers entered this arena briefly in 1915, then steadily from 1916 to 1919, when he was engaged by Ziegfeld for his rooftop Midnight Frolic and downstairs Follies.41 He now shared performance space with other forms of Indianness much more closely than on the vaudeville stage. In one number, for example, Euro-American dancer Ann Pennington, who often did “Indian Dances” for Ziegfeld, came on as “a papoose” on the back of a “stout Indian,” shortly to clamber down, change into cowgirl costume, and duet with Will Rogers in a lasso dance in which, again, the dexterous Cherokee roped the redface Indian.42 At the same time, the voice he had developed on vaudeville was here part of his billing: “Will Rogers (He is liable to talk about anything or

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anybody)”; by now, he was “The Cowboy Philosopher.”43 Revue culture made explicit the possibility that lurks in vaudeville—that notions of Indianness, among other racialized stereotypes, could be seized by racialized peoples as currency for the articulation of cross-cultural fellowship. Take Will Rogers’s relationships with Jewish performer Eddie Cantor and Bahamian American entertainer Bert Williams, both of whom he met on the vaudeville circuit and appeared with on the Ziegfeld stage.44 They traded and played with the dominant stereotypes of each other—Rogers referring to himself as a Yiddisher Indian while Cantor appeared in redface; Rogers proposing to don blackface to play Bert Williams; Williams blacking up his own face and appearing with Eddie Cantor also in blackface.45 In a revue culture so invested in in-jokes that created and reinforced group identities in many directions among performers and audiences, racialized performers, too, could more explicitly take slurs and stereotypes, visual and verbal rhetorics of irony that had been used against them, and repurpose them as sources of relationship. As always, they walked a fine line. This play did not break the racist structures that survived in revue; Ziegfeld not only extended vaudeville’s practice of racially segregating audiences in his auditorium but also refused to allow Black audience members to attend his rooftop shows.46 I take Michael Paul Rogin’s caution not to celebrate too easily play made with racism’s tools and his point that not all racialized masquerade is created equal.47 But that point, too, has to be balanced with analysis like Michael K. Johnson’s concerning the “Syncopation” vaudeville jazz act of African American musician Rosamond Johnson, partner of Taylor Gordon: “While it may seem odd to think that something as seemingly frivolous and entertainment-oriented as a vaudeville act could also be a tool of racial uplift, a means to a political end, the evolution of ‘Syncopation’ suggests that Rosamond ultimately saw the act in just that way.”48 The arc of Rogers’s performances suggests that an Indigenous performer, too, might negotiate the route from vaudeville to revue as a journey toward greater explicitness and solidarities. In 1934, Will Rogers remembered his time in vaudeville with a sense of loss: “I wish there was a vaudeville like there was in those old days. No branch of entertainment was ever so satisfying to work in. Never was there such independence. It was your act. And you could do it like you wanted to, and it was your ingenuity that made it.”49 Rogers’s own papers suggest that vaudeville industry conditions bore down on performers more than that comment allows. But his point about ingenuity rings true in terms of how he converted those

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conditions into an act to live by. Rogers’s time in vaudeville was a crossroads in the making of his public voice, in building rapport with a broad, cross-racial, international spectrum of audiences and fellow performers, and in interweaving among it all sustained homeland relations. Ingenuity is also a hallmark of Indigenous initiatives in polite vaudeville more generally, from Go-won-go Mohawk, whose virtuosic horse-riding, rope tricks, and stage presence preceded Will Rogers’s by two decades, onward. With other reconstructed vaudeville numbers in this book, I trace links and lineages between specific historical and contemporary performances. In the case of Will Rogers, I follow the lead of Daniel Heath Justice onto a vaster stage. Taking Rogers’s career beyond musical revue into radio, cinema, popular print, and political commentary, Justice shows how, in his sustained commitment to Indigenous nationhood—a defining feature of Cherokee identity, carrying with it “the tribal web of kinship rights and responsibilities that link the People, the land, and the cosmos together in an ongoing and dynamic system of mutually affecting relationships”—Rogers spoke to and was heard as the heart of America.50 He was revered as the “Ambassador of Good Will” by the Cherokee Nation, by the U.S. establishment that he so often skewered, and by international press coverage of him as the representative American.51 Thus Justice honors Rogers as “the Cherokee voice of America.” Reading Rogers’s vaudevillian work as one formative stage in the public crafting of that voice results in an understanding of vaudeville’s national significance that is quite different from the usual claims about its quintessential Americanness.

c h a p te r t w o

Go-won-go Mohawk, “Aboriginally Yours”

IF TONY PASTOR QUALIFIES AS “the father of vaudeville,” Go-won-go Mohawk (1859–1924) can equally be celebrated as, in several senses, the mother of all vaudeville Indians. A member of the Seneca Nation from Cattaraugus Territory, western New York State, a playwright, and a performer, Mohawk opened the space of vaudeville to Indigenous difference.1 From the late 1880s until the 1910s, she used vaudevillian forms to create distinctively border-crossing stage melodrama, intervene in popular print culture, and enter into film—in the process working with several genres of the culture industries that enabled and were enabled by industrial and urban modernities.2 Crossing racialized lines of representational control, undoing gender binaries, and creating distinctive popular paradigms, she generated opportunities for non-normative public identity and community centered on Indigenous presence. In identifying vaudeville as an opportunity for Indigenous creative control, Mohawk was one of the first to open the door to a performance space that others came to occupy in their own distinctive ways. As a public figure, Go-won-go Mohawk had two prominent handles; together, they suggest some of the risks and achievements of going public in the entertainment sphere. Throughout her career, her advertising taglines were variants of “The Only American Indian Actress in the World.” Presumably a creation informed by several managerial interests—and one to which Mohawk at the very least must have acquiesced—this publicity plays into the isolation 78

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and commodification of Indigenous artists through capitalist competition. The cost of those divisive forces can be detected in some of Mohawk’s work. At the same time, and signifying a quite different dynamic, her distinctive cabinet card signature was “Aboriginally Yours,” which she used from at least the early 1890s. As the twentieth century unfolded, this sign-off was used by several Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous artists and activists; it reads like a call to community across space and time.3 These contradictory signals point to the terrain—commercial, cultural, and geographical—that Mohawk navigated in fashioning an Indigenous presence so popular, vibrant, and disruptive of dominant categories that more than one white organization set about exploiting and suppressing it. This chapter follows Go-won-go Mohawk deep into the culture industries. It closely reads her playscripts, performances, and studio photographs. It traces her move away from European and Euro-American heteronormative melodrama to craft and star in her own gender-bending stories, the push-back from the dime-novel industry, her transatlantic successes, and her strategic response to genre and gender challenges by taking her Indigenous art into polite vaudeville. These negotiations, creations, and visual vocabularies constitute levels of Indigenous ingenuity and self-determination operating at the popular print– performance nexus at the turn of the twentieth century that are unacknowledged and unaccounted for in the received understanding of that history. To learn more about some of the stakes in this buried history, I turn to a conversation with the senior Indigenous artists and researchers Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) and Michelle St. John (Wampanoag Nation), who read Go-won-go Mohawk’s archive from their own perspectives, bringing emphases, priorities, and questions quite different from my own. The last section of the chapter follows Go-won-go Mohawk back to Cattaraugus Territory, asking what her wild west melodramas and transatlantic celebrity might have to say about the making of community, in terms of genealogy and land, when they were performed closer to home.

“i must act a man, or better, a boy” In February 1889, when Go-won-go Mohawk first galloped bareback onto the stage of H. R. Jacob’s Lyceum Theatre, Brooklyn, she was dashing away from the roles available to her through dominant modes of performance and toward a performance space attuned to her own gender and genre commitment.4 Carolina or Carrie Mohawk, as she was recorded in early state and federal

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records, was born in 1859 either on Cattaraugus Reservation (according to her own account) or in the town of Gowanda just outside the reservation (according to genealogical records) in western New York State.5 Her Seneca father, Dr. Allen Mohawk or Ga-ne-gua, was well known in the community for his skill with herbal medicines; her mother, Lydia Hale Mohawk, from Ohio, was identified in census records as “Indian” and by her daughter as “half-breed.”6 Although the family moved away from Cattaraugus Reservation to Attica when the daughter was one year old, and then farther east to Greene, New York, she remembered keeping close ties with the Seneca community until age ten, when her father died.7 At this point, Lydia Mohawk moved back to her Ohio relatives with her daughter, later marrying a non-Native man, sending Carrie to Painesville Seminary for young women, giving birth to a boy, and herself dying a year later, in 1875.8 Go-won-go Mohawk’s public memory of this period was dominated by alienation. As an Indigenous person, she did not fit in at her first school, presumably in Greene: Until I was 10 years old I went to school in my blanket and moccasins. I was so shy that I used to stand against a tree during recess while the other children were playing, and sometimes they used to try to . . . learn something of Indian life at first hand by quizzing me. “Did your father ever kill any one?” they would ask. “No.” “Well, did your mother ever kill any one? Well you never killed any one did you, Go-won-go?” they would add as they edged away. When I think of those American children, the English ideas of Indians don’t seem so funny after all.9 When attending school in Painesville, Ohio, she told another interviewer, she “sturdily refused [to] be bent by any process of discipline. She preferred to wear her hair over her eyes, she saw no need for a hat, and, generally speaking, she must have been anything but an elegant member of a young ladies’ seminary.”10 The school’s own representation of itself about ten years after her time there sounds again like an environment designed to train students for a white world.11 After her mother’s death, Go-won-go Mohawk married and began a stage career, developments that may have been intertwined, as her husband was the brother of the well-known actor Louise Pomeroy.12 Neither seems to have suited her well; the marriage broke up—spectacularly and even violently according to some newspaper accounts—and, when asked about her early theatrical roles,

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Figure 2.1.  Cabinet card for Go-won-go Mohawk as the Indian Mail Carrier, J. Wood Photo, ca. 1885 (© Trustees of the British Museum [number Am,B56.22])

she sounds dismissive: “Indian parts? No, indeed: roles of great ladies and suffering heroines, such as Isabel in ‘East Lynne’ and adventuresses in melodrama—adventuresses must be dark, you know.”13 Throughout the 1880s, she performed in several European and Euro-American melodramas and comedies, eventually arriving in New York City in 1888.14

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At this point, chafing against the racialized and gendered containment of the popular stage, Go-won-go Mohawk embraced the identity by which she came to be known, on and off stage, for the rest of her life. She characterized that shift retrospectively: “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles. I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature. I wanted to ride and wrestle, and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do that as a woman, I must act a man, or better, a boy.’ ”15 Teaming up with Charles W. Charles, the non-Native actor she had just appeared with in Michael Strogoff, she co-authored, copyrighted, and starred in Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier (figure 2.1).16 They began to build a theatrical troupe under her name. In 1888 or 1889, she married Charles, giving her name as Go-won-go Mohawk (for her first marriage, she had signed as Carrie A. Mohawk). The name both announced her Indigeneity—specifically it named her Seneca descent, though the press often misreported it as Mohawk—and obscured her gender identity.17 Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier Go-won-go Mohawk’s best-known play, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier, toured the United States, Canada, and the British Isles to large, enthusiastic audiences from 1889 to about 1910. The genre that she took on—melodrama—has been analyzed by Ben Singer as “a fundamentally modern cultural expression” for, among other effects, the ways in which it encapsulated the experience of urban modernity through the commercial production of “thrill.”18 A detailed reading of the script provides a close-up of stereotypes that Mohawk navigated, strategies by which she staked out her own terrain, and constraints that remained in bringing Indigenous agency to the making of that thrill. Wep-Ton-No-Mah is set in the U.S. frontier southwest. It begins on Colonel Stockton’s ranch, with a gathering of his servants, his young daughter Nellie, his cowardly, gambling-debt-ridden nephew Captain Franklin, and Franklin’s Mexican partner-in-crime Spanish Joe, along with cowboys and Indians come to round up Stockton’s cattle. The action kicks into high gear when a young Indian man, Wep-ton-no-mah, thunders onto the stage on horseback and rescues Nellie from a cattle stampede, for which act the colonel rewards him with the position of mail carrier to the fort. Next, Wep-ton-no-mah prevents Spanish Joe from kidnapping Nellie—a scheme tied to Franklin’s embezzlement—by beating him in a fistfight. In revenge, Spanish Joe shoots at a figure he takes to be Wep-ton-no-mah but in fact murders the young Indian’s father, Chief Ga-ne-gua. This takes us to the end of the first two of the play’s five acts.19 The

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rest of the plotline is essentially a revenge narrative, as Wep-ton-no-mah, while heroically saving the mail from attack, tracks down Spanish Joe, ultimately defeating him in what the press called “a dreadfully realistic knife fight.”20 Along the way, stock melodrama elements—disguise, ethnic humor, visual spectacle (including thunder, lightning, and the special “red fire” effect typical of nineteenth-century frontier melodrama)—accrue.21 In several ways, especially its racist caricatures—the stock Mexican villain and what one early reviewer called “the inevitable negro, the inevitable Irishman”—the script fits dominant popular-priced melodrama of the era.22 But Go-won-go Mohawk’s intervention constitutes more than slotting herself into a fixed paradigm. In her multiple capacity as playwright, actor, and costume and scene designer, she exercised an unusual degree of creative and contractual control for an Indigenous artist of that period. Although the script was labeled as co-authored by Go-won-go Mohawk and Charlie Charles, the U.S. copyrights are in her name alone. Publicity for the show also increasingly stressed that it was “written by herself,” a claim to literate agency that is reminiscent of, and as important as, that attached to slave narratives in the same period—given a cultural environment in which “primitive peoples” and “savage Indians” were displayed throughout North America and Europe.23 On the rare occasion when she spoke to the press about the play as “the joint work of Mr Charles and myself,” she attributed separate components to each: “a strong melodramatic story of American-Indian life into which, by the confession of the authors, Mr Charles has sought to infuse a liberal flavour of comedy”—which is to say, the racist caricatures and epithets, along with slapstick action—“and in which Miss Mohawk seeks to make the voice of the Indian heard in the way of protest against the wrongs which civilization has inflicted upon him, and against the widespread misapprehension of the nobility of his character.”24 The Indian role that Go-won-go Mohawk wrote for herself was unconventional in popular frontier drama in several ways, first in its non-normative gendering. As Roger Hall explains, it was conventional for women to crossdress in frontier melodrama, but their identity as disguised women was regularly written into the plot and revealed at its climax.25 Go-won-go Mohawk was unlike the better remembered Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. The popularity of the first, in the wild west arena and on stage, depended on the incongruous combination of girlish body and manly rifle skills; Oakley always rode sidesaddle to emphasize her femininity.26 While Calamity Jane’s notoriety in newspapers, in dime novels, and on stage rested on her acting and dressing like a

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man, she was regularly represented as protesting her violated womanhood.27 Mohawk did neither, thereby confounding reviewers’ gender categories. They consistently applauded her horse-riding skills, her facility with knife and gun, and her ability to throw burly men around, but they struggled with the terms of their praise. Sometimes they reached for conventionally incompatible combinations. One said, “her acting is so realistic that it is often hard to believe that she is a woman,” but also noted she “is not lacking in purely feminine accomplishments.” Another declared: “In cowboy costume, Miss Gowongo Mohawk would readily pass for a man if it were not for her soprano voice.” A third just as confidently praised her “truly magnificent contralto voice.” And sometimes reviewers gave up the struggle: “her acting is so realistic at times that her sex is often doubted.”28 A cabinet card from 1895 shows that she was adept in embracing multiple gender markers (figure 2.2). Man-spreading in frontiersman’s fringed jacket, Mexican cowboy hat on knee, and flanked by phallic signals—the pistols, the whip—she signs herself “The Only American Indian Actress” (emphasis added). One thing is sure, though again unconventional for the period: the play’s Native hero exhibits distinct moral agency. Wep-ton-no-mah’s pursuit and ultimate slaying of the Mexican villain turned the stock representation of Native violence into a story of motivated and reluctant revenge. Whereas the Mexican villain’s violence is vicious and recurrent, and his sidekick, Captain Franklin, can only feebly exclaim “no violence” when the train of events he has initiated gets out of hand, Wep-ton-no-mah displays both combat skill and ethics.29 The combination leads the white heroine, her cultural authority increased by her recent return from an eastern education, to egg him on: n e l l i e : . . . I glory in your noble retaliation of your father’s murder.

Wep-ton-no-mah, hound him down and when you find him kill him as he killed your father. That’s what I’d do if anyone killed my father.30 In this representation, western family and society depend not only on Wep-ton-no-mah but on the participation of Indigenous people generally in the western economy. The cattle roundup opening the play shows Indians (all, the publicity insists, “played by genuine Indians”) working alongside non-Indigenous cowboys.31 This was historically accurate—there were many Indigenous cowboys in the Far West—but highly unusual to make visible on the popular stage. The final scene includes the same Native figures working with white soldiers to surround the Mexican cattle thieves who threaten the encampment.

Figure 2.2.  Cabinet card for Go-won-go Mohawk, signed as “The Only American Indian Actress,” ca. 1895 (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution [INV 00785600])

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The Indigenous power over writing demonstrated by Mohawk’s authorship extends into her character’s position as letter carrier. In the West, the pony rider who carried the mail was a figure of some power: far-flung settlers depended on him for contact and news; as the Northern Paiute writer Sarah Winnemucca made clear a decade earlier in Life Among the Piutes, the Native mail carrier could negotiate a level of sustenance not available to other members of the Indigenous population in the late nineteenth century. Justin Randolph Gage has written about the significance of Native mail carriers to intertribal networks of communication at that time.32 Reinforcing Indigenous literacy once more, Wep-ton-no-mah performs “the meaning-laden acts of reading and writing” on stage when he reads and writes for his father, an act cut short by an assassin.33 With this articulacy, Wep-ton-no-mah speaks for his people’s nobility, at one point debating with Colonel Stockton the dominant characterization of his people—“savages as some of the civilized whites call us”—and at another insisting on his own independence: “I could not stand being under the control of anyone except the great Manitou. I want to be free—free—like the birds, the eagles and deers—owning no master but one.”34 The language partly anticipates the Hiawatha plays performed from about 1900 by Anishinaabe communities reworking Longfellow’s appropriations and in the 1910s by a subsequent generation of the Seneca Nation on tour in the southern states.35 Such declarations occur amid emphatic and recognizably vaudevillian Indian play, further dismantling dominant stereotypes. Indian caricature is skewered, first, by the Native characters, Chief Ga-ne-gua and Wep-ton-no-mah, code-switching between American English and “stage Injun” speech especially when puncturing white authority. Chief Ga-ne-gua’s opening words, for example, contest the paternalism of the rancher when Colonel Stockton inquires about the whereabouts of “my Indian boy,” to which the Chief retorts, “Oh! you mean my boy, Wep-ton-no-mah.” Almost immediately, the Chief shifts into stage Injun speech—“Big White Chief good man, like my boy, he good boy.”36 The sense of caricature floating free of lived identities is reinforced by a chorus of comic voices as both Black Sam and Matilda intermittently exclaim “Ugh!” and Rodreguez (a reformed Mexican cattle thief) also at times sounds stage Injun.37 On several occasions, comic figures play Indian in ways that could come straight out of Tony Pastor’s vaudeville afterpieces. Intermittently, apropos of nothing in particular, Black Sam, Irish Garry, and Matilda Sniffles (of comic New England stock) rush around the stage screaming that “Injuns!!” are about to scalp them and, Sam fears, his “Bullfoundland

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Terrier” Pinkie.38 For different ends, Irish Garry, Black Sam, Spanish Joe, and Captain Franklin all try to disguise themselves as Indians, sometimes donning blanket and feather, only to be exposed one after another by Wep-ton-no-mah. The real Indian on stage—with increasing fame as a real Indigenous performer—not only peels away these disguises with ease: he laughs outright at their efforts. The play both profits from popular vaudevillian comedy and exposes it as a poor copy of desired Indigeneity, one incident in the long fetch of “entwined performances of Indianness” that Laura Mielke argues underpinned the colonial project in North America from the beginning.39 The playscript moves the needle from melodrama to vaudeville also in its handling of the prerequisite romance plot. It begins conventionally enough, for a border drama, with Nellie’s declaration: “I have a romantic love for the Indian youth who saved my life at the risk of his own, and I can’t help loving him.”40 The sense that the outcome may be in question is signaled by Wep-ton-nomah’s shifting registers, which puncture Nellie’s dramatic gesture. Although he has articulated at length his political and other thoughts to several characters, when faced with Nellie’s adoration he slips into stage Injun mode: nellie : (Aside) My hero. wep-ton-no-mah : Ugh! White Fawn.

Soon after, he emphasizes to his father his lack of desire for whiteness: chief : If Colonel want risky work done, he send for my Boy—for he know

my boy smart and brave. You be Col. some day too. w e p [ - t o n - n o - m a h ] : My dear father, I’m so proud to have you praise me—but I am contented to be as I am to follow in your footsteps as you have followed your fathers and some day if I live to be Chief [of] my tribe and die a true American Indian.41 Ultimately, Mohawk as author and Wep-ton-no-mah as character simply let the romance plot lapse, and the white characters become increasingly ineffectual and irrelevant toward the end. Franklin returns to the fort, a reformed character swearing his allegiance to Wep-ton-no-mah; Nellie runs off, wailing, “Oh, I wish I had staid at home. I’m sure something terrible is going to happen”; and the Colonel declares, “this is going to be a lively night” before exiting at a run.42 The final scene is left to three figures: the reformed, wounded Mexican Rodreguez is the sole observer of the “Terrific knife combat” between Wep-tonno-mah and Spanish Joe. “Joe is conquered. Curtain and End.”43

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Although the script deploys stock caricatures galore, they are most often used to parody, and potentially unfix, the race-based relations of the melodramatic plot. With considerable slapstick and verbal bits, Irish Garry Cullin plays out his “revengence” on Black Sam for knocking him down, in comic parallel to Spanish Joe firing on the figure whom he believed to be Wep-ton-no-mah, and Matilda pursues the reluctant Garry in the same sentimental vocabulary as Nellie uses to Wep-ton-no-mah.44 In a time of segregated casts, presumably anticipating the cover of blackface, the script writes in a moment of BlackIndian contact. Sam addresses the hero, who has just saved them from a cattle stampede, in a mixture of standard and non-standard registers: “I suppose it’s a dangerous sort of liberty for a colored gentleman to talk wid an Injun gentleman, but Mr. Wep-ton-no-mah I would like to have de honor of shaking hands wid you.”45 The potential for cross-race community is most obviously fulfilled in the minstrel olio and vaudeville specialties. It was standard for stage melodrama to intersperse “specialty acts” into its plotline. This mix made the show amenable to different theaters’ schedules, and, especially in houses that alternated vaudeville and full-length melodramas (as Go-won-go Mohawk’s company did), it ensured continuity of attractions for a certain segment of the paying audience. What is very unusual in the late nineteenth century is the inclusion of Indigenous virtuosity in that grouping. Precisely because the vaudeville acts changed, the script does not specify them, but it is clear from reviews that Mohawk did horse-riding tricks, whip routines, and fancy lariat work years before Will Rogers won fame doing the same; she also sang. Her turns came among established vaudeville specialties: sand-dancing and minstrelsy by blackface Sam, sentimental singing by Nellie, piping and comic jigs by the Irishman, and “a roaring burlesque of the familiar serio-comic young woman of the vaudevilles” included.46 By occupying these positions, Go-won-go Mohawk made space in vaudeville for other Indigenous presences. Matilda, “appointed a committee of one,” organizes the carnivalesque coming together of specialties. She requests that Colonel Stockton “act as General Director of Amusements”—an inside joke, since Charles, who played Stockton, was the company manager and said to be responsible for the show’s comedy—“so now we will escort you in state to the chair and make you King of the Festivities.”47 The vocabulary and scene are reminiscent of Twelfth Night celebrations or any carnivalesque revelry. Despite Stockton’s positioning as “king,” the effect is to upend the ranching hierarchy and take the spotlight off

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the Anglo characters, as Native, Black, Irish, Mexican, and “others” come riotously together on the staging ground of the frontier. Front and center in this intercultural space was the gender-bending cultural traveling of Go-won-go Mohawk. As the stage Irishman Garry says, “this is the queerest country I ever saw in all the days of me life.”48

the dime novelization of go-won-go mohawk From the beginning, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier attracted large audiences, attention accruing first from the novelty of its “Only American Indian Actress” but increasingly from good reviews for its execution and effects. The production came to be judged “daring and original in outline and detail, and yet in its wildest extravagances justified in its success.”49 Go-won-go Mohawk became increasingly identified as the star on whom the production depended, in publicity strategies and reviews, especially for her combination of wild west skills and melodious voice. The only figures who approached equal billing were her ponies, Wongy and Buckskin: a typical review lauded the action as being “alive with thrills and sensational adventures . . . that sent delightful creeps down the spines of the breathless audience, [including] some tricks by Go-Won-Go-Mohawk’s trained horses.”50 This success made Mohawk available for appropriation by the white culture industries in the form of Beadle and Adams, the most prominent of the period’s cheap publishers. This company had initiated the mass production of complete novels for a dime (later, a half dime) in 1860, making a major impact on the formation of U.S. culture. They yoked their enterprise to American nationalism; scaled up production to the point that it created hosts of new authors, readers, and writing and reading situations; and clinched a range of narrative formulas including, prominently, a version of the western that relied heavily on the propagation of violent Indian stereotypes. Two years after the launch of Wep-Ton-No-Mah, Beadle and Adams capitalized on Go-won-go Mohawk’s celebrity with three serials in their story-paper Banner Weekly running continuously from February 14 to October 24, 1891. I have found no evidence on how the series came about. It is possible that Mohawk approached the firm as a publicity measure. Certainly, the dime series reinforced Go-wongo’s racial authenticity, which had been doubted in some early reviews: whereas the actor had initially been found “oddly light in color,” the dime-novel character, when repeatedly asked if he is a “stained” white man, repeatedly confirms his “full-blooded” status.51 It is equally possible that the firm, always with an eye

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out for novelty, appropriated her identity without permission or reimbursement. In any case, they hewed to the plot and central figure created by Mohawk while adapting them piece by piece for very different ends. In typical dime-novel fashion, the plots are convoluted and multiply stranded. The first novel in the series was titled Red Butterfly, the Spy of the Overland; or, The Nine Scouts’ League. It introduces Go-won-go as an Indian maiden who, first bereft of her father in the West and then taken east by a kindly miner, returns west disguised as a man to rescue her adopted white father who has been abducted by the outlaw Kit Quantrel. In the second novel, Go-won-go, the Red-Skin Rider; or, The Moonlight Marauders, Go-won-go is now a daring pony-express rider, alternately known as the Red Butterfly, Red Lightning, and the “Injun Mail Carrier,” and consistently identified as male.52 He leads a star-studded crew of scouts—Buffalo Bill, Frank Powell, Jack Crawford, Texas Jack—against a band of stagecoach robbers headed by Captain Moonlight, a.k.a. Kit Quantrel, the same outlaw on whom Go-won-go is seeking vengeance for hurting his adopted father. Meanwhile, Go-won-go is also defying the odds to get the mail through on the “Fatal Trail” between the mining camps and Fort Venture. In the final novel, Velvet Bill’s Vow; or, The Red Rider’s Retribution—among numerous attacks, gun battles, east-west journeys, mysteries, love affairs, mistaken identities, and other subplots—Go-won-go rescues his adopted father and takes his retribution on the villain. The parallels with Wep-Ton-No-Mah are strong, both melodramas revolving around a heroic Indian pony rider in the West who is driven to avenge hurt done his father, along the way saving white communities (a ranch in Mohawk’s play, a fort in the dime series) and ending by triumphantly killing off the enemy. The three novels were written by Prentiss Ingraham, at that time the main author of Buffalo Bill dime fiction. Dime novels would seem an obvious fit for Go-won-go Mohawk’s riotous rewriting of the western scene. They were on the queer end of the spectrum of popular western formulas: with their love of multiple disguises and identities, they played on class, race, gender, and sexuality crossings with a slipperiness that more middle-class and middlebrow westerns (the best-known example is Owen Wister’s best-selling The Virginian of 1902) held more firmly in check. Ingraham’s trademark was his lavish portraits of pretty male heroes, whose fine features and highly decorative clothing lend a camp air to his sensational tales of violence. They are particularly strong examples of what Daniel Worden calls the “fluid masculinity” promoted by dime novels, part of the larger anti-essentialist performance of

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identity, with its “unruly possibilities.”53 Yet a female Indigenous hero seems to have been a slippage too far for the dime-novel industry. While Go-won-go is celebrated throughout the series as “a hero of heroes,” capable of teaching even Buffalo Bill some scouting tricks, Ingraham’s novels and Beadle and Adams’s publishing apparatus work to disappear Go-won-go Mohawk’s difference, folding her back within wild west stereotypes and gender binaries.54 First, Go-won-go’s Indigeneity is made over to fit the dominant wild west formula, Ingraham’s version following the Sioux warrior image promoted internationally by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as authentic Indianness. Changing Go-wongo’s Nation was only the first step in making the figure over to serve white patriarchy. Ingraham attempts to silence the linguistic control that she asserted in writing her play and starring as the mail carrier who heroically protected valuable letters. In Ingraham’s dime novel Go-won-go becomes an “Injun mail carrier” whose prized packages are more about money than letters. While the dime-novel Go-won-go has all the positive attributes of the original, this figure is surrounded by numerous Indians who confirm the savage stereotype—unlike Wep-TonNo-Mah, in which Native people are central to the western economy. Despite the fact that he demonstrates the same independence of employment as did Wepton-no-mah on stage, Ingraham’s Go-won-go is repositioned within a group of white admirers and thus his image becomes heavily dependent on white affirmation. Go-won-go’s makeover as Sioux also extended the political work of Beadle and Adams’s Banner Weekly into this piece of fiction. Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, the story-paper’s journalistic and opinion departments ran a consistent campaign in support of Bill Cody as military scout and showman and against Sitting Bull and the Northern Plains people. When, from late 1890 into 1891, Ghost Dancing spread across the West, Sitting Bull was murdered by a member of the Indian police, and the Miniconjou Lakota families were massacred at Wounded Knee, the Banner Weekly redoubled its heroization of Buffalo Bill and its running attack on Sitting Bull as “the evil genius of the uprising.”55 Ingraham’s first Go-won-go story was in preparation as news from the West arrived, and its advertising was changed from “ALL OF THE WILD WEST. A Grand Bevy of Noted Scouts! Several Prominent Army Officers. A Famous Real Indian ‘Princess’ ” to hook it to “the recent Indian ‘craze’ and tragic uprising of the hostiles among the Sioux.”56 Red Butterfly then initiates the series by opening with the death of Go-won-go’s father, here called “the ‘Mad Chief’ of the Sioux,” murdered by white road-agents aided by

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Cheyennes.57 In the second novel, Go-won-go, Ingraham maneuvers his way back to a closer cleaving with his original’s celebrity: he changes Go-won-go into “the Mohawk-Sioux rider,” providing a backstory that her father, Patolla the Mohawk, had been stolen by Sioux and brought up in their homelands. In this account, the Sioux are indirectly responsible for the biological father’s death because they drove him from the tribe when he refused to lead a massacre against white settlers. Ingraham also, uncharacteristically, straightens out Go-won-go’s sexuality. Through the first two novels of the Go-won-go series, the hero presents as one of Ingraham’s typically pretty men: “His face was a study in the perfection of its features, and its beauty. Feminine it looked, and yet there was all in it to make up a splendid manhood.”58 Abruptly, in the final half-sentence of Go-Won-Go— the novel that most emphatically trades on Mohawk’s image—he is firmly returned to a womanly identity. The hero returns east “no longer known as a youth, for though Alice Seely, Surgeon Powell, and a couple more at the fort knew the secret, no one else suspected that the daring Red Rider of the Overland was a woman. The End.”59 Tellingly, however, that big reveal—that “secret”— had been insistently given away in the Banner Weekly’s advance advertising, which, for a month before the first installment of Red Butterfly, had harped on the beauty of “Princess Go-wan-go” [sic] at the center of Ingraham’s “new and stirring Wild West romance,” and their publicity continued to reference her womanhood throughout the life of the series.60 Beadle and Adams were highly experienced publishers, and it seems very unlikely that they inadvertently undermined the novel’s punchline. I believe that, by insisting on stable gender, they were countering Go-won-go Mohawk’s non-normative gendering, which she continued to perform on and off the stage. However much the dime-novel Go-won-go is garbed in male costume, Ingraham’s readers are discouraged from thinking of her as male, or as inhabiting a non-binary gender, by being alerted, repeatedly, to her female identity. The final novel reinforces that gender positioning. Ingraham describes “an Indian maiden, beautiful in face, exquisite in form, and dressed in the neatest of traveling costumes” who confirms in her own voice, “I am Go-won-go, the Indian Pony rider, now in my natural dress as a woman”—a direct contradiction of Go-won-go Mohawk’s press statement that acting the man or the boy gave her “something free and wild that would fit with my own nature.”61 The end of the series confirms her heterosexuality when Velvet Bill, another of Ingraham’s pretty, white, masculine heroes (who turns out to be the lost eastern heir,

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William Dillingham), claims her as his bride: he “went to New York and won his wife,” whom he now refers to simply as “Butterfly.” Similarly, the dime story prises Go-won-go Mohawk apart from her stage character Wep-ton-no-mah. Ingraham makes the figure over as “Wep-to-mah,” a Sioux chief who knows Go-won-go to be a woman, declares his love for her, helps her defeat the villain, and then is killed by “his own braves firing upon him.”62 Not only does the disentangling of these figures contain Go-won-go one more time as a heterosexual woman; it also kills off her Sioux lover in a scene with a brevity and inevitability that set up another chillingly casual parallel with Sitting Bull’s death. The series ends as it began, with the ritualistic re-killing of a “Sioux chief” that connects the work of gender straightening to genocide in the popular press. The real-life Go-won-go Mohawk was not, of course, contained by these rhetorical ruses. Not only did she continue to play fast and loose with gender binaries and cultural markers on and off stage, but she seems to have capitalized on and parried Beadle and Adams’s efforts. In the 1890s, newspapers carried a photograph of Mohawk posed in an outfit closely shadowing Ingraham’s description of his character’s: heavily embroidered suit, gauntlet gloves, slouch hat, down to the crimson sash, revolvers, and hair that “down his back, was black as night and waving.”63 In a cabinet card of the same period (figure 2.3), in which Mohawk appears in womanly dress, a butterfly brooch is pinned prominently at her throat, echoing Ingraham’s detail: “He was known as Go-won-go, the Red Butterfly, for upon his slouch hat was embroidered in velvet and gold a red butterfly.”64 In this trading back and forth across the performance-print nexus, the sequencing of who borrowed from whom, and who signified upon and played with whose gender construction, remains unclear. The larger points, however—that Go-won-go Mohawk originated her persona, challenged the templates of the dominant mass media, and continued to assert herself as Indigenous competition to be reckoned with in the making of popular print culture—are undeniable. Mohawk’s prominent presence—on stage, in cabinet cards, in press stories—can fuel a reading resistant to the narrative arc of the dime mini-series. Dime novels often made textual play with marketplace conditions and copyright issues among the wild west gunplay; early in Red Butterfly, the competition for control over Mohawk’s image is referenced when Sunset Sam the stagecoach driver asserts, “yer must be one of ther Injuns as acts in theatre plays,” to which Go-won-go demurs, “Not exactly, though I have come West to act in a drama,” and Go-won-go continues to disavow show business

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Figure 2.3.  Cabinet card for Go-won-go Mohawk, signed “Aboriginally Yours,” London, England, April 23, 1895 (Theater Biography Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

throughout the series.65 But any reader familiar with Mohawk would see that the joke is on the dime novelist, given the manifest success of her theater career as it continued to unfold. Other moments could be read to reverse the insistent heteronormativity of Go-won-go’s dime-novel characterization.

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Michael Denning famously made the case for a working-class reading of dime novels that took advantage of the multiple, slippery identities they perform. He persuasively argued for an “allegorical” reading: character types who are disguised as working-class only to be finally revealed as aristocrats remain available as “both-and” options for readers, demonstrating that the working classes can emerge as owners of the means of production.66 The “both-and” possibilities available for imaginative play in the Go-won-go series are considerably less buried. In the western scenes, where descriptions focus on the hero’s pretty masculinity, pronoun use vacillates, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, to the point that the authorial voice pauses the action to explain: “for known only as a youth then, I must still refer to Go-won-go as him.”67 And Mohawk’s apparent reading of and response to this mini-series remind us of Indigenous readership more generally. As with vaudeville audiences, piecemeal evidence suggests that there was a Native readership for cheap fiction, especially dime novels sold at train stations, on the street, by subscription, and in other accessible ways. The readers’ column of the Banner Weekly points, during the serialization of the Go-won-go stories, to at least one reader identifying as of Indigenous heritage, while Indigenous authors such as Luther Standing Bear (Lakota) and Mourning Dove (Okanogan) knew and took on dime-novel formulas; later, Maliseet author Chief Henry Red Eagle/Henry Perley was a successful author of pulp magazine stories.68 Native readers of the Go-won-go series might well know more than the authorial voice assumes and certainly more than the white characters display. While dime fiction has been persuasively analyzed as potentially empowering in class and gender terms, its handling of race is generally considered to be irredeemably repressive.69 The Go-won-go mini-series, however, suggests a more complex relationship between dime fiction and Indigeneity. When a preeminent cheap publisher attempted to take back the popularity that an Indigenous entertainer had generated, straightening out in print what she queered in performance, it inadvertently made visible the presence of Indigenous agency in the making of mass culture. When Go-won-go Mohawk navigated her way through an attempted takeover of her identity by Beadle and Adams, taking from and responding to this cheap publisher in ways that belie the standard white narrative about its success, she once more demonstrated the power and wit of popular Indigenous performance. That push and pull between the popular print industry and Indigenous agency has at least one more layer in the case of Go-won-go Mohawk. Following

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the copyright trail left by Mohawk and Beadle and Adams, in their separate dramatic and literary productions, I stumbled on an earlier copyrighting of Wep-Ton-No-Mah that predated Mohawk’s by eighteen years. It turns out that in 1871 a dime novel titled Weptonomah: The Hunted Wolf of the Wyandots was copyrighted by Frank Starr Company, one of the many names under which Beadle and Adams marketed their cheap fiction. Senecas and Wyandots had a long history, as traditional enemies and through instances of adoption, colonization, and alliance. In crafting her first playscript, did Go-won-go Mohawk take back what Beadle and Adams had taken from Indigenous culture? Did she initiate this paradigmatic sequence of stereotyping and counter-narrative that played out across the Atlantic? Did she put her own body into Beadle and Adams’s demeaning stereotype and refashion it as a site of sensation, agency, and popularity? Was it with a wink and a nod to those in the know that she made Wep-ton-no-mah refer to himself as “the Hunted Wolf”?70 Did she bring Wep-ton-no-mah specifically and Indigenous creativity more generally to resurgence by taking it back from the dime-novel industry and redirecting it to vaudeville?

not one of “bill’s indians”: go-won-go mohawk in britain For all Mohawk’s success in North America, her troupe was on a grinding schedule, playing two or more performances a day, often seven days a week, traveling up and down the East Coast, to cities in Ontario, Canada, and west as far as St. Paul, Minnesota. Often they played cheap theaters sandwiched between burlesque and vaudeville, “bad dates at second-class theatres,” as Mohawk complained.71 In 1892, Go-won-go Mohawk announced that she was taking her troupe overseas, to Britain. The schedules there would be less exhausting: geographical distances were smaller, there were no Sunday shows, and she announced that they would not do matinees.72 Clearly, she was calculating the differences of the cultural space she was about to enter, both materially and representationally. Such was her success that she ended up doing two extensive tours in Britain, 1893 to 1897 and 1903 to 1908. As soon as she disembarked in Liverpool, Mohawk began to refashion her self-presentation. By 1893, British audiences had encountered many generations of Indigenous visitors, and she was intent on carving out her difference from both exhibited curiosity—“Miss Mohawk highly resents being regarded as a ‘show’ ”—and from what she called “Bill’s Indians.”73 So familiar was

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Buffalo Bill Cody in Europe, and so entrenched was his show’s image of howling Sioux warriors, that the interviewer who quoted this phrase saw no need to explain the reference for his British readership. Mohawk shifted her promotional strategies to emphasize civility and control—both of her own people, whom she names “Eastern Indian” and “Six Nations,” “a people capable of the highest civilization,” and of herself as artist.74 When asked about her decision to write a play, she omitted her desire to act the boy, instead emphasizing, “It is natural for me to write, and besides that, I never had a part in a play which seemed suitable to me, and therefore I made one for myself.”75 She labeled herself an “actress-authoress,” using the performance-print nexus as cultural capital, and the British press seemed eager to accept it. In advance of her first British performance, the working-class Liverpool Weekly Courier reported: “She writes her own plays, and takes a leading part in their representation, and is highly spoken of in America as a dramatist and as an actress.”76 One program for her performance at the Whitechapel Pavilion in London’s East End extends that rhetoric into the auditorium: “Playgoers should note that this play is entirely different from any other so-called Indian plays[,] it being the creation of an Indian woman from Scenes in actual life of the American Indians, and not a vehicle for the introduction of heroics and pistol shots.”77 The British press had to make more of an adjustment in reporting Mohawk’s gender. That they had a more perturbed response to her genderbending than she had encountered in the U.S. press is evident from her first interview in Britain; the reporter records his first reaction: “Are you Miss Go-Won-Go—I—I—expected to behold an Indian squaw—a semi-savage,” I said, as soon as I recovered my selfpossession, which had utterly collapsed at the sight of this fine, dashing swashbuckler attired in buckskins and beads, and with a kind of untamed look in her eyes. . . . “Have you such a thing as a scalp hanging at your belt by any chance?” “Oh, dear, no,” she replied, laughing. “Those I hope to capture on my tour through your country.”78 Expecting a sexualized stereotype of Indigenous femininity, the reporter encounters instead a “swashbuckler”—a male-coded word—with witty repartee. The British press struggled to position Mohawk, not, I think, because of prudery—popular British stages by then had seen women riding bareback, women cross-dressing, and so on—but because of the long history of gendered British responses to Indigenous bodies. Women climbed out of British

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audiences onto stages to embrace Indigenous men, and British men, especially during the waning years of empire, shored up their own masculinity by routing it through male Indigenous bodies.79 Repeatedly British press coverage of Mohawk as Wep-ton-no-mah began with a familiar disquisition about the nobility of the Indian chief’s body, only to stop in mid-stream in recognition of her womanhood. In time, reviewers learned to deflect this rhetoric onto another cast member, a figure barely mentioned in the U.S. press—Ga-ne-gua, Wep-ton-no-mah’s father, played by a performer identified as Onondaga. He was not only certifiably male—variously described as “a plump and portly American chief” and as “a veteran of the late Civil War and Indian rising, bearing the scars of many conflicts”—but proved his heterosexual credentials by marrying a West Hartlepool girl.80 As far as popular audiences went, from the moment Go-won-go Mohawk galloped bareback onto the stage of Liverpool’s Shakespeare Theatre, she was an instant and enduring favorite. Whereas the acclaim for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, then and now, tends to emphasize his show’s appearances before royalty, Mohawk’s distinction was that she became solidly entrenched in the provincial circuit and London’s East End, with lots of repeat bookings, press coverage and interviews, and a high level of interaction with British working- and middleclass audiences. She was invited to appear in local pageants and benefit shows, other acts took her name, and a circus performer impersonated her as an Indian chief. In accounting for her success, some of the British press recognized the essential vaudevillian—or, in their terms, “variety”—content: “the indescribable plot of the most erratic character” is an excellent “medium for the introduction of variety entertainment and exciting incident.”81 She incorporated British variety numbers (such as sand-dancing) into her show, cleverly straddling multiple audiences and houses at a time of fierce debates in Britain about variety undercutting theater. Such was Go-won-go Mohawk’s transatlantic renown that Beadle and Adams got back in the game. In 1896, they reprinted their Go-won-go miniseries as three stand-alone dime novels in Beadle’s New York Dime Library. At this point, the sense of a visual thrust and parry became even more emphatic, given the prominence of dime-novel covers in the visual economy of popular culture. The publishers did not change the narratives, but they fashioned covers from the Banner Weekly illustrations that most downplayed Go-won-go’s manly presence, and they revised the subtitles on these covers to tuck her further into the Buffalo Bill firmament. Red Butterfly, the Spy of the Overland; or, The Nine

Figure 2.4.  Cover of Prentiss Ingraham, Red Butterfly, Beadle’s New York Dime Library, March 25, 1896. Go-won-go is the kneeling woman. (Courtesy of Nickels and Dimes, Northern Illinois University Libraries)

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Scouts’ League was retitled Red Butterfly or, Buffalo Bill’s League. The cover represents the opening scene of the novel, with the dying Sioux chief attempting to stab his daughter Go-won-go in the heart; when the heroic white miner steps in to shield her, he takes the chief’s knife through his arm (figure 2.4). The illustration feminizes Go-won-go in dress, pose, and helplessness. It also rings the changes on the much mythologized rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas and, more directly, on Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827), in which the Pequod chief inadvertently cuts off the arm of his daughter, Magawisca, when she steps in to shield the white male hero. The subtitle of the second dime novel, Go-won-go, the Red-Skin Rider, was changed from The Moonlight Marauders to Buffalo Bill and the Surgeon-Scout. Only by reading the novel could a reader identify the tiny figure on the cover, in the deepest background with arm raised, as Go-won-go, well obscured by Buffalo Bill, prominently positioned in the foreground. The subtitle of the third novel, Velvet Bill’s Vow, was changed from The Red Rider’s Retribution to Buffalo Bill’s Quandary. Its cover dispenses altogether with Go-won-go, being fully occupied with Velvet Bill, the Buffalo Bill look-alike. In the midst of this marketplace diminishment—possibly in response to it—Go-won-go Mohawk began to multiply the volume and variety of her cabinet cards in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic, sometimes on display in the same arenas as dime novels. As she traveled the length and breadth of Britain, she paused in studios to pose in numerous outfits, mixing Native and showbiz elements, animal pelts and two guns, womanly European dress and swaggering phallic getup. The sense that she had made a distinctive mark in Britain was reinforced later in 1896, when the British popular publishing company Aldine reprinted the three Prentiss Ingraham dime novels in their “O’er Land and Sea” tuppenny library for British readers. Again, this edition did not change the Ingraham narratives; however, the new covers not only do away with the subtitles about Buffalo Bill but introduce an image of Go-won-go on horseback, gun in hand, that is more prominent, more active, and considerably more queer than their American counterpart (figure 2.5). Go-won-go Mohawk’s overseas celebrity palpably increased her clout in the U.S. entertainment economy. When she returned to the United States in 1897, she almost immediately made it onto the front page of the New York Clipper, one of the most prominent entertainment newspapers, with a large illustration of one of her cabinet cards. She embarked on a steady run of engagements in the better popular theaters, at least two tunes were composed in her name, she was cited as a byword for melodrama, and she continued successfully to

Figure 2.5.  Cover of Prentiss Ingraham, Go-won-go, The Aldine “O’er Land and Sea” Library, 1896. Go-won-go is the horse rider with the gun. (Courtesy of British Library)

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increase the spectacle of Wep-Ton-No-Mah with more horses, street parades, and special effects.82 Her distinctive position in the economy of melodrama was entrenched when, in 1900, she swung the starring role, as a Native man— White Eagle—in The Flaming Arrow by Lincoln J. Carter, a major figure in the increasingly big business of melodrama.83 For three years, she toured with this show to considerable acclaim—though she was also back on a two-a-day schedule. In 1903 she returned to Britain for another five years, basking in the welcome she received up and down the country for her remount of Wep-TonNo-Mah before finally returning to the United States in 1908.

go-won-go mohawk takes the fight to vaudeville By 1909, Go-won-go Mohawk’s spectacle had run its course—in terms of her play and the genre of stage melodrama more generally. By her own calculations, she had performed Wep-Ton-No-Mah three thousand times, and she was approaching fifty years old—a tough age to be playing the youthful hero. There was also a larger theatrical crisis. Moving pictures were taking off, with technological spectacles that trumped a key element of melodrama—its production of thrill—and did so at nickelodeon prices a fraction of the 10- to 40-cent theatrical melodrama offerings. Furthermore, the re-gendering of Go-won-go Mohawk seemed to be creeping up on her again: the “Princess” label, not used since the earliest days of her troupe, reappeared in the publicity for The Flaming Arrow, over which she had less control.84 Mohawk made two hard turns out of stage melodrama, into film and into vaudeville proper. In neither case could her publicity claim that she was “the only” or the first. These years saw the rise of Hollywood’s first “power couple,” Ho-Chunk actor Lilian St. Cyr/Red Wing and Nanticoke actor-producer James Young Deer.85 By 1909, vaudeville had seen quite a few Indigenous performers and Indian acts—Will Rogers of the Cherokee Nation, several Mohawk families from Caughnawaga, St. Regis, and New York City, students from Carlisle Indian Industrial School who ran away to join vaudeville, as well as the whole Carlisle Indian Band. Nevertheless, in transplanting her gender-bending performance into the newest forms of entertainment, Go-won-go Mohawk completed a significant arc in expressing Indigenous agency within media considered central to western modernity. The film of Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier was released on June 1, 1909, by the independent Carson Film Company. Little is known about it, except that it was a single-reel (850 or 875 feet) black-and-white silent film,

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number 1000 in the Carson catalogue, marketed to exhibitors under a rhetoric familiar from its theater days: the Phoenix, Tiger, and Carson film factories made American films that “are in a class by themselves, absolutely new and different from any other American Films.”86 It is difficult to trace this film’s details, but it is possible to recognize the company it joined. Around 1909, early motion pictures were moving from the “cinema of attractions,” with its emphasis on the display of spectacle, to “American cinema’s transitional era,” which brought greater narrativization to film.87 A significant corpus in these developments was the earliest “Indian and western” films under Indigenous artistic control. Michelle Raheja has traced their celebration of Native agency, their resistance to white formulas of cruel justice, and their development of resources of “visual sovereignty” that influenced Indigenous film-makers up to the present day.88 Mohawk also continued to flex her muscle in the literary and liveperformance marketplace. Hardly had she set foot back in the United States when she typed up and copyrighted a new one-act play, which again seems to have disappeared from the scholarly record. This was An Indian Romance: A Forest Tragedy, A Drama in One Act, by Go-won-go Mohawk.89 By length, economy of setting, compression of plot, deployment of conventional tropes, and stagecraft (working the curtain to allow another act to set up in the space behind) it clearly is a vaudeville playlet or afterpiece. It would follow about eight acts: say, Japanese acrobats, blackface minstrelsy, a “Dutch” (German) comedy duo, Irish patriotic singer, photoplay, trick cyclist, and big-name European singer. Positioned within that mix, An Indian Romance is a fascinating work that converts the concentrated tempo of vaudeville specialties, in which Mohawk was already adept, into narrative form. Mohawk compacts spectacular action and formulaic plotlines familiar from dime novels, including the ones in which her namesake featured, into one “thickly wooded lot” between a wigwam, a hut, and a tree stump.90 Trick riding (one rider on two horses and two riders on one horse), two murders, and a climactic knife fight punctuate the strands of English aristocratic romance, Prussian-sounding skullduggery, and revelation and restitution of the Englishman’s inheritance by letter. Like the script of Wep-Ton-No-Mah, this playlet interweaves comic blackface dialogue and stage Injun speech, again moving in and out of both in ways that remind the reader that these are prerequisite conventions of the period. Among the sensations, caricatures, and sentimentality, the playlet makes two statements that would be

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far from conventional on the vaudeville stage—especially from the pen, mouth, and bodily presence of an Indigenous actor. One concerned the perceived value of an Indigenous woman’s life, the other enacted a direct riposte to the dimenovel industry’s appropriation and containment of Go-won-go. At the center of An Indian Romance are two love stories that double the sentimentality and cross Indigenous-settler lines in two directions. The romance concerns a white brother and sister, Anthony and Lena, unjustly exiled from their English home, and an Indigenous brother and sister native to these woods—the two pairs constituting two heterosexual, cross-race couples. For the Indigenous brother and sister, Mohawk reprised her role as Wep-tonno-mah, for whom she created a female twin, Mi-ra-no-mah, and played both parts herself. Never seen on stage at the same time, the twins ride on and off on Mohawk’s trained ponies, demonstrating equestrian skills while advancing the plot. Mi-ra-no-mah ends up carrying the letters that prove her English lover’s innocence and restore his inheritance; when she refuses to surrender them to the villainous Karl Kovoloff, who initiated and stands to profit from the lie, he kills her off stage. At that point, Wep-ton-no-mah gallops on stage in a panic, searching for Mi-ra-no-mah, and confronts Anthony, her white lover, about his missing sister: anthony : (Anxiously) What is this you are telling me? wep-ton-no-mah : You were the last one seen with her. anthony : What! Do you dare to think of me, the one that loved your

sister better than life. w e p - t o n - n o - m a h : (Sternly) What do the Pale Faces think when a Pale Faced Maiden disappears from amidst her people, do they not come in anger to seek her in the encampment the wigwams of the Red Skins? Do they not come in hundreds and attack without mercy the innocent with the guilty and leave the home of the Red Skins a scene of bloodshed and desolation?91 The vaudeville playlet stages a vivid contrast between the two characters’ attitudes: Anthony is outraged by the attack on his individual honor, whereas Wep-ton-no-mah is outraged on behalf of his people. Less than twenty years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee, in the midst of the ongoing (and still ongoing) myths of Indian captivity, this lesson about the perceived worth of an Indigenous woman’s life, delivered by the Indigenous author and actor to Englishman and audience, is striking.

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The play ends with Mi-ra-no-mah’s coffin centered on the stage, the white heroine reaching out her arms to her Indian lover. As with the ending of Wep-Ton-No-Mah and The Flaming Arrow, the Indian hero leaves that romance unresolved—indeed, almost beside the point. Wep-ton-no-mah leads his horse off into the sunset, the male character and his creator reunited bodily, the Indian princess deployed by the dime novel to straighten out Go-won-go killed off. The centuries-old trope of the sacrificial Indian maiden, when read within Go-won-go Mohawk’s performance history, is here used against itself, Mohawk once more clearing and riding into vaudeville space as her own kind of Indian. An Indian Romance may have been in circulation as early as the 1890s, given one photograph, “A Scene from One of Her Border Dramas,” published in 1898, whose props and setting match the playlet’s scenario.92 The fact that Mohawk copyrighted the script in 1909 means that she was about to go public with it or had already; there is no conclusive record of it being mounted. However, there is evidence that Mohawk played out its central relationship— between Indian hero, Indian maiden, and her own body—in one or more photographic studios in Britain, during the 1890s, perhaps at the moment when she and Beadle and Adams proliferated dueling images. One cabinet card shows Mohawk as Wep-ton-no-mah in a heavily beaded and embroidered outfit and shield, with furs and feather and hair tucked up. Monique Mojica guessed that this costume was of Go-won-go Mohawk’s own theatrical design, calling it “Indian-ish.”93 The other cabinet card, simply labeled “Go-won-goMohawk,” shows what happens when the head covering and tunic come off, the hair falls down in loose braids, and the pose changes from masculine legs athwart to demure female figure, hands clasped before her. Together, they look to me like the twins of An Indian Romance, in layered quick-change outfits (figure 2.6). The combination embodies the differently gendered positions in which Go-won-go Mohawk could be put and fuels a reading of her vaudeville playlet as her final word on Indigenous self-determination and self-fashioning within the culture industries.

“from amazon queen to oscar wilde”: indigenous readings of mohawk’s cabinet cards In April 2019, seeking to learn what Go-won-go Mohawk’s work might mean to contemporary Indigenous artists, I asked Monique Mojica and Michelle St. John to engage with her archive.94 The perspectives they brought to the exercise included their development in the early 2000s of The Only Good Indian . . .,

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Figure 2.6.  Cabinet cards. Left to right: Go-won-go Mohawk as Wep-ton-no-mah and possibly as twin Mi-ra-no-mah in An Indian Romance (Card Photograph Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

the show in which they researched and performed their stage forebears from the same period as Mohawk, as well as, in Mojica’s case, the legacies of a “show Indian” family. They showed little enthusiasm for talking in detail about Mohawk’s playscripts. Appreciating as they did the pressures on her to bring out stock figures if she was to make a living on the stage, appreciating the size of the challenge she faced and the importance of her legacy, it palpably pained them to grapple too closely with details of her characterization and dialogue— the intermittent stage Injun dialogue, Black caricatures, and anti-Mexican slurs. Not only were these graphic reminders of the costs and inevitable complicities of going public in that era; they also echoed too closely colonial regimes and expectations that still, today, assault Indigenous performers. Their responses, as I understood them, were another salutary reminder that to read as a non-Indigenous scholar of popular culture, measuring the work’s innovations within the stereotypes of its time, is very different from living its complex legacies.

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What excited and intrigued Mojica and St. John were Go-won-go Mohawk’s visual vocabularies, as generated in the cabinet cards and postcards that she circulated transatlantically from the 1880s to the 1910s. These were among the newest technologies of visual print culture. The craze for cheap celebrity and novelty photographs began with the “cartomania” of small cartes-de-visite in the 1860s, continued through the production of larger cabinet cards beginning in the mid-1870s, issued in the “postal carditis” of the 1900s, and carried on to the multiple fan media of the present day.95 In the nineteenth century, these new mass media thronged public and private spaces: crammed by the dozens into the windows of shops and photographic studios; affixed into scrapbooks and albums in the home; traveling theatrical circuits as advance publicity and application for employment, giving rise to vaudeville managers’ slang to performer applicants, “show me your photographs”; reproduced in newspapers, magazines, and playbills, all themselves contributing to the dense display of public print. The proliferation of costumes, styles, and gestures—negotiated among the photographic subject, the studio photographer, and the theatrical event that the image approximated—constituted a significant influence on the era’s conceptions of race, gender, and other cultural identities and expressions. Go-won-go Mohawk’s image was circulated in all those media, but the bulk of the images appeared as cabinet cards: photographs of about 5½ x 4 inches affixed to a cardboard mount of about 6½ x 4¼ inches on which appeared the studio name and address; the subject might autograph the photograph or the mount. Toward the end of Mohawk’s career, postcard reproduction (approximately 3½ x 5½ inches, often autographed on the front and carrying studio information on the back) took over. More than twenty different cabinet cards and postcards survive in the physical and digital archives that I have been able to access. The earliest was produced by Falk, a New York City studio frequented by vaudeville artists; over time, Mohawk sat for studios up and down the North American east coast and across England. The earliest followed the convention of approximating a theatrical scene, complete with props; most are close-up portraits that focus only on Mohawk’s body and attire. These studio images run a considerable gamut of stylistic, cultural, and gender markers, even when Mohawk poses as the character Wep-ton-no-mah. The earliest, from the 1880s, shows the actor in what Mojica dubbed “Amazon Queen” style: a long skirt of leaves, plumed crown, and top that gives the illusion of a bare chest. Over time, her head coverings proliferate: from ostrich plumes to eagle feathers, to what may be a roach (headdress), a cowboy hat, a

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Victorian lady’s hat—“Now there’s a fascinator,” said Mojica—helmets made to her own design out of pelts and feathers. Some outfits exhibit details of Seneca or Haudenosaunee dress, some hew closer to Plains Indian style, some incorporate wild west motifs. Many are gendered masculine but some styles are explicitly female. Mohawk’s poses refuse the stereotyped Indian gestures of the period: no pointing into the distance or gazing into space, hand shading brow; the one image reminiscent of “the stoic Indian”—in braids and feather, a blanket wrapped closely around her—is undercut by her dazzling grin. The signature that appears repeatedly also refuses dominant notions of authentic Indianness: “Aboriginally Yours.” Whether choosing to adorn herself in her own Nation’s materials, in showbiz fashion, or in European Victorian dress, she declared herself no less Indigenous for that. What was most striking about Mojica’s and St. John’s engagement with these cards was the degree of delighted scrutiny they brought to them. Far from treating Mohawk’s outfits as a meaningless wash of showbiz effects, they pursued, magnifying glass in hand, details as evidence of choice, intentionality, and Indigenous ingenuity. It became an hours-long process punctuated with shouts of surprise—“Holee!”; “What?”—head-shaking bemusement—“That’s so weird”—and admiration—“That’s wild.” Sometimes joy came in recognizing culturally specific details: Haudenosaunee-style brooches, her metal gorget, beadwork, floral embroidery, trade silver that looked Seneca, Plains Indian vest, belt, and purse. Sometimes they marveled at the artistry with which Mohawk produced or decorated an item: a beaded pistol holster, gorgeous gauntlets, the way she fashioned her hair. Michelle St. John marveled at the combinations: “It’s fascinating . . . the things that signify Seneca-specific mixed with all the other stuff, it’s so interesting, the tipi—I’m like, ‘What?’ ” Monique Mojica seemed riveted by the ingenuity of Mohawk’s leggings, which she first spied in the 1895 cabinet card (figure 2.2): “What’s she got on her feet? Are those like spats? . . . She’s got moccasins with spats over!” She homed in on them in photograph after photograph, including figure 2.6: “These leggings things that she has on, they’re not Iroquois leggings; they’re spats made to look like leggings . . . she’s got leggings fashioned like spats; look, they buckle on the side!” St. John laughingly put a point on it: “It’s kind of genius, when you think about it. . . . It’s what still happens, where you take the contemporary thing and you Indigenize it.” “It’s like beaded sneakers,” Mojica agreed. The conversation shifted gear when we turned to a cabinet card that Mohawk had made in West Bromwich, England, in the 1890s (figure 2.7).

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Figure 2.7.  Studio portrait, Whitlock Studios, West Bromwich: Go-won-go Mohawk, 1890s (John Culme’s Footlight Notes Collection)

Monique Mojica immediately reacted: “That’s very different.” Michelle St. John continued the thought: “That is a straight-up Seneca dress—wow—that’s beautiful.” We talked about how unconventional the pose was, especially for that period and the public presentation of an Indigenous performer, how intriguing it was that Mohawk had chosen to distribute this presentation of herself. St. John commented: “It almost feels like a moment in between the posing, probably . . . they’re talking about something and she’s kind of laughing.” Mojica said, “This is an actual person, not a ‘personage.’ I mean it’s not a character, this is an actual candid shot.” Unlike so much of the play with masculine and wild west signifiers, the attire in the West Bromwich cabinet card is, in Mojica’s words, “most definitely gendered female.” The question of personhood came out full force when I brought out the last of the sequence—a cabinet card that ended up in Australia but was probably produced in England around 1906 (figure 2.8). At this one, they audibly gasped and immediately dubbed the photograph her “Oscar Wilde” look—the pose, the hair, the clothing (he too, of course, regularly favored spats). This reference would have been familiar to Mohawk; she may have known the playwright himself. During her first tour of Britain, between 1893 and 1897, Wilde was at the height of his theatrical success when he was arrested, tried, and

Figure 2.8.  Postcard for Go-won-go Mohawk, signed “Aboriginally Yours,” ca. 1906 (National Museum of Australia)

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convicted of “gross indecency” as a homosexual man and sentenced to two years’ hard labor from 1895 to 1897. She returned to England a few years after he had died in exile in France. With a lot of thought, some long silences, and not a little laughter, Michelle St. John and Monique Mojica pondered this cabinet card’s signals: msj : That is a very declarative statement . . . mm : Yeah. I think she’s saying something all the way along . . . msj : Oh yeah, but this is unlike all of these, this is “Amurican” [laughter]

. . . I don’t see any silver brooches, I don’t see any Indigenous anything, maybe the belt but it’s hard to tell . . . she has a suit jacket and a tie . . . mm : Holee . . . her whole demeanor . . . she looks quite defiant to me in that one, don’t you think? There’s an expression of saying “And whaddya gonna do about it?” msj : Yeah . . . This is me in my natural state. Echoing Mohawk’s own language (“I said to myself that I must have something free and wild that would fit with my own nature”), the “natural state” on which they were speculating was Two Spirit—“an Indigenous identity category that is important both historically and culturally,” naming “Indigenous traditions of gender/sexual diversity and spirituality.”96 Their sense of that possibility was reaffirmed by some of Mohawk’s highly coded press coverage. When one magazine’s “Vanity Fair” section did a “celebrity at home” spread on her, the editor labeled the photograph of her talking to her husband—her arms akimbo and legs athwart—a chat with “a neighbor.” Mojica looked once at the photograph and said, “I smell a beard.” Was Charles cover for Mohawk in a world intensely dangerous for an Indigenous Two Spirit person? The more dynamic photograph in the magazine spread shows Mohawk and another woman—the caption, suggesting sexuality and intimacy, calls her “a soubrette friend”—galloping together, both riding full astride.97 Repeatedly, newspaper stories represented her as the dominant force in her marriage: she, a sight for “lovers of muscular womanhood,” her husband “a small man in a gray suit of clothes.” One press story recounted at length an incident on Broadway when the horse-and-trap that she was driving went out of control, whereupon “the Indian princess” leapt onto the back of the plunging horse, got astride the bucking neck, grasped the bit, and wrestled the horse to a standstill, all “while the little man in the gray suit clung to the dashboard and looked unhappy.”98

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At the end of the research conversation, Michelle St. John spoke a little about her own relationship to this earlier generation, her artistic forebears: “part of my heart is still with these women, and the men, of that era and wanting to understand their journey a little bit more.” From these Indigenous women artists’ reading of Mohawk’s photographic archive emerged a presence and a set of priorities quite different from what I had seen. When I scrutinized the cabinet cards, sensible of my position as a non-Indigenous spectator, I most closely followed the arc of performance and was most excited by the two cards that seem to show Mohawk’s on-stage doubling of gender as Wep-ton-no-mah and his twin sister, Mi-ra-no-mah. These cards held little particular interest for the Indigenous artists, except to marvel at Mohawk’s inventions: the “roman centurion–type shield”; “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said St. John; Mojica went straight to the spats. The cards that stood out for them were those that go beyond stage character, tracing a journey closer to the heart of the matter. Stressing that they were speaking about their own reactions to the sequence of photographic images— not claiming special knowledge—St. John and Mojica expressed a heartfelt sense of risk and exposure. m s j : Especially at that time . . . you know, we talk about what Pauline

[Johnson] and Zitkala-Ša and Go-won-go and other performers did at the time that could be so problematic, but the need to eat and all of those things, and then to take that a step further and put herself out there this way is incredibly brave and risky. . . . It almost makes me feel like the feminine Mi-ra-no-mah aspect to this personality is the safe public face to protect this side [gesturing to the “Oscar Wilde” card]. That’s what it seems like, and so in the images that are a little more androgynous, a little more ambiguous, it’s like you see this progression, steps of her just finally getting to this [points again to the “Oscar Wilde” card] to say [claps her hands in punctuation] . . . mm : This is it. msj : This is me. Monique Mojica sorted through the pile for the cabinet card shot in West Bromwich, in which Mohawk appears in a Seneca dress—“the other one that looked quite unusual is also her in her natural state.” She placed it next to the last, Oscar Wilde–like image. “Outside of all the regalia, there she is . . . that’s who she was.” “This is, I think, your narrative,” said Mojica, pointing back and forth to the journey between those two cards.

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making community Mojica’s comment points to the distance Mohawk traveled from her Seneca Nation community and opens the question of her ongoing relationship with them, a subject that can only be fully engaged by building relations of research exchange with contemporary community members.99 What clues about the making of community can be gleaned from the non-Indigenous record and Mohawk’s own work? Geographically, she moved ever farther from Cattaraugus Territory as she grew to adulthood and went on transatlantic circuits. And her theatrical settings—the formulaic frontier Far West of Wep-Ton-No-Mah and the wooded, geographically unlocated setting of An Indian Romance—seem far removed from her homelands. Nevertheless, there remain traces that suggest Mohawk’s work connected with family, community, and the ongoing resilience of the Seneca Nation in the face of unrelenting settler invasion. Ultimately, even on the vaudeville stage, these linkages are about land. The troupe Mohawk traveled with was family of her own making. Her husband, Charles W. Charles, functioned as actor and manager, and her halfbrother, William Henry Killey, whom she took into her household when he was orphaned, made bugling his specialty in Wep-Ton-No-Mah and The Flaming Arrow. Other members of her troupe were also part of her household: Guy Hackney, who did “vaudeville specialties” in blackface, and Albert Simms, who played Indian and whose ethnicity I do not know.100 And of course Mohawk’s ponies, which featured prominently in her publicity and on-stage spectacle, were constant companions. Indeed, she seems to have shared a nickname, “Wongy,” with one of them. Her gravestone from 1924 memorializes her as Go.won.go Mohawk Charles “Our Wongy.” The figure most resonant of family relations was the Onondaga actor who often played Wep-ton-no-mah’s father, a character carrying the same Seneca name as Go-won-go Mohawk’s father, who had died in 1869: Ga-ne-gua. In the play, the father dies in his son’s arms, a scene reenacted three thousand times, creating a tableau of Indigenous intimacy remarkable for the period.101 Mohawk also placed this character, in death, back in his Indigenous community, positioning the grave of “the noble Chief Ga-ne-gua, my father” in the Indian village; her real-life father was buried in Sylvan Lawn cemetery in Greene, New York, nine years after he had moved away from Cattaraugus Reservation.102 Her father’s name was further extended across the line between representational and embodied worlds when the Onondaga actor took it as his own, the dramatic character now being listed as simply “Wep-ton-no-mah’s father.” The actor married in Britain under the name Chief Ga-ne-gua and continued to use the

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name to play the character Black Eagle in The Flaming Arrow, father of White Eagle, played by Mohawk.103 These connections across Indigenous and settler lines were also played out on the stage. When Matilda in Wep-Ton-No-Mah calls together the carnivalesque community of specialties—Indian rope and riding tricks, blackface minstrelsy, Irish jigging, white girlish singing—with Charles Charles serving, in character as Colonel Stockton, as audience, it replicates their real-life community. When Wep-ton-no-mah, played by Go-won-go Mohawk, departs on his last, perilous ride as mail carrier, the bugler (her half-brother) announces her departure, the cast (some of them members of her household, some of them Indigenous actors) assembles, and the Colonel (her husband) announces: “Your friends are all assembled to see you off.”104 Mohawk’s sustenance of family and community through theater seems a counterweight to what her contemporary the actor and lecturer John Ojijatekha Brant Sero (Mohawk of the Six Nations of Grand River) described of her personal circumstances: “I believe she has lost every relation she ever had on the Cattaraugus Reserve where she was born.”105 The dime-novel version of her life also insistently removes such networks. In the opening scene of the first novel, Red Butterfly, Go-won-go, cast out by the Sioux and now bereft of her father, observes of herself in the third person: “she has no country, no people, no kindred now.”106 The perpetual vanishment of Native peoples, an ongoing project in government policy and popular culture, is pursued into the most granular textual detail. The entertainment axis also kept Mohawk somewhat connected to the people of Cattaraugus Reservation, who had their own rich and deeply embedded performance forms, including dance troupes, musical bands, actors, and protocols regarding which songs and dances were appropriate to show business.107 Although the 1890 U.S. census records only seven musicians and two “show people” among Cattaraugus Senecas, it is clear that the numbers of entertainers throughout this period were considerably higher, given the very popular Seneca-directed brass bands, the touring troupes, the wild west show and circus performances, and the athletics exhibitions, from the international celebrity foot-runner Lewis Bennett/Deerfoot in the 1860s to the lacrosse teams into and beyond the twentieth century.108 Entertainers played multiple roles in the community, which may explain the discrepancy in number counts. One such was Edward Cornplanter, or Sosondó:wa, “a member of the Wolf Clan and the principal preacher of the

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Gaiwi:yo:h”—teachings of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake—at the Newtown Longhouse, Cattaraugus.109 Cornplanter was a teacher and an authority on songs and ceremonies “of the old Cattaraugus Village variety,” in the words of his son Jesse Cornplanter, who traveled with his father in theatrical troupes in North America and Europe and who became famous as an artist, writer, and knowledge-keeper in his own right; he also documented the severe poverty that sent the Cornplanters and their neighbors on the road.110 Edward Cornplanter also ran the Newtown Lacrosse Club, a game both “known among the Hodinöhsö:ni´ as the Creator’s game” and a paying proposition in the contemporary sports world.111 In 1900, Cornplanter took his show band on “the Go-wan-go Mohawk Flaming Arrow road show,” as he called it.112 Orrin Jones and another unnamed Seneca actor also worked with Mohawk.113 Frank Kenjockety (Cayuga), who was born on Cattaraugus Territory, Seneca Nation, and made his home in Salamanca, New York, worked with Mohawk on The Flaming Arrow, perhaps in company with his entire vaudeville troupe “Kenjockety’s Hippodrome and Wild West Show.”114 Brant Sero reported from London that his role in The Indian Mail Carrier first took him overseas.115 Theyyan-da, who identified as Sioux-Tuscarora, said, “I was with my aunt, GowangoMohawk, in the ‘Flaming Arrow’ troupe for a season, and received a great deal of help and inspiration from her” on his way to vaudeville.116 Mohawk also made community through audience relations. She staged Wep-Ton-No-Mah on Cattaraugus Territory at least twice, proudly describing to the press her people’s enthusiasm for the work. In one of her early interviews in Britain, the interviewer asks about her standing in this community: “How do your own people regard you in your new capacity, Miss Mohawk? Do they resent your leaving their midst, and casting in your lot with the white man quite unreservedly.”—“Oh, no; there is no resentment. Nothing like it. They are very proud indeed of me, and look upon me as a person whose business it has become to show the white people that the Indian is not a savage. . . . I go to see my people sometimes, and sometimes they come to see me.”117 Back in the United States, she returned to the subject of her Native audience, describing a performance in the 1890s: “I played to the Indians at the [Cattaraugus] reservation. The orchestra was composed of Indians and most of the audience was Indians. I think all of the Six Tribes must have been present in front that night. Applause? Well, talk about your war whoops! There were

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cries of ‘Our Indian! Our Indian!’ which sounded better in my ears than all the bravas in the world.”118 In 1919, the community used her photograph and profile as a “film star” to advertise her attendance at the upcoming annual fair of the Iroquois Agricultural Society.119 There is another land connection, more oblique but significant in remembering how the power of popular culture cuts both ways and how fine a line Go-won-go Mohawk walked when she took on dominant formulas of representation. The place she came from and which she reconnected with periodically had seen waves of land theft by settlers, federal and state governments, and rogue land companies—as well as foreign diseases and military onslaughts that decimated the Seneca Nation. After the American Revolution, the Seneca lost most of their homelands in New York State; in 1794, the Treaty of Canandaigua, which recognized the sovereignty of the Iroquois Confederacy, reserved “nearly four million acres for the Seneca west of the Genesee River.”120 In subsequent decades—the years in which Mohawk’s father grew up on Cattaraugus Reservation—that area shrank exponentially: an 1838 treaty tricked the Seneca out of all their reservations; another in 1842 restored a diminished Cattaraugus, Allegany, and the tiny Oil Springs reservations (while Tonawanda Senecas had to buy back their site from those who stole it); and governments repeatedly threatened to remove the Senecas to Indian Territory, more than a thousand miles southwest. In the words of Laurence Hauptman, “One can hardly comprehend the level of stress on the Senecas in the period from 1797 to 1848.”121 In “the Seneca Revolution of 1848” the council of chiefs was overthrown at Cattaraugus and Allegany in favor of “a new political entity, the Seneca Nation of Indians,” with an elective system of government that itself was fraught with dissension for decades while fighting off external threats of taxation, the horrors of the Civil War, a smallpox epidemic, and the ever present fear of violent removal.122 This was part of the context in which Dr. Allen Mohawk moved his family, including his young daughter, farther and farther from Cattaraugus Territory. The Seneca Nation of Indians endured (its sovereign government resurgent to this day), and on March 20, 1899, it won a significant land-based struggle against the federal government. After more than twenty-five years of lobbying, in concert with other Haudenosaunee of the Six Nations, they won a land claim settlement and were awarded $1,967,056.123 Two months later, a ritual of white settler invasion occurred in Gowanda, the village on the eastern border of Cattaraugus Territory, sometimes identified as the place of Go-won-go

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Mohawk’s birth. It can be read as backlash to the recent Supreme Court decision or more generally as part of the unrelenting assaults on Seneca lands, and it was orchestrated under Mohawk’s name. This was the work of the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM), a nationwide fraternal order that began in the 1830s to revive the aims of some earlier organizations: to appropriate Indianness for American nationalism and business interests. The IORM developed complex vocabulary, rituals, and costumes, all loosely designed on those of North America’s Indigenous peoples, often deploying them to underline the inevitable vanishment of those they mimicked. Philip Deloria named this project “custodial history,” quoting one Red Man: “When the time comes that the Indian race is extinct, our Order will occupy a place original and unique, growing more interesting as years pass on, and becoming at once, the interpreter of Indian customs and the repository of Indian traditions. Could a higher destiny await any Organization?”124 On March 5, 1898, when Mohawk’s international fame was at its height, businessmen of Gowanda instituted a local lodge and called themselves the Gowongo (sometimes Go-wan-go) Mohawk Tribe.125 The following year, just after the land claim decision came down, they invited Red Men tribes from the City of Buffalo to “invade” Gowanda.126 What played out in this seizing of Native space was entangled indeed. On July 22, 1899, members of twenty-four “city tribes” of the Buffalo IORM disembarked at the Gowanda train station, welcomed by fifty members of the Gowongo Mohawk Tribe of Red Men.127 In an eerie echo of Indigenous ceremonies of the Four Directions, the two groups paraded around the “principal streets” of the village in a precisely mapped route marking their territory; as one newspaper headline put it, “Red Men Now Own Gowanda; Buffalo Tribes Capture the Little Village.”128 There was, however, a wrinkle to this takeover, as the third line of the heading noted: “Real Article Was Out in Force to Witness the Coming”; “What appeared to be the entire population of Cattaraugus Reservation lent a picturesque appearance to the scene. Sharp featured, keen eyed old Indian braves accompanied by round-faced squaws came in from the reservation by the hundred, attracted by the celebration of their pale-faced imitators.”129 Among the Seneca Nation present that day was “C. C. Lay’s famous Seneca Indian Band,” which led the Buffalo Red Men around town, while the Gowongo Mohawks were headed by the Gowanda Cornet Band. Lay was a prominent musician and an important figure in the community: he had earlier been elected president of the Seneca Nation and later he was called on to

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disburse the federal settlement to Cattaraugus Senecas.130 Over two days of celebration, the Gowanda Opera House hosted a “variety entertainment” in which Red Men and Indigenous people alternately performed and acted as spectators for each other; the IORM Seneca Tribe would visit the Seneca Nation on Cattaraugus Territory; and the assembled “Red Men” would watch “the reservation Indians” exhibit their lacrosse skills.131 Vocabularies became mired down in category confusion as journalists struggled to distinguish one group from another: “local Red Men,” “genuine Red Men,” “The men of the real coloring,” and “real Indians” becoming entangled across the very lines of difference the ritual was designed to reinforce.132 It was extraordinary for an entire performance of land theft to be ritualized under the name of a popular Indigenous performer, but more general enmeshment in organizations such as the IORM was one of the conditions with which Indigenous performers had to reckon in their survival, given the social and economic power of such groups. They formed audiences for Indian entertainment and commissioned Indigenous entertainers to enhance their rituals. Go-won-go Mohawk spoke of being enthusiastically received by “wannabee” audiences. In 1891, for example, forty members of the Hammonasset tribe of Red Men attended her production at Bunnell’s Grand Opera House in New Haven, Connecticut.133 Looking “for little points which might be useful to them in their pow-wows,” they too “gave a war-whoop in honor of the star, who responded by appearing before the curtain.”134 Mohawk responded to this segment of her public by wearing an IORM medal adapted to her own design, along with a Seneca silverwork brooch and her red butterfly; leading a Tammany parade in 1893; and speaking of support received from the Wood Choppers.135 Organizations that appropriated her name included at least three lodges of the IORM, a council of the women’s equivalent, Degree of Pocahontas, and a lodge of the Daughters of the American Revolution.136 Indeed, many of the performers’ names cited in this book were appropriated by such organizations. Read in this context, the frontier Far West that Mohawk created for Wep-Ton-No-Mah and the wooded setting of An Indian Romance begin to have resonances closer to home. Gowanda was long known by Senecas as a racist environment; in 2001, John Mohawk, distinguished professor, enrolled member of the Seneca Nation, and resident of Cattaraugus, called it an “antiIndian border town.”137 It was a local instance of the innumerable physical and cultural borders not of their own making that pressed in on the People of Turtle

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Island. On the popular stage and in her cabinet cards, Go-won-go Mohawk devised and performed her own border-crossing action and identity. Hedged around as the space of performance remained with the kind of caricatured expectations promoted by the IORM and embodied by some of her plays’ characters, nevertheless Mohawk traversed limits put on gender, sexuality, race, place, and Nation with spectacular virtuosity.

conclusion Go-won-go Mohawk’s performance career, as reconstructed in this chapter, suggests that she gradually reshaped vaudeville forms to make them appropriate for Indigenous spectacle, in the process intervening in several modern media. The gender-bending images that she produced in her melodrama she then took into cabinet-card and postcard production. She parried an attempt by the dime-novel industry to take over her image. Her first stageplay became a film. And she converted marketplace competition into Indian vaudeville with her last copyrighted playscript. The crossing of conventional boundaries and playing with cultural markers were reinforced in her publicity, which consistently juxtaposed the signifiers “genuine Indian” and “metropolitan,” a claim to Indigenous cosmopolitanism that again defied stereotypes.138 Her playscripts, and the IORM rituals done in her name, also show that to move beyond the frames imposed by dominant culture did not mean to enter safe space. Mohawk and those who came after made vaudeville a space of Indigenous possibility, continuance, and resilience, but it was always bordered by dangers and divisiveness. To quote Coll Thrush again, it remained “a domain of entanglement.”139 The force of engaging with the marketplace, of recovering lived identities from demeaning print representation through embodied performance, can be registered through one final comparison. In one of his Go-won-go dime novels, Prentiss Ingraham has a real-life showman-scout, Jack Crawford, thank her for shooting down Cheyenne warriors with the oft-repeated nineteenth-century dictum, variously ascribed to Philip Sheridan and Theodore Roosevelt: “Yes, they are good Indians, now.”140 Such is the continuing force of this statement of genocide that Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble used it as the title of their show The Only Good Indian . . . in 2007. In reviewing Go-won-go Mohawk’s performances, more than one journalist used this “old adage of the plainsman” as their baseline: “If, as some of the old plainsmen used to say, the only good Indian is a dead Indian, Go-won-go Mohawk, one time of the Cattaraugus

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reservation and now of Edgewater, N.J., must be a really truly, tomahawking terror of the plains, for she is the most vital creature imaginable from her blueblack hair and sparkling dark eyes to her flashing teeth and long, slender lithe body.”141 It is chilling testimony to what was seen as the threat of Indigenous vibrancy.

2nd Vaudeville Number Pri n ce ss W a ta h wa so a nd Yo ung C hie f P ool a w S i n g “I ndia n Lo v e Ca l l ”

ON NOVEMBER 4, 1927, at the Murray Theatre, Richmond, Indiana, Levolo and Reed ran off stage at the end of their “hokum” comedy act on the slack wire and the curtain opened on the fourth spot. The scene was “a painted drop of a teepee in a forest clearing”; posing before it were two women of the Penobscot Nation and two men of the Kiowa Nation, each clothed in distinctively designed materials, from the women’s beautifully decorated fringed buckskin dresses to the feathered arm bustles and bells of Kiowa fancy dancing to Plains Indian beading and full-feather headdresses (figure 2VN.1). For the next fifteen minutes, they wove together a musical revue titled “The Courtship of Rippling Water,” singing and orating with and to each other, soaring soprano with deep baritone, accompanying one other in “war” and “jazz” dances, “the tom-toms mingling with violin and other civilized musical instruments,” as one newspaper put it. The climax joined Princess Watahwaso/Lucy Nicolar of the Penobscot Nation (1882–1969) and Young Chief Poolaw/Bruce Poolaw of the Kiowa Nation (1903–1984) in a duet of “Indian Love Call,” the most famous song from the recent Broadway hit Rose Marie. The press called it “one of the most beautiful revues in vaudeville.”1 This was Princess Watawaso and Her Royal Americans, in one version of the vaudeville troupe led by Lucy Nicolar.2 In every combination, its membership crossed genders, generations, and Indigenous Nations, including Penobscot, Kiowa, Cherokee, Comanche, Onondaga, and Pawnee entertainers. 1 21

Figure 2VN.1.  Princess Watawaso and Her Royal Americans. Left to right: Young Chief Poolaw, Princess Watahwaso, Princess Wantura, Tommie Little Chief. Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, February 19, 1928 (Alabama Department of Archives and History)

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Forty years after Go-won-go Mohawk’s staging of a cross-race community, Princess Watahwaso produced all-Indian—that is, trans-Indigenous—community on the popular stage, each troupe member carrying his or her own performance lineages and developments, in her case joining popular performance and politics. Although vaudeville was a late, brief interval in Princess Watahwaso’s long career, reconnecting this act to some of the history of its making suggests the powerful relations—past and future—she brought to bear on that venue.3 Her repurposing of a Broadway ballad as trans-Indigenous, intergenerational community echoes through the generations, most vividly, a half-century later in work by Spiderwoman Theater.

indian island, maine On June 22, 1882, Lucy Nicolar was born into a community that had been under assault by generations of settler invasion yet remained, and remains, a sovereign Nation—“the oldest continuous government in the world”—resilient and creative in its cultural and artistic practices.4 The Penobscot Nation had negotiated the peoples’ continuity and survival with successive European forces, up to the making of nation-to-nation treaties with the new United States government and subsequently with Maine when it became a state in 1820. Through the various onslaughts, tricks, and broken agreements of these governments, as well as the decimation of the population by foreign diseases, Penobscot territory that had stretched for hundreds of thousands of acres across what became northern New England had, by the late nineteenth century, shrunk to Indian Island and some smaller islands north of it on the beautiful Penobscot River. In that period, as railway lines extended throughout Maine, the tourist economy took off and Penobscots’ distinctive skills—as hunting guides, birchbark canoe makers, and basket weavers—were in great demand. The community also had highly developed performance skills from their own ceremonial and social events, and some groups and individuals used them to find work in commercial entertainment venues—dime museums, medicine shows, circuses, variety houses—that were mushrooming as part of the same cultural economy. Basket-making itself became a site of performance, as tourists were drawn to watch the artists at work and younger Penobscots danced and sang for this audience. Lucy Nicolar’s own forebears—the Nicola and Neptune families—were part of the Nation’s distinguished lineage of leadership. Most immediately, her father, Joseph Nicolar, was elected several times as tribal representative to

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Maine’s state legislature, he served in various formal capacities within the Nation, and he was also one of its unofficial spokespeople as a newspaper commentator and author. Her mother, Elizabeth Josephs Nicolar, played important organizational roles within the community, including co-founding the Wabanaki Club of Indian Island, which would become a member of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs. She was a highly accomplished basket-maker who also managed trade relations with agents and customers.5 Joseph Nicolar’s work in speaking to multiple publics anticipates some of the challenges that his daughter would face but also some of the enabling connections among politics, community education, and popular performance they both fostered. In 1892, during his period as representative to the legislature, he teamed up with another member of the Penobscot Nation, the itinerant showman and early vaudevillian Frank Loring/Big Thunder. They mounted an “entertainment” in the City Hall of Old Town, across the river from Indian Island, where the local newspaper review suggested its range: Nicolar’s “lecture on the traditions of his people was found very interesting. The representation of Indian games by Big Thunder and others was very amusing.”6 The symbiosis between politics and entertainment was one of the legacies marking Lucy Nicolar’s career. In 1893, Joseph Nicolar published The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, a powerful work that tells the creation stories, histories, and lifeways of his people. The challenges involved in the book’s production have been described by Nicolar’s grandson, Charles Norman Shay: It was a very difficult time for Native Americans when my grandfather was growing up because we had no rights even though we were living in our own land. We were wards of the state, and this put us in a special classification of people. We had no right to vote. We had a man that was appointed by the state to watch over our financial affairs and so forth. We had no control over our own lives; it was all controlled by the white men. And I can imagine that this was very degrading for people like my grandfather and people in general because we were not [helpless], we had our own way of living, we knew, we had our own form of government before the white man came, and we knew how to survive, and suddenly this was all taken away from us.7 Shay thanked his grandfather “for having the foresight and discipline to write this book”; “he was very courageous to go about it and do it and put it down.”8

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Joseph Nicolar makes some of these pressures explicit in the book’s preface. He eschews histories published by white people, such is the depth of misrepresentation and misunderstanding by “the learned of these modern dates.”9 The urgent need for a Penobscot to put in writing “the simple and natural state of life, habits and ways” is spurred by the community’s fear “that the life of the red man will pass away unwritten.” Nicolar proudly lays out his lifelong work as a Penobscot researcher, but he also acknowledges the pressure of popular expectations: “I was never educated to that degree as to be able to excite the feelings of the people and make them pronounce me as a brilliant and popular writer. However, I have undertaken the work and have done it in my own way; have given the full account of all the traditions as I have gathered them from my people.”10 And so that this community knowledge will be passed on intergenerationally, this account is written “in a simple way and manner, so that even the small children will readily understand [it].”11 Lucy Nicolar would have been ten or eleven when her father’s book was published; she may well have read it and absorbed his thoughts on the pressures of white misrepresentations, modernity, and popularity.

“no one ‘discovered’ me; i just knew i could sing” Bunny McBride, who worked with Nicolar’s descendants and community for her biography Princess Watahwaso, has traced how Nicolar’s performance career began in the family. She sang and danced with her two sisters for tourists come to buy her family’s baskets at Maine coastal resorts where Penobscot families traveled in the summer along long-established seasonal routes; later, she made baskets and performed with her family at sportsmen’s shows around the East Coast.12 Pursuing her education beyond the Catholic primary school on Indian Island and the Old Town high school, Nicolar left Indian Island at fifteen to work for Harvard administrator Montague Chamberlain in Boston. This connection helped give her access to a white cultural elite, but Nicolar’s own telling of her life makes it clear that above all she used her own talents: “No one ‘discovered’ me; I just knew I could sing.”13 By 1900 she was performing as “Princess Watahwaso (‘Bright Star’),” presenting “songs and dances interpreting the customs of her tribe” to women’s clubs, society venues, and schools in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, where she moved in 1913.14 She joined the Redpath Chautauqua circuit for 1917 to 1919 and then moved on to New York City, where she debuted as “Indian Mezzo-soprano Princess Watahwaso” at Aeolian Hall on April 7, 1920, and made records for

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the Victor Talking Machine Company.15 Along the way, she married two nonNative men: a wealthy Boston doctor and then a lawyer, Tom Gorman, who became her manager. All this she had done before going on the vaudeville circuit. The standard narrative for Indigenous (and other) performers of the era was aspiration to move upward from vaudeville to Chautauqua, concert hall, and movie or audio recording. Sometimes, as in the case of the Ho-Chunk movie star Red Wing, vaudeville was a last resort on a downward route from fame. But Lucy Nicolar’s move was more sideways. When she and Tom Gorman moved to New York City, he became a manager for the Hippodrome, and she seems to have taken advantage of the connection to expand her repertoire. The distinctiveness of her vaudeville work is clearest in comparison to her time on Chautauqua. Indigenous women singers on Chautauqua circuits often appeared solo with a white male Indianist composer-musician whose stock in trade was the appropriation of traditional Indigenous expression into western structures. Lucy Nicolar toured with one of the best known, Thurlow Lieurance; she also sang compositions by Charles Wakefield Cadman (better known for his work with Creek/Cherokee mezzo-soprano Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone) and other Indianists. She released a recording of Lieurance’s compositions, including her most popular number, “By the Waters of Minnetonka.”16 Nicolar’s power is evidenced, in part, by her earning more than Lieurance and by her refusal to sing one of Lieurance’s arrangements until she had made contact with the Chippewa people from whom it was derived.17 Whatever was happening behind the scenes, Chautauqua, under its banner of education and gentility, framed Indigenous women as maidenly presences and rested authority in white male composers. Thus Lucy Nicolar, an established performer in her mid-thirties, could be publicly positioned as “a little princess, charming and demure” or as a subordinate: “Thurlow Lieurance, the young Kansas composer, who with the assistance of the Indian Princess Watahwaso will appear in a recital . . . has adopted [sic] his life to the preservation of the songs of the Indians.”18 On the vaudeville stage, despite appearing in attire similar to what she wore on Chautauqua—long buckskin dress, beautifully beaded and fringed— and singing some of the same repertoire, Lucy Nicolar fundamentally changed those public dynamics. In 1927, drawing on the community of Indigenous performers from across the country who congregated in New York City—where her Sunday-night dinner gatherings were famous—she put together a troupe

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crossing gender, Nation, and generation. At various times it included the younger Penobscots Molly Spotted Elk and Princess Golden Rod; Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa rodeo star from Oklahoma, and his friend Tommie Little Chief, also Kiowa, who arrived in New York City via another troupe member, Cherokee soprano Princess Wantura; and other Comanche, Onondaga, and Pawnee performers. Under different troupe names, for two years they toured the bigtime Keith-Albee and Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuits in New York City, around the Northeast, as far west as Iowa, south into Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, and north into Ontario and Quebec. Singing, dancing, and orating in solo and paired combinations, the troupe sustained a broad repertoire. They joined the Indian Revue and Indian jazz groups who thronged vaudeville stages in the 1920s. They retained some of Princess Watahwaso’s established repertoire of Indianist compositions and presented some of their tribally specific works. Although the press did not always identify each performer’s Nation accurately, reviewers consistently acknowledged the troupe’s power as an Indigenous collective, virtuoso in performance forms embracing “ancient Indian and ultra-Broadway steps” and sustaining urban-homeland connections: “all four are much more at home in a drawing room than on the reservation. None of them, however, have foregone his or her tribal rights, each maintaining their native connections and associations.”19 When Nicolar was interviewed early in 1927 about taking “a group of Indian singers” to Europe, she said: “I hope to dislodge thoroughly from continental minds the usual conception of American Indians as primitive savages, swinging tomahawks and uttering blood-cur[d]ling whoops as they swoop over western plains.”20 Her overseas plans apparently did not come to fruition; instead, she developed in North America a vaudeville act that fulfills similar purposes by different means.

“indian love call” One way in which Princess Watahwaso’s troupe put the public performance of Indigenous relations center stage was by reorienting commercialized popular forms that had been used to contain and eliminate Indigenous presence. “Indian Love Call” was the centerpiece of their revue, “The Courtship of Rippling Water.” Characterized as “a romantic, musical piece presented in the revue style, inasmuch as plot, while present, is least important,” its setting was singled out for praise: “the scenic investiture is beautiful—a glimpse of a fantastic Indian camp.”21 That description puts the revue in the company of

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many Broadway musicals and operettas of the era, except that this one was shaped, produced, and performed by Indigenous artists. In 1927, there was a plethora of “Indian Love Call” performances on popular stages across North America and Europe, but I have not seen coverage of any other by Indigenous singers in that period. The song was the most popular of Rudolf Friml’s compositions for Rose Marie, a sentimental operetta with book and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, which opened on Broadway on September 2, 1924, and went on to set records with its runs in New York, London, and Paris—“The biggest grosser of its decade.”22 Its success placed it in the international circuit—from New York to London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and Moscow—being carved out by musical theater. Jace Weaver has positioned Rose Marie in a very different lineage. In 1994, under the title “Ethnic Cleansing, Homestyle,” Weaver mapped the long fetch of American musicals on stage and screen that have prospered, box-office-wise, by appropriating and distorting Indigenous culture, from “Tammany; or the Indian Chief” in 1794 onward.23 By this measure, “Indian Love Call” was one of several means by which Rose Marie demeaned and disappeared Indigenous peoples. As Weaver points out, the show traded in racist caricatures in its Indian characters—Black Eagle and Wanda—who make up the subplot and its trivialization of Indigenous culture, such as its “Totem Tom-Tom” number, with “Girls in totem dresses” in synchronized “Wigwam” formation.24 The main plot, set in the Canadian West and Quebec, mounts a star-crossed love affair between Rose Marie La Flamme, a French-Canadian singer, and Jim Kenyon, a white miner. “Indian Love Call” is predicated on a legend of Indian marriage rituals—Rose Marie tells Jim, “De Indians teach dat call to me when I am a little girl”—that the hero and heroine mimic by duetting the song throughout the action and in the romantic resolution with the lyrics’ (and the show’s) final two lines: “You’ll belong to me / I’ll belong to you.”25 Among the white appropriations of Indianness, as Weaver points out: “Musically, Rose-Marie and Jim’s ‘Indian Love Call,’ supposed to be a Native song, was nowhere near Native in its chromatics.”26 I would argue that, when Lucy Nicolar incorporated this number into her vaudeville show during the revival of Rose Marie in New York, she upended those dynamics. Rather than two white actors (Mary Ellis and Dennis King) playing Indian in their song-making, on the vaudeville stage a Penobscot woman and Kiowa man sang to and with each other. While some accoutrements of dress and setting conformed to notions of “a thoroughly typical

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atmosphere,” the number was hailed as “a new arrangement.”27 Singing the song “in both English and Indian,” Princess Watahwaso added asides in which she explained “the manner an Indian brave proposes to a girl.”28 Whatever the markers of stereotyped Indianness, Nicolar and Poolaw were also playing out mutual attraction, Indigenous sexuality, and they were looking at each other with love. It was a dynamic that went beyond the stage: soon Lucy Nicolar would take Bruce Poolaw, who was twenty years younger, as her lifelong lover, husband, and business partner. Reconstructing vaudeville acts is challenging. The ephemeral nature of the form and the huge number of acts made for sparse reviews. What may be the closest reconstruction of the dynamic between Nicolar and Poolaw in their duet is a photograph by Poolaw’s brother, distinguished photographer Horace Poolaw (figure 2VN.2), taken during the period in which they staged “Indian Love Call” and in the same attire they wore on stage. Laura E. Smith suspects that “this image may reference their vaudeville act” and reports that Horace Poolaw’s daughter, Linda S. Poolaw, has speculated that Lucy Nicolar, with her understanding of “show Indian” dynamics, may well have influenced Horace Poolaw’s composition of this and other “playful portraits.”29 The look that they share in this photograph, the connection through which they suggest their enjoyment of each other, takes the notion of reciprocal looking to another level. In previous chapters I have noted that the vaudeville auditorium made available to Indigenous entertainers a degree of rapport with the audience—a looking and return of the look—different in scale and intimacy from other venues. Nicolar and Poolaw’s act brings attention to performers also looking at each other. One way of imagining the response created in the audience by this act is to compare it with The Daughter of Dawn, a contemporaneous film with an allIndigenous cast also shot in the Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma—its production witnessed by Horace Poolaw—and released in 1920.30 In the film, characters played by Kiowa and Comanche actors look at each other with love, desire, respect, revulsion; the circular zoom frame takes spectators into the perspective of the spurned lover spying on the woman he desires and of the hunter spotting buffalo for his people. Watching the 2012 restoration, I found these on-screen relations of looking deeply moving, more powerful and unexpected than the plot’s western formulas of sentimentalism. In a period when multiple forces were trained on eliminating Indigenous personhood, the film’s audience watched Indigenous actors looking at each other, bearing witness to

Figure 2VN.2.  Photograph by Horace Poolaw of Bruce Poolaw and Lucy “Wattawasso” Nicolar Poolaw, Mountain View, Oklahoma, ca. 1928 (Photograph used with permission of the Horace Poolaw Estate and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma)

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each other’s lived humanity, embodying sexuality and mutual desire. In their live enactment of this reciprocity, in their vaudeville act, Nicolar and Poolaw surely also overrode the encrusted formulas within which they moved. Horace Poolaw’s photograph also shows the living connection between popular performance and homeland. In the image, the couple is literally grounded in place, on “a raised bluff near the Poolaw home in Mountain View,” Oklahoma.31 In acting out this moment in the dress that they wore on the vaudeville stage, they suggest—as did Will Rogers, Esther Deer, and other Indigenous performers—the power of material culture as connective tissue, one way in which Indigenous performers carried their land and community with them. The vest worn by Bruce Poolaw in the photograph and on the vaudeville stage connected backward and forward in time through the medium of Horace Poolaw’s camera. In at least two of Horace Poolaw’s portraits of Kiowa elders, dated around 1930, they wear this same vest. One shows Heap of Bear, or Many Bears, the other Harry A-hote or Kau-tau-a-hote-tau (“Buffalo Killer”), “a Poolaw family relative” who “served in the all-Indian U.S. Calvary unit, Troop L, at Fort Sill in the 1890s and was an Ohomah Society member, a Kiowa military society.”32 The power of these photographic homages to the dignity and stature of the elders was only reinforced when Horace Poolaw made them into postcards to be sold at local Indian fairs, tribally run venues that he celebrated as sites of Indigenous continuity and vitality.33 The journey that the Poolaw brothers’ vest traces through popular circulation makes connections across generations, cultural sites, military events, and social relations. Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation, Turtle Clan) has written that “photographs made by indigenous makers are the documentation of our sovereignty . . . the images are all connected, circling in ever-sprawling spirals the terms of our experiences as human beings . . . hooking memories through time.”34 When an Indigenous artist on the vaudeville stage—in this case, Lucy Nicolar Poolaw—seized enough creative and material control to repurpose dominant stereotypes as performed images of lived Indigenous relations, some of that same power, connectivity, and memory work was set in motion.

sun moon and feather Another way to reckon the power of the lived connections performed by Lucy Nicolar Poolaw and Bruce Poolaw is to follow Indigenous meanings made of “Indian Love Call” in its next major iteration. Three motion pictures were made of Rose Marie, the best-known released in 1936, with Jeanette MacDonald and

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Nelson Eddy as the star-crossed lovers who ultimately reunite. Several changes were made from the 1924 playscript. The setting now moves between Montreal and the woods of northern Quebec; the heroine is a white American opera singer with a French name but no audible signs of a French identity; and her lover is a white Canadian Mountie. They sing “Indian Love Call” at several moments of emotional intensity in the film, in the process adding more layers of Indigenous erasure. The lovers first hear the dying echo of the song from Native voices in a mountain valley; then Sergeant Bruce explains that the song tells of doomed Indian lovers whose families’ refusal to let them wed led to a double suicide; and then the two white lovers take over the song, playing Indian in their search for a route to matrimony. Among the millions who watched this film were the two oldest GunaRappahannock Miguel sisters of Spiderwoman Theater, Elizabeth Miguel (who later performed as Lisa Mayo) and Gloria Miguel, who saw it as children in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the 1930s. The first show mounted by Spiderwoman as a distinctly Indigenous work with only the three Miguel sisters was Sun Moon and Feather. It premiered at the New Foundland Theater, New York, in 1981 and has since played across Turtle Island, Europe, Australia, and China and has been made into a film.35 The title derives from the sisters’ Rappahannock names, and the work revolves around their familial relationships and themselves as sisters caring for each other in the poverty, violence, but also strong community of growing up Native in an Italian area of Brooklyn. In reenacting these relations, the show joins quotations from Chekhov’s Three Sisters with lived memories, home movies, commercial film clips, and popular culture quotations. As in Rose Marie, the performance of “Indian Love Call” is one of the most well-known moments in Sun Moon and Feather. It is the last of the childhood games played out in the show, Gloria Miguel insisting on playing Jeanette MacDonald, Lisa Mayo reluctantly agreeing to play Nelson Eddy, and Muriel Miguel, despite a desperate offer to play the horse, being left on the sidelines. In the versions recorded at the American Indian Community House in 1997 and 2006, the mainly Indigenous audience sounds hilariously delighted as Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo lovingly describe their features and dress, sing ecstatically to each other, and then end in a clinch with three kisses. The sequence has also proved to be something of a critical flashpoint, with several non-Indigenous feminist critics writing enthusiastically of the power of the performance as “counter-mimicry,” revealing the absurdity of dominant forms

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of representation.36 Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi scholar and theatrical practitioner Jill Carter has a notably different and highly persuasive reading. She argues that Spiderwoman’s performance is not primarily a deconstructive act—not only parody—oriented toward the dominant and ultimately contained by it, but rather an enactment of imagination, connection, and survivance, situated in the specific sisterly and larger community relationship. I quote Carter at length; she provides an Indigenous-centered reading of this performance that can lead toward healing: Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo do not simply mimic the Hollywood icons who introduced the “Indian Love Call” into the cultural lexicon and “orientalist” imaginings of North America. They publicly re-play their younger selves who are training themselves for what they will become. They turn their gaze (and our gaze) upon the children that they were—young, beautiful, talented, creative dreamers. And these young artists-in-training would, at this time, have been playing out their own dreams of escape from Red Hook, Brooklyn and from the metonyms that they themselves were being forced to play in the Miguel family business—the Mohica Medicine Shows. . . . The non-Native viewer may have need of the easily accessible political lesson, which is imbedded in this scene, but the Native viewer has little need of this particular lesson; she knows it all too well. What this viewer may need is a lesson in transcendence: . . . two little brown girls nurtured that imagination in themselves and in so doing, nurtured the artistic voices that would facilitate the escape of which they dreamed. At the end of the day, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo re-play the story of two little girls who are finding their voices together: despite the humorous arguing and the jockeying for position (both of these little girls want to play the ingénue), they discover their individual instruments and how to make those instruments blend. Lisa Mayo is a mezzo-soprano, and her voice (now, as it probably was then) is best suited for the lower (Nelson Eddy’s) part. Gloria Miguel is a natural coloratura soprano; her voice is best suited for the higher (Jeanette MacDonald’s) part. Together, they harmonize beautifully, and we bear witness to the genesis of a choral community in which each voice fulfills its role; each voice contributes beautifully to a larger whole.

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Carter proceeds to challenge Rebecca Schneider’s reading: “To characterize this scene as merely ‘spoofing the gaze of the white’ . . . is to ignore these layers and to attempt to simplify the complex (and perhaps, politically inconvenient) truth that as children, the elder Miguel sisters actually enjoyed watching Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, admired their musical abilities and now credit these performers for being (along with the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy) early artistic influences. . . . These performers and the movies in which they appeared are part of their story and are honored as such.”37 Carter points out that, especially in the film version of Sun Moon and Feather, in which Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo perform “Indian Love Call” in front of a projection of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy doing the same, the differences are evident. Gloria exults, “I’m Jeanette MacDonald and I have great big green eyes and long red hair that comes down to there. And I have a low-cut white dress that goes down to there and goes in like this and out like that and lace all around the bottom”—much of which is contradicted by the sensibly clad figure in the 1936 film.38 Lisa’s description—“I’ve got a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform on. A big red jacket. I’m wearing black leather boots up to here. I have a big tan hat with a leather thong under my chin”—is closer, except for the last detail, as Carter notes. These are not errors but elaborations that they share— part of their own memory-making that keeps them alive and bonds them, as they sing together in a present tense that again subtly revises the futureoriented promise of the original lyrics aimed at white heterosexual union: You belong to me I belong to you (They run to each other and dramatically kiss three times.)39 Carter’s argument, that healing and interrelational self-making are at the heart of this theatrical piece generally and “Indian Love Call” specifically, is borne out by the sisters’ off-stage reflections. Lisa Mayo spoke about “fantastic games that went on for days and days . . . We have wonderful stories of making ourselves happy, protecting ourselves from the cruel world out there . . . That was like the core of Sun, Moon, and Feather, starting with what we did as children.”40 In the final sequence of Spiderwoman’s stageplay, the scene moves from “Indian Love Call” into Chekhov’s Three Sisters to the deaths of their parents, and the sisters’ language, reinforced by the silent home movies that play over and around their bodies, insists on the persistence of their family in

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themselves: “(Film on. Lights dim. They sing “We Three” in the dark until film ends.)”41 “Indian Love Call” makes an appearance in several contemporary Indigenous plays.42 What is particularly illuminated by juxtaposing its performances by Spiderwoman Theater and by Princess Watawaso and Her Royal Americans is how Indigenous artists could generate personal, familial, and communal bonds out of mass culture forms celebrating their elimination. Early in Sun Moon and Feather, Lisa asks, “How did we make it?”43 Part of the healing journey that the sisters enact in the show, and climactically in the final duet, as parsed by Jill Carter, rests on the movement from spectatorship to performance—from being in the audience watching yet another vanishing Indian entertainment that commodified Native life, love, and death to being on the stage reframing and repurposing that act to create Indigenous-centered space, relations, and resurgence. The sisters brought the Hollywood movie screen into their own House of Gathering, performing their own “home movie” version in front of their extended family’s actual home movies of “Beautiful Indian faces” and “the lovely islands that they come from.”44 Comparable relations were enacted on the vaudeville stage when Princess Watahwaso brought her own homeland cultures and lineages together with those of other troupe members, and they turned a Broadway number into an occasion for trans-Indigenous community. Lucy Nicolar Poolaw also carried those relationships back to her home on Indian Island, establishing a life there with Bruce Poolaw from 1929 and using their stagecraft and commercial know-how in the service of community politics and Indigenous rights.45 Lucy Nicolar Poolaw was one of the Indigenous women performers Muriel Miguel paid tribute to when she was honored at La MaMa in 2017, for going out into the world and coming back, making Spiderwoman and later generations of Indigenous artistry possible. Miguel’s homage to her forebears went far beyond one act or one troupe on the vaudeville stage. Nevertheless, remembering her words encourages me to hear the back-and-forth echoes between these two performances of “Indian Love Call” as sounds of convergence, connection, and living lineages that bridge the fifty-plus years between them and bring Indigenous transformation to the meanings made by mass culture.

c h a p te r t hre e

Princess White Deer, Her Family, and Her Show Blanket

IN THE EXHIBITION ABOUT THE KANIEN′KEHÁ:KA (Mohawk) of Kahnawà:ke in the Kanien′kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center, one panel tells the story of Paul K. Diabo. He was the Mohawk ironworker who, from 1926 to 1928, fought and won in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia his right, as a Caughnawaga Mohawk (as the English-language documents of the day put it) to free passage across the Canada-U.S. international border. It was a landmark case, upholding the Jay Treaty of 1794 and reaffirming Iroquois sovereignty.1 Next to the exhibition panel, standing in the corner, is a figure I found puzzling and incongruous: a male mannequin dressed in a typical wild west show outfit of fringed, beaded buckskin suit and big feathered headdress—not particularly Iroquoian in design, it resembled the more stereotypical panIndian style that Buffalo Bill and the like made famous. Why had the figure been positioned next to the Paul Diabo story? “That’s the outfit he wore in court,” explained Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, Kanien′kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke, Cultural Liaison, architect of the exhibition, and librarian to the center. I think I looked puzzled. “In that period, in the 1920s, it was the only way to ensure he would be recognized as ‘Indian’—and this court case was a major victory for Indians.”2 The moment became a touchstone for me in understanding how politics, public recognition, and popular paraphernalia could work together in 136

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Indigenous people’s hands. Their achievement in enforcing the freedom of movement and labor was not lessened but made more visible by being clothed in an outfit often considered only a getup for commercial consumption.3 “But I didn’t like how naked his forearms and wrists looked with this costume,” Thomas Deer continued, “so I put my own ribbon shirt on underneath.” Looking closely, I could see the deep red cloth sleeves and brightly beribboned cuffs below the buckskin fringes, one garment of Indigenous pride affirming another. The figure embodies a layering by which Mohawk identity is both protected and announced by the outer layer of expected stereotype; the outer garment is revealed by its underlay to have culturally specific power too; and a mobility at once geographical and intergenerational takes material form.4 What Teiowí:sonte Deer made visible has become my framework for tracing the performance strategies of Esther Deer, also known as Princess White Deer, and her family of Mohawk entertainers, who were contemporaries of Diabo in Caughnawaga and its neighboring community of St. Regis (now Ahkwesáhsne).5 The Deers went on entertainment circuits from the 1860s, ultimately performing across three continents and many countries. The Diabo case draws attention to the stakes in the family’s crossing of international borders, negotiating, as they had to, the power held over their movement by the Canadian and U.S. governments. The Deers devised ways of asserting their own authority over space—in their case, the space of performance—through legal mechanisms of contract and copyright and through astute management of their acts and audiences. The figure of Diabo, especially as clothed by Teiowí:sonte Deer, also highlights the personal, political, and popular meanings imbuing the performance regalia in which the Deers staged these acts, including layers of intergenerational relations and trans-Indigenous community that were accrued over time and that would be more or less visible to audience members of different cultures and nations. Within the Deers’ geographical journey and movement up the entertainment hierarchy, vaudeville figures as a turning point. It was the venue where—first in Europe, then back in North America— the Deers consolidated their creative agency and multiple forms of cultural work converged. While the troupe made its mark on what are conventionally considered sites of western modernity (internationalism, cosmopolitanism, mass entertainment), they were also deeply engaged in Indigenous-centered relations that followed their own spatial and temporal logics. In order to trace the vaudeville turn in the Deers’ performance journey, this chapter begins several decades earlier. I first position the family within the

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lineage of Mohawk entertainment and then turn to a rare first-person perspective: an 1885 memoir by James Deer, Esther Deer’s father. Although its focus is a military expedition, its relevance here is twofold: for how Deer later adapted the account for his stage career and for what it reveals about the alienation and danger to Mohawk workers of traveling abroad under colonial authority. I read the next three decades of the Deers’ work in popular entertainment partly as efforts to establish their professional autonomy, protect their cultural identities, and sustain home relations even as they traveled through multiple venues— wild west shows, stage melodramas, early moving pictures—and circuits on both sides of the Atlantic. These efforts crystallized in the theatrical space of continental European Variété, British variety, and North American vaudeville, in acts and relations that I closely read during the remainder of the chapter. I pay particular attention to the topmost layer of Princess White Deer’s attire, the show blanket that she began to wield prominently, making it visible as a border between artist and audience, visibility and invisibility, the “collectively private” belief systems of her people and the commercialized sphere of entertainment.6 Read within all of this—the Deers’ geographical territory and borders they navigated, the layers of performance and costume they accrued, the webs of kinship and community they drew across commercial lines, and the spectatorial gazes they shaped—their acts become legible as assertions of Mohawk sovereignty, especially on the vaudeville stage.

the deer family in performance The history that the Deers carried with them from Mohawk Nation Territory has been characterized by Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Gerald Taiaiake Alfred as “brokerage” under pressure.7 Pushed northward from the seventeenth century by European invaders, some Mohawks established communities along the St. Lawrence River where, among other strategies of survivance, they positioned themselves as trade and political intermediaries among the British, French, and Iroquois. When European powers carved out Turtle Island in their own interests—establishing the United States in the late eighteenth century and Canada in the mid-nineteenth—Mohawks had to navigate more borders not of their own making: Kahnawà:ke lies north of what became the Canada-U.S. line, across the river from Montreal, while Ahkwesáhsne is crossed by the international border, as well as those of Ontario, Quebec, and New York State. In the face of genocidal Indian Acts, educational regimes, and land grabs, the Mohawk people sustained parallel governance structures,

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spiritual practices, and cultural forms, insisting on their identity as neither Canadian nor American, but Mohawk. In the words of anthropologist Audra Simpson, also Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke, they “are nationals of a precontact Indigenous polity that simply refuse to stop being themselves.”8 Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now a growing population on a shrinking land base, the Mohawks of Caughnawaga and St. Regis took on modern marketplace conditions with familiar versatility, developing forms of “mobile employment” out of their long-established skills.9 They seized itinerant opportunities with repeated returns home: moving back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border in lumber work, river piloting, military engagements, iron construction, sports, the sale of fine beadwork and basketry, and entertainment.10 Across this spectrum of undertakings, they sustained a pronounced public presence, especially from the 1860s, when mass culture mushroomed in and beyond North America. The ruling motif of non-Native press coverage was Indigenous presence as spectacle—variously threatening, picturesque, pathetic, or incongruous—whether they were engaged in sports, performance, or political action.11 One of the skills of Mohawk popular performance was to turn the expectation of spectacle to their own purposes. The Deer family was part of the first generation to enter the entertainment marketplace. Esther Deer records that her grandfather, Chief Running Deer (Ennias Ta-Si-Tai-Ari Os-Ka-Non-Do), was born in the 1830s in St. Regis, participated in the display for the Prince of Wales’s visit to Montreal in 1860, and was among the first to travel with P. T. Barnum’s show.12 By the early 1860s, Running Deer was running his own Indigenous company—dancing, singing, craft-making, trick riding—and he and his wife, Esther Martin Loft (Ka-NasTa-Ge, Bay of Quinte descendant of Joseph Brant), raised their family of five children as a theatrical troupe.13 Touring—eventually nationally and internationally—was part of the job, but the Deers sustained ties to their home communities, the two oldest sons John (Ta-Ka-Lo-Lus) and James (Ar-Ha-KenKia-Ka) intermittently figuring as spokespeople for St. Regis land claims and political gatherings. Even when Running Deer returned to St. Regis full-time in retirement, he continued to work colonially imposed borders by rafting visitors back and forth to his International Hotel, which, according to the 1892 census, was “bisected diagonally” by the border that “about equally divides the population of the American and Canadian members of the Saint Regis nation.”14 His movement illustrates how the Deers turned colonially imposed borders into opportunities; throughout the decades, when family members looked to legal

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protection for their work or geographical mobility, they chose their best chance among the several governments imposed on them.15 A Mohawk Perspective James Deer provided a first-person perspective on being a Mohawk abroad when, in 1885, he published his account of working as a boatman for the British army on the Nile in Egypt. In time, Deer would dovetail this military undertaking with his entertainment career, using it as part of his vaudeville billing and adapting it into a stage performance that his descendants would continue to mount until at least the 1950s. The memoir is also important to an understanding of the Deers’ entertainment career because of what it reveals about the experience of itineracy and authority. From the first, James Deer’s life was border crossed and border crossing. Although he self-identified as being born in 1866 “on the reservation of his tribe near Hogansburg, New York”—that is, on the part of Ahkwesáhsne situated south of the international border—other records show his birthplace as Mexico, New York, where his mother accompanied his father as he supervised an itinerant Indigenous lumber crew.16 James seems to have been baptized across the Canadian border on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory and then later in childhood sent to the—now notorious—Mohawk Institute, run by the Anglican church on the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in Ontario.17 By eighteen, he was in Caughnawaga, although “his claim to band membership at Kahnawake was challenged by the chiefs,” given his youthfulness and connections to St. Regis.18 The 1880s were the years in which Mohawk Territory was being carved up by Canada’s Walbank Survey, designed to divide up land and scarce resources and to issue the first membership list of who qualified as Mohawk according to the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, a process that sowed divisions within the community. Perhaps partly motivated by that climate, in 1884 James and his older brother John agreed to join a contingent of fifty-six Mohawk voyageurs recruited by the British to navigate the Nile in an effort to rescue “Chinese” Gordon, besieged by Sudanese Muslim forces in Khartoum. It was a typically doomed exercise in British imperialism, but when James Deer chose to publish his memoir of the experience, he provided an invaluable perspective on the literal and cultural navigation of transatlantic survival—one instance of a vast body of global navigations by Indigenous peoples. In fact, there were two accounts of the Nile expedition published by Caughnawaga Mohawks: The Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt by James D. Deer,

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who signed himself “(of Caughnawaga), One Of Their Number,” and Our Caughnawagas in Egypt by Louis Jackson, “of Caughnawaga, Captain of the Contingent.”19 Although both plot the same six months of travel and military service, and both agree that the British depended on them to navigate the cataracts of the Nile, the narrative perspectives are quite different. Unlike Jackson, Deer does no diplomatic work in terms of praising or thanking British imperial powers; indeed he provides almost no context for the military purpose of this expedition, his focus instead on a close-up account of being a Caughnawaga Indian abroad. The Mohawk voyageurs traveled by permission of Canada’s Governor General and under the authority of the British army, in the shape of General Lord Wolseley. Deer does not include this information, but he communicates a strong sense of traveling under alien authority. Proportionately, his work tells much more about the journey from and back to Caughnawaga than does Jackson’s. On the way out, what looms largest is the wielding of authority he does not understand. From the beginning—the leave-taking and initial stages of the journey—the narrative is peppered with disallowances by unidentified authorities. The voyageurs have almost no time with their Caughnawaga friends who have come to see them off at Montreal “as we were almost immediately ordered on board of the ship.”20 After five days at sea, they reach Sydney, Cape Breton, where “we were all anxious for permission to go on shore . . . but were disappointed on being obliged by the officers to march in gangs”—an obtuse order that Carl Benn, a later editor of the memoir, explains was designed to teach them British military formation; “we were halted and given leave to bathe . . . we were again disappointed . . . [we] were not allowed on shore again.”21 Deer also reports his fellow voyageurs’ punishment for unauthorized travel, from being denied shore privileges after lingering too long at a tourist site on the way out to being court-martialed for setting off too soon on the return. There is a through line from these attitudes to their treatment as they return from Egypt, with the ship heading for Ireland: “The soldiers who came with us to Queenstown were treated very well, but the voyageurs were treated like so many dogs.”22 As the journey home proceeds, the biggest threat comes from “the Ottawa Frenchmen” (French-Canadians), who repeatedly attack the Indians mid-Atlantic, in Halifax, in Moncton, and on the train back to Montreal, for reasons they cannot understand: “We afterwards asked the English the reason that the French had attacked us, and were told that it was jealousy, as they knew that we had done better work on the Nile than they did.”23

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The service in Egypt, which occupies less than one-third of the pamphlet, seems less threatening than the travel out and return. While Deer bluntly says, “Our work on the rapids of the Nile was extremely dangerous,” and he details hair-raising challenges and mishaps in shooting the rapids with full loads of soldiers and goods, he also communicates a strong sense of skill: this is danger that the men are experienced and talented in navigating.24 While Deer includes less touristic color than Jackson, he spends considerably more time trying to understand an incident that Jackson reports in passing: the drowning of Louis Capitaine, “another of our Indian boatmen.”25 Capitaine was steersman, but a British officer insisted on taking over the tiller. Deer speculates that Capitaine was so upset and distracted by this usurpation of his expertise that, when the steering went awry and he stepped to the bow to assist, he fell overboard and, despite several attempts to save him, he drowned; “thus another of our Indian friends was taken from us.”26 Deer also attentively counts (overcounts, according to Benn) each drowning of “our Indian friends” and “the Caughnawaga boys.”27 It seems unsurprising that, when asked by the British captain Lord Avonmore to proceed to the front, the Caughnawaga boatmen refuse, choosing to start the return journey. This moment, left unreported by Jackson, is explained by Benn as the Mohawks’ contractual right.28 As voiced by Deer, the moment sounds more like a local instance of the history of refusal discussed by Audra Simpson as distinctive to the Mohawk of Kahnawá:ke. The difference between the endings of Jackson’s and Deer’s accounts is pronounced, the one emphasizing power and the other, vulnerability. Jackson ends with the departure from Egypt “well pleased with what we had seen in the land of the Pharos and proud to have shown the world that the dwellers on the banks of the Nile, after navigating it for centuries, could still learn something of the craft from the Iroquois Indians of North America and the Canadian voyageurs of many races.”29 His final words express satisfaction and a promise of future help from his people. Deer’s final scenes show the Mohawks under repeated French-Canadian attack, repeatedly requesting a separate train car to keep them safe on the way home. We were then crowded into a baggage car and for the rest of the way had rather an uncomfortable time the French all the way trying to burst into our car and threatening our lives. At last, however, we arrived at Montreal, where we were met at the Bonaventure Station by a large crowd, among whom were many well-known faces and friends from home. The next day our Indian party arrived at Caughnawaga,

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where we had a grand reception at the Exhibition Building. We were all glad to get home, glad to once more see our families and friends, and all well-pleased that the Egyptian Expedition was over.30 The final sentence bears the weight of repeated history. Throughout Deer’s journey, what is lost and longed for are “home,” “friends,” and “family,” the terms repeated over and over. Fast forward—through Paul Diabo’s case in the 1920s and numerous others—to 2010, when a Kahnawà:ke delegation to a Bolivia climate-change conference was prevented by the Canadian government from returning home on Haudenosaunee passports. In the telling of that experience, the constant refrain of the stranded Mohawks was their urgent need to “get home,” their Mohawk Nation identities intact.31 The dynamic in Deer’s account is also the opposite of the stock military rhetoric (or, in the entertainment sphere, the Buffalo Bill scenario) of threatened Indian outbreak, so popular in that period; here, all threat comes from without as others try to crowd in upon and kill the Mohawks. This is what mobility “in the service of others”—under the incomprehensible authority of empire—looks like.32 James Deer’s choice to put his account into print—and, later, into a script for a lecture-performance—can be understood as an act of self-determination. That it was a challenge for him is suggested, first, by the apparent need for him to self-finance the printing with the Montreal printer John Lovell (whose name might have been familiar to him from dime-novel publications).33 Deer’s command of English was strong—he served as an interpreter in Egypt—but he intermittently seems to lose his bearings. For example, in telling of Louis Capitaine’s drowning, he names the usurping officer “Lord Perry.”34 An unknown reader of the booklet has handwritten a correction, explaining that the officer was “Lieut. Pirie of the Life Guards”; the slip suggests Deer’s accurate sense that they were under the sway of British aristocrats. Then he names their place of arrival in what is now northern Sudan according to a place-name familiar from U.S. geography: “Sacremento.”35 Again, the unidentified reader corrects the text, to “Sarkamatto, 4 miles above Dahl.” Deer’s voice disappears altogether when he binds into his volume the programs issued for a sports day and sight-seeing trip, documents that void Mohawk identity and athletic triumph by naming all participants from North America “Canadians.”36 Like many Indigenous performers from this period, Deer would continue to aspire to the authority and permanence of print publication, accumulating notes for a book-length autobiography and, according to one source, composing a fivehundred-page manuscript.37

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Both Louis Jackson and James Deer would continue to navigate the local and global geographies of being Mohawk—Jackson as a force in Caughnawaga politics, from Canada’s imposition of the Indian Advancement Act of 1884 onward, and Deer as an itinerant performer. One context of the Nile expedition—whose consequences Deer directly experienced—was the effect of British caricatures in restricting the recruitment of Mohawk voyageurs and, quite probably, contributing to the expedition’s failure. Writing contemporaneously with Deer and Jackson, Colonel William F. Butler, the British commander of the Nile River boats, described the reaction of the British cabinet to his request for Indigenous voyageurs: “I had unfortunately laid stress upon the great desirability of obtaining as many Indians as possible. I say ‘unfortunately,’ for the name Indian conjured up in the mind of a cabinet minister visions of the scalping knife, the tomahawk, the war whoop.”38 In the domain of popular entertainment, such expectations, being so much more explicit, could be addressed and shaped—that is to say, brokered—more directly in live performance. On return from Egypt, James and John Deer rejoined the family troupe, reengaging with acts of visual sovereignty, kinship connection, and creative control. These acts, when read through the lens of James Deer’s memoir, seem not only to perform family as home, however far-flung the entertainment circuit, but to position Mohawk artists as exerting choice and authority over the space of performance, sustaining the self-determined mobility that so many regimes—from the British military to the Canadian and U.S. governments—attempted to deny them, then and since. The Deers’ Creative and Managerial Control A photograph from 1894 of one Deer troupe, the St. Regis Indian Show Company, introduces their choreography of performance space (figure 3.1). The composition centers Chief Running Deer flanked by members of his family and community, including his daughter Mary, her husband Black Eagle, and another relative, Lily Deer.39 Visible in their clothing and poses is the layering of cultural markers at which Esther Deer later became so adept. While the performers’ dress carries distinctively Mohawk designs and beadwork, four of the six adopt a stereotypical “Indian” gesture for the camera, hands shading brows as they gaze off into the distance; the row holding this pose on horseback also evokes the growing popular expectation that all Indigenous cultures were horse cultures. Black Eagle, on the far left, powerfully concentrates the conjunction of culturally specific items: the flaring ostrich feather headdress seen on Native peoples of

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Figure 3.1.  W. S. Tanner sell card, St. Regis Indian Show Company, 1894. Left to right: Black Eagle, Jake Paul, Mary Ann Black Eagle, Chief Running Deer, Phillip Big Tree, Lily Deer   (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

the Northeast since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an Iroquois warrior’s necklace of teeth or claws, the rifle introduced by violent European invasion, and, covering most of his body, the trade blanket that carried its own histories of attempted genocide and Native resistance.40 The card’s border extends the layering into the performers’ names, English above Mohawk, and articulates the commercial dynamics at play. This sell card is an advertisement for W. S. Tanner of Lawrence, Kansas, the non-Indigenous broker who brought the artistry of St. Regis Mohawks to market (“Largest Dealer in their Fancy Baskets”) and whose ownership of this image frames their self-representation (Tanner holds the copyright and sells the card for 35 cents). As the Deers developed their traveling acts, they took this power of brokerage for themselves.

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They also seem to have embedded family stories within the trappings of popular performance. Take, for example, the woman who became James Deer’s wife, Georgette Osborne. She was a British-born actor, a child star in several popular plays in North America, including at different times Topsy and Eva (that is, both in and out of blackface) in the massively popular stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.41 In 1888, she played Susan Boone, wife of Daniel in Daniel Boone, The Pioneer.42 In this or a similar production titled Daniel Boone and the Indians, she met James Deer, who, with his brothers, father, and others from St. Regis, was performing Indian in the show.43 When they married, in 1889, Georgette became a de jure Indian and ward of the government, according to Canada’s Indian Act and U.S. laws requiring her to surrender British citizenship. On stage, Georgette performed that recategorization, switching her costume in Daniel Boone from settler to buckskinned Indian maiden, tomahawk in hand.44 Later, the press would herald her as one of “the Queens of the Mohawk Tribe of Indians” for a virtuoso riding act in which she wore a western settler outfit of buckskin skirt and jacket, checked shirt, neckerchief, and broadbrimmed wide-awake hat.45 This visible embrace of multiple identities was not available to all. Then, as now, the effect of inequitable gender laws on the Mohawk people was destructive: Indigenous women who married non-Native men lost their Indian status, while non-Indigenous women such as Georgette who married into the Nation gained it. James and Georgette Deer may have reacted to the pull of entertainment opportunities on the road as well as the push of tensions at home. They based their residence in New York City while touring as far afield as the Midwest. On November 2, 1891, Ester [sic] Louise Georgette Deer was born to the couple in the Bronx. (Later it would be written that she was born on the international boundary line in St. Regis, which seems not to be accurate but nevertheless holds a truth about her life.)46 One method by which the Deers asserted creative and marketplace control was by wielding the tools of the western legal system. On August 17, 1892, John and James Deer announced themselves the first trick riders in North America to copyright their act. Registering their claim with the U.S. Copyright Office from the family residence in Hogansburg, on the southern side of the international boundary, they designated themselves “proprietors” and “authors” of “a Dramatic Composition” titled “Indian Riding” to which they subsequently added a scripted “scenario.”47 Their publicity leaflet detailing their act—each body part, pose, and action precisely choreographed—was at once marketing strategy and legal notice. Under the masthead of “The Famous Deer Brothers

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Champion Indian Trick Riders of the World,” James and John Deer Jr. issued a “Warning! Imitators Beware!” citing the authority of the Librarian of Congress and their attorney. In the Deer brothers’ hands, such governmental systems could serve Indigenous ends, recognizing and protecting their distinctive skills—what they termed their “untaught natural horsemanship” (a phrase that both declares the persistence of Indigenous distinction and, like the figures on horseback in the St. Regis Indian Show sell card, could speak to popular panIndian expectations). From this position of strength, James Deer, as Manager, offers to broker a deal: “We are always prepared to negotiate with responsible managers throughout the country, at the principal summer resorts, circuses, agriculture associations, parks, &c. We can always furnish a Historical Wild West at short notice, and guarantee the show first-class in every respect.”48 The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, 1901, saw a kind of culmination of the Deers’ entertainment and entrepreneurial strategies when they ran their own “Deer’s Indian Village.” There were bigger, more official Indian exhibitions at the exposition, but they went under the vanishing Indian trope.49 The Indian Village mounted by the Deers was more modest in its physical dimensions but more ambitious by far in its exhibition of contemporary Indigenous ownership and performance skills. One photograph shows the extended family arrayed at the entrance to their arena (figure 3.2). Several figures, including Chief Running Deer, just to the right of center, are recognizable from the St. Regis Indian Show. James and Georgette are at the ticket booth. John Deer ropes a man on horseback. At the center is nine-year-old Esther Deer on a white horse, her upper body seeming to be wrapped in the kind of striped show blanket that later figured prominently in her performance. The significance of the performance outfits in this historical scene is illuminated by a discussion of contemporary Indigenous theatrical costume by Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi scholar and theatrical practitioner Jill Carter. With reference to costume designer Erika A. Iserhoff (Omushkego and Eeyou Cree heritage), Carter delineates “the specific processes, challenges, and opportunities that are bound up in her work as an author of material texts that live in the commercial sites of spectacle wherein contemporary Native experience is performed. . . . Together, we ruminated upon the Aboriginal theatre worker’s struggle to address and resist being packaged as a spectacle for voyeuristic consumption while concurrently trying to attract audiences in to hear our stories.”50 The Deers, too, in their time were both creating and negotiating the terms of spectacle. Reading their attire as “material texts” created in particular

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Figure 3.2.  Deer’s Indian Village (Kanien′kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center)

environments redirects attention away from restrictive measures of so-called authenticity toward their life as connective tissue, linking performers on the circuit with their home communities, family members with each other, and different Nations of “show Indians.” The photograph of Deer’s Indian Village shows floral and diagonal patterns in the clothing that are recognizably Mohawk or Haudenosaunee. The distinctive gus-to-weh headdress common to the Haudenosaunee with distinctive markers for each Nation is here worn by Chief Running Deer in Mohawk Nation style, with three feathers up. The troupe also exhibits what Johnny Beauvais, a member of another Kahnawà:ke family of entertainers, called “the ‘Sioux look’ ” that audiences expected of “our Indians” in the later nineteenth century.51 Esther Deer is on record fondly remembering her father making the regalia; other items came from the community of Iroquois women in Lower Manhattan—at least one of them from St. Regis—expert in buckskin and beading.52 “The ‘Sioux look’ ” was made with Mohawk skill, visible in the

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beaded vests worn for many years by James, John, George, and Esther Deer, which reiterated each other in the Plains Indian–style motifs and in their fullfeather Plains-style headdresses. In this photograph, the vest is most visible on John Deer, the full-feather headdress on James Deer. The figure of Paul Diabo again serves as a touchstone; like him, the Deer troupe is clothed in material texts that respond to dominant audience expectations while retaining the power of Indigenous-specific labor, relations, and meanings. As well as showcasing a gathering of Mohawk performers under Mohawk direction, the Deer’s Indian Village also positioned them as hosts. Their entrance banner announced in large letters: “RedMen Welcome.” This phrase potentially puts in motion several conflicting gestures of “welcome and unwelcome,” to use the language of Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson.53 If the phrase referred to Native peoples, it can be understood to indicate pointedly one place where they were welcome—compared to the many places, by implication, they were not.54 Additionally, the phrase could be understood to politely discomfit non-Native spectators—inviting them to experience being less than welcome. But equally, especially in that period, the phrase could be inviting non-Native wannabees, such as members of the Improved Order of Red Men, the white male fraternity that patronized Indigenous events. By any interpretation, the Deers set the terms of this entertainment space; their gesture resonates powerfully with Robinson’s analysis of “the degree to which Indigenous sovereignty is constituted through gestures of welcome that take place in spaces of transit and gathering.”55 Discussing borders, airports, and exhibition spaces of today, Robinson limns “Indigenous protocols of welcome that remind guests that they are guests”; “To welcome guests . . . is, to varying degrees, to signal sovereign control over the rules of the space and the authority under which such rules are enforced.”56 Within the terrain of commercialized spectacle at the turn of the twentieth century, the Deers exerted unusual rhetorical and material control. They were literally running the show: making costumes, setting ticket prices, choosing and protecting their acts, reaping the financial rewards, showcasing their culturally specific skills, and positioning non-Indigenous spectators as paying guests on their domain. Particularly in the context of wild west shows, this was a notable achievement. Although there is a growing literature recognizing the agency exerted by Indigenous performers within wild west shows, the overall management and ownership were overwhelmingly controlled by white patriarchal figures.57 Sustaining that position, even sustaining name recognition, was an uphill struggle. Witness the Deers’ negotiations in The Great Train Robbery, which

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became the famous Thomas Edison film, directed by Edwin Porter, in late 1903. The Great Train Robbery began life as a stageplay by Scott Marble, first produced by Keogh and Davis in 1896 with a “combination company” including members of the Deer family.58 In Marble’s script, the Indians function mainly as allies of the train robbers, spectacular knife fighters, and performers of various unspecified “specialities”—the term signaling, again, vaudevillian mode. Their broken-English lines are considerably more limited, in quantity and type, than those of the Euro-American and comic Black characters. In terms of the show’s publicity, however, the Indians (along with the show’s two trained bears) took center stage, their presence giving rise to sensationalized headlines and stories. In 1896, Running Deer and James Deer—the latter as Cuts-the-Forest, an English translation of his Mohawk name—figured prominently in this coverage.59 The father is recognized with some accuracy, the son (and another Iroquois performer, Long Feather, who may be John Deer) less so: “The most celebrated among the Indians in the company is the old-time fighting chief Running Deer, of the Mohawks. He is well along in years, but appears as lithe as a panther. On his breast he wears a big silver medal, given in recognition of the renewal of the treaty of peace made with his tribe, back in the 50s. With him were three Crow Indians from the Pine Ridge agency. . . . The other Indians, Long Feather and Cuts-the-Forest, are Winnebagos, as fierce in looks as a butcher’s cleaver.”60 In the play, the Indians are Apache and Sioux. The identification of James Deer and his companion as Winnebago reads like a negotiation—whether initiated by the reporter or the actors—to move their identities a couple of thousand miles closer to the Far West location of the play. In 1897, perhaps in response to the balance of press interest, Marble added more “real Indians” to the script.61 At that point, the Deers disappeared in press coverage behind Sioux identities that, with the global impact of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, were already the most marketable version of “Indian.” If the Deers were still acting in the play, it was not under their own names or Nation. Perhaps it was in these years that they began to create their wild west regalia such as the full-feather headdresses— what Monique Mojica calls “the prerequisite accoutrements”—and to calculate the fine line between protection and disempowerment created by these layers.62 The adaptation of Marble’s stageplay to Edison’s film in 1903 rendered Indigenous participation yet more invisible. The silent movie adopted the stage melodrama’s plot and settings (train robbery, pursuit of outlaws, climactic shoot-out), but two major elements were excised: the six to twelve Indians and

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the two bears. A common joke about The Great Train Robbery is that this first western has no Indians. Indigeneity is deeply present, however, in its gestation and publicity, even in the continued, uncredited dependence on Deer family talent. According to Esther Deer and her descendants, Georgette Deer is visible in the quadrille specialty halfway through the film, and Chief Running Deer and his sons lent their riding expertise to the chase scenes, now all in “outlaw” rather than “Indian” costume.63 This latter-day recovery of vaudeville Indian contributions to early moving pictures is part of a larger story about how Indigenous vaudevillians shaped cinematic space. These may have been frustrating times in show business for the highly skilled Deers—not western enough to qualify as “real Indians,” not important enough to be credited in shows outside their managerial control. These were also hard years on Mohawk Territory, with the continued exacerbation of community tensions caused by colonization and governmental regimes. Perhaps such conditions contributed to the Deers’ decision, at the end of 1903, to accept an invitation from Texas Jack to join his wild west show in South Africa. Seeking an “entirely new company” for the coming season, Texas Jack particularly wanted a replacement for Will Rogers.64 This nine-month engagement promised headline status, an opportunity to create entertainment contacts abroad, and elbow room to establish themselves as “real Indians.” Thus began the Deer family’s overseas career—brokering new cultural expectations and crossing different borders—that would last approximately a decade.

the deer family overseas The Deer Family literally made their name overseas, launching their billing as “the celebrated Deer Family of Indians.” This was not an easy or straightforward achievement, as their negotiations across entertainment venues and countries show. Rayna Green has documented that the beginning of Indians playing Indian happened in Europe; Coll Thrush has demonstrated the long history of British voyeuristic viewing of Indians—but also the power of Indigenous visitors to “look back,” “cast an Ojibwe gaze on London,” and form their own opinions.65 The Deer family came to Europe via South Africa, where press coverage showed them initially hovering between creative control and more passive display. In mid-December 1903, John, James, George, Georgette, and Esther Deer—along with Phillip Big Tree, Black Eagle, and perhaps other performers from St. Regis—landed in Cape Town, South Africa. On the one hand, the

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South African press acknowledged them as “Irrequois,” listing their Mohawk names.66 They were applauded as performers with a wide range of skills, including “fancy riding,” singing, dancing, and acting in sketches.67 But they also became “Red Indians,” placed within the long tradition of exhibition, objectified culture to be explained by the European (in this case Dutch or Boer) authority in the “Redskin Encampment” beyond the arena: “A visit to the menageries, a large marquee where the animals may be seen and the Indians and cowboys inspected, is well repaid, and an opportunity should be sought of having a word with Captain Dierkes, who is in charge, as the Captain is thoroughly acquainted with Indian manners and customs, and being fluent of tongue gives one a host of facts in a few moments. In the menagerie he will point out many articles of interest.”68 As the scene is portrayed, human beings become visible as appendages to exoticized artifacts. These include “the calumet or pipe of peace” puffed on by “old Split Bark, the Medicine Man”— presumably Phillip Big Tree—and “scalps which White Deer [Esther Deer] wears, and were handed to her by her grandfather.” James Deer’s role as manager also seems to have been subsumed here “Under the sole direction of Texas Jack.”69 In terms of controlling the space of performance, this was the challenge: How to prevent the pride of specific Indigenous naming from being turned into exoticized objectification? How to prevent “real Indians” from becoming “Red Indians”? How to exploit competitive showbiz claims as “the only . . .” without playing into what Jean O’Brien calls the “extinction narrative” of “the last . . .”?70 Some of the answer lay in the specificities of theatrical space. In October 1904, the Deers sailed from South Africa to Britain and began hiring themselves out to venues across Europe. Press coverage over the next six years shows them shuttling back and forth among wild west shows, circuses, zoological gardens, music halls, vaudeville venues, variety palaces, and Variété stages. Program by program, headline by headline, and newspaper story by newspaper story (of which there were hundreds), the Deer Family made their way out from under a number of containing myths—that all Indians belonged to the Buffalo Bill firmament, that they were under the control of a white impresario, that they were Der letzte vom Stamme der “Mohawks” (Last of the Mohawks).71 They did so most visibly by working the structure, rhythm, and audience relations of vaudeville and variety. Seizing the conditions of this performance space, they brokered audience expectations with Mohawk expertise.

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The magnitude of the Deers’ breakthrough in British variety theater can be measured in the change that James Deer had brought to his circumstances. As a young man in North America, twenty-odd years earlier, he had a brush with pre-polite vaudeville, also called “wagon circus,” at the freakshow end of the performance spectrum. Billed as “Young Samson,” his specialty was lifting a horse with his teeth.72 Soon after that, he found himself on the Nile expedition, one of the voyageurs who, for all their superior skills, as he wrote, “were treated like so many dogs.” He had achieved moments of creative control—his brother and he copyrighted their riding act, his family owned their wild west show— but they seem to have been temporary. Now he had crossed the Atlantic again, this time directly addressing members of the nation for whom he had performed alienating service. He was working within his own familial relations on stage and off, calculating audience expectations and responding to their responses, creating skillful narratives and spectacles. Soon after the family’s arrival from South Africa, they secured a London theatrical agent, Fred Neiman, who belonged to networks supporting variety performers in the face of managerial combines. Neiman advertised himself as the Deer Family’s “sole agent” and presumably assisted in their self-representation.73 This included capitalizing on the Nile service. For example, when the family performed in Edinburgh, at the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties, the advertising backed up the claim to “The Most Genuine Troupe of Real Indians ever seen in Edinburgh” with “N.B.—James Deer and John Deer of the above Celebrated Family acted as Boatmen Scouts for Lord Wolseley in his Famous March to the Relief of General Gordon, of Khartoum.”74 The publicity clearly worked, with press reviews repeatedly folding that note into their positive coverage. The more the Deers appeared on music hall, variety, and Variété stages the length and breadth of Britain, Ireland, and Germany, the more agency they accrued. Increasingly billed as headliners, by late 1906 they had enough name recognition to be referred to simply as “The Deer Family.” They functioned as a self-contained unit within variety lineups, their act itself multi-part; they controlled the internal pacing, transitions, and variation key to the vaudeville experience. It is clear that, by this point, the Deer Family had creative control: the act is announced variously as “produced,” “presented,” “submitted,” and “told by” them. By mid-1907, their creative agency is taken for granted: “the sensational act, Indians of the Past, is a very interesting series of tableaux by the Deer Family.”75 The title resonates with the tradition of ethnographic display and the description with George Catlin’s Tableaux vivants of Indigenous figures

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in Europe over fifty years earlier, but the power dynamics are different.76 The sequence consisted of “1.—The Indian Camp Fire. 2.—Princess White Deer in her Famous Songs and Indian War Dance. 3.—The Settlers’ Cabin. 4.—White Rose [actually, Wild Rose] and Princess Deer in their Speciality. 5.—The Indians Burning Settlers’ Cabin. 6.—Sensational Knife Duel. 7.—Settlers to the Rescue.”77 While the content of the Deers’ act does not seem to have changed greatly over time, the public understanding of it shifted perceptibly during their years on European vaudeville-variety circuits. Whereas, early on, the press reported the sequence as a triumphal white-settler narrative in which the Indigenous performers enact their own inevitable vanishment, later it was covered as a showcase of Indigenous skill and versatility. The structuring principle for the spectator became less narrative teleology and more vaudevillian episodic rhythms.78 In the physical space of these theaters and the conventions of direct address, the Deers also developed a sense of intimacy with their audiences, as was heard during their first appearance at the Greenock Empire in the west of Scotland: An incident with a note of humour in it took place at the Empire on Wednesday night. The Deer family were giving their genuine representation of Indian life. The settler log hut was being surrounded by Indian braves in full war paint, when from an open window a girl’s voice exclaimed, as she looked out “O, mammy, I believe there’s Indians about” then an excited youth in the gallery, carried away by the realism of the scene, squeaked out “Watch yersel’, lassie, there’ ane beside the door!”79 This light-hearted anecdote provides a glimpse of additional layers of agency. The “lassie” would almost certainly have been Esther Deer, because she and Georgette played both “settler” and “Indian” in the Deers’ bit, a doubling that held real (though vaudevillized) relationship to their double lineage. Moreover, the history of their home territory at St. Regis, a place to which Indigenous people had moved under the pressures of colonization, redefined the notion of settlers and settlements well beyond the wild west binary. The performance journey traveled by the Deer Family overseas is epitomized in the contrast between their first appearance in Dresden, Germany, around 1906, and their second in January 1910.80 In joining the German entertainment world, the Deers were entering a powerful forcefield of fascination,

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projection, and identification with the Native peoples of North America; Hartmut Lutz’s term for the distinctive German national(ist) obsession is “German Indianthusiasm.”81 “By the 1880s, Völkerschauen”—the commercial display of Indigenous peoples—“became common in German cities” and continued to live in spectacles conjoining displays of animals and peoples, as in Carl Hagenbeck’s human zoos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.82 Every year, new groups of Native performers arrived with wild west shows and circuses, while German popular print culture, most famously Karl May’s Winnetou novels from 1893, was replete with caricatures of Indians.83 In their first appearance in Dresden, the Deers were part of “Grosse Indianer-Schauspiele aus dem Wilden Westen Nordamerikas” (Big Indian spectacles from the wild west of North America) conducted on the grounds of the Zoological Gardens, a place thick with the histories and associations—and smells—of the Völkerschauen and human zoos.84 Despite their photograph appearing on the program’s cover, the Deers were put firmly in their place under “Direktor und Unternehmer” (director and producer) Paul Schultze. The playbill’s eleven acts were organized and interpreted to create an evolutionary narrative of Indian vanishment and white supremacy. In this representation, the Mohawk performers’ singing, dancing, and riding skills become precursors to the closing sketch, “Trappers Heim” (Trapper’s Home), in which “ein indianischer Spion” (an Indian spy) enables an Indian attack on the log cabin, but the attackers are ultimately beaten back by “amerikanischen Cowboys” (American cowboys)—an act that is explicitly linked to history: Mit der Befreiung der Farmerfamilie und der vollständigen Niederlage der roten Räuber endet die Wiedergabe eines hochinteressanten Schauspiels, welches sich leider häufig in früheren Zeiten im wilden Westen ereignete.85 (With the liberation of the farmer’s family and the complete defeat of the red robbers, the rendition of a highly interesting drama ends, in a way that was unfortunately frequent in the wild west of earlier times.) The program emphasizes the Indigenous performers’ status as remnants, figures living now only in James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid romances: Es gibt nur noch eine geringe Zahl von Ueberlebenden jener Zeit, und die Stunde ist nicht fern, wo die so erschütternde Zeitepoche aus der

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Geschichte Nord-Amerikas nur noch in schriftlicher Ueberlieferung existieren wird. (There are only a small number of survivors of that time, and the hour is not far off when such a shocking epoch of North American history will exist only in written tradition.) In 1910, when the Deers returned to Dresden’s zoological gardens, German entertainment spaces were thicker than ever with Native presence, forty-two Oglala Sioux in Hamburg and twenty-two “Vollblut-Indianern” (fullblood Indians) in Onondaga Russell Hill’s touring American Indian Band among them.86 By this time, however, the Deers had climbed the entertainment ladder. No longer consigned to the grounds of the zoo, they now appeared “Im Konzersaal Zoologischer Garten” (in the concert hall of the Zoological Gardens), a place connoting artistry and reciprocal audience relations. In the Grosse Indianer-Schauspiele, the Deers had played in approximately four of the eleven acts; in 1910, their multi-part act was the main event, accompanied only by the clown Amandus and his troupe from the Circus Angelo who entertained during intermissions.87 The Dresden press in 1910 framed the performance with these new values. One English-language newspaper praised the opening act by Esther Deer: “The beautiful voice of Princess White Deer, the young Indian girl, gave evidence of real talent and excellent cultivation.”88 The Deers also worked their sense of the audience, adding scenes to appeal to the German Indianer fascination, especially a scalping scene much-cited by the German-language press.89 But the new ending seems to be calculated for the sensibilities of Dresden’s AngloAmerican population, a notable contingent before World War I: in a playful act of cross-racial modernity, the Deers mounted “the exposition of a genuine American cake-walk,” a dance closely associated with Black culture, apparently in full regalia.90 Whereas in an earlier iteration the act had ended with “Settlers to the Rescue,” any such narrative closure was now thwarted in the kind of entertainingly incongruous combination in which vaudeville reveled. Everything about the 1910 performance suggests that the Deers calculated their multiple audiences’ self-consciously modern, cosmopolitan sensibilities and used their own virtuosity to share a joke with them. In this work, they got at the fundamental conditions of vaudeville or Variété: how its novelty spoke to western modernity. The effect was noted by at least one German-language newspaper:

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Echte Indianer auf einer Saalbühne. . . . Eine Art Varietévorstellung indianischen Lebens in primitiver Urwaldszenerie auf moderner Saalbühne—eine anscheinend paradoxe Darbietung, und doch reizvoll. . . . Indianerleben und Varietébühne! Und doch ist es so. . . . Vor allem pakt der Gesang und der Tanz eines jünger schönen Indianermädchens, von deren Vortragskunst viele unsrer Brettlkünstlerinnen lernen könnten.91 (Real Indians on a concert hall stage. . . . A kind of variety performance of Indian life in primitive forest scenery on a modern concert hall stage—an apparently paradoxical performance, yet attractive. . . . Indian life and vaudeville theater! And yet it is so. . . . Most enthralling of all are the song and dance of a young beautiful Indian maiden, from whose elocution many of our cabaret artists could learn.) The comment constitutes a fundamental, and unusual, recognition that what is on display is modern artistry—including the artistry of converting an audience’s assumptions about cultural contradiction into their appreciation of entertaining paradox.92 Characterizing Indigenous people’s relationship to the automobile at the turn of the twentieth century, Philip Deloria has written: “Native people blurred together Indian pasts, presents, and futures as they sallied back and forth across the boundary markers of gender, class, and primitivism.”93 The magnitude of the Deers’ sallying back and forth across borders and boundaries of space, time, and race can be marked in at least two ways. When the Deers went overseas, they traveled not as autonomous citizens with passports but as wards of the U.S. government dependent on papers of permission being drawn up at U.S. embassies and consulates country by country.94 Through the power and inventiveness of their on-stage presence, especially on variety and Variété stages, they publicly transcended that childlike status. Performance by performance, and tweak by tweak of their act, they also redefined the term “Indian novelty.” Osage scholar Robert Warrior has critiqued “the rhetoric of novelty” for its containment and diminishment of Indigenous creativity.95 The term has signaled the “enfreakment” of Indigenous peoples on commercial display, their very humanity sold as a novelty and their cultural skills downgraded as anomalous oddities.96 But novelty had a particular purchase in vaudeville, as a core value, a central entertainment experience, for which the audience was paying. When the Deers were advertised as a “Special Novelty Treat” in Dresden, their

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value lay in producing what Filippo Tommaso Marinetti labeled “imaginative astonishment” of a distinctly modern and cosmopolitan type, whereby the audience was led to recognize and laugh at their own expectations of Indians while appreciating unanticipated levels of artistry.97 These vaudeville Indians overseas shifted novelty’s association from freakishness to creative control, making visible the modern Indian about whom Daniel Francis has said: “Whites could not imagine such a thing.”98

esther deer goes solo This moment in 1910 seems the apex of the Deer Family’s career as a vaudeville troupe. Later the same year they toured in the Russian Empire, performing together at the Apollo theaters in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Soon, however, family members went their separate ways. In March 1910, George Deer had become engaged in Dresden to Mme. Solange d’Atalide, trick rider and circus director.99 From Russia, James and George returned to Germany to sign up with Sarrasani’s Circus, the most successful European imitator of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Esther Deer, whose talented horse-riding, singing, dancing, and acting had been consistently singled out for praise from her first performance in Queen of the Highway in 1903, went solo. Her mother, Georgette, arranged to accompany her on much of her touring around eastern and western Europe during the next four years.100 Going solo for Esther Deer did not mean being alone on the stage, as she drew round her the acts and strategies developed with her performance family, which, in turn, carried lines of affiliation to their home territory. For the nonIndigenous spectator, the most visible evidence of the kinship lines that she drew together lies in her attire (figure 3.3). Esther took the pieces that she had accrued over the years—the buckskin clothing and footwear made by her people on and beyond Mohawk Nation Territory, the beaded vests with Siouxtype designs that echoed her father’s and uncles’ vests, the various head pieces (some Mohawk-specific, some of more wild west design), the trade silver and jewelery (to which she would add her own medals from European royalty)— and layered them on top of each other in the familiar practice of protection, adaptation, and self-proclamation. Almost twenty years later, French artist and Indianist Paul Coze would describe her performance regalia as “la parure sacreé de ses ancêtres” (the sacred adornment of her ancestors) and, in a way, he was right.101 Esther Deer remembered “our costumes” being lovingly made by her father; they visibly brought together distinctive Mohawk skills and items

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Figure 3.3.  Princess White Deer, Postcard, 1909/10 (Karl Markus Kreis Private Collection)

with signifiers of wild west popular culture as adapted from Sioux or Plains Indian motifs. They embodied a shared culture, reaching from immediate family to the extended community of Indigenous show people.102 The topmost layer was Princess White Deer’s show blanket. This item had become newly visible on the family’s European tour. In the earliest photographs that I have seen of the Deer family performers in North America—Chief Running Deer and Esther Loft in the late 1880s and early 1890s as well as the

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St. Regis Indian Show sell card—some men and women fold around them or put on horseback plain blankets typical of the earliest trade blankets. In the photograph of Esther Deer as a youngster on horseback at Deer’s Indian Village, a decorated blanket can be glimpsed, folded around the top half of her body. By the time she went overseas, she was much more prominently sporting a striped show blanket, sometimes on her horse, sometimes folded over her shoulder, sometimes carried over her arm, and choreographed into her on-stage performance. When she presented it to her audience, it can be understood—like Paul Diabo’s western regalia—as both protection and proclamation of her identity. Trade blankets were, and remain, double-edged swords in connection with Indigenous peoples. They functioned as tools of genocide, infected with diseases to which Indigenous people had no immunity when they were brought onto reservations by government agents and traders. They also tried to supplant Indigenous creativity—robes made from animal skins and hand-woven blankets. Eventually, factories appropriated Indigenous iconography into their designs, as ways of validating these objects of industrialized production. From about 1890 J. Capps and Sons developed categories and motifs that purported to represent Indigeneity; then Pendleton blankets developed highly ornate and complex designs based on a wide range of Native creativity.103 Yet these physical and cultural assaults were met with Indigenous ingenuity: some wearers Indigenized trade blankets with feathers, plants, shells, buttons, or other pieces. Some communities came to value them as forms of recognition and accomplishment. Some incorporated them into dance and other performances. And some Native creators negotiated with Pendleton to trade Indigenous artistry for recognition and material recompense. Framed by the politics of colonization, survivance, and resurgence, blankets seem quintessential embodiments of the brokerage running through the history of Esther Deer’s people. The material object, its aesthetic and spiritual properties, and its connection to settler-Indigenous relations bring together opposed forces, deployed differently by different communities. The power they embody is ongoing and unresolved—from Luther Standing Bear’s Lakota “language of the blanket,” ambiguously positioned between buffalo robes and government woolen blankets, in 1933, to the creation by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore of a performance of genocide by blanket in 2010.104 “Indian blankets” are still glorified by settler wannabees equally capable of wielding “Blanket Indians” as a demeaning shorthand for peoples supposedly incapable

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of entering the modern world. At the same time, going “back to the blanket” signaled Indigenous “opposition to assimilation,” historically and more recently.105 Esther’s show blanket had a design that would later be categorized by the Capps company as “Mohawk War Striped.”106 Esther used it as a horse blanket in her trick riding displays with her family; among other things, these routines included learning to replicate her mother’s act as Georgette went into retirement. Sometimes the blanket reads like a protective layer. In one photograph, in a lineup in which the young woman stands next to the Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder, she is protected on one side by Georgette’s touch on her shoulder and on the other by her blanket over her shoulder, distancing her from the man standing closely next to her.107 When this photograph was cropped by the press, Georgette was edited out, so the blanket plays that much stronger a role as boundary or barrier. And, of course, it is a show blanket, to be flourished as part of her spectacle—signaling danger, barbarism, artistic control. When Esther Deer went solo and her blanket became more prominent than ever, it held those complex lineages, dangers, and protections—both the violent onslaught on and resurgent survivance of her people—in its folds. As Princess White Deer, Esther Deer had considerable success on Variété venues across the countries of the Russian Empire. The company she kept on stage across Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Ekaterinoslav seems to have been more genteel than in some earlier venues, although the cities were places of considerable danger in the turmoil between the first and second Russian revolutions and the onset of World War I. Of the upward of thirty acts per bill, most were performed by women singers, dancers, and actresses, with occasional acrobatic or other troupes. Princess White Deer was prominently billed as sui generis. While wannabee and redface performers playing Indian on the Variété stages of eastern Europe strained to promote their novelty and while other female “Mademoiselles” were tethered to their nationality (such as Mademoiselle Cavaleri, Russian actress, Mademoiselle Juresko, Romanian singer, and Mademoiselle Kaminskaya, Polish actress), Esther Deer was simply “Indian Princess White Deer.”108 By 1913, she was making explicit in her publicity some of the links to family and trans-Indigenous kinship that can be read in her performance outfit. In advertising her appearance at the Fövarosi Orfeum, Budapest (and her availability for 1914–15 bookings), her photograph is framed on one side by her family connection, “Grand daughter of the Famous Mohawk Indian Chief

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Figure 3.4.  Full-page advertisement in Das Programm, November 23, 1913 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

Running Deer,” and on the other by her show credentials, “A Feature Act on Every Program Meeting With Great Success”; she signed the photograph, “Aboriginally yours, Princess White Deer” (figure 3.4).109 This is the same autograph used by Seneca performer Go-won-go Mohawk twenty years earlier.

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Esther Deer definitely knew about Mohawk and most likely knew her.110 Whether or not Esther designed the signature to echo Go-won-go’s, it gestured to her belonging to an Indigenous community including but not exclusively her own Mohawk people. It may also be telling that the signature seems first to appear in May 1913, when she was performing in Moscow; the previous month, her “dear uncle George,” as she would remember him, was killed in a riding accident in Hamburg.111 In reinforcing her connection to Indigenous community in a period of loss and grief, was Esther Deer, again, sending Indigenous messages down the lines of commercial transaction? Esther Deer was also about to extend the family, as had her father and uncle, across racial and national lines and, again, may have been reinforcing her identity as no less Aboriginal for that. In 1913 in St. Petersburg she met and eventually became engaged to Count Krasicki, of Polish or Russian aristocratic lineage.112 When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Esther and Georgette fled back to St. Regis, returning to Hogansburg (possibly to Running Deer’s hotel). For Esther Deer’s on-stage career, the years 1915 to 1916 constitute something of a hiatus. In 1915, with considerable press fanfare and trepidation about transatlantic dangers, she sailed to Liverpool to marry Count Krasicki; after they married in London, she sailed back to St. Regis to wait out the war, while he returned to fight on the Russian front. At this point, she mused aloud to the press about whether she would continue a vaudeville career and how the war prevented her from fulfilling her Russian bookings. Then, in mid-1916, she heard that her husband had been killed. This time in Esther Deer’s life seems to have been so painful that, as Patricia Galperin has documented, she pulled a veil over it; beyond one photograph in her collection of herself, her lover, and an unnamed companion, on the reverse of which she has written “Count Joseph Krasinck and Countessa Esther Louise Krasinck,” and one newspaper splash heralding her as “Countess Krasiska [sic], Wife of Russian Nobleman,” she seems to have buried her married name and identity as a widow.113

princess white deer on broadway By March 1917, Esther Deer had plunged into big-time U.S. vaudeville and would, over the next ten years, move into revue and musical comedy.114 In some ways, it was a different world than her experience of Europe. Her fame grew— her name appeared mile-high in lights at a B. F. Keith big-time theater—while her costumes were skimpier. Especially on the revue circuit, cross-racial and cross-ethnic play was more prominent and complex than in her European

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venues. Nevertheless, Princess White Deer’s success back in North America seems to have been achieved by her sticking to the terms of engagement that her family had brokered in Europe.115 She worked to control the performance space by developing and heading up her own troupes, choreographing her own multi-part acts, and persisting in her own versions of modernist racial play. She built on and expanded the lineage of her grandfather and father, as leaders and managers, when she took on those roles as a powerful Mohawk woman, leveraging her celebrity to gather and support familial groupings on vaudeville stages. In terms of popular performance, she can be understood to be negotiating the contract of novelty, vaudeville- and later revue-style; reading that dynamic starts with reading her wielding of the show blanket. As she reentered the U.S. entertainment scene, Princess White Deer posed for a series of publicity photographs by Moody Studios and Moffett Studios in New York City. Although her increasingly skimpy costumes were no longer made by her family, some of her original, home-made regalia remains visible: much of the silver, the headdress, and the beaded vest made by her father that closely resembled those worn by her father and uncles. She also works her show blanket like a lifeline. Sometimes she holds it as a backdrop to her own body, framing her pose. Sometimes she holds it close to her body, literally and symbolically countering the voyeuristic gaze. In one shot, as the blanket disappears out of the frame, she touches it with her toe, grounding herself while, in the words of the press, “shaking a wicked shimmy” (figure 3.5).116 Significantly, this is not the blanket featured on her European tours, but her father’s show blanket. Navigating the dangers of North American commercial commodification and continuing to raise the profile of her career, Esther Deer seems to have carried closer than ever kinship in material form. While there was no public fanfare about the blanket’s associations, they would have been recognizable to anyone close to the family. The layering of attire is now explicitly intergenerational, a line of relation unbroken by commodity culture, a living “material text,” in Jill Carter’s term, kept alive as Esther Deer carried forward and was kept company by her family’s performance legacy—including whatever histories, memories, and meanings her father’s blanket held within her family and community. Princess White Deer’s first move on the big-time circuit was to assemble her own troupe. “Princess White Deer and Her Braves” consisted of one to five male performers at different times. She starred in the advertising—heralded as a “Full-Blooded Mohawk Indian” with lineage through her father and

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Figure 3.5.  Studio portraits, with father’s show blanket in both poses. Left to right: Princess White Deer, Moody Studios, New York, for promotion at B. F. Keith Theatre, ca. 1917; Princess White Deer, Moffett Studios, New York, ca. 1919 (Patricia O. Galperin Private Collection)

grandfather, while “aided and abetted” and “assisted” by the braves.117 Best known was Os-Ko-Mon, a dancer and orator who identified as Yakima; busy building his own career, he worked with Molly Spotted Elk and Princess Chinquilla, among others, before and after his stint with Princess White Deer. Chief Eagle Horse, the Alaskan Indian baritone, also had a profile as a popular entertainer. Both men went into revue, at times with Princess White Deer. In some iterations of the act, the men framed her as she emerged from a tipi. In addition to singing, dancing, and playing various instruments, Os-Ko-Mon declaimed a patriotic speech that affirmed their status as First Americans, while “the paleface orchestra [was] led by a brave in war plumes, who directed them with an arrow.”118 The through line from Princess White Deer’s entertainment heritage is articulated in the advertising of “Indians Past and Present,” echoing and extending the earlier Deer Family act, “Indians of the Past.”119 This lineage was also about negotiating the performance genre contract. It was seen in Europe how Indigeneity could frame novelty; in the United States,

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the entertainment press explicitly recognized “Indian Novelty” as a category soon after Princess White Deer’s on-stage return. It was used, for example, in the classification of “New Acts This Week” by the leading trade journal Variety when, among such familiar categories as “Comedy,” “Blackface,” “Songs,” and “Acrobatics” appeared “Indian Novelty” to classify an act by “Princess White Deer and Co.” The review that followed was quite favorable: “Thus goes the ‘Hiawatha’ story of vaudeville’s latest novelty, but more than that, this act has the makings of a feature offering for at least one trip over the big time. It is different and therein lies its value.”120 But if the recognition of a classification shake-up became explicit, so did resistance to an Indigenous performer breaking the bounds of racialized categories. In the same issue of Variety, another reviewer found unexceptionable “two white girls wearing buckskin dresses and trimmings” for their act during the first half of the week at the Fifth Avenue Theatre but warned that Princess White Deer “made a mistake stepping out of the Indian character for an instant” in her act during the second half of the week at the same venue.121 A few days later, another review of the Fifth Avenue performance criticized one of Princess White Deer’s dances, “a jig,” and Os-Ko-Mon’s guitar playing as more Hawaiian than Indian, managing to insult several Indigenous Nations at once—“Give the girl a shredded wheat costume, and her ‘tom tom’ dance would be a hula. The guitar specialty is certainly more Hawaiian than Indian, and if Oskimon [sic] had a ukulele, the Honolulu picture would be complete.”122 When the act moved to the Harlem Opera House, the same reviewer (H.G.) judged it “considerably improved” by the guitar being “discarded for the tom-tom and the dancing and atmosphere . . . more typically Indian.”123 The tug-of-war over expansion and containment, innovation and expectation would continue to accompany Princess White Deer’s headlining in vaudeville. As Philip Deloria and others have shown, for Indigenous performers to enter popular and public spaces was to negotiate long-standing audience expectations. Within that overarching dynamic, particular spaces carried particular challenges and opportunities. When Princess White Deer transitioned into American revue and musical comedy, she continued to Indigenize vaudevillian notions of novelty, while also contributing to and expanding the performeraudience contract of irony that is central to revue’s claim to modern, cosmopolitan sophistication. In previous chapters I discussed how Indigenous performers in revue (such as Cherokee headliner Will Rogers and Mapuche opera singer Chief Caupolican) contributed to the ironic play of revue while

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also exceeding the frames of reference set by the gatekeepers of mainstream culture—Broadway producers, the non-Indigenous press, high-profile socialite audience members—with their own culture- and family-specific jokes.124 Princess White Deer similarly expanded her range and agency by bringing family and Nation to bear directly on the space of performance throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s as she appeared continuously in Broadway productions by Florenz Ziegfeld, Charles Dillingham, Raymond Hitchcock, and A. L. Erlanger. To trace more closely Princess White Deer’s expansion of “Indian novelty,” I’ll pause over her engagement in Raymond Hitchcock’s very successful revue, Hitchy-Koo, of 1919.125 Hitchcock was a Ziegfeld protégé, skilled in taking vaudeville-based rhythms and revue protocols to extremes: as one newspaper put it, his show “typifies the modern spirit in producing, which is one of lavishness and extravagance carried to the n’th power.”126 Hitchy-Koo, 1919 had more acts (sixteen), more lavish spectacle, more revealing costumes, and more intimacy with the audience than the run of revues to date. On this last feature, which was crucial to the irony contract, one newspaper described how Hitchcock typically set the tone for the performance to follow: “From a convenient place in the aisle, near the musicians, he whispered [to the audience] a few confidences about what might be expected.”127 This third edition of Hitchcock’s revue was the first to be produced postwar, and it was perceived as entering a new age. It is unsurprising, then, that yet again popular theater reached for the original American who guaranteed the authenticity at the base of western modernity, as symbolized by Pocahontas.128 The first act of Hitchy-Koo, 1919 ends with the musical sketch Pocahontas, “which purported to be a burlesque, but was so magnificently staged and costumed that the brilliancy of picture was quite as impressive as the comedy.”129 Pocahontas was played by a popular non-Indigenous vaudevillian, Sylvia Clark, and John R. Smith [sic] by the producer Raymond Hitchcock himself. Also, however, “An Indian band adds novelty to a burlesque on the well known bit of history”—Chief Eagle Horse, singing the “Song of the Sun”; Chief Os-Ko-Mon performing the “Dance of the Five Senses”; and Princess White Deer “doing an Indian jazz dance.”130 Not only does this array complicate the associations of “Indian”—around which more jokes clustered when the second act opened with “a temple dance” from the Indian subcontinent—but Princess White Deer also assembled an “Indian Ballet” of six Indigenous women dancers, in which she featured as Principal Ballerina. Cree/Métis

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scholar Kim Anderson, among others, has talked of how the mythically pliant Pocahontas was invented by the dominant culture to legitimize its access to Indigenous women’s bodies and Indigenous lands.131 Hence the recurrence of the figure at key moments in politics and popular culture, from the 1855 burlesque by John Brougham, Po-ca-hon-tas, or The Gentle Savage, through vaudeville and revue, to the 1995 Walt Disney film. What might be the effects of the pretend Indian maiden being de-centered and outnumbered by Indigenous women dancers, choreographed and led by an Indigenous woman celebrity— in a ballet which, as one press review put it, “of course, is presented in Indian costume”?132 The rhetoric of Broadway revue sought both to infantilize and to sexualize women dancers, and the fetishized Pocahontas was lodged deep in the national imaginary at the intersection of these two impulses. In Hitchy-Koo, 1919, Indigenous women dancers blocked easy access to the fantasy, potentially exposing their own bodies but also embodying the power of bravura performance, group solidarity, and kinship connections of the kind fostered earlier in Deer Family performances. The Indian ballet that Esther Deer put together was at least partly made up of her relatives from Caughnawaga, among them May (Marie Kaienens) Splicer, who performed as Moonlight, and members of the Beauvais and Skye families.133 In praising the group’s artistry, newspapers were led to acknowledge not only Princess White Deer as “the principal dancer in the ballet” but her land, lineage, and family. Press coverage named St. Regis reservation, her grandfather Running Deer, “prosperous hotel keeper,” and the women dancers in her ballet as “a half dozen sure-enough Indian maidens,” “her cousins more or less removed.”134 Reviews repeatedly emphasized that this was “a real Indian ballet” and “one of the real novelties” of the show; it was also real family being fostered in the midst of what was otherwise an offensive joke based on a tired stereotype.135 From this point, reviewers repeatedly praised Princess White Deer for her skill in dancing an array of cultural styles, including her own choreographed ballet, jazz, “Hindu dance,” “Native Dance of Hawaii,” and tango with “the Argentine Sheik” Peppy de Albrew.136 One syndicated newspaper story said: “Princess White Deer does very little Indian dancing in the Hitchcock revue, but she does the shimmy ‘pretty’ and she puts over a buck and wing that never fails to win applause.” She held her own on programs with a throng of highprofile racial and ethnic cross-overs, such as the “Yiddishe Indians” played by Jewish Fanny Brice (in flapper costume), Jewish Eddie Cantor (in redface), and

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Cherokee Will Rogers (in his comic commentary) as well as the blackface performances and rhetoric of Cantor, Rogers, and Bahamian American Bert Williams.137 In this company, Princess White Deer both expanded the ethnic and racialized range of her performance and insisted on her difference, increasingly using her Mohawk name—Ken-Tio-Kwi-Osta—in publicity.138 Increasingly, during her time on the Broadway stage and touring circuit— in Ziegfeld’s Nine O’Clock Frolic and Midnight Frolic, Charles Dillingham’s Tip Top and Lucky, and A. L. Erlanger’s The Yankee Princess—Princess White Deer clinched the profile, audience interaction, cultural range, and creative control that constituted a central difference separating vaudeville and revue from wild west and circus. As had her father and uncle years earlier, she took legal recourse to assert her control over her public image. She successfully took the magazine Pictorial Review to U.S. federal court for publishing her picture on their cover without her permission—a move applauded by one columnist as a model for authors’ rights in the movie business.139 The distance she had traveled from being an object of curiosity in Texas Jack’s Menagerie and on the grounds of the Dresden zoo seventeen years earlier was manifest when she was one of the handful of principals introduced “Face to Face” to the audience at the opening of Nine O’Clock Frolic.140 Vaudevillizing Ethnology As an Indigenous woman who had been both object and subject of the entertainment gaze, Esther Deer would intimately know the symbiosis between popular culture and anthropological taxonomies. In the 1920s, she made a move to intervene at that intersection by seizing the ethnographic narrative for the vaudeville stage and choreographing it into a chronological sequence embedded throughout in Indigenous authority. Sonita Sarker’s call to flip the cultural script by asking not how Indigenous peoples “entered” modern times but what it meant to “be modernist in Indigenous times” echoes Esther Deer’s emphasis one hundred years earlier when she pointed to the ongoing dependence of what was touted as distinctively American modernism on living Indigenous cultures.141 Her intervention began with her answering a question about jazz. In 1920, in a widely syndicated story, New York journalist James Henle asked Princess White Deer, “Who invented jazz?,” and she reportedly answered, “The redskins.” The story continues: “The princess insists that it was her people who, with their tomtoms, originated splitting beats to infinitesimals, which is

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the essence of syncopation. Members of the Omaha tribe, she says, had ears so acute that their musicians could distinguish separate beats down to thirtyseconds, while the lowest that musicians of the Caucasian race have been able to get is to sixteenths.” To display her people’s range and artistry, she was planning her own Indian Revue: “In arranging her one-hour review Ken-tiokwi-osta will have the help, it is announced, of the Indian department and the bureau of ethnology. Princess White Deer is well educated and worked with Prof. Patterson at Columbia university in his elaborate laboratory experiments upon the nature of syncopation.”142 For years, Esther Deer had performed with graceful playfulness the point that what was being celebrated as modern was fundamentally Indigenous—from her jazz dancing on vaudeville and revue stages to her studio portraits in hybrid flapper and Indigenous dress. Now she intervened in another discourse of western modernity, circulating largely among white male authorities, that brought together ethnology, Indigeneity, and the notion of “white jazz.” The authority Esther Deer invoked in the interview was William Morrison Patterson of the English Department at Columbia University, who in 1916 published a somewhat influential study, The Rhythm of Prose: An Experimental Investigation of Individual Difference in the Sense of Rhythm. Patterson anchored his analysis of the relationship between musical rhythms and human bodies to one of the most influential thinkers of the time: Franz Boas, his distinguished colleague at Columbia University. The book acknowledges Boas’s suggestions for the study and opens by citing his work: The music of contemporary savages, such as that of the Kwakiutl, investigated by Professor Boas, taunts us with a lost art of rhythm. Modern sophistication has inhibited many native instincts, and the mere fact that our conventional dignity usually forbids us to sway our bodies or to tap our feet when we hear effective music, has deprived us of unsuspected pleasures. Certain it is that the facility of the American Indian in the execution of syncopating rhythms is matched in most of us by a thoroughly blunted process, characterized by hesitation and awkwardness.143 Throughout Patterson’s report on his experiments, he repeatedly extols “our primitive ancestors”—variously cited as “our American Indians,” “the naked Hopi Indian,” “the Kwakiutl Indians,” and “the Omahas”—whose music has “variety and complexity of rhythm” that excels “most of our civilized music by a

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great deal.”144 When Esther Deer gestured to her collaboration with Patterson, she refused his categories of identity. Neither what he calls a “contemporary savage,” some kind of powerless remnant, nor part of the “most of us” who have lost American Indian rhythms, she was an artist with creative control whose research was supported by government departments. In speaking from this position of authority, further grounded in her use of her Mohawk name, Esther Deer also joined the company of what Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) and Isaiah Lorado Wilner have called a “vast network of Indigenous collaborators” who enabled Boas’s work and influence.145 Patterson’s opening references Boas’s 1895 report to the U.S. National Museum, The Kwakiutl Indians, whose influence contributed to his successful campaign for the country’s first department of anthropology, at Columbia University, and to the shift from paradigms of scientific racism toward cultural relativism. Wilner has closely traced the processes by which this report and Boas’s later publications came into being, shaped by the teachings of George Hunt, Indigenous intellectual, ethnographer, and member of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw First Nation, one of “a generation of Indigenous intellectuals” at the turn of the twentieth century who “converted the people who had come to categorize them into mediums of Indigenous thought.”146 Esther Deer was not among those who shaped Boas’s thinking, but rather part of the Indigenous reframing of official taxonomies and departments of ethnology that followed from his work.147 Speaking from a similarly commercialized entertainment space to those in which Boas himself first encountered Indigenous people, she signaled the close fellowship of popular culture and academic discipline. Over the years, her plan grew increasingly ambitious. In 1924, she announced that the revue would appear on big-time Keith vaudeville, and in it “she will show the influence of the native American upon art, music, dancing and the theater since the days of Pocahontas to the present time.” She continued to acknowledge assistance by “the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior in securing material for the scenery, costumes, music and Indian art.”148 And she gave her revue a title—“From Wigwam to White Lights”— acute in its multiple resonances regarding her own journey from Mohawk Territory to Broadway, the dependence of western modernity on Indigeneity, and the dominant stereotyped, primitivistic vision of Native peoples. In bringing Indigenous authority to jazz, Esther Deer name-checked another influential figure: the bandleader Paul Whiteman. Whiteman was a prominent performer and promoter of “white jazz”: the move by white cultural

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gatekeepers in the 1920s to produce what they called “advanced” or “refined” jazz—note the echo from “advanced” or “polite” vaudeville.149 Driving this distinction was racial panic over the powerful draw of African American musical forms and their status as distinctively American on the global stage. Whiteman’s book Jazz, co-written with Mary Margaret McBride in 1926, set out his argument for how white orchestration and legitimation of jazz had fulfilled its potential beyond its crude (that is, African American) origins, yoking this development to national myths of western pioneering.150 When Whiteman cited Patterson’s book as evidence, the whitening project of that earlier study came into focus: in all his close attention to syncopation, Patterson never used the word “jazz” nor acknowledged the centrality of Black artistry to his topic (although Walter Kingsley, a journalist and Keith circuit press agent, immediately made the connection in his book review).151 Into the push-and-pull of white desire for and fear of African American so-called primitivism, Princess White Deer injected a third perspective. She continued to publicize her revue as a combination of research, choreography, and cultural origination, now citing Whiteman’s dependency on Indigenous art. Amy Abbott wrote in her syndicated column, “Princess White Deer has made exhaustive studies of the influence of redmen upon art, music, dancing and costume in the theater with a view of staging an elaborate Indian revue. The Indian bureau of the department of the interior gave aid in her researches and she finally accumulated so much material that a book is the result.” After acknowledging her prominence on Keith’s vaudeville circuit and the European scene, the piece ends by citing her influence: “Paul Whiteman often discusses Indian music with the princess and takes down her melodies and utilizes them in his orchestrations.”152 Around the time of this interview, Princess White Deer appeared on the same bill as Whiteman, apparently sharing the stage with Coeur d’Alene musician and band leader Alton Rinker, who was piano player and “hot break” vocalist of the Paul Whiteman Band (along with Bing Crosby and Harry Barris), as well as brother of jazz vocalist Mildred Bailey.153 It was perhaps a backhanded acknowledgment of all these Indigenous creative connections that Whiteman intermittently put his band into redface.154 Esther Deer’s vision of the power of Indian jazz was borne out by an outpouring of Indian jazz revues and Indian jazz bands on vaudeville and revue stages during the 1920s.155 She also anticipated future creations and collaborations, such as the musical play by Joy Harjo (Mvskoke Nation), “We Were There When Jazz Was Invented,” in progress as of 2020.156 Esther Deer’s

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own project, however, seems never to have been fully realized. She did launch an Indian Revue in January 1925 titled “From Wigwam to White Lights” as part of Keith’s vaudeville at the New York Hippodrome. Although the piece matched some of her announced ambitions—in stretching from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries with dances by Princess White Deer interwoven through the eras—it was not the creation that she had publicly envisaged, not her triumphal vaudeville accomplishment.157 This version lasted seventeen minutes, not an hour. It did not transcend the established vaudeville framework but instead fitted into a lineup of operatic and comedic singers, dancers, circus acrobats, performing horses, and photoplays, with Harry Houdini as the headliner. It did not celebrate Indigenous influence on the scale her public comments envisioned: although two of the principals—Princess White Deer and Chief Eagle Horse—were Indigenous performers, the “Hip’s chorus of 18 girls” was not. And, although the Hippodrome audience was huge, the surviving press coverage, inasmuch as I have been able to access it, was tepid.158 In early March 1925, Esther Deer fell ill, “ordered to Florida by her physicians following a nervous breakdown due to overwork in preparing [her] elaborate act for KeithAlbee vaudeville.”159 Again, down south, she staged jazz culture as a meeting place for Indigenous peoples—in this case, when she demonstrated Charleston steps and flapper makeup tips to Seminole women. But the larger project— including the mooted book—seems not to have come to fruition. Her ambition for her revue seems to have been that Indian vaudeville would add to Indigenous reframings of debates over the origins of American culture and showcase Indigenous creativity as an ongoing force in shaping modernity. Was this ambition a bridge too far?

conclusion Esther Deer enjoyed a long life beyond her vaudeville career, living to over one hundred years old. When she left the stage in 1929, she continued to use the profile, skills, and voice that she had honed on vaudeville, variety, and Variété with her performance family. She facilitated meetings and celebrations by nonIndigenous Indianist groups, sometimes in company with Os-Ko-Mon. She joined her father in attempting to bring government heads to a meeting of the Iroquois Confederacy at St. Regis. She became a figurehead for a Lake Mohawk development in New Jersey (wielding another blanket, this time a Pendleton in the popular Harding pattern gifted her by the Lake Mohawk community, with her elderly father beside her wearing his own show blanket once more).

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Because she had spoken up for voting rights for Indigenous women and for an Indigenous Indian Commissioner in Washington, D.C., newspapers dubbed her “A Susan B. Anthony of the American Indians,” and she continued to participate in Indigenous gatherings that brought attention to women’s suffrage and land reclamation.160 Some of these endeavors were controversial among her own people. Positioned on a spectrum with James Deer’s 1885 booklet about his experiences on the Nile, however, her performances on and beyond the stage can be understood as a continuation of the effort to negotiate spaces at once dangerous and alienating, to broker conditions and cross borders not of Indigenous peoples’ making, through creative expression. (Indeed, the Nile story itself continued to give and be given life through its performances by Deer family descendants well beyond James’s death in 1939 and at least until Georgette’s passing in 1959.)161 The novelty at the heart of the vaudeville contract could be demeaning and dangerous for Indigenous performers. In the logic of the classic vaudeville joke—Niagara falls all over again—the trick was to surprise audiences with the novelty of a spectacle they had seen before. In the case of Indigenous performers, the vaudeville contract encouraged non-Indigenous audiences and commentators to constantly rediscover “real Indians,” with an astonishment that suggested they were always on the verge of extinction. The mock discoverycum-annihilation was equally explicit in Europe, but in North America it meshed with deep structural forces. Not only could this rhetoric play into vanishing Indian tropes that structured government policy as much as popular entertainment; it also dovetailed with logics of assimilation. I’m arguing, however, that, for all these threats to the Indigenous performer’s agency, the more closely I read what is visible to the non-Indigenous viewer—details of performance attire, press coverage, archival traces—the more the Deer family seems to have inhabited that dangerous space in selfempowering ways. While audiences were encouraged to see them as a disappearing people, the performers were busy generating material resources, kinship, and community. In different senses, the Deers were powerful negotiators of entertainment contracts—literally as owners, copyrighters, managers, autonomous actors negotiating their way around the international entertainment circuit and, more metaphorically, in engaging directly, sometimes intimately, with audiences and welcoming them as guests. The conditions and expectations of revue and musical comedy make that power more evident: not only did Princess White Deer enjoy more job security, higher pay, and better

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work conditions in those productions than in vaudeville, but she could also diversify her image while expanding her authority over its circulation and her public sphere of influence. The result was not unfettered control over the means of production—witness the revue that seems never quite to have been— but it was consequential cultural work to be continued by future generations. In 1918, just as Princess White Deer was moving from big-time vaudeville into revue, she appeared in a Ziegfeld lineup in a pose and company that say much about her stage challenges and strategies.162 The occasion was a special Midnight Frolic revue aboard the USS Seattle on November 7, 1918, in celebration of the forthcoming signing of the armistice to end World War I. The program for this patriotic occasion was a combination of nationalistic tableaux and revue entertainment. For the final ensemble—or bow—Princess White Deer found herself closely flanked on her right side by figures of national pride: “The Spirit of the Red Cross” and “America” (represented by the Statue of Liberty, wrapped in the national flag).163 Beyond, to her left, were two wellestablished performers who embodied the multiple racialized negotiations on Broadway during this period: Fanny Brice and Bert Williams. Princess White Deer, who had performed two solos—“Indian Song and Dance” and “Buck Dance”—struck a pose that was quintessential in its ambiguity. In her familiar feathered headdress and braids, she has wrapped her show blanket about her from chin to foot (figure 3.6). Again, it is not the striped show blanket used in Europe but her father’s blanket that she presents to the American audience. I read Esther Deer in lineage here with her family and according to the line of analysis first prompted by the Paul Diabo figure, as clothed by Teiowí:sonte Deer, in the Kahnawà:ke Language and Cultural Center: that is, as simultaneously announcing and protecting herself with this blanket, folding kin and community around her. Her pose can also, of course, be read as an expression of the stereotype that perennially threatened to engulf her and her people: the primitive “vanishing Indian” lined up with other icons of the American nation that refused them recognition. With the blanket, Princess White Deer controls what the audience can see of her body, but she also signals the danger of being smothered by it. And peeping out beneath the blanket is her flapper shoe, a sign of the modernity that she also continued to wield, pointing to a lifetime of modernist performance for those who might not otherwise see it. I’ll end this chapter as I began, with a scene from an exhibition, in this case “Princess White Deer: A Woman, A Mohawk and A Legend,” curated by Patricia O. Galperin in 2017. Among the photographs, playbills, travel

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Figure 3.6.  Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, November 7, 1918. Princess White Deer is just left of center; Fanny Brice and Bert Williams are on the right, seventh and fifth from the end. (Florenz Ziegfeld Photograph Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

documents, and press clippings, two show blankets glowed with astonishing richness. They were Esther Deer’s and her father’s blankets, between 120 and 150 years old, a little frayed but rich in shades of orange, brown, pink, green, and yellow. How powerful they must have been in their newness—holding in their folds lineages of violent onslaught and resurgent survivance; being wielded in invitation to, refusal of, and protection against stereotyped expectations—I cannot imagine. Perhaps, in the world of vaudeville at the turn of the twentieth century, this is what Indigenous brokerage looked like.

3rd Vaudeville Number Molly S po tted El k Do es th e Cha rl e s t on w it h J ohn Ford’ s th e Iro n Ho rse

IN JANUARY 1926, John Ford’s silent western The Iron Horse (1924) was showing at Loew’s Vendom Theater in Nashville, Tennessee, a picture palace for an audience of 1,600. The film’s narrative follows the joining of the U.S. railroad in the 1860s, “impelled westward by the strong urge of progress,” as the title card says, the familiar hyper-nationalism underwritten by a story of white heterosexual lovers who overcome their misunderstandings just as the silver spike is hammered in at Promontory Point, Utah.1 Indian figures loom large on screen, mainly as Cheyenne warriors in full-feather headdresses; whereas the white man “feels the momentum of a great nation pushing westward—he sees the inevitable,” the warriors “face it in defiance” with attacks foreordained to fail.2 But “The Indians on Stage”—the Indigenous entertainers who performed live before and during the film—told a different story. They were the dancer Molly Spotted Elk/Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud (1903–1977) of the Penobscot Nation and the orator and activist Chief Sheet Lightning/Walter Battice (1875–1930) of the Sac and Fox Nation. Working their stage act across Nation and generation—the press sometimes billed Sheet Lightning as Spotted Elk’s father—they were fitted to the Plains Indian stereotypes on which the movie trades in being advertised as “Full-Blooded Sioux Indians.” Instead of seeing the two performers embody the enemies of progress depicted on the screen, however, audiences were invited to “HEAR THE PRINCESS SING. SEE HER DO THE CHARLESTON,” while Sheet Lightning, trademark tomahawk in hand, mocked 1 77

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Figure 3VN.1.  Molly Nelson, or Spotted Elk, Penobscot, Maine, U.S.A., ca. 1920s. She is dressed in the outfit she wore to accompany The Iron Horse in 1926. (Courtesy of Glenbow Archives)

lurid scalping tales and spoke pridefully of Indigenous pasts and futures.3 The gap between live and filmic representation—especially the contrast between Molly Spotted Elk on stage and Madge Bellamy, the Euro-American star, on the screen—raises a question about the binary categories used so routinely to fix Indigenous people in the past. Between the young Penobscot dancer in buckskin beaded dress and headband with a single feather quick-stepping and singing on stage (figure 3VN.1) and the much less kinetic, stiffly crinolined, and silent image of the nineteenth-century heroine on screen, who would be seen as traditional and who as modern here?

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This scene is one of hundreds in which live Indigenous acts accompanied the projection of westerns, among other filmic genres. Piece by piece, the history of motion pictures is being rewritten to acknowledge significant Indigenous participation on screen and off. Yet the impact of live Indigenous performance on the making of cinematic space in its formative years has been little reckoned.4 Molly Spotted Elk’s vaudeville work was only one strand of her large, richly varied artistic oeuvre, but following her performance journey through vaudeville-film combination houses can illuminate distinct rhythms, spectacles, connections, and genealogies that Indigenous performers brought to filmic exhibition. In acclimatizing spectators to the shift from liveness to cinematic representation, Indigenous entertainers contributed to training audiences in two central entertainment technologies of western modernity— vaudeville and motion pictures—in the period when they came together. Molly Spotted Elk also illuminates some of the toll of that cultural work in her personal accounts of commercial exploitation and exposure that have been published more recently.5 Her case challenges the historian of popular culture, while honoring the importance of Indigenous artistry in the making of mass entertainment, not to forget its costs. And her presence illuminates a third connection traced here, as Indigenous artists of subsequent generations have succored that pain, transforming images of Molly Spotted Elk’s popular performance into healing relations of Indigenous remembrance.

vaudeville-film The intermedial relationship between vaudeville and film began with the first public projection of moving pictures in Berlin Variété in 1895 and New York vaudeville in 1896.6 Vaudeville houses were prime exhibition outlets for early one-reelers, having already brought together mass audiences and established national distribution circuits. Variety playbills responded and accommodated audiences to the rhythms of urban modernity with their atomized bursts of novelty into which short films could be slotted, dovetailing vaudeville time and filmic time. Many early films recorded vaudeville acts, transferring live rhythms and audience address to celluloid, creating what Tom Gunning famously dubbed “the cinema of attractions” and training audiences in new spectator practices.7 Some films made the training of audiences their subject, as in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), in which a vaudeville spectator comically misreads filmic images of an oncoming train as live action. Different exhibition practices, including accompaniment by live music and lectures, also worked to

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shape audience members’ expectations of and responses to what they saw on screen. When the balance shifted to predominantly filmic programs, with nickelodeons in 1905 and then picture palaces in the 1910s, live performance remained a significant force in mediating the viewing experience. Feature films continued to be accompanied by vaudeville acts and, later, floor shows; what Henry Jenkins called “the vaudeville aesthetic” continued to imprint filmic pacing and reception.8 Coterminous with these developments were other performances and exhibitions training spectators in how to look at Indians on film. Alison Griffiths argues that actualities of Indian dances, including those by performers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West filmed by Thomas Edison in the 1890s and shown up close in kinetoscopes, worked as “cinematic intertexts” training white spectators how to see Indians in later narrative films.9 Alison Fields probes the movement between wild west shows and films—specifically between the 101 Ranch Real Wild West and 101-Bison films—as shaping the performer-spectator relationship: “As Native performers traveled circuits of western spectacle and negotiated space within each performance venue, they contributed to turn-ofthe-century practices of looking.”10 By the 1920s, silent films had undergone what Miriam Hansen called “the paradigmatic shift from early to classical cinema,” which was also “the creation of this classical spectator.”11 Multi-reel filmic narratives had moved away from presentationalism—the direct look at the camera—aiming now to produce a “self-contained fictional world on screen, the diegesis” that would absorb spectators.12 As feature-film distribution became more standardized and exhibition spaces larger, live acts continued to localize audiences’ sense of themselves, sustain active relations of looking, and resist the passivity encouraged by diegetic absorption. To follow Molly Spotted Elk from one vaudeville-film act to another is to witness what live performance by a virtuoso Penobscot artist brought to creating this diegetic break.

“the indians are here” By the time Molly Nelson was born on Indian Island, on November 17, 1903, Lucy Nicolar was already building a career as Princess Watahwaso around Boston. In some ways the Nelson home seems reminiscent of the Nicolars’. Molly’s father, Horace Nelson, also served as representative to the Maine state legislature, as well as tribal chief, and her mother, Philomene Saulis Nelson (Maliseet), was a skilled basket-maker and a healer. Molly Nelson was

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surrounded by stories, songs, dances, and community performances—“The community’s dance repertoire ranged from traditional Indian to classical and contemporary western dances,” including their own variety shows—that she would remember and reenact, record and refashion throughout her creative life.13 Her father played in the Indian Island Penobscot Band; Molly performed with her sister, Apid, in pageants and parades organized on Indian Island. She also attended vaudeville and other popular shows across the river at Old Town. Molly Nelson shared Lucy Nicolar’s determination to access education beyond the six grades of Catholic school on Indian Island; she eventually studied at the University of Pennsylvania, with courses in English and anthropology, and worked with anthropologist Frank Speck. This last was an interest that she shared with several Indigenous performers, one that would recur in her creative commitments. Her attitude toward going on the popular stage, however, sounds distinctly different from Lucy Nicolar’s. As the oldest child in a large family, she had worked hard to contribute to the household from a very early age; she seems initially to have gone on the vaudeville circuit in Massachusetts, around age fifteen, as an alternative to unrelenting domestic chores and child care. Her relationship to vaudeville seems to have been catch-as-catch-can through the early 1920s, as she traveled the small-time venues, what she called a “tin can circuit of small dumps.”14 Presumably one of these was the relatively modest (800-seat) Universal movie theater in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where Molly Nelson performed as Princess Nee-Ber-Ben in live accompaniment to a photoplay, in November 1921: The Absorbing Photo Drama of Early New England   “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” A Masterly Picturization of Longfellow’s Poem.    Staged With   Elaborate Indian Prologue With Chief John Ranco, Princess Nee-Ber-Ben,   Blue Cloud and also Arrow-In-Sky.15 This live “Indian Prologue” took place between the opening “picture prolog”— photographs of “historic Plymouth, the birthplace of our nation” projected onto a screen—and the main film, a narrative of Pilgrim landings, settler romance, and resolution pointing to future procreation. Given that positioning, it would

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be quite possible to read—and perhaps some audience members did read—the Indigenous performers as reinforcing the portentousness of the American nation’s beginnings as they literally left the stage to be replaced by the technological spectacle and dramatic narrative designed to absorb the audience into its illusions and ideologies. Reconstructing the live Indian act, however, suggests something far different from vanishment. A vivacious combination of generations, genders, cultural positions, and performance styles that spoke of community, vulnerability, and fortitude, the live act came to overshadow the filmic component. The most prominent Penobscot on stage was John Ranco. With Newell Tomar, another member of a distinguished family in the Penobscot Nation, a few months earlier he had paddled three hundred miles from Indian Island to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in a birch-bark canoe of their own construction to participate in the tercentenary pageant commemorating the Pilgrims’ landing. As they proceeded south, their trip attracted voluminous press coverage and crowds.16 By the time John Ranco told his story on the vaudeville-film stage, it had been broadcast nationally as a journey of great bravery joining ancestral knowledge with present-day skills; the canoeists were acknowledged as blending “the ancient lord of the land and the present proprietors,” and the Penobscot brass band, of which Ranco was part, was hailed for its musicianship. “The children and grownups” were said to be “charmed” by his powerful on-stage presence: a man approaching middle age, dressed in distinctively Penobscot tunic and breeches, “fringed and rich with colored beads,” and an ostrich-plumed headdress, “the same head dress that their ancestors had worn on the warpath against the Mohawks of Massachusetts.”17 The other Penobscot performer had a strikingly different presence. The press reported: “Little Princess Nee-Ber-Ben’s singing, and her introduction of Indian and modern dancing is pleasing as it is presented in a dainty manner.” Molly Nelson, just approaching her eighteenth birthday, performed in a lightly beaded two-piece that looks like her own—or her family’s—design: a plain cloth band with shoulder straps, shorts covered by a knee-length beaded, fringed apron, headwear that looks somewhat like a beaded version of the peaked hat distinctive to Wabanaki women, and bells round her ankles. The name under which Molly Nelson performed points to both her rootedness in the Penobscot Nation and her ambivalence about entering the public domain. “Nee-bur-ban,” as she wrote it, was based on the Penobscot word for Northern Lights, and it had cultural and generational weight, having been used by a

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Penobscot basket-maker and performer of her mother’s generation.18 It remained a name that she used in intimate relationships throughout her adult life.19 It was also the name with which Molly Nelson signed some early poems where she talked about her closeness to nature and her timidity in going public with her writing, a comment that conveys some of the strength of her homeland connection and challenge in going public with live performance too.20 While the newspaper story makes the on-stage work sound joyous, it also exposes vulnerability: “Nee-Ber-Ben is also an expert basket-maker and may be seen in the window of the Universal fruit store”; the image of her sitting alone in a shop window, her basketry skill on display, is disturbingly reminiscent of sideshows and human zoos. The vivacity of the troupe was reinforced by other Indigenous and nonIndigenous entertainers, different again from their fellow Penobscot performers. Princess Blue Cloud, sometimes billed as “Indian woman baritone,” was a Sioux jazz singer. With Chief Blue Cloud, the Sioux trombone player, she fronted “Chief Blue Cloud and his Indian Syncopators,”21 the band whose energy was described by Wingy Manone as “jump[ing] up with a big war whoop and bust[ing] into some hot jazz.” In Massachusetts, reviewers raved about her “rendition of ‘Until we meet again,’ ‘Mother I didn’t understand,’ and her famous ‘Daddy’ song.” The fourth performer, Bernard Paté, seems to have been a Massachusetts resident of French-Canadian descent breaking into acting, here noted for his “good baritone voice and . . . good stage presence.” Sometimes the group was accompanied by “Red Star, tom tom player,” whom I have been unable to trace. Dressed in Plains Indian–style attire—buckskin dress, lots of beads, full-feather headdresses—these performers, with their stories, dances, and various musical instruments, would have added vibrant difference to the mix. All of this along with “Special lighting, scenic, and musical effects”—little wonder that soon the “Photo Drama” sank to secondary place in the program’s billing, beneath the blaring headline “THE INDIANS ARE HERE.”22 When Molly Nelson joined her younger sister Apid Nelson at the 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show in Oklahoma in 1925, she interacted with hundreds of Indigenous performers from at least twelve different tribes and Nations. She seems to have received the name Spotted Elk from her fellow Cheyenne performers in honor of her power as a dancer.23 Under that name, she returned to the vaudeville-film circuit, expanding her repertoire among a large community of Indigenous performers providing live accompaniment for

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feature-length films—comedies, historical dramas, thrillers—at large and small combination houses throughout the 1920s and beyond. Their work with western films is of particular interest, given how powerfully diegetic absorption aided this genre’s nation-building and Americanization work in the United States and overseas. Of all the film genres, westerns featured Indigenous actors most conspicuously; therefore, the possibilities for echoes, contrasts, and relations among on-screen figures, live Indigenous performers, and audience members were at their richest and most diverse. This is where The Iron Horse comes into the story. Molly Spotted Elk’s Charleston accompaniment was one of numerous Indigenous acts appearing alongside the film. Touching on two of them indicates their cultural reach. When the film was exhibited in its first run at the elaborate Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, it was accompanied by a live prologue by Arapahoes and Shoshonis from Wind River Reservation—some of whom also appeared in the film—organized by Tim McCoy, the rancher turned Hollywood actor. Performers came forward on stage, addressing the audience in sign language translated by McCoy, wearing whatever they chose in response to McCoy’s request that they “show the white man audience how they looked when they felt beautiful.”24 The result: “Eagle feathers, war bonnets, dentalium shell chokers, golden ear-rings, hair-pipe breastplates, Washington peace medallions, fringed buckskin shirts, beaded leggings and quilled moccasins erupted into a volcano of pure, joyous color.”25 Some audience members may well have found the live presence of Arapahoes and Shoshonis authenticated the movie’s representation of Cheyenne warriors, but the live performers’ vibrant display surely topped any black-and-white filmic effects. As The Iron Horse went on national release, it continued to be accompanied by live Indian acts before and during the screening, to cover reel changes. Throughout 1925, the most high-profile act and drollest commentary came from Chief Clear Sky/Joseph Henry Morris, Iroquois of Caughnawaga. His revue, “Where the West Begins,” showcased Seneca, Hopi, and Iroquois performers. In title and content, it again reminded audiences of what the western sought to forget: the geographical breadth, cultural diversity, and present vitality of the original People on whom the genre depends.26 Like Princess White Deer with her show blanket, Joseph Clear Sky carried with him the material texts of his endurance and ingenuity, in the form of his elaborate regalia. It had accompanied him onto the vaudeville stage in the early 1900s, into his infantry service in World War I, where he donned it to meet dignitaries

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abroad, and then into his 1920s promotional campaign for a Pontiac six bus with which he traveled his vaudeville circuits. Ever crossing categories of expectation, he was “known to the vaudeville stage as the Indian Al Jolson”; the Turtle Gals provide a mordant intergenerational echo in The Scrubbing Project when they sing along to “a scratchy 1920s recording” of Al Jolson’s “Who Played Poker with Pocahontas When John Smith Went Away.”27 Molly Spotted Elk and Chief Sheet Lightning’s 1926 act alongside The Iron Horse, then, resonates with multiple relations and time frames that cross commercial entertainment structures and join Indigenous performers on stage, their Indigenous colleagues on screen, Indigenous audience members, and the throng of Indigenous performers jazzing it up in vaudeville houses. More directly than the Grauman’s Prologue and more explicitly crossing gender and generation than Clear Sky’s Revue, Molly Spotted Elk’s virtuosity with signifiers of western modernity together with the oratory of Sheet Lightning, older than her by nearly three decades, enacted—to quote Joanna Hearne—the “intergenerational future that the [western] genre refused to envision for Native nations.”28 Later in 1926, Molly Spotted Elk moved up to the big time when she performed in the hyper-faux-Indigenized space of the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio, Texas, a new 3,000-seat building with towering “Mayan Revival” figures in the lobby and auditorium, a fire curtain mural depicting the meeting of Moctezuma and Cortés, and an auditorium designed to replicate “a great open court or patio in an Aztec palace.”29 She had been hired into the synchronized chorus line of sixteen Aztec Girls, costumed as everything from Scottish Highlanders to East Asians and reviewed by the local press as “a distinctly highclass, up-to-the-minute chorus of charming, shapely misses whose dancing showed us the perfect synchronism of a Broadway organization.”30 In August 1926, Metropolitan Pictures’ The Last Frontier came to the Aztec in its first run. It was another formulaic western, revolving around a post–Civil War wagon train going west to Salina, Kansas, so-called Indian massacres, several historical figures—Bill Hickok, Bill Cody, and George Custer—and a love story starring William Boyd and Marguerite De La Motte. The Indian villain, Sioux chief Pawnee Killer, was played by Lebanese American actor Frank Lackteen. The film’s advertising boasted a cast of more than 1,500 Indians who “enact a scene of plunder, pillage and ravage on the homes and wagon trains of white settlers in a manner that conforms perfectly to the data found in history.”31 The live prologue to the film presented “a novelty dance number executed by the sixteen

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Aztec Girls to the melody of ‘Castles in the Air,’ sung by Ralph Soule.”32 In the live finale that immediately followed the film, the Aztec chorus was choreographed into an elaborate “Round Up,” in which one of the Aztec Girls, Charlotte Middlemore, did an “Indian Charleston”; the chorus line, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, did the “Texas Tommy”; and Molly Spotted Elk choreographed and danced the culminating solo, “the Ghost Dance from the Sioux.”33 The juxtaposition of Indigenous performance and Indian mimicry in the Aztec auditorium was on a massive scale—from the “giant sculptures of Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec Moon goddess” ringing the audience to the screen climax of Indians stampeding three thousand buffalo straight at the camera to the live Indigenous and Indian dances on the stage.34 In its title, Molly Spotted Elk’s dance referenced the sacred Ghost Dance that swept through Lakota and other Nations in the winter of 1889–90; that was met with retaliation by the Seventh Cavalry in their massacre of Miniconjou Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee; and that continued to be practiced by several Nations well into the twentieth century. It is, of course, possible to read this entertainment setting as trivializing the Ghost Dance—although it is notable that, for their own reasons, the Aztec’s managers labored to make their performance arena a space of serious scholarship and representation, emphasizing the research in Mexican archives and archaeological sites that informed the lavish design. Most striking are the powerful connections that Molly Spotted Elk’s performance carried. Her own name echoed that of the Miniconjou Lakota chief murdered at Wounded Knee: Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot. She was an Indigenous artist choreographing and dancing under the title of a ceremony still forbidden Native peoples by the U.S. government. And at the 101 Ranch and other sites she had recently worked among Indigenous performers whose communities continued secretly to practice the Ghost Dance religion and whose relatives had been murdered at Wounded Knee.35 This dance was the final punctuation point to the evening’s entertainment. I have seen only a brief, somewhat bemused press report of Molly Spotted Elk’s choreography: “it is a weird series of maneuvers that are fully as exciting and hair-raising as her interpretation of two weeks ago.”36 More revealing is the description written by Eunice Nelson-Bauman for Bunny McBride’s biography, as she recalls seeing her older sister dance in a nightclub: “as I watched her, my heart pounded, tears streamed down my face, and my body trembled uncontrollably. Here, in this book, I read in an excerpt from her diary that she wanted her dancing to be ‘passionate,’ and I can affirm that for me it was just that.”37

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The film that Molly Spotted Elk’s dance accompanied, The Last Frontier, ends by evoking George Armstrong Custer: “YOU’LL CHEER when the American troops under General Custer charge upon the savage redskins.”38 Within the historical coordinates of the film’s action, the reference may have been to Seventh Cavalry raids on Cheyenne people in Kansas and Indian Territory in the late 1860s. But in 1926 an audience would be more likely to connect Custer’s name to his defeat by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), whose fiftieth anniversary had just been marked. That association would be reinforced by the title of Molly Spotted Elk’s solo, which chronologically points to a time after the film’s ending. As always, audience members’ responses would be various; but I read this as one of many moments in which—dancing in the network of Indigeneity created in the combination of screen presentation, the house’s physical décor, the known facts of history, and her own communities and memories—Molly Spotted Elk gave a passionate performance of living Indigenous power. At some point during or after this engagement, she also spoke in firstperson voice from within this performance, in her poem “We’re in the Chorus Now.”39 The first verse expresses the rhythms and rhyme schemes of the Aztec Girls’ synchronization, and then she breaks the uniformity of the chorus line rhythm to name and characterize an international range of individual dancers, with their very different stories and relationships, including Charlotte, the dancer who performed the “Indian Charleston.” The author chooses not to name or characterize herself, so that the speaker of the poem becomes the collective voice of the Aztec chorus line, returning in the final verses to the coordinated dance routine that is their public image. At one moment, Molly Spotted Elk also names their collective presence: “We Moderns.” I find the tone of that line difficult to read—is it mordant, celebratory, an implicit comment on the position they are trained to perform?—but it carries an echo of Joseph Nicolar’s naming and repudiating “the learned of these modern dates” three decades earlier. In another way, it anticipates Chief Caupolican’s powerful rendition within the equally saturated faux-Indianness and synchronized routines of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Whoopee! in 1929, which in turn evokes Tamanend atop Tony Pastor’s Fourteenth Street Theatre in 1881. Layer upon layer, period after period, Indigenous performers draw relations across and among themselves, reorienting the significance of the popular stage. After her time at the Aztec, Molly Spotted Elk joined Princess Watahwaso’s troupe—then touring as “Princess Wantura and Her Tribesmen”—and

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participated for several months in “The Courtship of Rippling Water.”40 Revisiting this musical revue in the context of Molly Spotted Elk’s journey through vaudeville brings attention to the movie shown on the same bill. In March 1927, at the 1,500-seat Feeley Theatre in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the troupe accompanied another feature-film western, The Flaming Frontier.41 The film’s “Romantic Love Story” concerns a white man and woman (played by Hoot Gibson and Anne Cornwall), while on-screen Indians appear “on the War Path” and as part of “Gen. Custer’s Last Stand” (with Dustin Farnum playing Custer).42 Once more, the on-stage enactment of loving Indigenous relations in the Indian Revue broke the film’s containment of Indian images and disrupted its offer of diegetic absorption into narratives of violent Indians attacking the white American nation. But Molly Spotted Elk’s participation in this moment also tempers a too-easy celebration of its making; when she agreed to join the revue, it was with doubts about working with an all-Indigenous troupe— “Indians are such a changeable lot,” she told her diary. This is a salutary reminder of the complexities of lived performance community.43 Molly Spotted Elk went on to do many kinds of artistic work that she seemed to find more fulfilling. She gave a ground-breaking performance when she starred in the film The Silent Enemy. She was honored in Paris by the “prestigious Salons du Cercle Internationale des Arts” for her work as dancer, lecturer, and writer. She sometimes wrote in collaboration with her husband, Jean Archambaud, and she gathered the tales that were posthumously published as Katahdin: Wigwam’s Tales of the Abnaki Tribe.44 I would argue that her work at the vaudeville-film axis is equally important. What Molly Spotted Elk shows, in company with other Indigenous performers, is that, with Indians in the house, gazes and relations could travel in multiple directions, and the rhythms of live Indigenous performance could tell truths about filmic time that attempted at once to speed up and kill off so-called primitive figures. While Indigenous presence was mediating the experience of cinematic modernity for audiences, Indigenous performers were also continuing to make community within and across Nations and generations—with whatever complexities and differences—beyond the structures and constraints of what Mark Rifkin has named “settler time.”45

the emergence of a legend Strictly speaking, the iconic image of Molly Spotted Elk in floor-length feathered headdress and skimpy two-piece, her back straight, chin up, toe pointed, and clenched fist and knee raised does not come from a vaudeville

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performance. Off and on throughout her career she shuttled between vaudeville of various levels and the cabaret and nightclub scene. Her attire in different venues suggests different contracts with audiences: while her vaudeville dress tended to be more modest, for Texas Guinan’s New York City nightclub she was required to don the famous skimpy two-piece designed by Guinan’s team. Of it, Molly Spotted Elk wrote in her diary: “My costume made me embarrassed. Looked like a loin cloth affair of satin and beads instead of leather and fringe. Not natural for my Indian dance.”46 Pay was better on the club circuit than on vaudeville, and audiences were more high-society, but expectations included a new level of physical exposure. During her years with Guinan, Molly Spotted Elk wrote about her humiliation at being “an injun in the flesh parade.”47 Even if it was not part of her vaudeville-film wardrobe, however, her most famous outfit tells truths about her vaudeville work, both in the power, poise, skill, and theatricality that it evokes and in the painful sense of exposure that she expressed in her diary. This image also figures prominently in the healing relations into which contemporary Indigenous artists continue to bring Molly Spotted Elk. In 2006 it was one of the poses struck by Michelle Olson (Tr′ondëk Hwëch′in First Nation) (Yukon) in her dance collaboration with Muriel Miguel (Guna/Rappahannock Nations), Evening in Paris, which remembered and reembodied Molly Spotted Elk and Michelle Olson’s grandmother, bringing them together in healing relationships across generations and between human and more-than-human beings. In 2007, when Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s The Only Good Indian . . . brought together earlier Indigenous women performers with their contemporary performance heirs, Falen Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora, Bear Clan, Six Nations Grand River Territory) researched and performed Molly Spotted Elk. Intermittently, Johnson struck Molly Spotted Elk’s iconic pose on a pedestal that twirled and twirled hauntingly throughout the play’s unfolding generations, conversations, and relation-making. This was also the costume chosen in 2006 by Kent Monkman, a member of Fisher River Cree Nation, in his homage to Molly Spotted Elk’s performance. In the early 2000s, when Monkman had created his “alter ego,” Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle, some observers recognized his nod to the singer Cher’s “half-breed” persona from the 1970s, in one component of the name (Share/ Cher) and in Miss Chief’s flamboyant outfit: buckskin bikini (sometimes with dreamcatcher bra), outsized floor-length feather headdress, and “beaded

Figure 3VN.2.  Miss Chief as Vaudeville Performer from the series The Emergence of a Legend (2/5). Kent Monkman in collaboration with photographer Chris Chapman and makeup artist Jackie Shawn, 2006. Chromogenic print on metallic paper. Photo size: 4.5 × 6.5 in. Framed size:   16 × 13.25 in. (Image courtesy of the artist)

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moccasins” with six-inch heels and peep-toe fronts.48 Monkman soon clarified that his creation was also inspired by Molly Spotted Elk: “She had a long feathered headdress way before Cher.”49 Part of Miss Chief’s cultural work is to challenge the egotistical (Eagle Testickle) appropriation of the First Peoples’ lands and identities by European and Euro-American artists. Monkman has said that Miss Chief was created “as a way of challenging the subjectivity of the artist, challenging these signifiers of aboriginal identity that had become so popular in Hollywood film and nineteenth-century painting.”50 Monkman meticulously re-creates some of these landscapes, populating them with often riotous cross-race sexual couplings that revolve around the flamboyant Two Spirit Miss Chief, who also often figures as an artist. Monkman has insisted that her eruption into sublime landscapes is not the eruption of modernity. It is the resurfacing of Indigenous vibrancy that was always there, including the flamboyance and Two Spirit presence that the nineteenth-century artist George Catlin particularly and the Catholic church more generally tried to obliterate.51 Molly Spotted Elk was not, I believe, Two Spirit, but her body was subject to the white settler gaze of colonization and desire (“an injun in the flesh parade”). Monkman embodied her place in Miss Chief’s lineage of power when Miss Chief appeared as Molly Spotted Elk in the second of a series of five period photographs, The Emergence of a Legend (figure 3VN.2), striking her most famous pose. Monkman glosses this portrait: Miss Chief as Vaudeville performer. After the popularity of the Wild West shows waned, many Aboriginal performers transitioned their performance careers onto the Vaudeville stage. This photo is styled closely after a photo of one vaudeville performer, Molly Spotted Elk, who also danced in all-female revues in Paris in the 1920’s. The “various performance guises” adopted by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle in these five poses include a woman performer in George Catlin’s 1850s Gallery, “a fictitious Hollywood silent film starlet,” and a “Trapper’s Bride”— one of “the mothers of the Metis Nation”—who is also a performer for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: “like a Cree Annie Oakley.”52 Within this powerful gathering, the fourth photograph in the sequence speaks most directly to the performance combinations considered here: “Miss Chief as movie director poses with bullhorn and camera in front of a backdrop of Monument Valley. This references the Hollywood Western, specifically [John Ford’s] The

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Searchers, one of the most racist Westerns ever made.” Reembodied by Miss Chief, Molly Spotted Elk again finds herself adjacent to a John Ford western, but now she is explicitly honored as part of a community of Indigenous women announcing authority, self-representation, and mutually sustaining performance lineage.

ch a p te r f o ur

How Princess Chinquilla Found Herself in Montana

THE PERSON WHO WROTE TO Owen Wister in 1904 as the “Only U.S. Reservation

Indian in Vaudeville” is remembered today—when she is remembered at all— as a faker. The most famous person to doubt Princess Chinquilla’s claims to Indigeneity was the distinguished Yankton Sioux writer, performer, and activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša. A quarter of a century later, non-Native Nebraska scholar Mari Sandoz followed suit. Over the years, opinion has only hardened that Chinquilla belonged in the long North American lineage of wannabees and hobbyists who appropriated Indian identities for their own purposes: “no one any longer believes her claim.”1 In 2013, in a blog about Norway’s Indigenous peoples, the Saami, Chinquilla is casually invoked—as if it is self-evident—as “the fraud Chinquilla.”2 Well, maybe. But maybe not. This chapter follows the trail left by Chinquilla: through the thickets of tropes, half-truths, fantasies, facts, and misrepresentations in over five hundred newspaper clippings, several dozen official documents, a handful of publications, a few reminiscences by people who knew—or knew people who knew— her, and an international range of theaters, halls, rooming houses, private homes, and Native reservations in which she made her mark. These archival remains tell some incontrovertible truths about what it took to construct, or reconstruct, a life and a community as a vaudeville Indian at the turn of the twentieth century. To trace this journey is to reckon not only with what might have been but with how thin was the line between atrocities on the southern 1 93

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plains and tomfoolery on the popular stage. I’ll begin with the moment when Chinquilla went public, as far as I can locate it, then follow the documentary trail through layers of relations across the geography of her identity, and finally return to the question of her origins.

“chinquilla, indian princess”—missouri, 1885 It was October 16, 1885, Princess Chinquilla was about eighteen years old, she was an exhibit in Cole’s Dime Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, and she was advertising for a husband. What made her one of the dime museum’s “Living Curiosities!” was her combination of Indian identity and great wealth. Exhibited alongside her was “eight thousand dollars worth of gold dust” bequeathed to her by her father, “White Cloud, one of Sitting Bull’s Chiefs.” The one stipulation for a prospective husband was that he must be an “American born citizen,” so that the money could be inherited. “Applications for the lady’s hand in marriage must be made in writing addressed to CHINQUILLA, Indian Princess, Care Cole’s Dime museum.”3 Another newspaper story said, “The young Indian is now making a tour of the various museums to see whether or not she can find a husband to her liking. . . . Mr. Cole is determined, if possible, to have the wedding come off in his museum. Fancy, a young, handsome Indian wife in buckskins and beads and $8,000 worth of gold dust.”4 As she proceeded on her dime museum tour, appearing between “Darwin’s Missing Link” and “the hirsute wonder,” Chinquilla—perhaps getting publicity back into her own hands—immediately tweaked her profile. She reidentified her father as “the Cheyenne Chief Star,” characterized his wealth as cattle and lands rather than gold dust, and specified that she was born near Camp Supply, Indian Territory.5 She called herself Southern Cheyenne, an identification that she would hold to throughout her life, in government documents as consistently as in public promotions. Whether or not the advertisement for a husband was simply a publicity stunt (Cole had pulled a similar one a year earlier, when exhibiting Minnehaha, the Indian Princess), whether or not there was a dime museum wedding, eightand-a-half months after the initial announcement Chinquilla was back in Missouri.6 This time she was in St. Louis, in a boarding house by the railroad tracks, giving birth. The official record names her son Harry Kysypen (or Kysyplen) Cole, the mother Chinquilla, born in Indian Territory, and the father Clarence Eugene Cole—a white vaudeville musician from Connecticut, his relationship to Arthur W. Cole of the Dime Museum unclear.7

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For two more years, Chinquilla did the rounds of dime museums, wild west shows, and circuses across the U.S. Midwest and up to Canada, presumably with a baby in tow—bareback riding, tight-rope walking, and eating fire.8 Harry Cole later said that his father died in 1888; records suggest that in fact Eugene Cole went on to another wife and other children, playing in musical bands on the vaudeville circuit. Chinquilla teamed up with Abraham Bliss Newell, who sometimes billed himself “Prince Santasma, the champion Japanese juggler of America,” a byline that referred not to his ethnicity but to his training as a street performer in Japan.9 Chinquilla and Newell went on the rural circuit with one mesmerist, Professor Lawrence, and then another, Professor W. W. Dayton “the prince of mediums.”10 They played one- and twonight stands in town halls and makeshift venues throughout New England and the Maritimes for seven years, a phase written up with considerable hilarity by Newell late in life. At this point, Chinquilla’s act involved a large dose of slapstick. As “Chinquilla, the only Indian doing an Irish Speciality” (which may be why Tony Pastor later took notice of her) she danced, sang, tumbled, did somersaults, and assisted the Professor in his magic routines.11 Her “Indian Princess” costume of this period was catch-as-catch-can. One image shows her in a dress full of patches and a headband with a few feather plumes, another in a rudimentary fringed top and skirt. Part of her performance included being “made up for an ecentric [sic] old maid . . . singing or rather shouting, I’m a Ring Tail Squealer from Japan”; “Whang. Bang. A Round Off Flip-Flap with long white drawers coming down to her ankles, a high back somersault, landing on her posterior, in sitting position, with her clothing in indescribable disorder, she stuck her tongue out at the audience amid screams of laughter and delight.”12 Far from fulfilling expectations of Indianness, her act seemed designed to flout them. At one stop, the troupe performed in a fish storage barn on the Magdalen Islands, in the Atlantic between Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, to a group of fishermen. Dancing on an impromptu stage made of piles of cod covered by a canvas sail, Chinquilla fell flat and started throwing fish at the audience. “This produced a tremendous roar from the delighted crowd,” who started throwing them back.13 The episode sounds like the Duke and Dauphin con sequence in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, especially when the troupe escapes by steamer from a jeering crowd in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, with the pursuers on the wharf jeering “FAKE! FAKE!” at the Professor, throwing pieces of coal when he appeared out of the rear cabin “and leaping upon the rail with one

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arm around a stanchion and a bunch of greenbacks in both fists, he yelled, ‘SUCKERS! SUCKERS!’ ”14 Such was Chinquilla’s training in performer-audience relations.

the “only united states reservation indian in vaudeville”—new york, 1904 When Chinquilla and Newell emerged from the rigors of the backwoods entertainment circuit, around 1897, they began to revamp their act for vaudeville. A symbiosis grew between Chinquilla’s public identity and her on-stage success. Once they were booking on big-time vaudeville, metropolitan newspapers—on both sides of the Atlantic—paid attention to Chinquilla in particular. The more she developed her story of Indigeneity in the press, the more she tweaked her on-stage performance to match it, the more bookings on big-time vaudeville circuits ensued. Over the next few years, consolidating her Indian identity and establishing her place in vaudeville were one and the same exercise. First, Chinquilla upgraded her outfit, putting together a calico dress typical of a Plains Indian woman and a bone choker and breastplate typical of a Plains Indian man, while Newell more firmly lodged himself in “the cowboy juggler” persona with a western shirt that seems to be appliqued with vaguely Indian motifs, a neckerchief, and a cowboy hat and gloves (figure 4.1). Newell’s outfit remained unchanged, but Chinquilla continued to refine hers, including reaching across gender distinctions. Sometimes she wore a headband with a single feather, sometimes a full-feather headdress (they look like artificial feathers); she added beading to her dress, leggings, and moccasins; and her ensemble accrued shell, metal, woven, and beadwork pieces (figure 4.2). Dress became part of her Indian authority on and off the stage. Newspapers quoted her as an expert on the naturalness of Indigenous women’s dress as opposed to the agonies that Anglo-American women put themselves through with corsets and high heels. Her wit is palpable. When asked whether she wore her “native costume” on the streets of New York, she replied that she “changed it to your native style” after passersby laughed at her: “I laughed, too, at the hats your women wore, and I thought how delighted our wild chiefs would be if they could have head dresses like those.”15 On stage, Chinquilla and Newell shucked off the slapstick and began to highlight their musicality, especially their banjo duet. While banjo might seem to have more associations with minstrelsy than Indianness, Chinquilla Indigenized it by building it into her life story. In her first splash in the New York World in

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Figure 4.1.  Photograph of Princess Chinquilla and Ed Newell, December 16, 1887 (McGown Collection of Theatrical Photographs, courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries)

1897 she explained that she lost her parents at an early age and was taken from the Cheyenne Reservation in Indian Territory into a circus, which she left to go to school; she then learned banjo to make a living.16 In turn, the press recognized the biography as integral to the success of the act: “Newell and Chinquilla, banjo artists, are conspicuous on the bill, not only by reason of their talent, but by force of Miss Chinquilla’s position as the only genuine Indian woman in the

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Figure 4.2.  “Chinquilla, Cheyenne,” identified here as “a Native American (Cheyenne) man” [1880–1910?] (The Denver Public Library, Special Collections)

vaudeville profession.”17 Sometimes they were joined by Italian-American Salvatore Dunifrio on the harp, producing a “refined musical specialty.”18 Soon, the act’s name changed from Santasma and Chinquilla to Chinquilla and Co., also The Chinquilla Trio. As they became more securely

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lodged on big-time circuits—including stints at Proctor’s, Keith’s, Poli’s, and Pastor’s—Chinquilla’s newspaper coverage grew. She also moved to establish her position within the Native urban community. Newell and she bought a small house in Queens, New York, and built in the garden “Chinquilla’s Indian Museum.” It displayed Indigenous artistry—“Specimens of almost all the native hand work are on view from New York to New Zealand”—and aimed to be a gathering point for Indigenous people living in or passing through New York.19 In 1901, she participated in the Indian Congress at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo alongside a host of Indigenous performers; when she returned, she had tweaked her father’s name from Star to Lone Star, Chief of the Cheyennes. In 1902, she received an endorsement from Buffalo Bill Cody as he passed through New York City: “This will serve to introduce Chinquilla, who is a full blooded Indian and a real Princess of the Cheyenne Nation.”20 Chinquilla’s vaudeville performance, increasingly the centerpiece of the act, became labeled “Indian Songs and Dances.” Over a decade, she expanded her routines from “soubrette” to “skirt dancer” to performer of a “war dance” in full feathered headdress.21 Long before Princess White Deer, Princess Watahwaso, and Molly Spotted Elk, Chinquilla developed a repertoire spanning the cultural spectrum: “The princess has a rich contralto voice, sings pleasingly in English and Indian, and performs skilfully on the banjo. She plays classical music, but naively says that the audiences want rag-time, so she gives them that.”22 One noted performance included “an Indian love song in the dialect of the Southern Cheyenne.”23 Also a “big drawing-card” was her rendition of the 1903 hit song “Anona” by Mabel McKinley, niece of the recently assassinated president.24 While there is not, to my knowledge, an extant recording of Chinquilla’s voice, it is possible to hear the recording that she would have heard, of Mabel McKinley serenading “Anona, my sweet Indian maid.” In October 1904, “Chinquilla’s Indian Company” was on the bill at Manhattan’s Grand Opera House the same week that Owen Wister’s The Virginian was playing Brooklyn’s Broadway Theatre; attending that show spurred her to make her pitch: I saw the Virginian, and I was thoroughly convinced who ever wrote it understood western life perfectly. Now I am in want of a play, under what conditions will you write a play around me. In real life an Indian girl’s life is not very exciting. But the public want her with lots of romance. There has never been anything written to my knowledge with an Indian girl Star part. I am just what I claim to be, with a little

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talent. Col. Cody who is a friend of mine has encouraged me quite a lot. I have never been with any [of] the cheap price shows & always play the best Vaudeville shows. I would like to have an interview with you & bring the lady who is interested financially with me.25 The authenticity that she offered him had as much to do with excising her dime museum and backwoods past—“I have never been with any [of] the cheap price shows”—as with citing Bill Cody’s endorsement. And she had secured financial backing by a society lady. Chinquilla was at the top of her vaudeville game.26 Meanwhile, through all this tinkering and trimming, Chinquilla was undergoing another kind of identity test. Her young son, Harry Cole, was in public school and feeling the effects of racism as the only Indian boy in his class.27 In December 1899, she succeeded in placing him in Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first and most famous of the off-reservation Indian boarding schools. This is the first crack in the carapace of certainty with which some commentators label Chinquilla a fraud. Although the system was not foolproof, Carlisle required considerable evidence of an applicant’s Indigeneity, especially when coming from outside the reservation system. As well as the parent or guardian (in this case, Chinquilla) swearing an oath to a qualified official, the application had to attach “vouchers from two ‘disinterested persons’ testifying that the applicant ‘is known and recognized in the community in which he lives as an Indian.’ ”28 In a slanting of the truth that became a familiar part of Chinquilla’s public identity–making, almost immediately after Harry entered Carlisle, she changed the story on her own education from having studied in Kansas City to attending Carlisle Indian School.29 The school denied this claim, and after her death Newell debunked it.30 But the Carlisle administration did accept Chinquilla as—according to Harry Cole’s Student Information Card—“full-blood Cheyenne.” The reality of Carlisle Indian School was one of the hard places to which Chinquilla’s vaudeville career brought her. While the school carried cachet as a means of navigating the white world and it taught musical skills that some students later developed as professional sustenance, its rigid, para-military routines abused Indigenous children. Gertrude Bonnin, whose time as a teacher there overlapped with Harry Cole’s time as a pupil, exposed the effects of boarding schools’ violently enforced assimilation of Indigenous pupils in writings she published as Zitkala-Ša. One piece showed the school rendering a young Sioux boy unfit to care for his people and ultimately causing his death;

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Carlisle’s founder Richard Henry Pratt angrily denounced this representation on the front page of the school newspaper.31 Certainly, Harry Cole was not happy there. In November 1901 he ran away with a Sioux classmate, Samuel Ortley.32 His mother, distraught, now used her public profile to appeal for help in newspapers throughout the country. At one point, she feared he had landed in prison, as had Ortley; later she suspected that he was going under the pseudonym Andrew La Belle. She managed to track him as far as Elmira, New York, at which point he disappeared. Seven months later, all the while crafting and revising her stage act, she was still looking: “The mother is heartbroken and has asked the police in every part of the country to assist her in the search.”33

“high-class vaudeville” to “high caste cheyenne”—montana, 1905 Through 1904 Chinquilla talked publicly (or the press reported her as talking) as though Harry Cole was back at Carlisle. But he was not; the school had “discharged” him in March 1902. And Wister had failed to respond to her overture. In early 1905, she and Newell took themselves off to Montana to do exactly what she had asked of Wister: to write Chinquilla into a story about an Indian maiden with herself in the starring role. In doing so, she bound more firmly together still the links among vaudeville, identity, and Indigenous kinship. The land that became the state of Montana is doubly meaningful in Chinquilla’s story. It is part of the Cheyenne Nation’s homeland and the site of the Battle of Greasy Grass (also known as the Battle of Little Bighorn), where, along with their Sioux and Arapaho allies, Cheyennes defeated Custer’s Seventh Cavalry in 1876. In 1884, the southeast corner became the site of the Northern Cheyenne Tongue River Reservation. At the turn of the twentieth century, Montana was also home to the biggest vaudeville industry west of Chicago. Chinquilla arrived during “Butte’s Golden Age of The Theater,” said to last from 1890 to 1910.34 The mining town, “The Richest Hill on Earth,” was “the city between Minneapolis and Spokane.”35 The twenty-four-hour workings of the copper mines created a twenty-four-hour demand for cheap entertainment, and venues of many kinds mushroomed. Chinquilla capitalized on the recent establishment of polite vaudeville in the city by one of Butte’s two major theatrical impresarios, Richard P. Sutton, who transformed the variety entertainment of disreputable box-houses into family vaudeville.36 By 1905, the city had a population of 70,000 and rising, “a multitude of theaters,” and boarding houses crammed with as many itinerant entertainers as miners.37

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Week by week, performing Indian songs and dances and partnered by Ed Newell as “the cowboy juggler,” Chinquilla again clawed her way up the hierarchy of vaudeville houses: from Butte’s New Arcade, where she performed an exhausting four times a day; to the Empire, where she shared the bill with short movies, often gruesome recordings of real-life lynchings; and finally ascending to Dick Sutton’s Grand Opera House, which publicized her as a “High Caste Cheyenne” appearing “by special request of the many patrons of the house of hits.”38 At this point, Chinquilla used vaudeville to further expand kinship lines. Like many vaudevillians, she took advantage of the relationship between performer and audience, the up-close rapport that often has been fondly remembered as community-making and that was quite different from the distant relationship with a wild west show audience, on the one hand, or the exposure of the “freak show” or “living curiosity” on the other—all of which Chinquilla had previously experienced. At Butte Grand Opera House, the press reported, “The princess is introducing something of a novelty in that she has a little Indian boy sing the chorus of her songs from the audience.”39 This plant in the audience, this “little Indian boy,” I believe was Harry Cole. Through this means, Chinquilla was bringing him into the fold of her vaudeville family, helping him to grow his performance talents while protecting his identity. It is unclear where Harry had been since escaping Carlisle or what his current status was; looking back in 1912, he simply said that, in the years since Carlisle, “I have had a great many downs, more downs than ups.”40 Although by 1905 Harry was nineteen years old, he was a very slight figure who had been something of a childhood invalid. He easily could have looked younger than his age, as well as being infantilized by dominant press stereotypes of childlike Native peoples. I would argue that, hidden in the plain sight of Butte vaudeville, Chinquilla was drawing her family around her. If this mother-son relationship was coded and hidden, Chinquilla’s next kinship move in Butte was anything but. In April 1905, with a great fanfare of press puffery, Chinquilla eloped with Ernest Barbour, a monologist turned manager of Butte’s Grand Opera House and an employee of Dick Sutton. It was a tremendous performance that increased her press coverage (and her theatrical bookings) exponentially. The marriage was reported from Butte to Brooklyn, Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., from the major metropolitan press to small-town newspapers (figure 4.3).41 Whatever the truth of the relationship between Chinquilla and Barbour—whether it was a publicity stunt or true

Figure 4.3.  “Butte Manager Is Married to an Indian Princess,” Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, April 27, 1905 (Anaconda Standard Collection [NP013], Accession 1986.013, Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, Butte, Montana)

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love—it was a real marriage with a real marriage certificate.42 They chose to cross two state lines, traveling to Ogden, Utah, to be married by a Mormon minister, at a point when polygamy, though recently outlawed, still ensured a laxer approach to documentation. This choice of wedding venue turns a question about whether Chinquilla ever married Harry Cole’s father into a question about whether she ever divorced him.43 Chinquilla also enlarged her backstory to connect her Southern Cheyenne origins with the Northern Cheyennes in Montana. She wove a sensational story line whereby the elopement was a response to Northern Cheyenne “tribesmen” so incensed at her engagement to a white man that Barbour had secretly to hire a Pullman car and carry her off to Utah.44 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, most likely read by some of the urban Native community that she was cultivating in New York, gave a half-page and large photographic portraits to the story “Stranger than Fiction.” The story lists her credentials as “full-blooded” Cheyenne, “vaudeville artiste,” speaker of many languages, Indigenous and European, and owner of “lands, cattle and other possessions” inherited from her father, which her tribe has confiscated in punishment for marrying a white man. The account ends by quoting Chinquilla: “I love my husband, and he and his people have been good to me, but I yearn for my own people, the braves and squaws of my far off Cheyenne tribe. . . . I adopted the ways of the white but in my heart I long for the old life. . . . I shall strive with Colonel Cody (‘Buffalo Bill’), and other men influential with my people, to win forgiveness for me. My prayer is, ‘May my people’s sleep never be peaceful and sweet till I am forgiven.’ ”45 In however trope-heavy and sensationalist a register, Chinquilla was using narrative to connect with Cheyenne relations. Soon, Chinquilla decamped once more, now embarking on a “South Seas” tour—the Brooklyn Daily Eagle covered it as an escape from Cheyenne wrath— with her husband, Barbour, and her partner, Newell. The tour was organized by M. B. Curtis, an early Jewish American actor who had become a somewhat unreliable manager of his “Famous American Novelty Company.”46 This threemonth tour suggests Chinquilla and her team’s deftness with trans-Indigenous entertainment vocabularies within a colonial circuit. In the Pacific, the imperial aims of the syndicate that drove the North American–European axis of circuits became explicit in their colonial geography. The route of the American Novelty Company began at the intensely cosmopolitan port of Honolulu during Hawaii’s early days of illegal annexation by the United States. Its next stop was “American Samoa,” at the port of Pago

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Pago on what Barbour called “the most civilized of the islands of the Samoan group, and the only one under the United States flag”—the archipelago having been recently carved up between Germany and the United States, both seeking to raise their colonizing status.47 They performed at Suva, the port that the British colonial government had recently deemed Fiji’s new capital, violently removing its Indigenous inhabitants in the process. And they ended with a mini-tour of another British colony, New Zealand, where they played urban centers Wellington, Palmerston North, Lyttleton, and Auckland. First in Hawaii, Chinquilla’s promotional rhetoric seemed to tap into local reference points. There was continuing anger among Native Hawaiians about the illegal overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani by American and European forces. One of the vehicles through which her devotees voiced support for members of the royal family was the kaona, “veiled language” or hidden meanings—to quote Adria Imada—of the string band and hula performances, modes in which the people also sustained the Native language that had been forbidden in the education system.48 Such performances and debates would be known to popular U.S. performers and presumably had echoes among Indigenous performers of Turtle Island. Native Hawaiian performers appeared at the same international expositions as a host of North American Indian performers, Chinquilla included, and by 1905 they were a pronounced presence on vaudeville circuits across North America and Europe.49 Playing the Honolulu Orpheum, Chinquilla was prominently billed as “An Indian of Royal Blood,” the first appearance of that label alongside her banjo-playing credentials. She was “THE SENSATION OF FOUR CONTINENTS” while Newell “The Cowboy Juggler” and Barbour “Humorist, Monologist, Impersonator and Imitator” were further down the bill.50 This was also the first time that a local press thought it would be of interest to the community that Chinquilla had translated a love song by George Evans into a Native language—purportedly Cheyenne. Whether such signals were read as jokes, winks and nods of solidarity, or exploitative noveltymaking, they were gestures of connection to this place. In New Zealand, Chinquilla invoked common cause with Maori women through the topic of clothing, on which she spoke with increasing authority and press attention. When she played the Wellington Opera House, she said in one interview that her traditional songs, stories, and dress challenged James Fenimore Cooper’s representation and “the five cent, novel notion” of the North American Indian. Then she pivoted to the Maori: “She tells of a Maori woman that limped into an hotel she was staying at bemoaning her lot at having to wear

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boots which ‘makit te corn bad.’ Miss Chinquilla wears moccasins, but stupid convention bars the return to the natural, and even the Maori was prepared to bear her cross rather than wear anything but boots.”51 It’s not a great political line but it indicates, again, that Chinquilla knew her place and her audience. Her husband, Ernest Barbour, seemed equally aware of the Indigenous peoples at their stopovers but less at ease in his characterization of them. In speaking of the company’s success in Fiji, he emphasized their bonding with the “Fiji chiefs” whom they had honored with free passes for the show. The chiefs reciprocated by declaring their show days to be national holidays, showering gifts on Princess Chinquilla, and feasting the company. But Barbour also indulged in primitivist caricatures of their “national drink,” cava, as disgusting and intoxicating, offering these qualities as metonyms for the people’s deficiencies.52 By this stage Barbour was tailoring his remarks for a Montana audience. The South Seas tour had turned into a financial disaster, Manager Curtis had absconded with their takings, and the company had made their way home on their wits.53 Barbour had previously announced that, after the tour, he would bring his wife back to Butte to star in a series of Indian plays—a reverberation of Chinquilla’s proposition to Wister.54 As it turned out, that plan too collapsed. Chinquilla went back to the vicissitudes of the vaudeville circuit, which took her, with Newell, from Nevada to Pennsylvania to New York. In 1907, Barbour filed for divorce in Helena, Montana.55 Chinquilla’s search to perform family into being would continue without him.

“hoostooona”—montana to oklahoma, 1929 It turned out that Harry Cole, a figure even more buried and lost to history than his mother, also used vaudeville as a route to survival. When he reported that his life had taken an upward turn in 1911, presumably that was related to his having met and developed a vaudeville act with Anna De Bride, a “half-Apache” widow whom he married that year.56 They sang (“Both Indians have sweet and powerful voices”), presented “Indian war dances,” and acted “in a novel skit called ‘Children of the Plains.’ ”57 Billing themselves variously as Cole and Hastings, White Hawk and Red Feather, and Cetah Ska and Wakaya Luta, they played up Harry Cole’s lineage as a Carlisle alumnus and descendant of Lone Star while they concocted a more standard Sioux identity for Anna.58 They performed from Washington, D.C., to Ottawa, Ontario, and from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, making a living good enough to buy their own home in Long Branch, New Jersey.59 Harry wanted to add an educational element to the act,

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asking the Superintendent at Carlisle Indian School: “Is there any-body at the school, ‘I mean a student,’ that would write me a lecture on the advancement of the indian, I would like a lecture that I could explain to the whites, that the Indian can really speak english, and that they are not ignorant & blood-thirsty as the moving pictures & dime novels picture them.”60 In this sentiment, he replicated his mother’s comments and her ambition to transcend the lower reaches of the vaudeville circuit. But Harry Cole died on January 14, 1915, at age twenty-eight.61 Chinquilla and Newell, by this time married, left the vaudeville circuit, and Newell became caretaker of Chinquilla’s Indian Museum. They housed Harry’s widow and his two stepsons for a while; Anna Cole performed briefly with Os-Ko-Mon but on December 13, 1916, she also died.62 Chinquilla took the profile that she had established on the vaudeville circuit—her lineage as a Southern Cheyenne, her educational credentials, her know-how with Indigenous dress and crafts—and used it to develop a solo career on the lecture circuit and as a political organizer. When she extended her public identity beyond vaudeville into a wider sphere of influence, however, she came up against Gertrude Bonnin. Making her way up the social ladder, Chinquilla changed her bone breastplate for buckskin and cloth dresses; instructed children and adults in beadwork and other skills; and drew on her life as it had been made known in vaudeville publicity as the source of her authority on tales of the past, Indigenous lifeways, and criticisms of the educational system. She retained some of the humor of her vaudeville routine when she imitated Native people of different ages doing their dances—a routine to which she still brought the full-feathered headdress—but she teamed up with a different class of entertainer when she worked with Oskenonton (Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River), who was developing an opera career. As ever, she reshaped her public kinship accordingly, now calling herself Mohawk on her mother’s side and Cheyenne on her father’s, and now identifying Oskenonton as her half-brother. She began to recite from other Indigenous writers, especially E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, Mohawk of Six Nations of the Grand River, who had recently died. Chinquilla chose one of Johnson’s explicitly angry works, “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” in which her protest against colonialism and land theft is lodged in family relations.63 She began to appear on speakers’ lists and women’s committees in distinguished company: W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, John Collier, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger. Chinquilla’s politics took an organizational turn in 1926 when she teamed up with Red Fox St. James, also known as Rev. or Dr. Skiuhushu.64 He was

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founder of the American Indian Association (AIA), and Chinquilla became Great Sacajewea of the Daughters of Sacajawea, the ladies’ auxiliary of the AIA. Together, the two established an American Indian Club in Manhattan; the New York Times declared that the “New York Indian Colony Now Has Its Own Club,” and they called Princess Chinquilla “Who Is Aiding Her People Here,” “An Indian Leader” (figure 4.4).65 At this point Gertrude Bonnin and her Yankton Sioux husband, Raymond Bonnin, stepped in. Having been stalwarts of the first pan-Indian organization, the Society for American Indians, the Bonnins had just founded the National Council of American Indians (NCAI). Aiming for full Native citizenship, they worked to build grassroots solidarity among the Indigenous peoples of North America with a structure of local lodges throughout the country.66 The Bonnins were deeply disturbed by Chinquilla’s intervention, which they viewed as potentially dividing and distracting the work of Indigenous self-determination. They particularly distrusted Red Fox St. James, having it on reliable report that he was “a pretty shifty Indian”— indeed, no Indian at all but a white swindler promoting a bogus religiosity designed to profit himself.67 Bonnin also knew how thin the line could be between popular performance and political efficacy—she had navigated it herself, bringing at times her own “Indian Princess” persona to the lecture circuit and collaborating on a “light opera” that was not so far removed from vaudeville.68 She set another Brooklyn Indian secretly to investigate Chinquilla, instructing her to pay attention to Chinquilla’s looks, which Bonnin considered “not natural”: “Her pictures in Indian dress are not right; and . . . I believe she ‘painted’ her face all over with some kind of stuff, attempting to copy the ‘Indian complexion.’ ”69 Bonnin’s quotation marks show that she understood the power of popular culture stereotypes to shape general expectations and Chinquilla’s selfconstruction. It was the ultimate measure by which Bonnin and her informant judged Chinquilla a “faker.”70 Meanwhile, Raymond Bonnin was making inquiries among the Northern and Southern Cheyennes, mainly through his brother, Sam, who was with the U.S. Indian Field Service in Concho, Oklahoma. None of Sam’s contacts knew Chinquilla—one mistook her for Lilian St. Cyr, others doubted her Cheyenne standing—but the correspondence was clearly embedded in a whole other set of politics, alliances, and oppositions around amalgamating three Southern Cheyenne Agencies—at Concho, Clinton, and Cantonment in Oklahoma—into one, a position for which Sam Bonnin was vying.71 In the end there was no definitive proof or clear-cut results, other than

Figure 4.4.  “Invoking the Redskin’s God,” unidentified newspaper clipping [ca. 1927] (Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah)

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the considerable tensions generated when questions of authenticity traveled from the tropes of the popular stage to the complexities of Indigenous community. Chinquilla continued her progress up the cultural ladder. In 1934, when John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, convened a conference to solicit feedback on his draft Indian Reorganization Act, there were only three Indigenous invitees: Gertrude Bonnin, Raymond Bonnin, and Chinquilla.72 Coincidentally or not, while the Bonnins were engaged in disproving her identity claims, Chinquilla was binding her ties more firmly in Montana, converting her vaudevillized links with the Cheyenne people into lived relations. For a few years, she supported a Blackfeet community near Browning, Montana, by sending educational resources.73 Then, in 1929, Chinquilla got in her “small roadster” and took the long way round from Queens, New York, to Lame Deer, Montana.74 As well as doing lecture-recitals in the central and eastern part of the state, she was searching for family through the local press— as she had done with her son—focusing attention on the Northern Cheyennes. Additions to her backstory now came thick and fast. In her Montana interviews, she described how, as a young child, she was rescued from a burning Cheyenne Indian camp by a family of homesteaders, named Kitchin, who settled in Western Kansas. She began to pile up her educational credentials, citing Indian boarding school at Arkansas City, Kansas, Carlisle Indian School, and Columbia University’s night school as well as her connections with “educated and refined” white people, including Bill Cody’s family.75 Chinquilla headed to the Tongue River Reservation, hoping to find among the Northern Cheyennes links to surviving relatives among the Southern Cheyennes who had been displaced to southern Colorado a hundred years earlier and then penned into reservations in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, at the end of the 1860s. In Lame Deer, she lodged with Rodolphe and Bertha Petter. He was a Mennonite missionary who had served among the Southern Cheyennes at Cantonment, Oklahoma, immediately prior to his position on the Tongue River Reservation; he had long been working to translate the Christian Bible into the Cheyenne language (a project he published in 1934). The Petters believed Chinquilla’s story about her origins and introduced her to the Black Horse family; according to Mrs. Petter, the “Blackhorses adopted her, believing her story to be true. . . . Thru them she was led to believe that she had an own brother in Oklahoma.”76 They also gave her a new name, whose spelling she simplified as “Hoostooona,” a word associated with fire, perhaps from the forest fires raging around Lame Deer during her stay or from the story

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about her rescue from a burning Indian village—the scars from which, according to Mrs. Petter, remained.77 Others at the Tongue River agency— “Some of the older Indians”—“advanced the theory that she was taken from a Cheyenne camp after it had been attacked and fired by white soldiers. . . . Burning of Indian camps was a common practice during the fierce border wars preceding the Custer battle, and Indian tradition names several members of the tribe who lost children in this way.”78 The case was far from closed, however. A couple of decades later, Mari Sandoz, highly respected scholar of the Cheyennes and author of Cheyenne Autumn, remained unconvinced: “Black Horse may have been taken in by Chinquilla but I’m harder to please.” Sandoz never met Chinquilla, but, like Gertrude Bonnin, she doubted her looks: “The photograph of her in Indian regalia is very-unIndian. She probably had some Indian blood but not very much, or it didn’t show through the make-up.”79 It may have been Petter who pointed Chinquilla to Canton, Oklahoma, the town closest to Cantonment and a subagency to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency at Darlington.80 She got in her Model T once again, drove south, and there made contact with Night Killer, a sixty-odd-year-old Southern Cheyenne living just northwest of Canton in Fonda, Oklahoma. According to Rudolph White Shield, a younger Southern Cheyenne resident of Canton who worked as a translator and show Indian, Chinquilla and Night Killer identified each other as brother and sister. For the next few years, Chinquilla went to Oklahoma “once in a while to see her brother.”81 The Petters also introduced Chinquilla to something else that indelibly marked her finding of herself in Montana. In Lame Deer, Chinquilla was greatly surprised to encounter a mimeograph machine—“fancy a mimmeograph [sic] on an Indian reservation, where there is only one well for water, to supply 100 families”—that Petter used for his own work and as training for his Cheyenne neighbors.82 On a later visit to Lame Deer, she produced the first of her self-published booklets on this machine. Sandoz dismissed Chinquilla’s publications as “spurious”; certainly, if the yardstick was Sandoz’s own heavily researched histories, Chinquilla’s work does not measure up.83 But read as her final act of identity-making, an extension of the process she began on vaudeville thirty years earlier, the booklets are fascinating. Their focus is not her life story—that work she did in newspaper coverage. Rather, the booklets write her into Indigenous community by various means. The first, Natives of N. America, reprints some documents of the Iroquois before turning to “Tribes of the Plains,” with an epigraph from Petter’s

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Cheyenne translation of John 3:16. Chinquilla writes, “In speaking of the Indians of the west, the ground has been so well covered by more able writers than I, it would be I think more interesting, if I told you of a trip I made on one of my recent lecture tours.”84 Once again, a vaudeville Indian story takes geographical form. She recounts her five-month journey in 1929, driving from New York City all the way to the Blackfeet Agency in Montana, to the school she supported (located, nicely enough, in Family, Montana), back to Lame Deer Agency, down to Pine Ridge Sioux Agency, down to Canton, Oklahoma, and finally back to New York City. Nowhere does she explicitly discuss her search for relatives, but she encodes her identity in her signature to the book—“by Chinquilla (Hoostooona) (Cheyenne Nation)”—and in her choice of frontispiece, a photograph taken in her well-known vaudeville outfit of bone breastplate, choker, single feather, and braids. It was her quintessential statement of identity—vaudeville image, Cheyenne name, and member of Cheyenne Nation—and she had got to it in Montana. She and Newell set up a printing press in their Queens residence, and she continued to issue works as a recorder and voice of her people. In 1935, she published A Speech by Red Jacket, one of the Seneca leader’s famous orations in which, in 1805, he asserted Native religion and rights against the proselytizing of a Boston missionary society; here, Chinquilla yoked his words to her project: “done into a little Book by Chinquilla a Southern Cheyenne Indian at her Indian Craft shop, which is in Jamaica, Queens County, State of New York.”85 She issued annual almanacs as preservers of the past and predictors of the future. The last was issued in 1938: “The Old Indian’s Almanac Being a cronological [sic] account of land cessions, treaties, etc, and the various quarrels and dissimulations that have been taking place between the N.A. Indians and the U.S. Gov’t., from the year of our Lord 1550 to 1938 Compiled by Chinquilla Of the Cheyenne Nation Cantonment Res. Canton Okl.” This was her final publication, but Abraham Newell continued the project after her death, publishing a eulogy to Chinquilla, the tales of her escapades in Town Hall To Night, and many other titles, in what he came to call “Chinquilla Publications,” in honor of “an amazing personality . . . a veritable enigma”; “You could tell she was royal by the way she walked and talked, and held her head.”86 As Chinquilla’s final statement of identity, The Old Indian’s Almanac was combative—gathering voices that ranged from U.S. government officials to American Horse’s devastating account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, signing off with a nod to Walt Whitman (“this is no book, who touches this touches Men”), and grounding

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her identity with considerable geographical specificity while embracing the history of those she called her people.

family stories—indian territory, 1860s Finding family in Oklahoma ultimately killed Chinquilla, according to Abraham Bliss Newell: on one drive there she had a car accident whose effects, several years later, caused her death.87 In some ways, it is a fitting obituary: Chinquilla made her life out of and used her life up looking for Indigenous family. From where had Princess Chinquilla come onto the stage of Cole’s Dime Museum in 1885? As she aged, and the Great Depression hit, her stories became wilder and her familiar claims more exaggerated. But the fundamental coordinates of her backstory remained consistent: that she was born into a Southern Cheyenne family in Indian Territory, survived military onslaught, was taken in by a white family or joined a circus (or both), got herself an education, and then moved into the entertainment world. Many holes have been identified in Chinquilla’s story. Gertrude Bonnin judged her complexion insufficiently “Indian.” Her clothing was culturally incoherent and her stories inconsistent. Indigenous cultures do not have “Princesses” and her name is not recognizably Cheyenne. Sandoz called her out for naming her father chief of the Cheyenne Nation: “There was never a head chief of the Cheyenne nation, and in the fifties the Cheyennes were already separated into Northern and Southern Divisions.”88 Raymond Bonnin thought it a decisive strike against her that the language she called Cheyenne was closer to Sioux. Yet such objections do not allow for the common tropes of popular culture, the formulas used by Indigenous performers to stake out and protect their public presence—whereby, for example, “Princess” and “Chief” became code for “performer.” They do not allow for the dislocation from community: she could have lost her language and picked up smatterings of Sioux on the entertainment circuit. Many details of the autobiography Chinquilla floated could suggest as much about the traumatic breaks caused by violent assimilation as about her own capacity for fantasy and masquerade. What ties her into Southern Cheyenne history are the threads of family stories: what was said by and about her father, her brother, her son, and her last husband. In many senses, they are broken threads, and in putting them together into a chronology, I may not be accurately reconstructing Chinquilla’s life. However, these stories point to real connections and conditions in the lives

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of Indigenous people at the turn of the twentieth century, including the intertwining of popular culture with regimes of genocide and assimilation. They show vaudeville tomfoolery as a breath away from military assault—out of this, too, a time called modernity being made. The family stories begin with Chinquilla placing her birth in the mid1860s near Camp Supply to Star, later revised to Lone Star, and Janie or Jane E.—a version of her origins that she seems to have held to on every official form and in every public story throughout her life.89 The location is unexpected, because extant records do not show Southern Cheyenne encampments in that place at that time.90 In 1869, however, Camp Supply briefly served as the agency for the newly enforced Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation, before it moved south to Darlington. Chinquilla might have conflated her birthplace with another place-name that figured in her family’s movements. The very uncertainty makes the story sound plausible; after her first brief publicity at Cole’s Dime Museum, Chinquilla eschewed the more obvious templates of Sioux and “Cherokee Princess” identities so popular at the time, along with the places and names they carried with them. As General Philip Sheridan came onto the plains and began to implement his “total war” strategy in the winter campaign of 1868–69 against the Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche, Chinquilla’s family names recur across Indian Territory. In October 1867, Night Killer, who (according to Rudolph White Shield) accepted Chinquilla as his sister, was present as a young boy at the gathering of Southern Cheyennes for the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, whose terms were violated by the U.S. military in a series of bloody engagements and which ultimately issued in what was then the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation. Seventy years later, Night Killer participated in the pageant commemorating the signing, along with Lucy Nicolar Poolaw and Bruce Poolaw, representing Kiowa ancestors who had also participated in the treaty gathering. In September 1868, the warrior Star participated in the battle in which Roman Nose was killed (also known as the Battle of Beecher’s Island); he was identified in George Bird Grinnell’s scholarship on the Cheyennes and, as “old man Star,” was known to Northern Cheyenne historian John Stands In Timber, who visited with him as late as World War I.91 In November 1868, at the massacre on the Washita River, George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry murdered Cheyenne men, women, and children camped with Peace Chief Black Kettle. It sounds like this or another atrocity of the winter campaign that Rudolph White Shield described as the attack that

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Chinquilla survived as a baby and bore the scars to prove it.92 His understanding was that she had been taken and raised by a white soldier. In 1874, according to Abraham Newell, Chinquilla joined one of the circuses touring the rural west—he thought it was John Robinson’s Circus— perhaps first as part of the “freak show,” later as a performer. There exists one cabinet card, dated approximately 1880, of a young Princess Chinquilla as a sharpshooter; she has also been identified as a horse rider and high-wire artiste.93 It could well have been among the Mexican and Indigenous community of circus performers that she took the name Chinquilla. It is the only surname—other than those of her husbands—by which she identified herself in all surviving written records and representations. After a few years as a circus employee, she grew tired of her exploitation, saying in an interview: “I was a star getting unlimited applause and never realizing that twelve dollars a month was not ample compensation for my services.”94 At that point, she would insist throughout her life, she made her way into school. For years, she said that she had been educated in an Indian boarding school in what she remembered as Kansas. The two likeliest were Haskell, which opened in 1884 in Lawrence, Kansas, and Chilocco Indian Industrial School, then called the Haworth Institute, in northern Indian Territory on the border with Kansas. Night Killer’s son Edgar Night Killer/Flying Bear later attended Chilocco, as did generations of Rudolph White Shield’s family, including his father and himself.95 Given the scanty documentation on the first students to enter, Chinquilla could have been part of Chilocco’s first intake on January 18, 1884. On that date, Southern Cheyennes gathered twenty-two boys and twelve girls, age six to twenty-three years, at Darlington Agency and sent them north accompanied by a man whom the newspaper called Chief Lone Horse of the Cheyenne.96 Chinquilla was probably seventeen years old on that date; the oldest she could have been, according to all documentation I have seen, was twenty. When Chinquilla changed her story to claim that she attended Carlisle Indian School, after her son was signed up, she reached for the link that Haskell and Chilocco themselves promoted, stressing that they were modeled on Carlisle.97 School officials would have given her a “Christian” name—in her case, Mary. One newspaper reported that the first year’s intake were well schooled in “songs, recitations, dialogues, tableaus” as well as “penmanship, arthography [sic], grammar and map drawing”; girls were also taught needle work and domestic duties.98 Mvskoke/Creek scholar Tsianina Lomawaima has

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reconstructed conditions at Chilocco, including the darker side not reported by the press, as children were subjected to “enforced uniformity, regimentation of the body, and subservience training.”99 Lomawaima also emphasizes the resistance and resilience forged by students in the face of techniques of assimilation, colonization, and cultural genocide. According to one government commentator at the time, the first eighteen months of the school were chaotic; he blamed the wildness of the pan-Indian student body, but more recent revelations about residential schools show how staff practices could cause chaos and trauma.100 One of the school’s earliest teachers, Emma DeKnight Smith, later reflected on “mistakes” made in the children’s treatment, including solitary incarceration in an unlit room, lack of food, and corporal punishment. She also documents that school runaways were frequent.101 Lomawaima adds: “Most runaways made their break in September and October.”102 If Chinquilla was there, she broke out in October 1885 and made her way northward to St. Joseph, Missouri. Like her son, Harry, sixteen years later, she escaped from school to stage, although in her case she went initially onto the dime museum circuit as a “curio,” and she must already have been several weeks pregnant with him.103 The one topic on which Chinquilla came to lecture more than any other in later life—and the one topic on which she agreed with Gertrude Bonnin—was the need to stop separating Native children from their parents for their schooling: “The way it is now arranged a child is separated from his mother during the years when he most needs her.”104 When she talks about damage done by that practice, we can think of Harry Cole’s experience, for sure, and of Chinquilla’s, perhaps. So many forces of physical, psychological, social, economic, and spiritual destruction were arrayed against Indigenous survivance in the years through which she lived, and an intensity of traumatic breaks, land devastation, and cultural fragmentation ensued. If Chinquilla was one who needed to put the pieces back together, to make a life, what better place to exert her considerable wit and talents than among the bricolage of vaudeville and the entertainment and Indigenous communities of Montana?

4th Vaudeville Number Pri n ce ss W a h letka Sh if ts Ra c e a nd R e a ds Minds

IN OCTOBER 1935, an “All-American Indian Revue,” also titled “From Camp to Campus,” headed by distinguished band leader Joe Shunatona (Pawnee-Otoe) was “delivering some torrid jazzapation to show-stopping returns” on vaudeville circuits around Pennsylvania and New Jersey.1 The thirteen singers, dancers, and musicians strutting their stuff—including Shunatona’s daughter Mifawny, “Youngest Indian Tribe Dancer”—belonged to the Pawnee-Otoe, Pawnee, Mohawk, Menominee, Shawnee, Pueblo, Sioux, Penobscot, and Chippewa Nations; some of them had played at the U.S. presidential inauguration in Shunatona’s U.S. Indian Band and had represented the country at the Paris Exposition with Molly Spotted Elk.2 During a pause in their routine, their guest for the month emerged from the wings in a flowing garment, headband, and braids. Introduced as Princess Wahletka, the “Cherokee Princess Psychic,” she donned a blindfold, sent her assistant into the auditorium, and began to read the minds of one eager audience member after another. It was a still moment of primitivist mystification within the inventive, high-energy choreography of Shunatona’s troupe; Wahletka’s audiences responded to her revelations with silent wonder. For those desiring to extend audience participation in the Indian mind-reading act, on sale in the lobby was Wahletka’s book, Lifting the Veil: How You Yourself May Acquire Mystic Power and Develop Mind, Body and Spirit. This was a double act in several senses. As Shunatona would have known, Princess Wahletka (1885–1968) was a member of Rayna Green’s “Tribe Called 21 7

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Wannabee”: she played Cherokee on and off stage, on both sides of the Atlantic, for over fifty years. In coordination with her assistant—for a long time her husband, Victor Royal—she layered onto this identity a highly successful seeress number in live performance and popular print. Opening with this on-stage scene establishes three directions for the reconstruction of Wahletka’s story. First, it brings attention to how the phenomenon of Indian masquerade could latch onto vaudeville—with its promise to deliver impossible combinations, modernity’s rhythms, and audience intimacy—ultimately as one route into transatlantic modernism. Second, it is a reminder, in reconnecting her act with her documented backstory, of how faux-Indian identity, however outlandish, was an exercise in extraction from Indigenous lives, lands, cultures, and relations. But, third, it also demonstrates the power of Indigenous performers on the vaudeville stage to reorient power relations, to reposition the pretindian as their novelty, their guest in Indian Country, vaudeville-style.

prestidigitation in plain sight Princess Wahletka’s act remained much the same for nearly thirty years. What happened after the blindfold went on, according to her own account, was that Victor Royal went into the audience, “stopping here and there among the hundreds who clamor for his attention to ask [me], ‘What is this lady’s name?’ ” Wahletka continues: The name having been given correctly, my assistant asks me to tell the lady what she is thinking about, and to give her all the information I am able to concerning her question. . . . At the conclusion of this part of the entertainment, my assistant returns to the stage, and requests all individuals in the audience, wishing to have a personal answer, to concentrate their mind on their name and question. My assistant stands at the side, near the wings, I stand in the center of the stage. Without any word from him I proceed to call the name of some individual seated in the auditorium, or perhaps even in the balcony or gallery. I tell him or her what he or she is thinking of, and the question they desire to have answered. My assistant asks that the person whose name I have called, and whose question I have stated, to rise or raise their hand, and identify themselves and acknowledge their question. I then proceed to answer the question . . .

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Figure 4VN.1.  “Wahletka Repeating Word for Word the text of a Newspaper Article Read Telepathically,” from Lifting the Veil (1923) (Internet Archive)

I answer from 30 to 50 questions in all, at each performance— and quite frequently am informed that I am correct in every single instance—quite 100% of accurate answers to a performance.3 The act tapped into two figures of western modernism: the primitivized, exoticized Cherokee Princess and the fad for telepathy, part of a revived interest in the occult at the turn of the twentieth century. From the beginning, popular performance and psychic research went hand in hand: one of the first secretaries of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in Britain in 1882, was a music hall mind-reader.4 The convergence of ancient belief systems and contemporary scientific innovation was quintessential of western transatlantic modernism, answering anxieties and creating teleological continuities for those who felt the fissure of change; Wahletka and Royal played on that intersection, including in a telepathic turn on the telephone (figure 4VN.1). Vaudeville dynamics were tailor-made for telepathic thrills; there were playbills featuring ethnicized and racialized mind-readers galore: “Egyptian,” “gypsy,” Yiddish, Scottish, male, female, and non-human mind-reading turns. Wahletka was unusual, however, in identifying as a Cherokee telepathist. In spiritualist discourse, North American Indians most commonly functioned as

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spirits called up at seances, not agential figures making a living by their skills.5 I have identified only one other vaudeville mind-reader in the period who claimed Native American status: Lolo the Sioux Seeress and Sure-Shot, who had a much shorter-lived career, who did not commit exclusively to mind-reading, and who did not develop the heart of vaudeville relations—performer-audience address—with such energy as Wahletka’s act.6 Royal’s role in making that intimate connection was key. He steered an audience toward the collective suspension of disbelief, promoting the frisson of a vaudeville Indian getting closer than ever, right into spectators’ minds, while protecting her mystery. He moved through the auditorium, “a brunette young man with searching eyes and a psychic touch,” inviting spectators to whisper their requests to him, all the time feeding Wahletka whatever clues she needed.7 As her assistant connected performer and audience, so Wahletka connected the mysterious and the everyday. According to one reviewer: Wahletka’s wisdom is a byword among the Cherokee Indians . . . . by a process, which may be likened to the unrolling of a film before the projection machine she flashes in bold type before your very eye the thought that lies buried in your innermost consciousness. How is it done? How can she read and speak out a question or a thought that you yourself have not even voiced? It is one of the mysteries of all times, the marvel of the Delphian oracle and the clairvoyance of Mme. Caruyo combined in this modern Indian princess.8 “This modern Indian princess” was a figure through whom mysticism’s compensations for modernity, packaged as cheap entertainment, could be channeled. She was also Wahletka and Royal’s route into big-time circuits. In 1920, they appeared in Ziegfeld’s 9 O’Clock Revue (“The Cherokee Seeress” Assisted by Prince Royle [sic]), brushing close to Esther Deer and appearing alongside Fanny Brice.9 In 1921, they went on the first of two very successful tours across the British Isles: “The Amazing Princess Wahletka The Indian Prophetess Astounds England!” (and Scotland and Wales).10 Victor was applauded as her “ ‘medium’ in the auditorium.”11 Their status in New York City’s entertainment scene was confirmed when the Eastman brothers, Russian émigrés whose Manhattan Arts and Crafts Studio commercialized avant-garde styles, prepared a series of increasingly flamboyant set designs for Wahletka, rich watercolors that brought Russian orientalism into her exoticized

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mix, along with body-revealing costumes, in the likes of which she never appeared.12

lifting the veil transatlantically Wahletka boasted that her effects were achieved in plain sight: “During my act, I stand out in full view of the audience and I even walk up and down the stage while doing my work.”13 Yet her deftest sleight of hand may have been deflecting questions of authenticity away from her identity claims and onto her psychic abilities. Of all the vaudeville Indians, Indigenous and not, she was among the least subject to publicly expressed doubt about her claim to Indigeneity; her body was scrutinized not for ethnic fraud but for psychic trickery. When, in 1923, she and Royal extended the act into print, they made legible the larger cultural operations of which that stagecraft was part. Lifting the Veil occupies a distinct niche in the large body of “playing Indian” print culture: it is a “how-to” book. The genre’s logic required building a case for both the special status of the author and the capacity of all readers to emulate her. To this end, the prose moves between the “campily artificial” and the scientifically authoritative.14 Wahletka and Royal’s print production (she was named author, he co-publisher) may provide the closest approximation available to the registers of their live act; it also illuminates their strategic adjustments for audiences on either side of the Atlantic. Chapter One, “My Life Story,” begins with a “love story” in which a FrenchCanadian hunter wins a Cherokee maiden, Minnie, “the daughter of Spy Buck, or Spybuca, as his tribe called him, chief medicine man of the Cherokee tribe.”15 When Minnie dies, her two-week-old baby, Wahletka, is left to be raised by her grandparents in Indian Territory, her father being expelled from the tribe because he no longer has a blood connection.16 Wahletka grows into a singular figure, an inheritor of royalty who can predict the future. When her father returns to claim her, she is sent to Carlisle Indian Boarding School, where she amazes her teachers with her psychic talents and eventually, with her father’s permission, performs them on the stage. The autobiographical story wields formulas, stereotypes, and misinformation to a near-parodic degree. The geography is scrambled from the get-go: “My father came from Canada to the land of the Iroquois, where lived my tribe,” the Cherokee.17 The tropes of Indian royalty play into Eurocentric misprision and desire, harping on Wahletka’s “rank,” “rule,” and lineage from a “Princess” and “chief medicine man.”18 And her portrait of human relations bears a campness

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at odds with her dignified mysticism, “a prophetess whose words could never fail.”19 Exaggerated language tinged with sexualized double entendres is most pronounced in her descriptions of her father, whom she repeatedly refers to as “the big white man.” Their reunion after the tribe banished him—“a wanderer over the mountains and through the valleys”—is particularly arch: “He returned to my people and he claimed me, with all the imperiousness, and with the same masterfulness with which he had claimed my mother as a bride. . . . So it was that I went to him gladly, and I learned to love him just as any white maiden loves her daddy. However, the Cherokees are still my people, and I am still their Princess, although my love and my memory are still loyal to the big white man who was my father.”20 I first read this camp voice as a man in female drag, an identification encouraged by some of the company Wahletka kept (notably Karyl Norman/ George Peduzzi, a female impersonator in big-time vaudeville and part of Manhattan’s gay subculture).21 My suspicions were encouraged by her eschewal of the Eastmans’ body-revealing costume designs and her gender-indeterminate studio portraits, including one cut off above the breast line with a dangling asp ornament that could indicate ambiguous gender coding (figure 4VN.2).22 Later, I learned that Wahletka was cisgendered, although she and Royal could well have constructed the figure to hail queer communities, among others. Certainly, the narrative voice participates in what Katrin Sieg calls “ethnic drag”: “the performance of ‘race’ as a masquerade.”23 In white feminist analysis of male drag, one function of exaggerated stereotypes of femininity is to gesture—whether in celebration or critique—to female absence in the cultural transaction.24 Similarly, over-the-top gestures in Lifting the Veil point to “Cherokee” as a site of artifice, absent of Indigenous identity. The major incongruity occurs in the photograph placed at the end of the autobiographical chapter. Captioned “Minnie Spy Buck, Mother of Wahletka,” this studio portrait of a visibly Indigenous woman, wearing what looks like a wool dress with Southern Plains–style concho belt and drop, bears no physical resemblance to the frontispiece portrait of Wahletka (figure 4VN.3). The fact that both wear their long dark hair in braids only emphasizes the differences in complexion, bone structure, and body type. Reading identity off physiognomy is of course a fraught practice, but the book encourages the reader to make the comparison and it seems to shout “white Indian.” At first blush, this striking contrast further undermines the autobiography’s credibility. The wink-and-nod of ethnic drag, however, accords with the

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Figure 4VN.2.  Princess Wahletka (Card Photograph Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

long history of Indian play in the making of the U.S. nation, whereby a visible gap was maintained between Euro-American actors and Indian guise.25 Whether it was “Mohawks” at the Boston Tea Party in 1773 or a “Cherokee Princess” on vaudeville in 1920, political and entertainment efficacy lay in rendering Indian identity symbolic, a tool available for non-Indigenous agendas. In flaunting the gap, this how-to volume makes Cherokee identity available to anyone who adopts the stereotyped trappings. As the book’s photographic illustrations unfold, they constitute a visual essay on this process: having demonstrated the contrast between herself and her Cherokee “mother,” Wahletka substitutes her own body in the space of Indigeneity, illustrated by two of her entertainment acts, a meeting with the mayor of Newcastle, England,

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Figure 4VN.3.  Left to right: frontispiece, “From a Portrait Painted by E. E. Richards,” and illustration, “Minnie Spy Buck, Mother of Wahletka,” from Lifting the Veil (1923) (Internet Archive)

and finally an image of her in New York’s Central Park, surrounded by children to whom she is teaching “Indian legends.” Wahletka’s outlandish backstory is accompanied by voluminous, scientifically detailed evidence of her psychic abilities. Asking “What Is This Mysterious Power?,” she itemizes her stage act, her insights, and experts’ classification of her powers: telepathy, autosuggestion, psychometry, spirit invention, and communication with the dead among them. Numerous authorities within and beyond the Society for Psychic Research are cited and debated, named individuals testify to the accuracy of Wahletka’s predictions, innumerable revelations accompanied by specific times and places are provided, and the possibility of fraud is acknowledged and disproven.26 Then the book turns to its ultimate selling point, explaining how readers can cultivate their own “hidden forces.” Her method combines Émile Coué’s autosuggestion—to his “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” she adds “I am master of my

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fate!”—with physical health and disciplinary regimes that will fulfill the “sixth sense” possessed by all.27 Together, Wahletka’s tale of her Cherokee birthright and documentation of her psychic authority carry an explicit promise (“In Every Person There is Something of the Psychic”) and an implicit one (in every person there is something of the Cherokee Princess).28 There is another version of Lifting the Veil, one that Wahletka and Royal quietly put through line-by-line editing to accompany their second British tour in 1925. The revisions seem to respond and contribute to what Kate Flint calls the greater “protean” quality of Indianness overseas, especially to a recalibration in British images of Native Americans in the post–World War I era.29 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British popular press framed touring shows such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West with anxieties about how rising American power challenged British imperialism. They often focused on the physicality of such shows’ Indigenous performers as a potential threat to the “modern, imperial culture of the disciplined body” fundamental, in Coll Thrush’s analysis, to British superiority.30 By the 1920s, British popular discourse had largely consigned North American Natives to history, preoccupied with colonial subjects rising up against its own waning empire—an erasure in the face of actual and still ongoing Indigenous presence in the United Kingdom.31 This process was furthered by the great popularity of filmic westerns that repeatedly made magnificent landscapes by emptying out Indigenous inhabitants and paraded Indians as routinely played by non-Indigenous actors.32 When Wahletka and Royal headlined the Moss Empire chain of variety houses, the biggest circuit with the most palatial architecture in Britain, their act was imperialism of this order, reinforcing the making of “Red Indians,” in British parlance, as ciphers and symbols uncoupled from Indigenous lives. During Wahletka and Royal’s first tour in 1921, they would have heard and read responses suggesting that British audiences, enthusiastic as they were about Wahletka’s act, could not have cared less about the authenticity of her Cherokee identity, accepting it as a novelty device. The British press seems not to believe in it—typically keeping her “Princess” status in quotation marks— but spare no column inches debunking it. The book revisions respond by reducing the incongruities that enabled American Indian play, moderating the gestures that call most attention to the gap between masquerade and original. While the camp autobiography remains the first source of Wahletka’s authority, it is now embedded in a somewhat cleaned up geography—“My father came from Canada, the land of the Iroquois, to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma),

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where lived my tribe”—and the discordant European terminology of royalty, rank, and ruling is reduced.33 A head-and-shoulders portrait of Wahletka remains, but the photograph of Minnie Spy Buck has been cut—and with it, the prominent disjunction whereby Indigenous presence is included in order to be displaced by a wannabee. For British variety audiences, it seems, that operation was largely a done deal. Sieg has defined Indian “drag acts” as “instructional devices that teach spectators, faced with two incompatible truths, what to see and what not to see.”34 Wahletka and Royal crafted a double pedagogy, in their on-stage sleight of hand and their how-to book; in their revisions to the latter can be glimpsed how they read their audiences, promoting and responding to transatlantic nuances in Indian play. While trimming the outlandishness of the book’s Indian claims, the revisions shore up the seriousness of the telepathic claims. The British reviews in 1921 had been overwhelmingly positive, but they nevertheless showed a greater propensity than their American counterparts to question the authenticity of Wahletka’s mind-reading. In interviews and press statements, she acknowledged the skepticism, commenting that British audiences applauded at the end of her act whereas American and Canadian audiences sat in silent mystification; “Mine is not really an applause act.”35 The 1925 revisions nudge the material away from entertainment toward revelation, with a new prefatory statement that anticipates and deflects incredulity by wielding “facts” and paying proportionately greater attention to the power of a healthy body—emphasizing the association between Indianness and bodily power long evident in British audiences, here not as a threat but as an achievable end. The partners’ growing ambitions to use vaudeville as a springboard into the scientific community are evident in a revision echoing one reception of Wahletka’s first British tour. In the London Guardian, R.H.S. reviewed her act at the Palace as “to say the least, disturbing.” He was astonished to find that, even in the music hall, “the intimacies are not safe from the prying eye of the ‘psychologist.’ ” The review continues: A person dropping suddenly into the hall might have been excused if he thought that by mistake he had happened upon a pathological lecture. He would have heard the “Princess” discoursing upon the symptoms of a questioner’s father’s illness—upon bronchial tubes and tuberculosis of the apex of the lungs. He would have been still more astonished at the replies of the “Princess” to a man who asked her to tell him what he was thinking about. If the “Princess” Wahletka really possesses the powers she claims her place is in Harley Street.36

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This reference to the famed street of medical specialists, voiced as a criticism, may have given Wahletka and Royal an idea for one more maneuver. To the author’s billing on the title page of the U.S. edition, “World Renowned Indian Seeress,” the British title page added “and Psychologist.”

twilight roads Another way of decoding meanings at work in the opening vaudeville number is to reattach Wahletka’s stage and print act to some of the lived identities and relationships that produced this flamboyant artifice and formulaic narrative. Here, the challenge is less to trace what Wahletka carried with her than what she sought to leave behind. The incomplete documentary trail points to a key operation of settler modernity: the extractivism enacted on Indigenous lands, cultures, and identities for the making of western economies and modernist aesthetics. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) says, “Extraction is a cornerstone of capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism. It’s stealing. It’s taking something, whether it’s a process, an object, a gift, or a person, out of the relationships that give it meaning, and placing it in a nonrelational context for the purposes of accumulation.”37 Wahletka’s story shows what that process could look like at the granular, quotidian level of popular culture–making: she and her husband made a living, and found protective cover for their combined gender and ethnic vulnerabilities, by taking Indigenous lives and lands as resources to be fitted to the conditions of vaudeville through Indian masquerade. The biographical story begins on August 4, 1885, when Loretta or Lottie May Navarre was born to a Basque-American farmer, Isadore G. Navarre, and his Irish American wife, Marjorie O’Connor, in Monroe township near Detroit, Michigan. Although she left home briefly to work as a stenographer in Toledo, Ohio, Loretta Navarre returned to Monroe to help her ailing, widowed mother, who died in 1905. At that point, presumably needing support, she married a clerk from Toledo, John Hissem Rhoads. Two years later she apparently left him, returning to the workforce as a bookkeeper and living separately in Toledo.38 At that point she drops out of sight. Stitching together fragments of evidence, it is most likely that she disappeared into Oklahoma. Entering statehood in 1907, Oklahoma was promoted as a place of great opportunity for settlers seeking land, minerals, or other prospects. Loretta Navarre Rhoads’s two younger brothers—Ignatius Gregory Navarre and Neal Bernard Navarre—were among the vast numbers who

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responded, relocating in part of the state—then, Indian Territory—to which the Cherokee Nation had been violently removed in 1838.39 What was opportunity for settlers was cataclysmic for the Cherokee Nation. The creation of the state of Oklahoma was one more step in what Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) calls “the attempted elimination of a people,” which included “allotment dispossession”—“when the U.S. government shattered the commonly held tribal lands of Indian Territory into individual allotments for the benefit of exploitative robber barons and their ruthless railroad interests and non-Indian settlers”—and the abolition of the Cherokee Nation’s official tribal sovereignty.40 It was the beginning of what Kirby Brown (Cherokee Nation) cites as a “dark age” in Cherokee history.41 The Navarres were not wealthy oil men or land grabbers but workers with rural origins seeking to enter the urban middle class, their modest status making them no less part of the white extractive economy that bore down on cultural as much as mineral resources. The brothers rented accommodation in Bartlesville, an oil-boom site in northeastern Oklahoma where “Nig” Navarre seems to have worked for a plumbing company and Neal Navarre became an office boy for Barnsdall Oil Company. There are hints that their sister settled about an hour east of them, in Vinita, Oklahoma, a railroad boomtown and newly minted county capital. For someone with credentials as a “lady bookkeeper,” Vinita would have offered many employment opportunities. The fact that I cannot find Loretta Navarre Rhoads in the records is not evidence of her absence; as Justice remarked, if someone wanted to lose their identity, the chaos and carpetbagging in Oklahoma around 1907 would make it the perfect spot.42 In the area around Bartlesville and Vinita, Loretta Navarre could well have heard of—even encountered—the Spybucks. Cherokee by blood and Shawnee by adoption, as the Dawes Rolls put it, they had a high profile among the local Indigenous families.43 In October 1907, the real Henry Spybuck organized a week-long powwow for thousands of Native people in Collinsville, equidistant between Bartlesville and Vinita.44 For the many settler spectators who thronged to “The Last Great Pow-Wow before Statehood,” it seems to have been mainly a colorful spectacle; for the participants—including Apache leader Geronimo, Comanche leader Quanah Parker, Chief Rogers of the Cherokee, and O-lo-cowah-la of the Osage—it involved strategizing for survival. One newspaper reported it thus: While all the ancient Indian games, dances and amusements will be indulged in, the pow-wow is expected to have serious effects by the

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inauguration of a plan whereby the Indians of the entire Southwest shall abandon their tribal relations and take up the paleface mode of living. Chief Spybuck, of the Shawnees, is the leader in this movement. He believes that the redskins have become sufficiently civilized and well enough educated to become good American citizens, and the coming of statehood in Oklahoma renders such action imperative if the Indians are to protect their interests.45 There were long histories of disagreement about the best route to survival in the face of genocidal conditions: the parties’ arguments were driven by conservative, traditionalist, progressive, resistor, assimilationist, and other competing visions. The fact that Wahletka chose to base her primitivist construct on a figure publicly represented as an advocate of assimilation suggests the contortions and distortions entailed by acts of cultural extraction. Henry Spybuck had a daughter Minnie Spybuck (married name Tinker). Both Spybucks had been allotted plots around Skiatook, close to Collinsville, and the bureaucracy involved in their leasing of farm lands and oil fields often appeared in the local papers that Loretta would have read; one company drilling on Spybuck land was Neal Navarre’s employer.46 Mark Rifkin has characterized the space of the Osage Nation, also violently incorporated into the state of Oklahoma in 1907, as suffused “with settler administrative mappings and directives.”47 Similar suffusion fills newspaper columns of Cherokee allotments, leases, “removal of restrictions” on Cherokee land owners by the secretary of the interior, and evidence of their “competence.”48 These dry listings and normalized categories camouflage what Brown describes as the “complex, and at times devastating, social relations” resulting from “the chaotic aftermath of allotment and statehood during the early decades of the twentieth century.”49 Every so often this chaos and violence erupt more visibly in newspaper reports. In 1910, Minnie Spybuck Tinker approached the district court in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, to annul her marriage, charging that her Osage husband was guilty of adultery and “extreme cruelty and went so far as to point a gun at her in the effort to take her life.”50 In fact, it appears as though the couple remained married and grew their family over many years. But the coverage makes imaginable how Loretta Navarre might have extracted a figure from complex personal and National histories to provide an identity for her sacrificial Cherokee Princess. Wild west shows came through this area, the 101 Ranch was nearby, and vaudeville—including Indian vaudeville—was much in evidence. This was Will Rogers country; his home base was in this geographical triangle and part

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of his family lived in Vinita. By 1907, his success on big-time vaudeville was much reported in numerous local, state, and national newspapers.51 Many vaudeville shows came through, and there were so many palmists, clairvoyants, and mind-readers that in December 1910 Bartlesville passed a city ordinance levying them with a license and occupation tax.52 Loretta Navarre may even have been inspired by her namesake—Madame Loretta “Clairvoyant and Palmist,” who stopped in Bartlesville during the big powwow—to set up shop herself as a mind-reader and go on the circuit of tent shows and private rooms that would have taken her out of the state.53 All this evidence is, of course, circumstantial. What is for sure is that, when Loretta Navarre Rhoads reemerged in 1912 in Atlanta, Georgia, she had a new identity and occupation. Recording her birthplace as Vinita, Oklahoma, she now went under the name Twilight Roads. Whether she made the pseudonym up on the spot or had used it as cover for the past five years, the name is richly resonant of her situation. It reads like a pun on the name of the husband she seems to have been fleeing and on her identity as a woman on the road, perhaps on the run. For a vaudeville act, too, the name seems purpose-made, gesturing to itineracy and an aura of mysticism. In Atlanta, she met Victor Allen Royal, who was also engaged in remaking his identity. Royal, also known as Rothstein, had immigrated from what is now Moldova in 1900 as an eleven-year-old. Until recently, he had worked in the Manhattan Yiddish garment industry, a laborer making “neck-wear” along with his father and two of his brothers, and had lived in an East Harlem tenement with nine siblings and his parents.54 This was “the congested tenement district east of Lexington Avenue” on 102nd Street, where “the lower-class segment of East European Jews resided,” the majority of them working “in menial positions.”55 Victor’s official designation in coming south was “merchant,” but apparently he was also trying his luck as a vaudeville singer.56 Three days after Loretta and Victor met, they traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to marry. Florida’s marriage rules were much looser than Georgia’s, their officials notorious for keeping pre-signed marriage blanks on hand for shotgun weddings. There would have been little check on names, places of birth, or divorce status, and so, on May 15, 1912, Victor Royal of New York married Twilight Roads of Oklahoma. They both identified as white on the marriage documents, but this was the beginning of her racial shifting.57 Three months later, “Wah-Letka Indian Girl of Mystery” was born under the banner of “ROYAL and ROYAL” at the Alamo Theater in Macon, Georgia.58 As

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the act’s success grew, so too the identity of this “sure-enough Cherokee Indian” expanded beyond the stage.59 Circe Sturm (Mississippi Choctaw descent) defines “racial shifters” as “individuals who have changed their racial selfidentification on the US census from non-Indian to Indian.”60 Her study of more recent times shows that many Cherokees believe socially and economically marginalized white people most commonly appropriate Cherokee identity.61 This was the demographic out of which Princess Wahletka was born. Loretta and Victor were insecure economically, personally, and culturally. Both were seeking to escape poverty; she may have been a bigamist and certainly was hiding her name; and neither was an American citizen. Victor was an “alien immigrant” whose parents had never taken up citizenship; in marrying him, Loretta lost her own citizenship. Princess Wahletka Royal, Indian, became her public persona and her official identity on travel documents, the federal census, and other official papers.62 Emerging from Oklahoma as a faux-Cherokee princess was not unknown; one difference in this story was Royal’s contribution as a Yiddish Russian immigrant. Royal was of the generation steeped in Manhattan’s Yiddish vaudeville. Judith Thissen has tracked how immigrants adapted the American form into Yiddish-language cheap variety entertainment, first in the public meeting halls and concert saloons of the lower East Side and then in vaudeville houses, and how Yiddish vaudeville supported neighborhood identity and cohesion through the centralization of film production.63 It contributed to reconstructing the fragmented community of Jewish immigrants escaping the “tumult and terror” of czarist Russia and eased them into Americanized popular culture.64 Audience participation was different from that in English-language politevaudeville houses. Even in its first emanations in concert saloons, Yiddish variety played to mixed family audiences, who remained a boisterous presence.65 Responses to what was happening on stage intermingled with conversation and newly unchaperoned forms of courtship.66 This entertainment took off in 1905, just as Royal entered adolescence, at a moment when a settlementhouse study of Yiddish music hall judged that, for his community, packed into overpopulated tenements, “Recreation becomes essential.”67 Royal’s social and performance skills would have been forged to a considerable extent in the vaudeville auditorium. Vaudeville also afforded opportunity to enter professional life beyond the grind of menial labor. As Wahletka’s partner, beyond the auditorium Royal networked within local communities, newspaper offices, and show-business

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connections—the Eastman brothers included—as he prepared the ground to expand the act into newspaper columns, onto the telephone, and on radio. Presumably he was familiar with the Yiddish mind-reader’s role in providing reassurance: Mark Slobin translates one advertisement in a Yiddish broadside “for a ‘thought-reader and advice-giver’ who takes no fee if the patron isn’t satisfied.”68 As Royal and Wahletka grew the act, that dual role became her specialty, responding to queries about “Birthmarks, bad debts, thefts, weak eyes, travel, domestic woes, old age, mental ills, visits, school studies, salesmanships and love”—a list that sounds as if it belongs as much to the quotidian community of Yiddish vaudeville as to psychic theatrics.69 Victor Royal would also know something of Yiddish Indians, the stage Indian being as familiar in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish entertainment as in later twentieth-century films. Slobin parses a surviving vaudeville playlet, Tsvishn indianer (“Among the Indians”) by Khanan-Yakov Minikes, performed in New York City in 1895.70 This predates Victor’s arrival in 1900, but its comic handling of Indians seems symptomatic of the ongoing immigrant environment. In a tale of Jewish salesmen on the road, the Yiddish-speaking Indians fit right in: at once solemn, explicitly commercial, keen on a bargain, and proud of their clothes. Peter Antelyes has tracked generations of Jewish performers and writers who worked with Indian and western range scenarios, “revealing the range to have been a vaudeville stage all along, a performative space open to Jewish appropriation as a vehicle for inclusion.”71 Royal’s contributions to Wahletka’s making fit this pattern; an enabler of stereotyped Indianness, he joined company with his more famous Jewish contemporaries Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor, who performed comic Indianness. The eclecticism and play with wild west conventions also map onto the explicitly commercial contract of Wahletka, the Indian Princess seeress who “Gives Positive Proof to Every Purchaser.” The name itself could have come from Victor, if he knew of the Wahletka family in New York City, Austrian-Bohemian immigrants whose son was a contemporary of his.72 Contextualized by the reconstructed record of Wahletka’s making, biographical hints in Lifting the Veil become legible. The stylistic excess may owe something to Yiddish cultural style—the large gestures, the double meanings, the flaunting of stereotypes that were hallmarks of Yiddish vaudeville. If Royal ghost-wrote the book, he could have scrambled the first edition’s geography. Among the many testimonials to Wahletka’s psychic credentials, some are from “experts,” others, although it is not acknowledged, from members of

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the New York society in which Wahletka and Royal moved. One long story proving the accuracy of Wahletka’s predictions, for example, is provided by the set designer Irving Eastman. Another witness turns out to be Loretta’s brother. He is identified only as “I. G. Navarre, of 2804 Eighth Avenue West, Seattle, Washington”; as in so much of Wahletka’s act, details ostensibly guaranteeing transparency deflect from a more significant truth. His testimonial concerns one of Wahletka’s predictions: A year before he had asked the Princess in a theatre if she could tell him where his sister was. She said that she did not know the name of the town, but that his sister had passed through a period of poverty as a result of an unfortunate marriage, and that within a year her husband would die and that she would be free, and that she would correspond with him again. He wrote to the New York booking offices to inform the Princess of the correctness of her prediction, of more than a year previous.73 According to the available records, Ignatius Gregory Navarre had only one sister, Loretta. Could this tale be a refracted telling of her own movements in the years lost to documentation, a version of her flight from her first husband and rebirth into vaudevillian “freedom”? The Cherokee fantasy also encodes some of Loretta Navarre’s origins. The French-Canadian father who abandons her, returns years later to place her in Carlisle Indian School, and then gives permission for her public career could well be a shadow of Isadore G. Navarre, Loretta’s father, some of whose family came to the United States via Quebec, and who died when she was nine.74 She had, in reality, closely attended her own mother’s death, an event that may inform the book’s dedication to the memory of “the gentle little old lady whose spirit is with me constantly.” This figure has no correlative in Wahletka’s childhood story but literally haunts the book when she fleetingly appears in Wahletka’s later life as one of two “ghostly friends”—the other is an Indian Chief—whose visitations cause the seeress’s near-eviction from a Manhattan hotel.75 The book’s truly haunting presence is the photograph captioned “Minnie Spy Buck, Mother of Wahletka.” Whether this is a photograph of Minnie Spybuck of the Cherokee Nation who lived near Vinita, Oklahoma, I have been unable to ascertain, although I have looked at hundreds of studio photographs of Indigenous women from this period—Cherokee, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—who wear clothing, silver, and beaded high-top moccasins like

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this woman’s, whose dresses’ necklines lie just like hers, and who seem closer archival company for her to keep than the images in Wahletka’s book. How Loretta Navarre Rhoads/Twilight Roads/Princess Wahletka obtained this photograph remains a mystery. Did she have a relationship with the Spybucks? Was the photograph a gift from Minnie Spybuck, did Wahletka and Royal purchase it on their travels, or was it ripped from some other community context? As an absent presence within an outlandish story of appropriation, Minnie Spybuck is a troubling reminder: stitching together these compensatory references and echoes of family and community are lived Indigenous identities and relationships from which Wahletka extracted her means of survival.

a guest in indian country, vaudeville-style In the later 1920s, Wahletka’s and Royal’s paths began to diverge personally and professionally. In 1931, she sued him for divorce, and he worked his way into New York’s entertainment industry as a booking agent on Broadway.76 It was a path that their son, Neal Vernon Royal, born in 1918, also came to follow: beginning as a stage actor, he eventually made his way to Hollywood as a noted movie agent.77 Wahletka, meanwhile, began to move into the public company of urban Natives. In 1924, she began to tour with Chief Sheet Lightning/Walter Battice, the Sac and Fox entertainer and activist who performed with Red Wing and Molly Spotted Elk, among others. With another bait-and-switch, Wahletka guaranteed the authenticity of Chief Sheet Lightning’s Indigeneity—calling him “a splendid example of Indian blood”—as evidence of her own: “He belongs to the Fox and Sac tribes and he knows my history and all about my family and the great powers I have had of reading the minds of people and peeping into the future and looking back over the past.”78 In 1926, after successfully reclaiming her American citizenship, she campaigned with Chief Sheet Lightning for a new pan-Indian association and the founding of American Indian Day—a move consistent with his work building broad coalitions in Chicago and New York City.79 In 1928, she began to wear a headdress of 114 eagle feathers, saying that Chief Sheet Lightning had made it for her when he adopted her “for some service she has rendered him and the Indians.”80 In 1931, she took it upon herself to adopt the mayor of Philadelphia into the Cherokee tribe.81 She rewrote some autobiographical details, now claiming descent from John Ross, a famous leader of the Cherokee Nation in the earlier nineteenth century. She

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simultaneously beefed up the non-Indigenous side of her lineage, claiming that her French-Canadian hunter-father descended from the royal House of Navarre.82 As a Cherokee Princess first floated by “ROYAL and ROYAL,” she seemed compelled to accumulate evidence of high birth, bearing out the sardonic analysis by Vine Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) of white “Cherokee” appropriations: “a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking.”83 It was at this point, as Wahletka began to layer on new identity claims, that she received a guest spot on Shunatona’s revue, likely by his invitation, given that he had fired his non-Indigenous manager earlier in the 1930s and was thriving professionally.84 In what spirit did the troupe make stage space for her? The several possible explanations are not mutually exclusive. Wahletka was probably experiencing new vulnerabilities with the Great Depression and, in divorcing Royal, the loss of a mainstay of her act. Perhaps Shunatona’s troupe was giving her support, perhaps they were practicing the kind of coalition building encouraged by Chief Sheet Lightning, or perhaps there was a quid pro quo by which in return for stage time she worked on their costumes, as she was reputed to have done. Were they having fun with their title? “From Camp To Campus,” earlier floated to highlight the performers as college graduates, could take on new resonance with Wahletka’s inclusion. Whatever their motives, when Shunatona’s troupe reframed Wahletka’s ethnic drag with their Indigenous talents they put back in play the relationality that Simpson identifies as at the heart of what settler extraction steals. They also joined a larger network of Indigenous reframings and reworkings, as when the Deer family welcomed the Red Men to their wild west show or Princess Watahwaso and Molly Spotted Elk changed the narrative on western films with their live accompaniment. The cost of Indian masquerade to Indigenous welfare, well known to Indigenous performers, had recently received official recognition. In 1933 and 1934, legislation was introduced in Congress to protect Indigenous workers from fraudulent representation and to secure their control over images of Indianness.85 The urgency of the bill, according to its framer, Republican Senator Frazier of North Dakota, was that, especially but not only in the midst of the Great Depression, “While the real American Indian is in desperate need, many persons of other races are imposing on the credulity of the white race by pretending to be Indians.”86 The proposed legislation died in the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, but the material impact was registered. When

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Indigenous vaudevillians appeared on stage with a faux–Cherokee Princess, they reinforced the point, with the most entertaining of displays, that in her making and sustenance, whether in Cherokee Nation territory or New York’s performance community, her livelihood rested on a foundation of Indigenous creativity and resilience.

ch a p te r f i ve

Chester Dieck, “Winnetou on a Bicycle”

WINNETOU, KARL MAY’S HIGHLY FICTIONALIZED Apache hero, has become a byword

for a distinctively German fixation on North American Indigenous peoples that is also the epicenter of a wider European phenomenon. Since the 1890s, Germans have repeatedly resorted to this figure as a source of projection and validation, his identity morphing according to subsequent generations’ “psychic and political needs and pressures” but consistently revolving around the power of primitivism.1 The late nineteenth century also saw the rise of German vaudeville—more accurately Variété—promoted as “quintessentially modern” for the novelty of its cultural forms, rhythms, and audience relations and its role in internationalizing entertainment capital and labor.2 This chapter considers what happened when the primitivism of Winnetou hit the modernity of Variété, in the form of the German redface trick cyclist Chester Dieck (1880– 1968). Dieck’s act survived an astonishing six decades, through fiercely opposed government regimes and devastating world wars. It was one of numerous Indianerakts on Variété stages that have been little remembered in Englishlanguage scholarship, overshadowed by commercialized ethnographic displays and wild west shows in Germany during the same period. Because the meanings of Dieck’s act are embedded in these entertainment environments, as well as in Germany’s shifting socio-political climate, I reconstruct his career chronologically by moving back and forth among larger cultural moments and his 237

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cycling turns. I end by juxtaposing his Indianerakt with two instances of lived Indigenous performance that brushed closely by him on the European circuit. Several things become clear. First, how Dieck’s minimal Indian trappings became a much more invested identity under the pressure of German state power. Second, how the distinctiveness of his act lay less in mining myths of Indian primitivism and more in appropriating Indianness as a route to western modernity. And third, how his movement among Indigenous performers in Europe epitomized the need not only to access the resources of their ingenuity, but also—in popular entertainment as in society more generally—to edge them off the stage.

from indianthusiasm to variété The ideological context within which Indianerakts in Variété played had been in the making for four hundred years, ever since European group identities became entangled with Indigenous people brought back by travelers from the so-called New World to show off what was construed as their primitivism.3 The display of Indigenous peoples had particular meanings for Germany, which claimed special affinity with North American tribes in its myths of origin and, after declaring itself a nation-state in 1871, its imperialist and colonialist aggression.4 In the mid-1880s, wild west shows began to overtake commercialized ethnographic displays in popularity.5 American wild west showmen toured with Plains Indians—mainly Oglala Lakota performers—through Europe, most famously Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which came to Germany in 1890–91 and 1906.6 In 1910 Carl Hagenbeck, the German developer of animal and human zoos, organized a wild west show of Sioux performers in his HamburgStellingen zoo to great success.7 The German takeover of wild west spectacle continued when circus entrepreneur Hans Stosch-Sarrasani brought twentytwo Sioux performers to his newly built stationary Zirkus in Dresden in 1913.8 Expectations and perceptions of these Indigenous performers were reinforced in popular print: postcards, dime novels, translations of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, and Karl May’s Winnetou novels, first published in 1893.9 In imagining a blood brotherhood between Winnetou and the German narrator, Old Shatterhand—at once exoticizing the Apache and proving German superiority—May crystallized what Hartmut Lutz terms deutsche Indianertümelei or “German Indianthusiasm”: “a yearning for all things Indian, a fascination with American Indians, a romanticizing about a supposed Indian essence.”10

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While Indianthusiasm was fastening on the language and imagery of antimodernism, Variété was selling itself as ultra-modern.11 German Variété had goals similar to those of North American polite vaudeville: winning a broad, gender-inclusive “family audience” and distinguishing itself from competing forms of cheap entertainment such as the more risqué Tingel-Tangel and more political Kabarett. The closest equivalent to Tony Pastor was Julius Baron, who developed Berlin’s Wintergarten, opened in 1887, into “Europe’s most prestigious variety theater”; in 1902 Baron was reputedly “the first person to build a large and wide bridge between vaudeville artistry and bourgeois society.”12 The epicenter of Germany’s newly booming entertainment scene was its capital, Berlin, its Variété bills packed with brief, spectacular acts contributing, as in North America, to the intense pace and stimulation of the modernizing metropolis. However, the shoals that German Variété came to navigate were more complex and ultimately dangerous in terms of geopolitical relations, linguistic borders, and brute government power. The German Variété scene at the turn of the twentieth century was lodged within a transatlantic community of management and labor. Pushing back against transnational entertainment combines, workers organized an international union for “the better class Variety-Artists,” the Internationalen ArtistenLoge (IAL), in 1901.13 Founded and headquartered in Berlin, it fostered a global community of itinerant performers who would have the strength, dignity, and protection of any skilled labor, “giving artistes for the first time what is practically a fence around the world.”14 Considering itself “the pioneer and forerunner, in a way even the parent society of the other European artistes’ organisations,” it worked toward a universal “Normal Contract” through affiliations with sister unions—the White Rats Actors’ Union of America (founded 1900), the Union Syndicale des Artistes Lyriques of France (1905), and the Variety Artistes’ Federation of Great Britain (1906)—and IAL offices in capital cities from New York to Moscow.15 IAL’s main organ was Das Programm: International Variété-Journal, a weekly trade journal that it began publishing in a combination of German, English, French, and Russian in 1902. Germany did not have the vaudeville circuits that were rapidly expanding in North America and Britain, and the union was conscious of the challenges of independent itineracy. It advised members on different countries’ opportunities and perils, especially for those without the host language: untrustworthy agents, managerial tricks, insurance needs, political instabilities, and the perils for women artistes in countries

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where variety performance was accompanied by alcohol. Das Programm also advertised gigs, theaters, managers, agents, accommodations, and eating places, functioned as a poste-restante, and provided many additional services across Europe, the Russian Empire, and North America; the Berlin office fielded queries and correspondence in thirteen languages.16 And it circulated, through playbills and advertisements for individual acts, a cornucopia of variety entertainment across Europe. These early years of German Variété seem the most buoyant. A litmus test of cultural confidence was the comparison with American vaudeville. While American entertainment had a speed and novelty that the German industry felt challenged to match, the IAL knew that working conditions in Germany were more favorable. American salaries were larger, but for them vaudevillians had to perform three or more times a day, seven days a week, and manage large geographical “jumps” between venues. The German standard was one performance a day, mostly Sundays off, longer engagements, and better contractual protections. These practices also enabled more sociability among artistes, which Das Programm encouraged by spreading the word on vaudeville exchanges: cafés across the continent where performers could meet, share insiders’ tips, and provide “mutual aid and protection.”17 America figured prominently on stage too, among a throng of national and racial stereotypes—Tyrolean singers, Scottish Highland dancers, Arab and Asian acrobats, African exotics among them. Amerika generally signified the North American West, in acts’ names (The Montana Girl, The Three Denvers, The Dakotas) and in small-scale Wild-West and Cowboyakts configured for the Variété stage. The most prominent Indianerakts in Variété were free-standing solo or small-group formations. What all these performances had in common was the spaces they navigated, moral and physical. Although Variété is often remembered as sexually titillating, the IAL was intent on steering a course of respectability. To qualify for union membership, artistes had to achieve a salary threshold above VolksVariété (small-time vaudeville), in which beer-drinking working-class audiences impinged more closely on stages and which tended to be associated with prostitution. The IAL focused on FamilienVariété and internationale Variété (family and big-time vaudeville), whose auditoriums also often accommodated dining but did so with tables regulated and distanced from the more elaborate proscenium stage.18 Another spatial distinction arose from the overlap between Variété and Zirkus. Stationary circuses—cupola-domed, round brick structures with permanent seating surrounding a performance

ch es t er dieck   24 1

space—were common across continental Europe. Enough acts went back and forth between the two venues that in the early twentieth century hybrid buildings and forms of Zirkus-Variété were devised. These opportunities, along with the challenge of performing across multilingual countries, made for a proportionately higher number of visually oriented Schau-Nummern (dumb acts, in North American terminology). These conditions—the long fetch of Indianthusiasm, the emphasis on internationalism, the navigation among cosmopolitanism, respectability, and visual spectacle—produced a peppering of frivolous or novelty Indians on Variété stages: non-Indigenous entertainers using well-known names and images as accessories to their acts. Their ruling motif was the upending of expectations around racial and cultural categories. Pocahuntas, Die indische Nachtingall conflated two kinds of “Indian”—the long-mythicized Powhatan woman and the German word for South Asian Indian. Red Wing was not the famous Ho-Chunk film star but “The half cast [sic] Indian Girl” singing and dancing in an elaborate floor-length outfit anchored to Indianness only by a feathered headdress and stock pose (figure 5.1).19 Others included Irish Indian Maids (dancers), Miss Arizona and Sitting-Bull (jugglers), Chester Piels and His Cow-Girl (Indianer Luft Akt [Indian aerial act]), and Morcashani, a black British singer, with “Her Sioux Indian.” A cartoon advertisement for The 3 Arizonas suggests how the comic potential played out on stage: “Hoo!” exclaims the capering Indian as a juggled tomahawk falls on his head (figure 5.1). Wending their way through this scattering of novelty Indians were numerous Indigenous performers from North America. Given the complexities of national and linguistic borders, most of them remained within the larger wild west shows run by non-Indigenous showmen. But a few appeared on Variété stages, the most well-known being the Mohawk Deer family, whose daughter Esther Deer soloed on European Variété tours. How the Deers’ richly layered stage attire, range of performance modes, and deft comedic turns read within this company of Indianerakts is a topic for this chapter’s final section. “Chester Dieck, the Indian Wonder on the Wheel” This is the context in which Chester Dieck enters the picture. Frantz Hermann Dieck was born November 12, 1880, in Essen, Germany. He and his brothers were fascinated with bicycles—building them out of scrap metal, doing tricks on them—and by 1895 he was in a troupe performing in Russia and China. At the onset of the Russo-Japanese war, he returned to Germany to build a solo

Figure 5.1.  Clockwise from top right: Advertisements for Chief Hailstorm, Das Programm, January 1, 1922, and December 25, 1921; photograph of Melencias Indian Show on city streets, 1920s or 1930s; advertisement for Red Wing, Das Programm, November 23, 1913; advertisement for 3 Arizonas, Das Programm, July 20, 1913 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau). Top left: Os-ko-mon as Medicine Man, Karl-May-Spiele, Rathen 1938, photograph from Neue Funk-Stunde (Courtesy of Artikelarchiv der Karl-May-Gesellschaft). Collage designed by Leon Aureus.

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career as Europas waghalsigster Cyclist (Europe’s most daring cyclist), under the stage name Chester Dieck. He joined the IAL and subscribed to Das Programm, typifying their target membership: neither a theatrical star briefly passing through variety, nor an amateur or low-class entertainer, but a dedicated, virtuosic performer. One of his first appearances was in Berlin’s Passagetheater, one of the city’s most popular Variété houses. The entertainment scene was thick with trick cyclists distinguishing themselves with novelties: bicycling while juggling, lifting other cyclists, operating a ventriloquist dummy, navigating perilous surfaces. At this point, as Dieck toured Europe, the Russian Empire, and other points east, he had no novelty feature; his claim to distinction was simply being the most daring. In 1906, for example, his act was the last turn on a bill composed of an opera singer, a rag collector making art out of his materials, an acrobatic demonstration of Japanese war games, a house comedian, a dressage act, a song-and-dance scene in an idyllic forest, and a quick-change artist—then Dieck’s display: Saltomortale über die lebende Todesbrücke. Sensationeller Feuer- und Flammen-Tanz mit Bicycle. Unerreichte Produktionen auf Vier- und Fünfsitzer. Saltomortale mit dem Zweirad über eine Droschke.20 (Somersault over the living bridge of death. Sensational fire and flame dance with a bicycle. Unequaled productions with four- and five-seater bicycles. Somersault on a two-wheel bicycle over a cab.) In certain spaces—especially Zirkus-Variété—he took the thrill of his act deep into the audience, setting up over their heads a long, steeply angled chute down which he stormed on his bicycle before somersaulting over an occupied carriage, later a cab, on stage. Between 1906 and 1908, Dieck found his signature novelty. On October 14, 1906, he could have read in Das Programm’s “American Notes” not only that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had left Europe earlier that month but also that William F. Cody “expects to retire after next season, as age creeps on and his hair is growing silvered.” On January 20, 1907, the journal confirmed: “Buffalo Bill’s show will never return to Europe.” In late 1906, Dieck had begun billing himself as amerikanischer Kunstradfahrer (American cycling artiste).21 By 1907,

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Figure 5.2.  Poster for Chester Dieck, ca. 1907 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

he was in full Buffalo Bill look-alike costume—fringed pants, necktie, western hat, long flowing hair—riffing on the famous image of Cody controlling his rearing horse by controlling a rearing five-saddle tandem bike (figure 5.2). He also began to incorporate English into his German-language advertising, promoting himself as “America’s most sensational and dauntless Cyclist.”22 He seems never to have traveled to North America; this claim instead signaled the cultural resources on which his performance now drew. Later in his career, Dieck would work with some well-established managers and booking agents, but at this stage he flagged these as his own rhetorical choices, advertising that he ran his own firm. Chester Dieck’s next move was to go Indian. By January 1908, performing at the Fövarosi Orpheum in Budapest, he had substituted a feathered headdress for his Stetson. While he shifted between cowboy and Indian for a while, he committed long-term to a loose approximation of a Plains Indian look. Dressing himself and his male assistant in feathers—sometimes a full

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Figure 5.3.  Advertisement for Chester Dieck, Das Programm, January 26, 1908 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

headdress, sometimes a single feather—and pulling his hair into braids, he developed a new advertising tag: “Chester Dieck, the Indian Wonder on the Wheel.”23 A full-fledged novelty Indian, he played up the incongruities between his primitive Indian image and his advertising for Dunlop Pneumatic as the newest thing in wheel technology (figure 5.3). His success was considerable: he was booked steadily for Variété and Zirkus across Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire. His advertising mimicked the IAL’s multilingual embrace, as in one full-page advertisement on Das Programm’s front cover: “Chester H. Dieck The world’s greatest Trick Cyclist mit kolossalem Erfolg Tour in Russland.”24 He reputedly earned a hefty 500 marks (around U.S. $125) a night and remained engaged through the German Empire’s declaration of war, appearing in Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, until in mid-1915 he disappeared off stage and into the German air force.25

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weimar years When World War I broke out, most Indigenous performers returned to North America and many German entertainers went into war service. The IAL’s vision of international artistic solidarity shattered in August 1914; from one issue to the next Das Programm shrank to a slim volume without cover, advertising, or any language besides German. The Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933 was a fragile, volatile time: in military defeat, Germany had to surrender its overseas colonies and shrink its landmass; it underwent political upheaval and economic catastrophe; and only briefly, between 1924 and 1929, enjoyed relative stability before the Great Depression hit. While the Weimar entertainment industry became more hectic and extravagant, it lost confidence in its cosmopolitan primacy. The shift is visible in the content of Variété, Kabarett, and Revue, which ceased, as Peter Jelavich has shown, to celebrate Berlin as the center of modernity; clearly “modern” now equaled “American.” A similar development was happening behind the scenes, as the IAL responded to deteriorating working conditions by emulating American structures: kick-starting a circuit of Variété houses and reversing policy to embrace the popular-priced Volks-Variété and the explosion of moving pictures with Kino-Variété.26 One German Variété manager described the war’s consequences for entertainers, some interned on enemy territory, all cut off from an international scene: “Even after the war one could not conceive of working abroad. England denied all artists of German and Austrian-Hungarian nationality to perform on British territory until 1924. In Russia, due to the putsch, all variety theater disappeared over night.”27 After the ban on international exchanges was lifted, the IAL watched foreign performers flooding bigtime houses such as Berlin’s Wintergarten and hinted that European performers should adopt more “international” (read: English-language) names. That advice was partly directed, ominously, at Jewish performers encountering growing prejudice.28 In Marlene Otte’s words: “in the final years of the republic, ethnicity was no longer grounds for communal laughter.”29 In the face of Germany’s diminution of political and cultural power, and growing resentment of Americanization, the public rhetoric of special affinity between Germans and Indians became, if anything, stronger. German and Indigenous populations, it was argued, shared a “common enemy” in the AngloAmerican alliance and were equal victims of U.S. imperialism. In Glenn Penny’s words, “Scores of German intellectuals and others turned to American Indians during the interwar period as a means of thinking through the challenges posed

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by technology and their modern, ‘machine-age’ world.”30 That affinity was closely embodied in the Indian hobbyist movement that began across Europe in the 1910s and gathered pace after World War I, with especial intensity in Germany.31 Inspired by encounters with Indigenous wild west performers, Indian clubs developed, at first centered around men but ultimately including generations of families.32 Their purpose was, and continues to be, to immerse themselves part-time in Indigenous material culture, spiritual observance, and lifeways. Indian hobbyists crystallized German Indianthusiasm, appropriating Indian identities and claiming their practices and creations as more authentic— because more rigidly following ancient models and materials—than those of contemporary Indigenous peoples.33 The thirst for a heavily constructed and embodied version of authentic Indianness brought about a distinct change among Indianerakts in Variété. Remnants of the comedic novelty Indian showed in feather headdresses and tomahawks randomly accessorizing acrobatic and dance acts, often accoutrements to the more body-revealing costumes of the 1920s.34 But the newly dominant emphasis echoed hobbyists’ primitivist lifeways, weaponry, and scenes of family life, performed off stage as well as on. Although these Indianerakts with their claims to Indigenous authenticity were the domain of German weiße Indianer (white Indians), their development was entangled in the postwar return of Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying performers from North America. First came Chief Hailstorm (Jarrette Talmadge Van Noy), “The GlobeTrotting Cherokee,” who entered Germany in 1921 with the entertainment for the U.S. Army of Occupation in Coblenz and who adapted his Variété act to Weimar hobbyism.35 Advertised as “ein echter Cherokee-Häuptling” (a genuine Cherokee chief), his purpose was “um die Gewohnheiten u. Lebensweise seines Volkes dem Publikum zu erklären” (to explain the habits and lifestyle of his people to the public).36 Showing a short film of traditional Cherokee life, he bridged American filmic and German everyday space by carrying over his on-stage dress—regalia with long feather headdress—into the city streets. As well as demonstrating that primitive Indianness could live in metropolitan Germany, Hailstorm also Indianized war—“in echten indianischen Kriegstänzen in voller Kriegsausrüstung mit Kriegsschminke u. Federn” (in real Indian war dances in full military equipment with warpaint and feathers)— vaudevillizing Germany’s military shame into a power with which it had a special affiliation.37 He also showed how Variété could combine hobbyists’

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enthusiasms for weaponry and family when he staged a torture scene with his newly wed German wife, Alvine Emma Maria Tewes (figure 5.1). A few years after Chief Hailstorm, Indigenous wild west performers returned to Germany in large numbers, mainly hired by circuses and wild west shows. German outfits competed to build relationships with the Miller Brothers’ 101 Real Wild West Ranch in Oklahoma as “a kind of clearinghouse for American Indian performers in Germany.”38 There was especially fierce competition to hire Lakota performers from Pine Ridge, who had been a prominent contingent in prewar shows. In 1927, when Sarrasani succeeded, his advertising blared: “Die ersten Sioux in Deutschland” (The first Sioux in Germany) and “Sarrasanis Indianer aus dem Stamme der Sioux sind die einzig echten Indianer in Europa” (Sarrasani’s Indians of the Sioux tribe are the only real Indians in Europe).39 Neither of these claims was accurate, but they suggest the stock put in a specific version of Indigenous presence. Yet there was also concern that these professional artists would disrupt the cultural narrative set by German appetites and expectations: from Hagenback in 1910 to Sarrasani in 1927, showmen, especially those with Sioux performers who spoke English, fretted that they would start communicating directly with the audience. One German recruiter grumbled about having to teach Indigenous performers “Indian behavior,” including “warrior dances, comportment at the martyr pole, and ambush on a stagecoach.”40 Also in 1927 Circus Krone, outmaneuvered by Sarrasani in bidding for Lakota performers, hired eighteen Iroquois performers led by F. L. Kenjockety, Cayuga from Cattaraugus Territory, Seneca Nation. While their costuming adopted the “Sioux look,” these “New York Indians” were deemed unsatisfactory in not conforming to physical expectations.41 The complaint may have masked a deeper unease about the group’s managerial independence. In North America, Kenjockety ran them as a vaudeville troupe, with acts and sketches calibrated to proscenium-type stages and more emphasis on music, dancing, and ceremony than horsemanship.42 In Germany, he positioned himself as a showman “Furnishing Indians Cowboys and Mexicans” and advertising their availability to go beyond the Circus Krone arena.43 Whether they succeeded in breaking into Variété remains unclear, but these employment stories suggest Indigenous adeptness with the structures of mass entertainment that went against the script of German Indianthusiasm. The most persistent “Indian” presence in Variété and Zirkus-Variété during the Weimar years were the German weiße Indianer performing in family formations. Like Indian hobbyists, they emphasized material culture:

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their clothing, tools, weaponry, and tipis drew in much more elaborate detail on a range of Native Nations than the earlier novelty Indians. Their acts revolved around skills still showcased by hobbyist clubs decades later: lassoing, knifethrowing, whip-cracking, and shooting with bow and arrow or rifle. The largest, most durable act was “Melencias wonderful Indian-Family.”44 This group of weiße Indianer ranged from three to a dozen performers crossing genders and generations, all heavily adorned with beadwork, animal skins and teeth, feathers, and names such as “Chief Samo-Haha Wa-Ta-Wa,” “Minnie Ha-Ha,” and “Ish-Koo-Dáh eine Indianische Schönheit” (an Indian beauty).45 Terri Melencia, the troupe’s German wannabee founder, aimed to combine ethnographic authority and virtuoso spectacle: “Melencia’s Indian Show and exotic etnografic exhibition. The greatest act of this kind.”46 They advertised themselves as “Die letzten Rothäute” (The last redskins), specializing in “Indianische Sport- u. Waffenspiele alter und neuer Zeit Original-Kostüme / Original-Sättel Museumswerte” (Ancient and modern Indian sport and weaponry, original costumes and original saddles, museum pieces). This ancient authenticity positioned them well for modern entertainment vehicles: attractive street and railway advertising, and performances “für Zirkusse, Varietes, Zoologische Gärten, Ausstellungen etc.” (for circuses, variety halls, zoological gardens, exhibitions, etc.)47 The audience was promised: “Wer Melencias sieht, verspürt einen Hauch echtester Indianer-romantik” (Whoever sees Melencias will feel a touch of the most authentic Indian romance).48 The troupe’s capacity for bridging primitive Indianness and contemporary popular culture extended into the everyday life of the city. Based in BerlinPankow, a working-class area popular with entertainers, Melencia’s troupe was often to be seen on the streets in full Indian costume, with Terri Melencia/ Chief Samo-Haha Wa-Ta-Wa strolling arm-in-arm with the Austro-Hungarian Andreas Aglassinger in full western gear as “Raffles Bill,” the troupe’s cowboyagent.49 For at least a dozen years, Melencia’s Indian Family showed, on stage and off, how primitivistic German Indianer could be lodged in the heart of the industrial city (figure 5.1). Chester Dieck on a Motorbike During the war, Chester Dieck lost his brother William, all his money disappeared, and he returned to a defeated Germany with an entertainment industry desperately trying to survive. By the end of December 1918, he was once more on his bicycle, generating a steady stream of engagements across Europe.50

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During the Weimar years, as the emphasis in Indianerakts on the Variété stage shifted from incongruity to authenticity, Chester Dieck pivoted in a different direction. The ways in which he distinguished himself from other trick-cycling and Indian acts provided him with a double escape from German turmoil: into a geography beyond continental Europe and a fantasy of Indianness as unlocalized modernity. During the Weimar years most Indianer in Variété used primitivist scenes of scalping and torture to proclaim their ethnographic authority and their cathartic defiance of death in a society traumatized by mass war casualties. Chester Dieck’s image followed a different syllogism: America had emerged in the postwar world as the quintessential site of modernity, Indians were the most authentic Americans, hence Indianness was the quintessential means to accessing modernity. He ceased invoking America by name or symbolism, his advertising now shaping stock images of Indianness—arrows, typeface, feathers—into sleek modernist lines in a design that first appeared on Das Programm’s front cover in 1919, where an elongated arrow curves around to trace the trajectory of the bicycle (figure 5.4). His visual image is youthful, somewhat delicately drawn—closer to May’s graceful, feminized Winnetou than to his fellow performers in full-feather headdresses who predominated in Variété. In Dieck’s act, proficiency was linked to modern technology: the lightweight bicycles, the latest pneumatics, and, in the Weimar years, the motorcycles added to his routine. His advertising increasingly traded on the Indian figure’s global appeal. In late 1919, when Dieck toured Scandinavia, he proclaimed himself “Skandinaviens populärste und sensationellste ReklameAttraktion! Welt-Sensation! Unkopierbar!” (Scandinavia’s most popular and sensational advertising attraction! World sensation! Inimitable!).51 The rhetoric and self-presentation enhanced his act’s cosmopolitanism while distancing it from the chaotic working conditions of Germany and problematic associations with the United States. In April 1920, Dieck returned to Berlin for a prime spot (the first after intermission) at the Wintergarten, one of the few fully functioning and solvent German Variété houses in those turbulent years.52 On the same bill was Gulnare Höyer, Nordische Tänzerin (Nordic dancer), the stage name of Danish prima ballerina Ellen Marie Høyer. Later that year, Høyer and Dieck married, and throughout the Weimar years they appeared on the same bills, upping the spectacle of their respective acts with increased degrees of flamboyance and danger, the rhythm of Dieck’s act speeded up with motorized routines.

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Figure 5.4.  Advertisement for Chester Dieck, Das Programm, March 5, 1922 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

The relative stability of 1924 to 1929 did not extend to the world of popular entertainment. In 1926, Das Programm warned its artistes: “It is simply awful, the way things have changed for the worse since the currency has been stabilised and the gates were opened for foreign acts about two and a half years ago.

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There is no gainsaying, vaudeville is in a bad way in Germany at present.”53 The IAL tried to juggle available employment, encouraging members not to work more than one gig a night. Meanwhile, the competition for Indianer spots in circuses stiffened with the return of North American Indigenous performers. These conditions may have spurred Dieck and Høyer to look beyond Europe; in 1926, they broke into English-speaking entertainment with a three-year engagement with Wirth’s Circus in Australia (twenty-three years after Will Rogers played the same venue). Appearing “With Absolutely the finest Array of Circus and Vaudeville Artists,” they ramped up spectacle some more.54 While Dieck completed “Impossible Rides on all Sorts of Motor Cycles and Bicycles,” including “career[ing] headlong on single wheel through hoops of flame” and over moving vehicles, Høyer added to her repertoire a “thrilling Dance of a Thousand Feathers Among a Den of Ferocious Lions” that ended with her and one lion suspended together high in the air while fireworks exploded around them.55 In Australia, Dieck’s Indianness did not need to be hooked to Americanness. His billing was simply “Chester Dieck, Marvellous Indian, in Terrific Motor Cycle Rides and Bicycle Stunts. Extraordinary.”56 This was a memorable time for the couple; when they returned to Copenhagen in 1929, they named their house “Villa Australia.” After a few years working across Scandinavia and Germany, they left continental Europe again, with another economic crisis erupting and anti-Semitic violence gathering on the entertainment scene.57 Although neither Dieck nor his wife seems to have been Jewish, the sense of an endangered German entertainment community was strong. Their escape route was a tour of Britain with Lord John Sanger’s Circus Revue, which not only gave them both headline acts but put Dieck at the high point of his trajectory toward Indian modernity. When the show hit Gloucester, England, a journalist (“Jug”) stretching for a witticism heralded it as “Circorevudeville”—“the greatest, newest, and most varied style of entertainment ever conceived,” a form too mixed and modern to fit existing labels. The coinage never caught on, but it nicely encapsulates how vaudeville continued to be promoted as a maker of modernity, even in its waning days, now merged with circus and revue. After a series of spectacular acts—lions, horses, clowns and elephants, a sea lion, Høyer with “The Chang Tee See troupe of Chinese wonder workers,” and a trapeze artist made up as Charlie Chaplin—the show reached its finale. “Jug” described it: “An Indian scena [sic], a gorgeously dressed ceremonial opening: ‘Young Eagle’ and his dancing horse, Sundawn; a wonderful display of perfect horsemanship. Indian

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dances; everything holding you thrilled; Chester Dieck, the Indian wonder on wheels, a fitting climax; the greatest show I’ve ever seen.”58 In achieving top billing, Dieck also scaled the evolutionary ladder atop which sat Indian modernity. The British press figured the sequence as an evolution from the traditional partnership of Indian rider and horse to the modern combination of “a Red Indian with bicycles and ‘properties’ worth nearly a thousand pounds”; “Chester Dieck can ride anything on two wheels—or one! He takes his machines to pieces as he rides, leaving himself riding on one wheel only. To reveal the details of his great ‘riding through fire’ act would be to give the show away.”59 As with Princess Wahletka’s British tour a decade earlier, there is no press debate about Dieck’s identity; his costume and virtuosity are sufficient to the label “Red Indian,” the identification as “American” sloughed off never to return, as if he had publicly arrived at some entertaining essence of Indianness. This was perfect preparation for his return to the Third Reich as a white Indian.

national socialism From 1933, under National Socialism, Indian figures were instrumentalized by official voices for new purposes—as Aryanized versions proving Germanic purity and might. The Nazi propaganda depended on long-standing myths of German-Indian affinity, now intensified around notions of biological purity and militarism. There were obvious contradictions in celebrating non-white peoples as the essence of German Aryanism, and the Nazi regime issued contradictory statements, but they were also peculiarly literal in their Indianthusiasm: “In 1938, for example, the government in Berlin granted citizenship and Aryan status to the grandson of a Sioux woman and a German immigrant to the United States. Soon afterward, Nazi officials extended the recognition to embrace all Sioux Indians.”60 As had happened around World War I, the regime also shored up anti-Americanism by denouncing U.S. persecution of its Native peoples, in the process deflecting attention from their own onslaught on dissidents and ethnic minorities, positioning themselves as, in Frank Usbeck’s words, “benign colonizers.”61 Karl May’s 1893 novel Winnetou became a central reference point within this Aryanization of the Indian. According to Usbeck, “The Nazi appropriation of Karl May soon evolved into a regular cult,” with the party identifying fascist values—“heroism, a martial bearing, a diminished fear of death, the mythification of war, a willingness to engage in brutal physical violence, and aggressive

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chauvinistic masculinity”—in Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, or Charlie, the German narrator.62 The Indianer fantasy became embodied again in 1938, when Nazi authorities brought about the first of the outdoor Karl-May-Festspiele (Karl May Festivals) at Rathen, near Dresden and not far from the Karl-MayMuseum in Radebeul, whose 1928 opening had been attended by Sarrasani’s Sioux performers.63 The spectacular Karl-May-Festspiele consisted of live enactments of May adventures along with stock Indian scenes, a formula that has long continued and grown across Germany. In its first iteration, the amphitheater’s 2,400 seats were packed with Hitler Youth, the scene was flanked with Nazi flags, and among the performers and audience were members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and Hitler’s elite security force, the Schutzstaffel (SS).64 National Socialism’s impact on Variété is evident in Das Programm. On April 2, 1933, in the wake of the Nazis’ seizure of dictatorial powers, the IAL quashed rumors of anti-Semitism and xenophobia: “Important! Our English and American Readers, all artistes, abroad of every nationality, we beg to be assured that the news, published in some foreign papers, reporting alleged horrors and terror acts to Jews and Foreigners in Germany are absolutely untrue and illintentioned.”65 A week later, a war between National Socialist groups and the IAL was being waged in the journal’s pages. By 1934, both the union and Das Programm were quashed, as Goebbels’s propaganda ministry remade the journal—retitled Die Deutsche Artistenwelt, Die Deutsche Artistik, and Artisten-Welt—in the Nazis’ image. How closely the regime pressed on the entertainment world is manifest in the journal’s visual transformation. Perky advertisements were replaced by text-heavy prose, in Frakturschrift, with sayings by Nazi officialdom (Hitler included) in black-rimmed boxes.66 Photographs showed spaces of entertainment crowded out by fascist authority: high Nazi officials and uniformed spectators filled the Wintergarten, the Scala, Sarrasani’s Zirkus, and other popular venues, all hung with massive swastika’d banners. The journal’s Ausland (overseas) section disappeared, and in 1944 the journal itself disappeared. On greatly diminished Variété playbills, Indianerakts survived at two extremes, both distanced from identification with America. On the one hand, novelty Indians were more frivolous than ever. Les Iwanows, for example, who had previously performed in cowboy costume, changed their act into The Hanel Comp., throwing into the midst of their aerial acrobatics “Eine IndianerSzene, die jeden fesselt” (An Indian scene that captivates everyone) while emphasizing its lack of cultural authenticity: “keine neue Firma, sondern nur

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neue Aufmachung” (not a new company, just a new look).67 On the other hand, Melencia’s Indian Show expanded their emphasis on authentic Indigeneity into sales of their original craftwork and hooked their advertising to the Karl-May-Spiele: Melencia-Indianer-Aristokraten Auf den Spuren Karl May’s zeigen Das lebende Ziel an rotierender leuchtender Scheibe68 (Melencia’s Indian Aristocrats, in the footsteps of Karl May, demonstrate the living target on a rotating, shining disc). References to Winnetou began to proliferate on playbills: Texas-Jack und Winnetou demonstrated wild west skills; Winnetou & Charlie Die weißen Adler (The White Eagles) were acrobats who became increasingly martial during the Third Reich with Indianische Kampfspiele (Indian war games).69 Thus did performers take May’s German Indian into Variété and close the circle on the German creation of American Indians made over in their own image. A lingering question is whether such acts sometimes camouflaged Jewish identities. In the early 1920s, “Jewish Indian” was one of the incongruous novelties on display, such as the horseback-riding Coenens with their “Original Indian Speciality Act.”70 More generally, before 1933, Otte argues, German popular entertainment was essentially Jewish, given the extensive role in its making played by German Jewish producers, performers, and audiences. During the Third Reich, the stakes in Indianthusiasm’s dialectical relationship to anti-Semitism—Lutz argues that each antimodernist movement promoted the other—are evidenced in the Nazi version of Karl May and in their propagandistic literature. Penny cites one 1937 essay for young Germans in which American Indians are threatened by “crooks” and “vultures” from “the Jewish quarter in Eastern Europe.”71 By that logic, Aryanized German Indianerakts would be the least expected place to find Jewish performers; in the face of programmatic persecution, Indianness could become camouflage for survival. The most famous case from German wild west acts of the 1930s was actually a Cowboyakt: Erich Rudolf Otto Rosenthal (1885–1954) hid his Jewish lineage with his stage name Billy Jenkins, der amerikanische Cowboy-König (the

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American Cowboy King).72 In his advertising and shows, Jenkins literally surrounded himself with Indian figures—one of his acts showed him tied to the stake while Indianer throw tomahawks at him—many of whom, he claimed, were Indigenous. He became a favorite of the Nazi regime, performing before them with a giant swastika and birds of prey.73 The uncovering of his case points to the possibility of many other such dangerous secrets layered within German stage Indianer. “Chester Dieck, ‘The Raging Winnetou!’ ” Chester Dieck and Gulnare Höyer returned just before the National Socialist regime took over. They reworked the presentation of their act once more, adjusting to the ruling conditions much more systematically and thoroughly than any Indianerakts around them. Höyer now joined forces with Dieck fulltime. Eighteen years younger than he, she extended the life of the act and enlarged the spectacle by executing acrobatic extensions to Dieck’s virtuoso riding, balancing on his shoulders as he tore round on a motorbike (figure 5.5).74 Her outfit—skimpy bra and fringed skirt with a floor-length full-feather headdress, following the parodic look of 1920s Broadway and Berlin Revue— magnified the sexuality that was increasingly showcased in Variété; despite the image of the “roaring twenties,” more sexual titillation and nudity are evident in Variété during the Third Reich. They elaborated a faux-Indian setting with tipi and totem pole, modernized their typography along with their motorized equipment, and declared themselves “New for America and England.”75 Dieck now inhabited his Indianer image with more depth and narrative, well beyond its original novelty redface function, much closer to what Marta Carlson (Yurok) critiques as “racial reembodiment.”76 In 1937, Dieck’s advertising anticipated the Karl-May-Spiele by a year, labeling his act Eine Karl-MayVision (figure 5.6); once World War II broke out, he adopted a new soubriquet: Chester Dieck, der ‘rasende Winnetou!’ (the raging Winnetou).77 One of the features distinguishing Dieck from other “Winnetou” entertainers was the expansive textuality devoted to the connection. The following lengthy quotations demonstrate the morphing of an entertainment identity under the pressure of a violent regime. This publicity narrative bears out yet again the point made by Rayna Green thirty years ago: “I would insist now, the living performance of ‘playing Indian’ by non-Indian peoples depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians.”78

Figure 5.5.  Advertisement for Chester Dieck & Comp., Das Programm, October 25, 1931 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

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Figure 5.6.  Postcard, Chester Dieck, The Indian Wonder on the Wheel. The image is his “death burst,” used to advertise his “Eine Karl-Mai-Vision” 1937–39 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

In March 1939, appearing at Berlin’s Plaza, Dieck took out a full-page glossy advertisement whose commentary connects his volcano trick (earlier named his “death bursts”) to his place in the Winnetou lineage, claiming to beat out contemporary Indigenous people’s grasp of modern technology. This is what audience members would have read in their program, as Dieck somersaulted on his bicycle before them: Was würde Karl May sagen, wenn er Chester Dieck und seine Leute auf ihren Motorrädern und Fahrrädern sehen würde. Zu Winnetous und Old Shatterhands Zeiten waren die Indianer als die verwegensten Reiter der Welt bekannt, die auf ihren ungesattelten Pferden die unglaublichsten und tollkühnsten Kunststücke zeigten. Aber auch den Söhnen Manitous sind die Pferde etwas unmodern geworden und sie bedienen sich moderner Fortbewegungsmittel. Aber wenn sie heute nicht mehr wilde Mustangs ungebändigt vorführen, wenn sie statt eines kraftvollen Pferdes viele Pferdestärken meistern, ihre Lust zu den verwegensten Kunststücken ist bei den PS geblieben. Chester

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Dieck und Partnerin zeigen, zu welchen ausgezeichneten Fahr- und Balancekünstlern eine Rothaut werden kann. Halsbrecherische Tricks, treppauf und treppab, von der Leiter über einen Tisch mit dem Fahrrad, dann einen regelrechten Salto auf diesem, freihändiges Kunstfahren mit Obermann auf einem Motorrad, Steptanzen auf dem Steuerrohr eines fünfsitzigen Tandems—ein Gipfel artistischer Leistungsmöglichkeit.79 (What would Karl May say if he saw Chester Dieck and his people on their motorbikes and bicycles? In Winnetou and Old Shatterhand’s time, the Indians were known to be the most daring riders in the world, displaying the most incredible and daredevil bareback feats on their horses. But even for the sons of Manitou, horses have become a little unfashionable and they use modern means of transportation. But even if they no longer perform with wild, untamed Mustangs, mastering a lot of horsepower instead of one powerful horse, even with hp they still want to do the most daring tricks. Chester Dieck and his partner show how a redskin can become excellent at driving and balancing acts. Breakneck tricks, upstairs and downstairs, from the ladder across a table on a bike, then a proper somersault with it, no-hands stunt driving by the top man on a motorbike, step dancing on the steering column of a fiveseat tandem—a summit of artistic performance.) By 1940, while performing in Berlin’s Wintergarten, Dieck had developed a backstory that reattached his identity to the United States, but only to demonstrate German superiority: in beating Indians at their own game, he became a true Indian (figure 5.7). The tall tale involved him visiting America and traveling to Indian country (now Oklahoma). “Ich saß mit Sioux, Irokesen und Apachen an den Lagerfeuern zusammen,” erzählte er, “die wollten nicht glauben, daß ich ein— Bleichgesicht sei! Sie bestaunten meine Arbeit auf dem ‘Roß aus Stahl’ und meinten, der leibhaftige Manitou habe mich verzaubert. Wie besessen erstiegen sie mein Rad und flogen damit hin. Immer wieder wollten sie es zwingen, immer wieder schlugen sie auf der Erde auf. Schließlich hielten sie Kriegsrat über dieses bleichgesichtige ‘Menschenwunder’ von jenseits des großen Wassers und wollten

Figure 5.7.  Cover of Winter Garten program, Berlin, July 1940 (Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin-Spandau)

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mich dann zu ihrem—Medizinmann machen mit lebenslänglicher häuptlingspension! Hab’ aber dankend verzichtet,” lacht er.80 (“I sat with Sioux, Iroquois, and Apaches around campfires,” he said; “they did not want to believe that I was a—bleached face! They marveled at my work on the ‘steed of steel’ and said that the true Manitou had enchanted me. As if obsessed they climbed on my bike and flew with it. Again and again they wanted to force it, again and again they hit the ground. Eventually they held a council of war on this pale-faced ‘human miracle’ from the other side of the great water and wanted to make me their—medicine man with a chief’s lifelong pension! But thankfully I declined,” he laughs.) The story says that he did, however, accept from them his stage name, Chester. The next step was predictable: spending such a long time in Indian Territory (“lange Zeit im Indianer-Territorium in Amerika”), “ich kann sagen, ich bin selber beinahe eine echte Rothaut geworden!” (I can say, I almost became a real redskin myself!).81 At the same time, in the Third Reich, it was crucial to emphasize that he was truly Aryan. However Indian his look during his act—“Seine schwarzen straffen Indianerhaare fliegen, sein kupferfarbenes Gesicht glänzt in der Freude der Ueberwindung schier übermenschlicher Schwierigkeiten” (His black taut Indian hair flies, his coppery face shines in the joy of overcoming sheer superhuman difficulties)—a visit to the dressing room revealed the true man. “Wenn man Chester Dieck aber dann in der Garderobe besucht, merkt man, daß er in Wirklichkeit gar kein Indianer ist. Sein schwarzer Skalp hängt an der Wand und die Kupferfarbe ist vom Gesicht gewaschen.” (But if you visit Chester Dieck in the dressing room, you realize that he is in fact not an Indian. His black scalp hangs on the wall and the copper paint has been washed off his face.)82 He is revealed as “ein Weltmann mit lichtem, blondem Haar und hellen blauen Augen” (a man of the world with light, blond hair and bright blue eyes).83 One of the internal contradictions within Nazi appropriations of Indigenous peoples was that they figured as both models of Aryan purity and the inevitable sacrifice for imperialism. One resolution was to idealize Indians of the past while portraying Indians of the present as degenerate remnants. This is the logic into which Dieck finally slid. In the battle for modernity, the Aryanized Indian not only needs to better North American Indians at their own skills; he needs to knock the Indian off the Variété stage. Dieck’s story of dispossession

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starts with him employing an assistant, who had appeared in pre–World War I advertisements in Indian costume: Erst als ich in die Zivilisation zurückkehrte, merkte ich, wie sehr ich zum Indianer geworden war. Ich hatte mir einen wirklichen Indianer als Assistenten mitgenommen, Sid Black hieß er, und da ist es mir doch so und so oft passiert, daß man ihn für den falschen Indianer hielt und mich für den echten! Dieser Sid war ein recht anstelliger Bursche, aber er hatte eine Angewohnheit, die es mir unmöglich machte, ihn auf die Dauer mitzunehmen: er trank den Spiritus, der fürs Räderputzen verwendet werden sollte. Meine Räder behandelte er mit Wasser, was sie sehr übel nahmen und verrosteten . . .84 (It was only when I returned to civilization that I realized how much I had become an Indian. I had taken a real Indian as an assistant, called Sid Black, and it often happened that he was considered the fake Indian and me the real one! This Sid was a skillful enough guy, but he had a habit that made it impossible for me to keep him on in the long run: he drank the alcohol that was to be used for cleaning the wheels. He treated my wheels with water, which they took very badly and rusted . . .) By the logic of Dieck’s one-upmanship, he seizes modernity by taking its technologies away from Indians (and, in the naming of his assistant, a hint of Jewish identity too). Indigenous performers’ virtuosity on the quintessentially modern stage had to be belittled and diminished by Dieck’s superior deployment of their skills. This dynamic became fully evident when, in 1938, Sarrasani hired Dieck into his circus. Sarrasani’s boast was that he only employed real Indians: “Indians can ultimately be made with rouge and dyed feathers. . . . But we, we didn’t want that. We wanted to have them for real and in person.”85 However, as war loomed again, he lost his complement of Indigenous performers; “rouge and dyed feathers” was exactly what he resorted to. Positioning Dieck & Co. halfway through the bill, the program presents him not as a substitute or mimic Indian, but as a better, modern, more technologically adept Aryan Indian: “Chester Diecks Kraftradakt im Indianerstil muß man gesehen haben, wenn man sich das richtige Bild von soviel Verwegenheit und artistischem Können machen will.” (You must see Chester Dieck’s motorcycle act in the Indian style if you want to get a true picture of how much audacity and artistic ability it takes).86

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post–world war ii By the end of World War II, with the destruction of many German cities and the country’s division, Variété as such was dead, but the representation and imitation of Indianness continued. Through the decades of the Cold War and beyond, West Germany and East Germany instrumentalized Indian figures— in hobbyism, live performance, and films—to different ends, demonstrating yet again the malleability of the image. Winnetou remained a prominent figure in this mythological mix, reemerging in films played by Pierre Brice in the West and Gojko Mitic in the East, demonstrating one more time the enduring desire for Indianer primitivism. During World War II, the Diecks lost all their equipment, scenery, and costumes.87 Retreating to Denmark, they revived their act once more, buying new equipment, making new costumes, engaging three young women acrobats, and getting themselves—Chester Dieck and Gulnare Höyer, ages 74 and 56—fit for performance. While they secured some engagements in Sweden, they found it slim pickings in Scandinavia and yearned to return to Germany, especially to Berlin. Again the Jewish note surfaces, Dieck complaining in 1949 to agent Robert Wilschke, about solche Juden-bande (such a gang of Jews) running the entertainment industry in Scandinavia.88 The last image I have of Dieck occurs in 1957, at age 77. In their newest act, “Chester Dieck Girls,” his body disappears behind three scantily clad young women balancing around him on a bicycle. He had come full circle, flaunting once more the incongruity and frivolity of the novelty Indian, making fun of his own equation between bicycle and horse, as another young woman rides a unicycle fashioned into a carnival horse, lasso in hand.89 Through the long arc of his career, Dieck was as virtuoso in his selfpresentation as in his trick cycling, recognizing that durability lay in appropriating and playing on Indigenous performers’ skills with the tools of modern entertainment. In this context, “Indigenous modernity”—as a term recognizing Indigenous ingenuity within Eurocentric cultural categories—seems an accurate characterization of what Dieck identified, desired, and competed against. “i sat with sioux, iroquois, and apaches around campfires” Reconstructing how Indigenous performers in Europe might have looked to Chester Dieck requires a return to the backstory he developed when he moved into full Winnetou mode. He often reminisced about sitting around a campfire

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in Indian Territory with Sioux, Iroquois, and Apache who marveled at his “steed of steel” but could not match his virtuosity with it. As with May’s before him, Dieck’s wild west experience was a fantasy tailored to the times, apparently ungrounded in firsthand acquaintance with North America. Tracing his entertainment contexts and routes, however, provides an additional reading of that campfire story, as a palimpsest of his actual encounters with Indigenous performers on the European entertainment scene, two of whom particularly clarify the power and threat of Indigenous modernities from the perspective of those who traded in Indian primitivism. Chester Dieck’s knowledge of “Apache” probably derived from May’s fiction, but he would have experienced in-person encounters with Sioux and Iroquois performers, as a spectator and fellow entertainer. He was ten years old when Lakota performers toured Germany with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, heavily influencing children and their “Indian games,” according to German newspapers.90 When the Wild West returned in 1906 and then Sioux and Iroquois entertainers arrived to work in Sarrasani’s and Krone circuses, Dieck was an established entertainer. He was briefly back in his hometown, Essen, in 1914, when the famous Lakota performer Two-Two died there, an event, along with the revelation of his Catholic faith, much publicized by local newspapers; it was also there that a group of Onondaga performers found themselves stranded.91 What Dieck came to know was that Indians were far from vanishing. Not only were they demonstrably proficient in what were heralded as the most modern of entertainment venues, but they also had been involved in bicycle demonstrations for decades—Indigenous horse-riders and foot-runners competing against cyclists and Indigenous cyclists displaying their own skills. If Dieck mingled with Indigenous performers as fellow employees of Sarrasani in 1926 and Krone in 1932 to 1933—he may even have sat around or had friendly bicycle competitions with them—he would have seen close up masters of modern entertainment. In 1938, just after Dieck had completed his act as Winnetou on a motorcycle for Sarrasani in Dresden, down the road in Rathen Chief Os-Ko-Mon starred in the first Karl-May-Festspiele as the fierce “Medicine Man.”92 Charlie Oskomon was in many ways the quintessential vaudeville Indian, a performer of great cultural range who had worked with Indigenous and wannabee artists and whose own identity was slippery. Born around 1895 in the United States, Oskomon went on the stage in his late teens, identifying first as Micmac and then as a Yakima singer and dancer.93 He performed with Anna Cole—Harry

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Cole’s widow and Princess Chinquilla’s daughter-in-law—in Boston in 1915, and on stage in Australia in 1916 he claimed Chinquilla as his aunt.94 He was one of Princess White Deer’s “Indian Braves” in her number for Keith’s vaudeville in the 1920s, while in the same years he developed a solo act of modernist choreography and worked as a model for New York avant-garde artists.95 The agent Robert Wilschke, who latterly arranged bookings for Chester Dieck, brought Oskomon to Berlin in 1929 to perform in the Wintergarten and later the Scala.96 He also booked a gig in Paris, where Oskomon became the darling of the “Peau-Rouge” set and stayed throughout the 1930s.97 Among other cultural activities, he performed Indigenous song and dance with Penobscot performer Molly Spotted Elk in Parisian salons and ethnological circles.98 She doubted his Yakima self-identification, believing him to be at least partly of African American parentage; she also seems to have thought that he was gay.99 Through his reputation in Paris and a chance meeting in Berlin, Oskomon was offered a role at the Karl-May-Spiele.100 Adaptable as ever, he accepted. His function at the event was to embody authentic Indigeneity, through spectacular movement, song, and dance, for twenty-four hundred Hitler Youth and Nazi officials, including what Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen names die hohe Parteielite (the high party elite).101 According to newspaper coverage, his success was considerable as he came and went in the arena, his fearsome, masked medicine man appearances offset by reenactments of Winnetou scenes and parodic turns by Indian hobbyists, including members of the SA and SS.102 Off stage, too, Oskomon played his part. He lectured to Hitler Youth about Indigenous ways, including an explanation “that the shape of an Indian peace pipe resembled one-fourth of a swastika,” and he offered up encomiums of Hitler and the Nazi party to the German press.103 With the hindsight of history, I find this one of the most frightening scenes of vaudeville Indian performance. If Molly Spotted Elk was right, Oskomon embodied some of the racialized and sexual characteristics most attacked by the Nazi regime while, right in their faces, he was tricking a mass audience into accepting him as the personification of full-blooded Indigenous purity—the unadulterated, authentic primitivism so valued by Indianthusiasm and connected by National Socialism with Germans’ own full-blooded Aryan purity. One performance photograph shows Oskomon in loin cloth and elaborate headgear kneeling in front of a cliff face while more than a dozen redface performers, including members of the Nazi party, fully clothed with headbands and long hair, stare fixedly at his near-naked body (figure 5.1 above). The

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aggression is part of the play-acting but it feels frighteningly close to the real scrutiny and demands perpetually made on Indigenous bodies on show. It was a spectacular manifestation of the risks and dangers borne by Indigenous artists through the rigid expectations of those in power. In May 1939, Oskomon agreed to do it all over again. This was the Indian that Chester Dieck chose not to play—the one whose power rested on his primitivism. Dieck flirted with the “Medicine Man” position in the backstory he circulated in 1940, just after Oskomon’s performances, which he may have seen. In Dieck’s version, he declines the position, a ruse by which he claimed Indigenous spiritual authority without committing to a primitivist identity. The stakes in Dieck’s and Oskomon’s choices were, of course, very different. Dieck faced considerable physical risk in his trick riding act but his redface display was a strength, playing into the biological essentialism of Nazi Germany. Oskomon’s work in Nazi Germany was a step backward, as he acted out the primitivistic violence that his career had previously destabilized, while risking his own physical existence. The image of Oskomon being pushed to the margins of modernity was reinforced when, back in the United States, he ended up as a hotel doorman in the same years that Dieck continued to sustain an entertainment career.104 Both the logic of commercial competition and the tenets of National Socialism encouraged Dieck to claim Indigenous modernity as his own. Earlier in his career, Dieck had already repeatedly brushed against another performer who epitomized the power of Indigenous modernity, this time in female form: Esther Deer/Princess White Deer, Mohawk of Caughnawaga and St. Regis. Dieck may have known the Deer family from their mutual relationship with Circus Schumann, and between 1911 and 1914 he and Esther Deer shadowed each other on the Variété circuit across Russia, what is now Ukraine, and Poland, sometimes appearing at the same time and city in different houses, at other times appearing in the same house sequentially.105 Like Dieck, Esther Deer used the services of Das Programm to route her correspondence and to circulate her act, her ever-changing addresses, and her availability for hire. Presumably she also followed its advice about lodgings and meeting places across central Europe, scrutinized other artistes’ advertising, and noted warnings about the countries in which she was performing. It is likely that, when Deer and Dieck appeared in St. Petersburg in November 1911, both patronized the Jardin d’Hiver, where Princess White Deer was performing and which was recommended by Das Programm as the meeting place and exchange point for the itinerant community of Variété artistes.106

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These were Dieck’s early years, when his redface outfit was minimal—a wig and a feather. His perspective on Indigenous womanhood would have been heavily influenced by May’s handling of Winnetou’s sister, a maiden rapidly killed off to boost the novel’s homosociality, and by his fellow pre–World War I novelty performers—Pocahuntas, The 3 Arizonas, and the other Red Wing among them. Dieck may have glimpsed the very few Indigenous women with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Europe.107 If he saw Princess White Deer on stage or encountered her in person, he would have been up close to an Indigenous woman performer whose dignity and ingenuity far exceeded his expectations. Esther Deer and her family’s dancing, oratory, singing, riding, and dramatic sketches embraced Indigenous kinship, cultural layering, spectacle, and comedy in a complex mix quite distinct from novelty routines or Indianthusiast fixations on primitivism and vanishment. Indeed, the Deers seemed to understand those expectations and at times comedically upend them, as in their cakewalk routine in Dresden, while sustaining deft management and advertising strategies. Esther Deer, not yet twenty years old, navigated transnational mass culture while maintaining lineages and relations, sometimes encoded in her attire. In other words, she could do everything that the weiße Indianer around her did and so much more, working Variété, as she did vaudeville, for Indigenous ends. Whatever Dieck made of all this, when he subsequently grew the redface dimension of his act, his publicity worked to erase evidence of Indigenous contemporaneity and cultural range, such as the Deers displayed, harping repeatedly on Indigenous people’s inability to master the tools of modernity. Yet for Dieck’s distinctive tag to be his Indian modernity, he had to outdo Indigenous wild west performers who, all around him, were manifesting their talents as modern show people. His backstory sets them up as the competition to beat; his means was the bicycle and motorcycle and his aim—as so often in settler invader stories—was displacement. He rested his case on technological modernity, but in a climactic narrative flourish in 1941 he inadvertently revealed the hollowness of his premise. He claimed that the high point of his (imagined) U.S. tour came when he rode off the Empire State Building—ganz New York hat mir zugejubelt (all of New York cheered me).108 Presumably Dieck chose this site—only a decade old, the 102-story building was the tallest in the world—as the epitome of modern wonder, another peak that he had scaled. But he had unknowingly chosen one of the buildings whose structure depended on Mohawk skill, the ironworkers who hailed, like Esther Deer, from

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Caughnawaga. In trying to one-up an Indigenous making of western modernity, Dieck’s stories revealed once again how Indigenous work created, uncredited, the ground for German Indian spectacle and how the making of a Variété career can expose the voracious desire of European performer and audience to enter the space of Indigenous modernity.

conclusion In Chester Dieck’s act, Euro-modernity met Indigeneity on the German Variété stage. For all the tricks, puns, and sensations, the German context made clear that the stakes in popular entertainment were not trivial. Dieck survived the early, giddy years when Indianthusiasm, an international entertainment community, and German modernity were all in the air, through the chaos of World War I to the final dead hand of Nazi authoritarianism and beyond. He vaudevillized real, highly consequential political and ideological strains; his movement from redface to Aryan Indianer was shaped by and built on a climate directly connected to genocide. Generations of Indigenous artists have reckoned and reframed the destructive power of the Winnetou phenomenon. Spiderwoman Theater’s Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City (1988), for example, riotously exposed the costs of fake Indians all along the spectrum from circus acts to pretend shamans. Kent Monkman’s “Dance to Miss Chief” (2010) put Winnetou into new relationship, replacing the German, buckskin-clad Shatterhand with the seductively chiffoned Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. In 2008, Bear Witness, the Cayuga co-founder of A Tribe Called Red, grandson of Gloria Miguel and son of Monique Mojica, brought new media technologies to the narrative. His video The Story of Apanatschi and Her Redheaded Wrestler splices samples from the 1966 West German film Winnetou und Das Halbblut Apanatschi and the 2006 arcade video game Virtual Fighter 5.109 As the sound track combining global Indigenous and activist rhythms unfolds, May’s Winnetou (played by the slim, elegant Pierre Brice) is replaced as the romantic hero with the video-game figure Wolf Hawkfield, the massively muscle-bound Redheaded Wrestler, whom Bear Witness has dressed in mukluks, a full-feather headdress, aviator glasses, and a dreamcatcher round his neck. This is a different story, medium, and moment from the entertainment world of Chester Dieck, but it nicely punctuates the point that Indigenous creative innovations, technological and otherwise, always trumped German Indianthusiasm.

Conclusion

on Indigenous time looks like from where I stand. The acts and stories traced in this book bring into view networks of Indigenous performers that enrich, enlarge, and challenge the still-dominant history of popular culture and western modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Such performers demonstrate the debt to Indigeneity of entertainment industries, from vaudeville to revue to motion pictures, considered central to the making of western modernity. Acknowledgment of that debt disturbs the very definition of modernity, which depends on a binary division from the primitivism assumed to be embodied in Indigenous peoples. Some of the most distinctive products of the U.S. culture industries—dime novels and western films—look not only reactive to but daunted by the ingenuity of live Indigenous performance. Bit by vaudeville bit, the accumulation of this network reframes vaudeville from the epitome of modernity’s forms and rhythms to a moment in the multi-temporal, ongoing practices of Indigenous cultural absorption, adaptation, visual sovereignty, and survivance. Thus, the vaudeville stage affords a glimpse of much larger Indigenous communities extending across generations, Nations, and global geographies. To contribute to the recovery of Indigenous performance histories is also to encounter Indianness, the appropriation, extraction, and reduction of Indigenous cultures into stereotypes and fake identities with which Indigenous performers constantly contended. There is a long-established understanding of THIS, THEN, IS WHAT VAUDEVILLE

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how centrally playing Indian fed North American national and individual imaginaries, as it did European and especially German myths of identity. Following lived instances of this process onto the vaudeville stage illuminates the uses of incongruity—a central plank in the staging of novelty—at the heart of Indianness. Impossible combinations structured Indian masquerades, entertainment techniques, and governmental regimes, each bleeding into the other. However incongruous the Indian act, however outlandish the fake Indian identity, such performers apparently remained drawn to, dependent on, and sometimes threatened by evidence of Indigenous modernities—superior Indigenous skills with technologies of contemporary performance and politics—that the logic of masquerade and redface denied. Indian vaudeville was built from the entanglement of Indigeneity and Indianness, and a pattern recurs through this history whereby the energetic ingenuity of the first repeatedly saves vaudeville from the tired stereotypes of the second. The staging of acts, given the degree of creative control exerted by individual entertainers and troupes, could clarify the difference. When the Indigenous performer appeared next to the redface imitator, the distinction was not only obvious; it could become a matter of comic commentary. When an Indigenous troupe made space for masquerade, their choreography could emphasize their power in welcoming a guest to their show. Items that an audience might perceive as primitive—show blankets, regalia—repositioned within networks of Indigenous performance can look, even to an outsider, as something quite other: material texts of continuance bonding generations and Nations. Having followed vaudeville Indians into the complexity and diversity of individual journeys, acts, and relations, I want also to acknowledge the power of their coming together in three configurations. The first concerns the extensive geography of vaudeville circuits, tracing how Indigenous and Indigenousidentifying connections and crossings made it into “Indian Country.” Then I note how this mobility was also grounded in vaudeville Indian gatherings by turning to two sites: cinematic space and public urban space. I discuss them as what Renya K. Ramirez (Winnebago/Ojibwe) calls “Native hubs,” a concept that she acknowledges learning from Laverne Roberts (Paiute), founder of the American Indian Alliance.1 The term visualizes Indigenous urban dwellers as the center (the hub) of social networks (the spokes of a wheel) radiating out to their diverse Native homelands, territories, reservations, and villages. While “hub-making activities . . . bridge tribal differences so that Native Americans

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can unify to struggle for social change,” hub and homeland also reinforce each other through the physical and communicative travel between them: “For Roberts, a traveler is a carrier of knowledge who catalyzes change by weaving networks of relationships across great distances.”2 Ramirez’s analysis concerns twenty-first-century Indigenous peoples in urban California and their hemispheric networks—a very different focus from this study. The dynamic she lays out, however, illuminates the potential for such a pattern to be at work in the global travels and gatherings of vaudeville Indians.

vaudeville indian country To follow Indigenous performers on vaudeville routes is to encounter Indian Country in the most literal sense. See, for example, the Ohio River Valley, the great swath of states that vaudevillians in the hundreds crossed and recrossed, that entertainment combines fought over and carved up and rejoined according to profit—from the small-time Park Circuit across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to the Keith-Albee juggernaut joining up big- and smalltime houses across twenty-one states (plus the District of Columbia and parts of Canada) from the East Coast to the Mississippi River.3 Chief Powless of the Onondaga Nation has documented that all that land, and more, was never surrendered by the Haudenosaunee. He demonstrates that the treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Great Britain in 1768, whereby Fort Stanwix, now in Rome, New York, was negotiated as the western boundary of the colony called the Province of New York, is still in force, given that subsequent negotiations between the U.S. federal government and the state of New York were illegal—“if you don’t believe me, you can go back, you can check. Because the documents are there.” From Rome to the Mississippi River, “as per the 1772 map. It is still Indian Country.”4 Haudenosaunee performers on entertainment routes—from Uncle Beaver to Go-won-go Mohawk to the Deer family to Frank Kenjockety and many more—were traveling their people’s homelands. That situation is replicated across Turtle Island: treaties broken, territories unceded, stolen lands mean that itinerant Indigenous performers were repeatedly traveling their own and each other’s ancestral lands. These are circuits of a different order, emphasizing roots in and routes through “Native space,” as named by Lisa Brooks, by members of different Native Nations and tribes traveling commercial entertainment structures that they were adopting, adapting, and going beyond. Indian Country is also a way of naming the lineages and connections sustained by these performers. Sometimes the geography of intergenerational

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connections was localized: the line from Chief Big Thunder/Frank Loring to Princess Watahwaso/Lucy Nicolar Poolaw to Molly Spotted Elk/Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud traces three generations of the Penobscot Nation, performers who traveled out on entertainment circuits and always returned home to Indian Island, in what is now the state of Maine. Sometimes the connections bridged vast distances—as when the Deer family followed in Will Rogers’s steps in South Africa; when Esther Deer gestured “Aboriginally Yours” across the ocean and the generations from Budapest, naming her grandfather Chief Running Deer in St. Regis and echoing Go-won-go Mohawk’s earlier transatlantic reach; and when Joe Shunatona and Molly Spotted Elk on an ocean liner to Europe danced the Red Atlantic. And Indian Country acknowledges what Daniel Heath Justice calls “the geographic connectedness” carried by these globe-trotting vaudevillians; in the words of Ramirez: “Native Americans bring their own senses of culture, community, identity, belonging, and rootedness with them as they travel.”5 In their dances, songs, stories, protocols, memories, and relations, they sustained connection and community—not all visible to non-Indigenous audiences. The connection most visible to this non-Indigenous looker lies in material details: Will Rogers’s rope, Esther Deer’s blanket, Bruce Poolaw’s vest traveling across sites and wearers imbued with performance control, generational relationships, and trans-Indigenous community-making. These geographical routes and the connections created between one vaudeville site and another also functioned as the lines along which Indian ghosts traveled, as Indigenous-identifying performers sought ties to community. They too sustained local and global relations, inserting themselves into complex configurations of Indigeneity and Indianness. Princess Chinquilla, on her South Seas tour, sent ambiguous signals to Native Hawaiians and Maori women. Chief Hailstorm, having literally circled the globe, developed his most lasting performance persona in Germany with his German wife. Charlie Oskomon danced with Chinquilla’s daughter-in-law, Anna Cole, in Boston and hailed Chinquilla herself, as his aunt, from Australia. Complex and slippery as these webs of connection become, they were also crossed by on-stage masqueraders and mimickers of Indianness, reminders of how crowded sites of performed Indianness could be, how many stereotypes, obstacles, competitors, and followers Indigenous vaudevillians had to navigate in their travels. In Will Rogers’s decade-long journey through vaudeville, he was constantly shadowed by non-Indigenous performers playing Indian, who

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variously became the butt of his jokes, his stage props, and his friends. Go-won-go Mohawk and the Deer family made space on British variety stages that Princess Wahletka occupied years later. When redface performers found themselves adjacent to Indigenous acts, in North America and Europe, they look like they are doing catch-up. On the Ziegfeld revue stage, Fanny Brice put her own Yiddish spin on a flapper Indian act that had been modeled by Princess White Deer several years earlier. Similarly, when Chester Dieck and a throng of novelty and white Indians were juxtaposed with Lakota and Iroquois performers in Europe, the redface performers looked less modern, in their own terms, by far. Another geographical effect of following vaudeville Indians is that it reorients the compass of continental European variety. In this study, with the focus on Indianness, Germany becomes central. France, often understood as the hotspot of vaudeville overseas, is more liminal. There are a few reports of Indigenous performance in Parisian variety theaters and music halls early in the twentieth century, but the performers at the center of this study did not go that route. Molly Spotted Elk and Charlie Oskomon, who spent some years in Paris, made their way toward different audiences and communities there, connecting with ethnographers, Indianists, and scholars. Parisian variety theaters and music halls (including “Nude Music Hall”) had the reputation of being more risqué by far than those in North America, Britain, or even Germany.6 The most visible Indians on these stages were redface performers, such as the outrageous Edgar Laplante with his career of high-stakes conmanship, told by Paul Willetts. Born to Québécois blue-collar workers who had moved to Rhode Island, he did quite well on the Parisian circuit as Chief White Elk (“Cherokee of Oklahoma”).7 Following Indigenous entertainment routes also reorients the map of vaudeville more broadly. There are two dominant ways of characterizing vaudeville. One revolves around the monopolists and syndicates that carved out their territories and called the shots on employment conditions. They were “among the first show business entrepreneurs,” in Robert C. Allen’s words, “to apply the principles of industrial standardization and mass production to popular entertainment,” to the point that performers were diminished into “components in a system, whose value was determined by the efficacy with which they fulfilled their purpose on the bill.”8 From this perspective, vaudeville was part of what Alan Trachtenberg named “the incorporation of America,” its circuits capillaries carrying newly concentrated capital across the globe. The other version revolves around audiences, arguing that the spread of cheap,

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family-oriented entertainment created a new intimacy with the common people: commentators from Marinetti in Italy to Meyerhold in Russia to Artaud in France to Studs Terkel in the United States celebrated variety’s participatory dynamic created by performers’ direct address and audience members’ responses. Terkel remembers his experience as a youth in the auditorium of the Chicago Palace: “There was nothing separating that performer on stage from me. . . . He was singing to me. He was making cracks to me. He was jumping and tap-dancing to me. . . . And so it was highly personal.”9 From this perspective, especially in North America, vaudeville venues became nodes in a network creating cohesive communities and enabling inclusive democracy. Centering Indigenous performers, who were also embedded in both these dynamics, delivers a different image, a scene of survivance in which power relations revolve around attempted reduction and manifest resurgence—the trading on caricatures of vanishing Indians side by side with the performance of vibrant and burgeoning Indigenous acts—all set within a larger mesh of Indigenous relations. This remapping also has a temporal dimension. Commentators on all sides seemed easily to identify modern and modernist time at work in vaudeville’s fragmentation, speed, and concentrated energy, from the Futurists celebrating it being “fed by swift actuality” to the guardians of child welfare despairing that “Like the succession of city occurrences, vaudeville is stimulating but disintegrating. . . . Both represent hyper-stimulus and lead to neurasthenia.”10 What seems to have been less broadly noticed—and again comes into view when the focus is on vaudeville Indians—is the multiplicity of Indigenous time at work. It is detectable in the intergenerational presences on stage and the interrelations and interconnections carried in the details of their dress; the oratorical invocation of the ancestors; the unexpected Indigenous histories of what are often considered milestones of western modernity such as jazz, ethnology, and copyright; and the ongoing generations of performers reaching back before Uncle Beaver and onward after Spiderwoman Theater.

cinematic space The space of cinematic exhibition and spectatorship concentrates large geographical and temporal movement into the kinds of gatherings theorized by Ramirez. This book’s 3rd Vaudeville Number traced the intersections between vaudeville and film as rich sites of Indigenous performance when their live acts were juxtaposed with and potentially reframed early motion pictures. In order

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to reckon more fully the scale and resonance of live Indigenous presence in cinematic space, I return to the topic here. Hundreds of live Indian acts appeared alongside movies, from moving pictures’ first public projection in vaudeville houses in the 1890s to at least the 1940s, when presentation houses continued to intersperse movie features with live performance. When live Indian acts were juxtaposed with westerns, as they frequently were, their energy, virtuosity, variety, and burgeoning numbers contradicted the vanishing Indian tropes so common in this genre and the U.S. national narrative it supported. Some live Indigenous performances explicitly commented on film offerings. In 1909, for example, the program offered by Capt. H. A. Brunswick’s Great Wild West Indian Vaudeville—which is to say, Lakota activist and author Luther Standing Bear, as Charging Hawk, and his fellow Indigenous performers—included “A complete lecture on the Western pictures (which change each night).”11 Through the 1910s and into the 1920s, live Indian Prologues routinely accompanied westerns. Some worked in a very different register from the film, jazzing it up on stage while filmic representation continued to insist on primitive war-like identities for Indian figures. Some Indigenous performers positioned themselves as both presenters and creators of this new medium: they purchased films in which they had appeared and framed their exhibition with their own live performance.12 In various ways, they brought into the vaudeville-film house the vibrancy, artistic multidimensionality, and intergenerational and cross-gender relationships that their screen representation denied. Live Indian acts also appeared in juxtaposition with many other film genres, pointing to the broad entanglements of cinematic modernity-making with live Indigenous stage presence. In 1922, for example, Buster Keaton—one of the comic geniuses of the new medium—co-wrote and starred in The Paleface, his slapstick take on Indigenous land dispossession by an oil company. Keaton himself was not many years out of vaudeville, and the comedic timing, visual gags, and knock-about precision of his Indian play extended his stage techniques to the screen. In Arkansas City, Kansas, his short movie played on the same bill as Princess Red Wing/Lilian St. Cyr, as accomplished a screen actor as Keaton, in a very different style: the publicity announced that the “Winnebago Indian Movie Actress will appear in person, giving a talk on movies; also give songs in Indian and English,” along with her “Omaha Indian boy” partner, Norman Tyndall (her young relative, as Linda Waggoner reports).13 Audiences were here offered multiple versions of the vaudeville Indian and

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multiple ways to read St. Cyr’s embodied knowledge and the generative culture on which the redface mugging and Indian jokes of Keaton’s ensemble depended. In 1935, a vaudeville act that already seemed layered—Joe Shunatona’s all-Indigenous U.S. Indian Band appearing on stage with the wannabee Princess Wahletka—became yet more resonant of cultural crossovers when it accompanied The 39 Steps, a new release by the British director Alfred Hitchcock, in the Runnemede Theatre in Camden, New Jersey. After Princess Wahletka, “World Renown [sic] Seeress” did her on-stage mind-reading act, Hitchcock’s film opening echoed it in a mind-reading act by Mr. Memory on the stage of a London music hall. “Ask him your questions!” the emcee announces on screen, repeating the invitation that Wahletka’s assistant gave her live audience, on that night and a decade earlier in another London music hall.14 How audiences received and remembered these juxtapositions—who was understood to precede whom, who survived whom, and who was the generative presence—are not trivial questions in a time when dominating discourses insisted that Indigenous peoples could not keep up with modernity. The archive of this moment in entertainment history is so fragmented and incomplete—part of the process of rendering Indigenous presence invisible— that some thought-provoking possibilities deserve consideration despite their speculative nature. I’ll return to a moment in chapter 3 where I discussed the adaptation of Scott Marble’s stageplay The Great Train Robbery to the film of the same title, directed by Edwin Porter in 1903, and how that process suppressed the contribution of Indigenous actors, notably the Deer family of St. Regis and Caughnawaga, to the stage and screen versions. Registering Indigenous presence in this iconic work involved, for me, the central methodology of this book: tracking archival press clippings made it possible to document the Deers’ roles in the stageplay; tracing family memory (as told by Esther Deer’s niece, Sylvia Karonhiahawi Goodleaf Trudeau, to Patricia Galperin) made visible their par­­ ticipation in the film; and it is in the connecting up of pieces that the larger presence and importance of a network emerges.15 I parsed this account as an instance of filmic dispossession that the Deers transcended through their persistence and prominence as international performers. There is another thread connecting The Great Train Robbery to persistent Indigenous community. When Porter’s film appeared on vaudeville playbills, it was intermittently juxtaposed with live Indigenous and Indian spectacle; the instance that jumped out at me involved Princess Chinquilla. In May 1905, en route to her South Seas tour, Chinquilla made “her Pacific Coast bow”

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on the same bill as The Great Train Robbery, reviving in her dancing, singing, and oratory the visible Indian presence that the film suppressed.16 It is also possible (though not yet proven) that the Deer family themselves appeared on playbills next to the film, touring British variety houses and music halls in the same years that The Great Train Robbery appeared in these venues. One innovation for which The Great Train Robbery is famous is its wielding of the direct look at the camera, as the outlaw points his gun and shoots directly at the audience at the film’s beginning or ending (depending on which order the exhibitor chose for the reels). Direct audience address, I have argued, was one of the significant features of Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying presence on the vaudeville stage, carrying with it a reciprocal relationship between performer and audience—in its largest terms a recognition of common humanity that many entertainment forms and government policies denied. Again a question. While the new technology of looking modeled in this film can be understood to suppress and obscure Indigenous access to the audience, to what degree—and how literally, if the Deers were involved—might the live Indian acts presented in the same evening’s entertainment play out the resurgence of Indigenous looks? Returning to the Deer family also enlarges the possibilities of cinematic space as a site of Indigenous gathering. In 1921, after James Deer’s retirement from the vaudeville stage, he opened “a picture house” on the St. Regis Reservation—“Redskins are his patrons,” the press reported.17 I have been unable to document what films and live entertainment his house offered, but the potential for multiple forms of what Joanna Hearne calls “Native recognition” is powerful.18 Given how many of the local Indigenous population had themselves appeared in films—Johnny Beauvais says, “When the movie industry was based in New York, Kahnawake Indians were much in demand to portray Indians of all types”; given how many would know Indigenous film actors from their common time on the 101 Ranch and similar outfits across and beyond North America; and given how many performed live alongside films, the auditorium could have been dense with relationships, genealogies, stories, and understandings.19 St. Regis can be understood here as a spoke on Ramirez’s wheel: tribal differences brought together at the site of the films’ production, traveling to the reservation through technological representation, and participating in embodied relations in the gathering site of James Deer’s picture house. This hub-making connects, in one direction, to the Native hubs of early Hollywood and, in another, to more recent Indigenous cinematic gatherings, imagined and actual.20 The 2002 film Skins, directed and produced by Chris

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Eyre (Cheyenne and Arapaho), represents Lakotas watching and making their own meanings out of westerns on television; Eyre then conjoined live and screen relations when his “Rolling Rez Tour” brought the film to Native communities, including Pine Ridge, where the film was set and produced. Hearne explains that Eyre constructed his own mobile cinema space: “a semitrailer equipped with a 100 seat theater, air conditioning, and a 35 mm projector”—this, too, was Native space, in which Skins, in content and exhibition, “explores what it means to resituate media images onto Native lands.”21 If James Deer’s picture house was an early contributor to making cinema an Indigenous gathering site, it was not the first. In 1913, the vaudevillian Chief War Cloud, who identified as Sioux, became proprietor of a “moving picture show” in Jamaica, Queens.22 War Cloud had worked with an all-Indian troupe on vaudeville stages for some years, and he seems to have used his moving picture house to give them live stage work alongside his filmic offerings. On one occasion, the gathering was covered by the press as “Jamaica’s Indian Pow-Wow”: the performance included Princess Prairie Flower, who identified as Mohawk and “claims to be 95 years old, but who . . . is as spry as any woman forty years her junior”; Chief White Moon/Louis White Moon, who was Iroquois of St. Regis, “Lecturer and Demonstrator”; and Yellow Bird, “an Oneida brave, from the Green Bar Reservations, Michigan.”23 As noted in chapter 1, Louis White Moon’s correspondence reveals that he had been through hard times; in a direct way, War Cloud’s picture house served as sustenance for the vaudeville Indian community.24 Presumably his moving picture house also drew together some of the same Indigenous community that Princess Chinquilla wanted to attract with her Indian Museum; the two buildings were in the same neighborhood. Both are now buried by structures that oddly replicate while erasing their original owners’ vision. War Cloud’s picture house seems to have been close by the site now occupied by Jamaica Multiplex Cinemas; Chinquilla’s home and museum, the base from which she traveled the world and to which she aspired to welcome Indigenous Nations, was torn down to build first Idlewild then John F. Kennedy airport.25 Entertainment history, like other urban histories, is layered with Native hub-making that has been covered over and obscured. A final way to acknowledge Indigenous framing of cinematic space and its connection to the lived urban environment lies in the live ballyhooing that constituted cinematic audiences by gathering their attention, directing their gaze, and shaping their expectations. If the impact of Indigenous liveness on

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audiences might vary, so might it affect performers differently. Molly Spotted Elk reflected, in her diary, on one of her experiences of ballyhooing in 1922 for a performance at the Scenic, “a small beach theatre at Oakland Beach, Rhode Island”: “Rode around. Had to ballyhoo in my costume. So tiresome I could leave the company. They’re making a regular little monkey out of me.”26 About a decade later, Gloria Miguel, senior Guna/Rappahannock theater artist who performed as a show Indian as a youngster, also ballyhooed, in New York City. When she reflected on this experience in 2017, her emphasis was quite different. She remembered that she and her family “did John Wayne ballyhooing for the John Wayne movies. It was in Brooklyn, we were on a big float, and the whole family was on the float, and the family posing and saying, ‘Go to see John Wayne . . .!’ [laughter] Ah, we did crazy things—we used to have Indian Day celebrations and the social clubs and the Cowboy and Indian Club—we all really knew each other.”27

american indian day Gloria Miguel’s memory of community connects cinematic to urban space, one site of hub-making to another, in the form of American Indian Day in New York City. This was only one iteration of Indian Day observations that happened across the country. It was also only one of many kinds of community-making in New York City that were connected to Indigeneity or entertainment communities under pressure, from the hundreds of Native Hawaiian entertainers gathering there to its African American vaudeville communities.28 In New York City, Indian Day observances have happened most prominently at Inwood Hill Park, at one time under the shade of a 240-year-old tulip tree. On this site, at the northwesternmost tip of Manhattan, tradition has it that Hendrick Hudson encountered the Lenape in 1609 and essentially tricked them out of their land. The push to convert the site into a park began around 1903, and in 1904 Indigenous people living or temporarily working in New York City gathered there. They sang and danced together, and then they communed privately in council to plan for mutual aid, protection, and selfdetermination.29 It took until 1926 to achieve the park’s official opening. Indigenous people came from across North America for annual gatherings, some in full regalia and some not, to foster their own community with feasts, dancing, singing, and sports; they called for a national American Indian Day to honor the ancestors and support current and future generations. In 1929 Chief Sheet Lightning/Walter Battice moved the gathering temporarily to Prospect

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Park in Brooklyn, closer to the city’s largest Indigenous neighborhood, and got a turnout of approximately two hundred participants from twelve different Native Nations, attracting hundreds more spectators. Among them, the vaudeville Indians were out in force. Seeing them together brings home once more the vivacity of a collective public presence that joined the popular stage to political voice. Among the many professions and trades represented by Indigenous workers at Indian Day gatherings, performers attracted the most press attention, and they were adept at turning it to their own purposes. The vaudeville stars were named for their Nations and their shows. Princess White Deer “of the Iroquois tribe, a former Ziegfeld girl” was front and center. Princess Watahwaso “of the Penobscot tribe,” “well known as a radio and vaudeville singer, also was present and did the Eagle Dance.”30 Penobscots Molly Spotted Elk and her sister Darly Little Elk were identified as “members of the cast of ‘Fiesta.’ ” On another occasion, Molly Spotted Elk “took off her moccasins and did a corn dance to the rumble of a tom-tom . . . the Indian equivalent of the Charleston.”31 Red Wing—still remembered for The Squaw Man—and one of her sisters were present, as was “White Moon of the Iroquois.” Later, Joe Shunatona and Bruce Poolaw turned up. Chauncey Yellow Robe (Sioux Nation), who subsequently appeared with Molly Spotted Elk in The Silent Enemy, was honored as one of the celebrities who participated in the 1929 ceremonies. Another actor in that film, Buffalo Child Long Lance, who self-identified as Cherokee, then Blackfoot, and who carried a complex lineage of Indigenous, Black, white, and Kainai (Blood) adoption, was noted as “a guest.”32 While the Indigenous participants feasted together, danced together, and gave and listened to each other’s speeches, they also negotiated their own internal community dynamics. I was surprised and intrigued to see “Princess Wa-let-ka of the Cherokees” on the list of those present, still seeking the camouflage of community in plain sight, prominent enough to be named but not to be quoted.33 Princess Chinquilla, on the other hand, far from ghosting the event, seems to have been vying to take it over—the year before, at Inwood Park, bustling around with a retinue of boy scouts, she annoyed her colleagues by turning the occasion into a stump speech for the Hoover and Curtis presidential ticket. In 1929, she persuaded the press to feature her as the Indian princess “who is known as ‘mother’ to the Indians and who sponsored the Indian Day celebrations.”34 By 1937 she was still somewhat center stage, posing for photographs in stock Indian gesture.35

co ncl us io n  28 1

One purpose of Indian Day was to directly address non-Indigenous audiences and governmental powers. Various spokespeople used their public visibility to speak of self-determination, in a range of registers. At the 1928 gathering, James Deer, still identified as a “bareback rider” and cited for his service in Egypt, sounded proud and angry when he declared that being able to vote meant that his people’s “political slavery” was ended; “they could ‘speak with pride of our nation, which was never a slave to any paleface nation.’ ”36 In 1929, Chief Sheet Lightning persuaded the gathering to sign a resolution petitioning Congress to establish National Indian Day each September “to honor their forefathers.”37 And in 1937, on a different occasion but with a very similar gathering, Chief Clear Sky—last noted dancing between movie reel changes— took the microphone to use his vaudeville wit with a sting to it. He announced that the Indigenous assembly bid $30 for the Island of Manhattan—$24 was what the palefaces originally gave the ancestors; “The extra $6, the chief said, was an allowance for improvements made by the white folks.”38 And here again, as in the much earlier days of this project, Chief Eagle Eye turned up in the newspaper archive. On Indian Day in 1933, in Inwood Park, the father of Gloria Miguel, Elizabeth Miguel, and Muriel Miguel, the grandfather of Monique Mojica, and the great-grandfather of Bear Witness was photographed with men of other Nations—Chief White Elk, Osage; Chief Crazy Bull, Sioux; Chief Little Moose, Chippewa—sitting cross-legged in a semicircle, dressed in rich regalia, passing the peace pipe.39 The newspaper caption strives to demean the scene, to turn it into a jokey sideshow to modernity, but the photograph shows live fellowship and community that read as both performance and connection. The participants simultaneously seem to be aware that they are on camera—White Elk’s face is turned toward it, though his eyes seem to be closed—and to be intent on the common focus in their midst. This is especially so in the still presence of Eagle Eye, his gaze concentrated on the pipe that he offers across the circle to White Elk’s outstretched hand. Somewhere in that gathering were the children, Gloria Miguel and Elizabeth Miguel, feasting and dancing; Muriel Miguel was yet to be born. Popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century insistently framed Indigenous peoples—from dime-novel formulas, to Broadway rhetoric, to formulaic film narratives, to newspaper headlines and captions—in ways that do great damage. Without denying the seriousness of these effects, this book has dwelt less on this damage than on what Indigenous vaudevillians did with

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conditions not of their own making. With a cornucopia of specialties, acts, and attire; cabinet cards, self-published writings, and letterheads; and businesses, contracts, and copyright registrations, they defied discourses of containment, diminishment, and vanishing. They repurposed formulaic frames of presentation so that they emphasized Indigenous vibrancy and continuance. They used the vaudeville stage as one platform on which to develop forms of public voice and visual sovereignty. They spoke to each other across and around the constraints of commercial entertainment. Some performers sent messages of kinship down commercial lines of communication; others reoriented stock gestures away from dominant settler conventions toward connecting with each other. In this environment, performers who self-identified as Indigenous but were without community accessed and imitated these lines of connection as lifelines in the modern world. Performers who played Indian from nonIndigenous positions—wannabees and redface entertainers—confirmed again the power of Indigenous networks when they sought, through mimicry, to latch onto such communities as sources of survival. On Indigenous time and by Indigenous agency, vaudeville’s keywords changed their meanings. Novelty was transformed from a site of objectification to a tool of brokerage. Vaudeville bits were both self-contained turns of polished entertainment and parts of much larger, deeper, and ongoing histories of survivance. And vaudeville circuits were made over from routes and death trails devised for capitalist accumulation to land- and kinship-based mobilities.

NOTES

ab b rev iat io n s A: Ancestry.com, online AG: AccessGenealogy.com, online BL: British Library BNA: British Newspaper Archive, British Library BRBM: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library BRTD: Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library BSB: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives CCPR: Civic Club of Philadelphia Records, Historical Society of Pennsylvania CISDRC: Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, online CO: Canadiana Online DAOT: Digital Archives of the Old Town Public Library, Maine, online DB: Detlev Brum collection (accessed via Karl Marcus Kreis) DNC: Dime Novel Collection, University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections EHDK: Emma H. DeKnight Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries ELTA: East London Theatre Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, online eV: eVols, University of Hawaii, online FGS: Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music, Baylor University Library Digital Collection, online FJLBN: Frank Kenjockety and Louis Belmont Newell Native American Entertainers Collection, ca. 1886–1940, Smithsonian Institution Online Virtual Archives FSHN: Fulton Search: Historical Newspapers, online FZBB: Flo Ziegfeld–Billie Burke Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library 28 3

2 8 4     n o t es FZC: FZPC: GRB: HRC: HTDL: IA: IDNC: IGS: JKIP: KAC: KORLCC: LC: LOC: MHDL: MHS: ML: MLMC: MSC: N: NA: NAD: NYHS: OHS: OWP: PCPC: PHN: PP: PTH: PWDC: RG75: SSB: TBC: TGPE: TPAS:

Florenz Ziegfeld Collection 1893–1979, Harry Ransom Center Florenz Ziegfeld Photograph Collection, Harry Ransom Center Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin HathiTrust Digital Library, online Internet Archive, online Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections, online Iroquois Genealogy Society Collection, online Joseph Keppler Jr. Iroquois Papers, 1882–1944, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, online Keith-Albee Collection, Iowa Digital Library, University of Iowa, online Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center Collection, Kahnawà:ke Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library Library of Congress Media History Digital Library, online Montana Historical Society, Helena Milner Library, Illinois State University Digital Collections, online McLaughlin Library Microform Collection, University of Guelph Mari Sandoz Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Newspapers.com, online NewspaperArchive, online Nickels and Dimes: From the Collections of Johannsen and LeBlanc, online New York Historical Society Library Oklahoma Historical Society Owen Wister Papers, 1829–1966, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress Princess Chinquilla Photograph Collection, Wyles Mss 163, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara ProQuest Historical Newspapers, online Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, online The Portal to Texas History, online Princess White Deer Collection, Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center, Kahnawà:ke Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Sammlung Varieté, Zirkus, Kabarett, Stiftung Stadtmuseum BerlinSpandau Theatre Biography Collection, Harry Ransom Center Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble Archive, University of Guelph Tony Pastor Anniversary Scrapbook 1890, Harry Ransom Center

no t es t o p ag e 2  28 5 TPCBRTD: Tony Pastor Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library TPCHRC: Tony Pastor Collection 1861–1908, Harry Ransom Center TPS: Tony Pastor Scrapbook Press Cuttings Book January 1892–August 1893, Harry Ransom Center UODC: University Libraries, University of Oklahoma, Digital Collections, online WSU: Washington State University Libraries Digital Collections, online







in t ro d u ct io n Epigraph. Monique Mojica, interview by Christine Bold, November 9, 2015. Quoted with permission. 1. Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble was founded in Toronto in 1999 by co-artistic directors Jani Lauzon (Métis), Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations), and Michelle St. John (Wampanoag Nation). In 2006, Falen Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora, Six Nations of the Grand River) and Cheri Maracle (Mohawk/Irish, Six Nations of the Grand River) joined as artistic associates; in 2006, Monique Mojica resigned as co-artistic director. In 2008, the company disbanded. 2. J. Carter, “Repairing,” 241. 3. Turtle Gals, Scrubbing, 331. 4. “Survivance” is the much-cited term by Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota): “survivance, in the sense of native survivance, is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence. . . . [S]urvivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Fugitive, 15). 5. P. Deloria, Indians. Scholars recovering such work in the sphere of performance include Bellin and Mielke, Native; Flint, Transatlantic; Galperin, In Search; Maddox, Citizen; McBride, Molly; McNenly, Native; Thrush, Indigenous; Troutman, Indian; Ware, Cherokee; Weaver, Red. Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō) worries that the term “Indigenous modernities” can be used as a kind of barker’s promise: “My critique instead asks how we might consider some of the blind spots and spectacle of the phrase that may not follow through on its promise. Yet I am not content to leave behind the potential of this term either, what it ‘imagines otherwise’ ” (“Speaking,” 222–23). Mark Rifkin critiques the term “modernity” for ways in which it folds Indigenous “temporal multiplicity” back into “non-native frames of reference as the self-evident basis for approaching Indigenous forms of persistence, adaptation, and innovation” (Beyond, ix). My use is shaped by the relationship between scholar and subject: whereas in the hands of Indigenous scholars, “Indigenous modernities” can open up multiplicity and difference, from a settler scholar the phrase can signal a more blinkered approach along the lines argued by Rifkin. Here, I use “western,” “Euro-,” or similarly qualified “modernity” when referring to dominant Eurocentric periodization; I use “Indigenous modernity” to name what European performers saw when encountering Indigenous skill with the technologies of western modernity; and I refer to “Indigenous time” when acknowledging Indigenous creative engagements embedded in Indigenous temporal and other relations.

2 8 6     n o t es to pa g e s 2– 6 6. Raheja, Reservation, 198–200. The many discussions of Indigenous kinship include Tsianina K. Lomawaima (Mvskoke/Creek Nation) on “expansive Indigenous theories of kinship, including biological descent, adoption, marriage, and clan affiliation” (“Mind,” 61) and Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) on the “kinship foundation” of Indigenous nationhood (Our Fire, 225, 24). 7. Thrush, Indigenous, 23. 8. Hansen, Babel, 29. Other scholars on vaudeville’s centrality within modernity include R. C. Allen, Vaudeville; Gebhardt, Vaudeville; Glenn, Female; Green and Laurie, Show; Guerin, “Dazzled”; Gunning, “Cinema”; Hodin, “Class”; Jelavich, “Modernity”; Jenkins, What; McLean, American; Monod, Soul; Oberdeck, “Contested”; Palladini, “Amateur”; S.D., No; Snyder, Voice. 9. Pastor quoted in New York Herald clipping 1893 (Box-Folder ob31, TPS); Marinetti, “Variety,” 127. 10. Exceptions include Kibler, Rank, on Cora Youngblood Corson, who self-identified as Cherokee (190–93), and Troutman, “Joe,” on, during the 1920s, “hundreds of American Indians who travelled the country playing music in various vaudeville troupes and ensembles” (21). For the growing literature on Indigenous performers beyond Turtle Island whose circuits included vaudeville, see Imada, Aloha; Troutman, Kīkā. 11. They include Antelyes, “Vaudeville”; D. Brooks, Bodies; Brundage, Beyond; Cohen, From Hester; Dormon, “American”; George-Graves, Royalty; Kibler, Rank; Lhamon, Raising; Lott, Love; McAllister, Whiting; Mintz, “Humor”; Moon, Yellowface; Otte, Jewish; Pollard and Soyer, Emerging; Rogin, Blackface; Snyder, “Immigrants”; Sotiropoulos, Staging; Thissen, “Film.” 12. See, for example, P. Deloria, Indians; V. Deloria, “The Indians”; McNenly, Native; Moses, Wild; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo; Standing Bear, My People. 13. See Bold, Frontier, for the larger story of this cultural gatekeeping. 14. Editorial, The Civic Club Bulletin 2.4 (December 1908) (CCPR). 15. Turtle Gals, Scrubbing, 331. 16. Ibid., 353. They reference the attack on the Métis and Indigenous allies at Batoche in 1885 during the resistance led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont against the Canadian government; the murder of Dudley George, member of Stoney Point First Nation and unarmed protestor against the occupation of his people’s land, who was killed by an Ontario Provincial Police Officer at Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995; the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee by the U.S. 7th Cavalry in 1890; and the U.S. military onslaught on the occupation of Wounded Knee led by members of the American Indian Movement in 1973, in protest against treaty-breaking and other acts of oppression against Indigenous peoples. 17. Ibid., 352. 18. Ibid., 343, 333; J. Carter, “Repairing,” 244. 19. Turtle Gals, Scrubbing, 346, 366. 20. House Program, The Only Good Indian . . . World Premiere, Tarragon Theatre’s Extra Space, Toronto, December 1–12, 2007 (TGPE). 21. Mojica, “Stories,” 98.

n o t es t o p ag es 7– 1 1   28 7 22. Justice, Why, 174–75. 23. The Toronto Theatre Database, ttdb.ca/shows/the-only-good-indian. The premiere was performed in 2007 by Jani Lauzon, Michelle St. John, Cheri Maracle, and Falen Johnson and directed by Yvette Nolan (Algonquin/Irish). Historical performers re-embodied on stage included Creek/Cherokee mezzo-soprano Tsianina Redfeather (researched and performed by Jani Lauzon); Yankton Sioux author, activist, and musician Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša (researched and performed by Michelle St. John); Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River, author and orator E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (researched and performed by Cheri Maracle); and Penobscot dancer and writer Molly Spotted Elk (researched and performed by Falen Johnson). 24. See Green, “Tribe.” 25. Michelle St. John, in discussion with the author, March 4, 2005. Quoted with permission. 26. In the development workshop in December 2006, directed by Yvette Nolan, Buffalo Bill Cody names: “Princess Watawaso, Princess Chinquilla, Gabriel Dumont, Chancey Yellowrobe . . . Geronimo . . . Red Shirt, Sitting Bull, brought to you by yours truly, William F. Cody but you can call me Buffalo Bill” (S.M. Prompt Script for November workshop 2006, Theatre Centre, Toronto, TGPE). 27. Lisa Mayo/Elizabeth Miguel passed in 2013. 28. See J. Carter, “Repairing,” 27–34, for the sisters’ early years. 29. J. Carter, “Shaking,” 9. 30. Quoted in J. Carter, “Shaking,” 9. For an extended discussion of Spiderwoman’s storyweaving, see J. Carter, “Repairing,” 137–53. 31. Monique Mojica has written about Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s processes inherited from Spiderwoman Theater (“Stories,” 97). See Carter, “Writing,” on Turtle Gals’ ongoing artistic legacy (14). 32. Gloria Miguel, interview by Christine Bold, January 14, 2012. Quoted with permission. 33. See “Note on List of Vaudeville Indian Acts, 1880s–1930s.” 34. On “trans-Indigenous” as naming the gatherings, intersections, and relations among Indigenous Nations and communities, see C. Allen, Trans-Indigenous. 35. Hamill, “American.” 36. I thank Monique Mojica for this wording (in personal conversation, February 13, 2019). Attributed with permission. 37. Raheja, Reservation, 107. 38. I use “redface” differently from Raheja (Reservation, 20), whose use is more connected to embodiment on and off stage and screen. 39. For example, P. Deloria, Indians; Floyd, “Negotiating”; Hearne, Native; Raheja, Reservation; A. B. Smith, Shooting. 40. Amiotte, Transformation, 35. 41. Quoted in Haugo, “Weaving,” 225. 42. Monique Mojica performed Geronimo; Jill Carter, substituting for Michelle St. John, played Gertrude Simmons Bonnin; and Jani Lauzon played Tecumseh Stubbs. 43. Mojica and Knowles, Staging, 325.

2 8 8     n o t es to pa ge s 1 1 – 1 4 44. “Conversations in Contemporary Art: Bear Witness,” Concordia University, Montreal, April 3, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoXKy5_3lXk. 45. Jenkins, What, 24. 46. Troutman, Indian, 114. 47. V. Deloria, Custer, 146. 48. TallBear, “Making,” 147. 49. See Galperin, In Search, 86, 87; “Princess White Deer and Co. (3),” Variety, September 7, 1917 (IA); “What Variety—World’s Best Stage Authority Says About U.S. Indian Reservation Band,” Scranton (Pa.) Republican, March 29, 1929 (N). 50. On popular culture’s continuing appropriation of Indigeneity and resistance to it, see, e.g., Barbour, From Daniel; Carstarphen and Sanchez, American; Fenelon, Redskins? 51. Henrietta Fourmile quotes William T. Hagan, with reference to definitions by Winnebago Reuben Snake; the fuller quotation reads: “the historical Indian may be the captive of the archives, but the key to those archives is in the hands of nonIndian historians. . . . [F]or the Native American this is more than just some intellectual game. What is at stake for the Indian is his historical identity, and all that can mean for self-image and psychological well-being. At stake also is the very existence of tribes, and the validity of their claims to millions of acres of land and to the compensation for injustices suffered in earlier transactions with the federal and state governments” (Fourmile, “Who,” 1–2). 52. P. Deloria, Indians, 21, 60. 53. Wilson, Research, 99. See also Kovach, Indigenous; L. B. Simpson, Dancing; L. T. Smith, Decolonizing. 54. These principles include staging conversations around archives; learning from Indigenous artists acts of looking and listening that move beyond colonizing assumptions and make transparent the position of the settler scholar, without recentering whiteness or invading the space of Indigeneity; and negotiating an expanded range of resources—material, financial, archival, scholarly, pedagogical, performance—to contribute to the process of exchange. The principles of Indigenous Research Methodologies are often summarized as respect, responsibility, reciprocity, relationality, and usefulness. In the scale of this project, these principles translate into the always ongoing, always unfinished process of building relations of research exchange—that is to say, building trust across settler-Indigenous divides—and respecting its limits. On non-extractive scholarship, see Kovach, “Conversational,” 46; Robinson, “Enchantment’s”; Robinson, Hungry, 14–15. 55. Early in his career, the press identified Frank Howling Wolf as “full blooded Coahuila Indian” (“A Full Blooded Indian to be at Opening,” Santa Ana [Calif.] Register, July 31, 1918 [N]). See Barrows, Ethno-Botany, 8, for pronunciation of “Kow-wee-yah,” which may account for Howling Wolf sometimes being called “Keewanee” (e.g., “Vaudeville for Theatre Tonight,” Santa Maria [Calif.] Times, March 23, 1929 [N]). Later press identifications scramble the more popular “Sioux” identity, presumably trying to associate this performer with Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. Stories say Howling Wolf and his partner Princess Lillian (a contralto whom I cannot identify) are “from the Pine Rock Agency,” “Pine River Reservation,”

n ot es t o p ag es 1 4 –24   28 9 and “Pine Ridge Reservation, Oklahoma” (“Indian Jazz, Comedy, Rifle Marvels and Mirth, Babcock Bill,” Billings [Mont.] Gazette, May 30, 1926 [N]; “Seventh Street,” Minneapolis Star, November 17, 1924 [N]; Advertisement, Princess Lillian’s Indian Jazz Revue, Owensboro [Ky.] Messenger, January 22, 1926 [N]). By 1929, he was doing rope tricks between film reels (Al McCombs, “Rolltop Roundup,” Chino [Calif.] Champion, August 9, 2008 [N]). 56. See, e.g., “Indian Revue Features at the Columbia,” Davenport (Iowa) Quad-City Times, November 30, 1924 (N); “Real, Live Injuns on Vaudeville Bill at National,” Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, March 1, 1925 (N); “Indian Actors Top Show Bill,” Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune, May 25, 1926 (N). 57. Mojica, “Stories,” 109. 58. Monique Mojica, email to author, June 22, 2016. Quoted with permission. 59. In January 2020, Henu Josephine Tarrant staged “Red Moon Blues,” “a reimagined vaudeville cabaret” hosted by Lilian St Cyr/Red Wing, to whom she is related. Murielle Borst-Tarrant is a playwright, actor, and activist; Kevin Tarrant (who passed in 2020) was founder of Silvercloud Singers and a traditional dancer, singer, drummer, and actor. 60. Murielle Borst-Tarrant website, www.murielleborsttarrant.com, consulted October 23, 2017. 61. Anderson, “Affirmations,” 83. 62. Sotiropoulos, Staging; Troutman, Kīkā. 63. Mathews, Sundown, 258. 64. P. Deloria, Playing, 125. 65. See Carter, “My!,” 20. 66. Maddox, Citizen, 33. 67. For a differently theorized inquiry into historical looking at an Indigenous performer—E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake—see Daniher, “Looking.” 68. Margaret Kovach (Plains Cree and Saulteaux) parses this responsibility: “Giving back involves knowing what ‘useful’ means, and so having a relationship with the community, so that the community can identify what is relevant, is key” (Indigenous, 82). Through conversation and negotiation with Indigenous artists and scholars, I am learning how resources I can draw on from my institutional position can support their work while also forwarding this research. In this project, the giving back revolves around transferring historical materials from non-Indigenous institutions to Indigenous sites of creativity, collection, research, recirculation, and return. This process goes beyond the pages of this book, but it impacts the book’s practices, priorities, and analyses at every turn. 69. These projects are ongoing. I particularly thank Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, cultural liaison and archivist for the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center; David L George-Shongo Jr., director, Seneca-Iroquois National Museum; Monique Mojica and Michelle St. John, Indigenous research consultants to this project; and Cree-Métis scholar Deanna Reder, principal investigator, and Alix Shield, Indigenous digital content specialist, of the Indigenous digitization site The People and the Text. 70. Lyons, X-Marks, 13.

2 9 0     n o t es to pa g e s 2 4– 3 2 71. Will Rogers explained to his sister in 1905: “You see in Vaudeville you are working for different people almost every week some you might have to work for cheaper than others and you are with different acts as you are not in a company you are by yourself and book your act wherever you can” (Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 218). In 1911, Joe Morris wrote to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which he attended 1895–1901, “I am now making twice as much money as I did when I was an Iron Worker. I am getting all the way from $35.00 to $100.00 a week. Here in the City [Chicago] nothing less than $35.00 a week on the road $100.00. I pay my own expenses. I clear about 75.00 on the week” (Joseph H. Morris, Record of Graduates and Returned Students, U.S. Indian School, Carlisle, Pa., June 3, 1911 [CISDRC]). 72. See Browder, Slippery, 111–39, for “slippery character” and its implications for Indian impersonation. 73. Ramirez, Native. chap t er 1 .   v a ud e v i l l e un d e r th e s i gn o f “ t h e indian” 1. P. Deloria, Playing (on “playing Indian” and the larger cultural uses of Tammany); Green, “Tribe.” 2. On other Tammany Hall connections to vaudeville, see Welch, King, 90–92. 3. “Fun for Big and Little,” The World, December 2, 1892, Box-Folder ob31, TPS. 4. Charles Somerville, “Tony Pastor, Starting as the Youngest Actor Hailed this Week as Oldest on the Stage,” clipping, Tony Pastor, Box 624, TBC. 5. Shea Murphy, “The People,” documents U.S. and Canadian federal anti-dance edicts, 1880s–1930s. 6. See, for example, Phillips, Trading, 38. 7. L. Brooks, Common; L. Brooks, “Awikhigawôgan.” 8. Warner, James. 9. Monture, Teionkwakhashion, 37. 10. Warner, James, 204. 11. Ibid., 81, 155, 57. 12. Galperin, In Search, 23. 13. Warner, James, 112. 14. Blanchard, “Entertainment,” 12. 15. McBride and Prins, Indians, say “ostrich- or rhea-feather headdress” (120). 16. McBride and Prins, Indians, 122. 17. Ibid., 118. 18. Prins, “Chief,” 146; McBride and Prins, Indians, 120; J. W. Johnson, Life, [34]. 19. See Biron, “Iroquois,” “Iroquois Medicine”; Browder, Slippery, 70–71; Frost, Never, 1–9, 22–25; Heath, “Native”; Lewis, From Traveling, 4–8, 137, 241, 264–65; Warner, James, 53–54. 20. Unidentified clipping (LC Envelope 1495 Mohawk, Go-Won-Go folder of clippings, BRTD); “Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” Des Moines Register and Leader, March 31, 1910 (N). 21. Taken from her mother at birth, Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nuñez (1888–1972) could not confirm her belief that she was “a member of the Rincon band of the Luiseno

n ot es t o p ag es 32–36  291 people” (Steiner, Spirit, xii). For her criticism of Go-won-go Mohawk, see Steiner, Spirit, 214; Haugo, “Circles,” 232. 22. Quoted in Lapier and Beck, City, 90. 23. Bellin and Mielke, Native, 3. 24. McBride and Prins, Indians, v. 25. See, e.g., “Tony Pastor’s Day,” New York Recorder, March 20, 1893, Box-Folder ob31 TPS; Armond Fields, Tony, 11–18. 26. Pastor was with P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in 1846. Prins dates Frank Loring’s first stint with P. T. Barnum to his teenage years (i.e., 1840–47) (“Chief,” 146). In 1843, Lydia Maria Child reported attending Barnum’s and seeing “fifteen Indians, fresh from the Western forest,” including No-Nos-See, the She Wolf, a niece of the famous Black Hawk, and Do-Hum-Me (Jacobson, “Agencies,” 36). See also “Indian Princess.” 27. Advertisement, “Mabie’s Menagerie, Den Stone’s Circus, and Tyler’s Indian Exhibition! Combined!,” Milwaukee Daily American, October 6, 1856, digital. archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/6351. 28. “Tony Pastor Looks Far Back,” unidentified clipping, January 27, 1907, Tony Pastor, Box 624, TBC. 29. Armond Fields, Tony, 20. 30. See, among others, R. C. Allen, Horrible, 178–80; Easton, “Vaudeville!”; Snyder, Voice, 17–25. 31. O’Brien, Firsting, xii. 32. For the first year, both were in partnership with minstrel Sam Sharpley (Monod, Soul, 173; Zellers, Tony, 23–29). 33. Kattwinkel, Tony, 114, 108, 4, 59n3, 110–29. 34. Advertisement, Holliday Street Theatre, Baltimore Sun, April 13, 1871 (N); “The Live Indian,” Playbills, October 9, 1871; March 12, 1872 (Box 5, Series 9, TPCBRTD). 35. Advertisement, Tony Pastor’s Opera House, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 6, 1873 (N), inter alia. Pastor often allowed his name to be used on the Old Sleuth detective series without authoring the work. The copyright history on Dare Devil Pat, however, strongly suggests that on this occasion Pastor was novelist and stageadapter. See Pearson, Dime, 95–97; LOC Copyright Office, Card Catalogue 1870– 1897, Cards headed “Dare Devil Pat” and “Pastor (Tony)”; LOC Copyright Office, Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States 1870 to 1916, Vol. 1, 9846 (Pastor, T.); Zellers, Tony, 38. 36. Its title and characters varied. One traveling version was Modoc Jack, or, The Three Chiefs (Music Hall, Worcester, Playbill for April 25, 1873, American Broadsides and Ephemera, NYPL). 37. Kattwinkel introduces and reprints Go West, with its variant titles (Tony, 155–76). Opening on January 19, 1880, it was said to be a burlesque on William A. Mestayer’s The Tourists in the Pullman Palace Car of 1879 (Zellers, Tony, 60). 38. Quoted in Kattwinkel, Tony, 155. 39. Kattwinkel, Tony, 166. 40. Ibid., 174, 175. 41. Ibid., 174.

2 9 2     n o t es to pa ge s 3 6 –40 42. “Tony Pastor’s Anniversary,” Paterson (N.J.) Daily Press, March 21, 1890, TPAS, Box-Folder ob30. 43. Advertisement, “Huber’s 14th St. Palace Museum,” New York Sun, January 4, 1891 (N). 44. “Tony Pastor,” unidentified clipping, March 29, 1890, Box-Folder ob30, TPAS. 45. “Tony Pastor’s Anniversary,” New York Press, March 19, 1893, Box-Folder ob31, TPS. 46. New York Herald clipping 1893, Box-Folder ob31, TPS. 47. Monod, Soul, 184. 48. Kattwinkel, “Tony,” 55. 49. Williams, “Indian,” 88; Waggoner, Starring, 85–86. 50. Williams identified its boundaries as East 14th Street, Broadway, and Canal Street. 51. “New York’s Indian Women,” New York Sun, April 11, 1909 (N). 52. Glenn says, “females comprised half to three-quarters of the audience” (Female, 80). See also Douglas, Terrible; Enstad, Ladies; Erenberg, Steppin’; Nasaw, Going; Peiss, Cheap. 53. See, e.g., Ames, Carl, 249; Jacobson, “Agencies,” 36; Kreis, “Indians,” 199; Lapier and Beck, City, 12; “Princess Esteeda Robbed,” Buffalo (N.Y.) Evening News, June 7, 1901 (N); Moses, Wild West, 48; Napier, “Across,” 387, 391–92; Riegler, “Tame,” 19; Saxon, American Theatre, 121–22; Stetler, “Buffalo Bill’s,” 232, 258; Thrush, Indigenous, 80, 116, 200. 54. Gallop, Buffalo, 43. 55. Zellers, Tony, 92, 104–6. 56. Marston and Feller, F. F. Proctor, 50. 57. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre Program, week of Feb. 6, 1893. Box-Folder ob29, TPCHRC. 58. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre Program, March 2, 1891, Tony Pastor, Box 626, TBC. 59. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre Program, November 20, 1899, Tony Pastor, Box 322, TBC; see also The Era (London), December 2, 1899 (BNA). In 1897, they were at Huber’s Museum (New York Times, October 17, 1897 [N]). 60. Advertisement, Pastor’s 14th St., New York Sun, December 11, 1904 (N). 61. Pastor’s Theatre Program, Week of April 30, 1906, Box 322, Tony Pastor, TBC. 62. Jenkins, What, 39. 63. R. C. Allen, Vaudeville, 39–40. 64. O. H. Kurtz, “Some American Impressions,” Das Programm, November 5, 1911 (SSB). 65. R. C. Allen, Vaudeville, 40; Wertheim, Vaudeville, xvii. 66. Oliver Double estimates annual attendance exceeding 25 million in London around 1912 (Britain, 46). 67. Wertheim, Vaudeville, 162. 68. Cullen, Vaudeville, Vol. 1, xv. 69. The earliest use of the term I have seen is in “Kickapoo Indian Vaudevilles,” Casino Theatre, Middletown (N.Y.) Times-Press, February 24, 1894 (N). 70. “Indian Entertainment,” Vancouver (British Columbia) Daily World, September 11, 1900 (N).

n ot es t o p ag es 4 0–4 9  293 71. “Redskins to Paris Theater,” Sioux City (Iowa) Journal, November 20, 1903 (N). 72. On Chief Dark Cloud, see, e.g., “Local Theatres,” Wilmington (Del.) Morning News, January 10, 1909 (N). On Red Eagle’s family, see, e.g., “Armory Theater,” Binghamton (N.Y.) Press and Sun-Bulletin, August 20, 1908 (N) and “Fulton Theatre,” The Chat (Brooklyn, N.Y.), January 15, 1910 (N). 73. Waggoner, Starring, 70–79. 74. Ibid., 86. On Luther Standing Bear’s career as performer and activist, see also Vigil, Indigenous, 234–302. 75. Waggoner, Starring, 90. 76. Ibid., 245. 77. Ibid., 262. 78. Pratt, “Kill.” 79. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Honouring, 1. More recently, many Indigenous leaders have publicly spoken of them not as schools but as institutions of assimilation and genocide. 80. White, “White Power,” 111. 81. Waggoner, Starring, 63. 82. Quoted in Katanski, Learning, 42. 83. Landis, “Names,” 98. 84. Richard Eugene Holmes Student File, CISDRC. 85. “Perpetuating Tribal Lore,” Moline (Ill.) Dispatch, March 11, 1911 (N). 86. “Mary Morris Student File,” CISDRC. 87. “Joe Morris Student File,” CISDRC. 88. “Mlle. Toona’s Indian Novelty Co.,” Variety, November 12, 1910 (IA). 89. “American Indian Another Caruso,” New York Times, November 24, 1912 (N). 90. “Keith’s Theater,” Boston Globe, April 1, 1900 (N). 91. “Keith’s Theater,” Boston Globe, April 3, 1900 (N). 92. Katanski, Learning, 91. 93. “Indian Entertainment,” Vancouver (British Columbia) Daily World, September 11, 1900 (N). 94. The Carlisle Arrow, December 22, 1911, 2, CISDRC. 95. “Indians Who Are Employed in New York,” Carlisle Arrow, October 25, 1912, 4, CISDRC. 96. Carlisle Arrow, February 18, 1916, 2, CISDRC. 97. Troutman, “Joe,” 19–20. 98. Ibid., 20. 99. McBride, Molly, 158; Troutman, “Joe,” 21. 100. Waggoner, Starring, 250–51, 275. 101. Lapier and Beck, City, 81–104. 102. Ibid., 94. 103. “At The Orpheum,” Harrisburg (Pa.) Telegraph, September 29, 1908 (N); “Armory Theater.” 104. O’Brien, Firsting, xxi. Focusing on local southern New England histories while illuminating national ideologies, O’Brien analyzes the tropes of double

2 9 4     n o t es to pa g e s 49 – 52 dispossession in settlers repeatedly claiming status as first Americans and identifying Indigenous figures as final remnants—“the last”—of their people. 105. “Indian Baritone Singer,” Oregon Daily Journal, December 19, 1922 (N). 106. Justice, Our Fire, 119. 107. Gray, Flint, 166. 108. I thank Margery Fee for this reference; undated clipping, St. Thomas Times, Box 6, file 11, E. Pauline Johnson Papers, McMaster University. 109. I thank Margery Fee for this reference, from Gray, Flint, 273. 110. Raheja, Reservation, 106. 111. Flood, Lost, 283–85. 112. Acoose, Iskwewak; Bird, “Savage”; Green, “Pocahontas”; Mithlo, Our Indian. 113. Among many newspaper stories on this Princess White Cloud, see “Slayer’s Son Sues Here,” Kansas City (Mo.) Times, January 15, 1924 (N). 114. “Indian Princess at the Grand,” Shreveport (La.) Journal, February 3, 1923 (N); “Princess Winona Gets Her Divorce,” Hartford (Conn.) Courant, December 22, 1923 (N); for photographs, see Princess Winona, TBC. 115. Sturm, Becoming, 5. 116. Lapier and Beck, City, 155–56; “Indian Blames White Man for Race’s Trouble,” Tampa Tribune, January 26, 1930 (N). 117. “Chiefs Come with Feathers,” Boston Globe, January 10, 1916 (N); McBride, Molly, 193. 118. See Jarrette Talmadge Van Noy, 1900 U.S. Census (A). On his passport application, June 28, 1920, Jarrette T. Hailstorm Van Noy, traveling for theatrical work, is born December 21, 1891, Rockwood, Tenn., American Indian (U.S. Passport Applications, 1795–1925 [A]). On his certificate of marriage to Maria Emma Alwine, September 24, 1921, in Zurich, he is Jarrette Talmadge Hailstorm Van Noy, Artist, Cherokee Indian Chief of Rockwood, State of Tennessee, U.S.A. (U.S. Consular Reports of Marriages, 1910–1949 [A]). On his World War II Draft Registration Card of 1942, he is Hailstorm Van Noy, born December 21, 1890, Muskogee, Okla., Race: Indian (A). 119. Numerous newspaper stories detail his entertainment activities from at least 1915, when he appeared as live accompaniment to the “Buffalo Bill Historical Pictures Company,” to 1958 (“Heap Big Chief Arrives; He Is a Movie Indian,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 25, 1915 [N]; “How!,” Deming [N.Mex.] Sun, March 6, 1958 [N]). 120. “At the Orpheum,” Madison (Wisc.) Capital Times, October 20, 1923 (N). 121. Crow, Jazz, 4. On complex relationships between Black and Indigenous jazz, see Keillor et al., “Jazz,” 329–38; Welburn, “Most,” 305–6; Welburn; “Native” 201–9; Wright-McLeod, “Songs,” 265–90; and essays in Berglund et al., Indigenous Pop. 122. Advertisement, Ninth and Arch Museum, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 28, 1898 (N). 123. Letter, Louis White Moon to Dept. of the Interior Indian Affairs, May 10, 1909; letter, R. G. Valentine, Acting Commissioner, Education Administration, May 19, 1909 (CISDRC). 124. “At the Electric,” Coshocton (Ohio) Daily Age, October 12, 1909; Waggoner, Starring, 98.

n o t es t o p ag es 5 2–5 6  295 125. On North American vaudeville’s syndication, see Wertheim, Vaudeville. 126. On the syndication of British music halls, see Double, Britain; Nield, “Popular”; Senelick et al., British. On Beck, see Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 54. On Australian circuits, see Waterhouse, From Minstrel, 118–20. On Marinelli, see his advertisement, Das Programm, September 10, 1905 (SSB). 127. “The International Conference,” Das Programm, June 18, 1911 (SSB). See Easton, “Vaudeville!,” for invocation of Alan Trachtenberg’s “incorporation.” 128. For example, “Cost of Armies,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 9, 1896 (N); “Theatre News,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 7, 1897 (N); Wertheim, Vaudeville, 123, 98. 129. Marx quoted in Wertheim, Vaudeville, 145; Dix in Hannan, “Voice”; see also Downes, “Dix.” 130. Erdrich, Tracks, 225. On filing cabinets full of reports, see Wertheim, Vaudeville, 158–61, 164. For managers’ granular scrutiny, see the Managers’ Report Books, KAC. Fond memories of unfettered relationships between stage and auditorium are somewhat belied by managers’ requirements that, in addition to cutting censored vocabulary, performers not throw a hat or other prop into the audience, address people in the process of leaving, or use forms of address such as “oh you naughty audience” (Managers’ Reports November 13, 1916–January 21, 1918, KAC). 131. “Charleston Makes Small Hit with This Seminole Matron,” Miami Daily News and Metropolis, March 31, 1926 [actually 1925], Newspaper Clippings, PWDC; “Still an Indian,” Defiance Express, February 28, 1906 (NA). 132. Advertisement, Princess White Deer, Das Programm, November 23, 1913 (SSB); “On and Off the Stage,” Table Talk (Melbourne), July 13, 1916 (T); “Believes that Indian Race Descended from the Jewish,” Anaconda Standard, July 15, 1914 (N). 133. See McBride, Molly, 149. 134. Quoted in Double, Britain, 132. 135. Proctor’s Ladies Club Theatre, week commencing May 20, 1895, program, Programs, BRTD; Kibler, Rank, 5; Proctor’s Novelty Theatre, May 9, 1887, program, Tony Pastor, Box 624, TBC. 136. Wertheim, Vaudeville, 33. 137. Zitkala-Ša, “School Days.” 138. Wertheim, Vaudeville, 9. 139. Kibler, Rank, 191–93. Recent information from a relative of Corson’s makes her Cherokee self-identification unlikely. 140. “Chiefs Come with Feathers”; “Funeral of an Indian Chief, with All Tribal Customs, in Boston,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1916 (N); “Chief Awhie Buried with Indian Rites,” Boston Globe, January 15, 1916 (N). 141. “Chief Caupolican Tired of N.V.A. Program Blah,” Variety, May 12, 1926, 22 (IA); Slide, Encyclopedia, 368. 142. Floyd, “On Hollywood”; Ramirez, Native; Vigil, “Warrior.” 143. Gebhardt, Vaudeville, 26, 28. 144. For example, Princess Chinquilla’s troupe was abandoned on their South Seas tour by their manager, M. B. Curtis: “Theatrical Company Is Financially

2 9 6     n o t es to pa ge s 56 – 6 1 Embarrassed,” Butte Miner, October 7, 1905 (N); Imada documents vaudeville managers’ exploitation of Native Hawaiian dancers (Aloha, 75–76). 145. “What We Want!,” Das Programm, no. 1, 1902 (SSB). 146. “Vaudeville Shows Fete of All Nations,” Chicago Tribune, January 27, 1907 (N); “Perpetuating Tribal Lore,” Moline (Ill.) Dispatch, March 11, 1911 (N); “Vaudeville’s Most Novel Act Is An Orpheum Headliner,” Harrisburg (Pa.) Daily Independent, November 13, 1911 (N); Wilschke, Im Lichte, 153. 147. “The Palace,” Irish News and Belfast Morning News, April 25, 1905 (BNA). 148. “A Texas Wooing,” The Chat (Brooklyn, N.Y.), January 15, 1910 (N). 149. F. Ziegfeld, “Preface,” in Revues. Higham says, “Ziegfeld loved Whoopee because it gave him a chance for a fantastic Indian reservation number, with the girls in a dazzling array of feathers, riding their horses across the stage” (Ziegfeld, 67). 150. Cantor and Freedman, Ziegfeld, 46. 151. Ibid., 53, 88. 152. Program, Follies of 1907, Week beg. July 22, 1907, Container 1, Series 1, FZC; Playbill, Follies of 1907, Commencing August 24, 1907, Container 12, FZPC. For details of this show, see Ommen van der Merwe, Ziegfeld, 2–12. Lyrics and sheet music for “My Pocahontas,” by Edgar Selden and Seymour Furth, for Follies of 1907 at www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200004349. 153. Ommen van der Merwe, Ziegfeld, 9. 154. On this use of “Indian Princess” from colonial times onward, see P. Deloria, Playing, 29; Green, “Pocahontas”; Mojica, Princess. 155. See Mizejewski, Ziegfeld, 65–88. 156. Undated photograph, Early Life and Career, PWDC; undated photograph, Showbiz and Glamor Photos, PWDC. 157. She would later make a case, for example, for Indigenous roots of jazz; see chapter 3. 158. “A Granddaughter of the Last Ruler of the Iroquois Gives a Lesson to Her Sisters in the Art of ‘Make-Up,’ ” The Sphere, April 18, 1925, Newspaper Clippings, PWDC. 159. “I’m an Indian,” lyrics by Blanche Merrill, music by Leo Edwards (New York: Leo Edwards, 1922) FGS; Hoffman, Great, 75–76. 160. Fanny Brice’s Comedy Songs, Container 2, FZC. 161. Antelyes, “Vaudeville”; Antelyes, “Haim,” 16. 162. Antelyes, “Haim,” 27. 163. Marks, “Our American,” 75. 164. Ibid., 76–77. 165. Ibid., 80. 166. Ibid., 84. 167. Ibid., 81. 168. Emile Barrangon/Chief Caupolican (1876–1968) entered vaudeville around 1900 and performed in Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna, Brussels, and across North America. He spent time in Chautauqua, the Metropolitan Opera, and on Broadway. Born in Chile to a Mapuche father and French mother, as a performer

n o t es t o p ag es 62–66  297 Caupolican identified as Mapuche, as of the Araucano Tribe of Chile, and as South American Indian. There are many genealogical documents and newspaper stories on him. A small sample includes his U.S. World War I Draft Registration Card, September 5, 1918, categorizing him as “Half Breed Indian” (A); “In the Vaudeville Houses,” New York Times, April 20, 1913 (N); “Chilean Indian in Vaudeville,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 27, 1913 (N); “Chief Caupolican’s Debut [in England],” The Billboard, June 27, 1914; “Versatile Indian Wins His Hearers,” Anaconda Standard, February 21, 1918 (N); “Versatile Indian Here,” Montreal Gazette, March 14, 1918 (N); “Fine Concert by Indian Chief,” Delaware County (Pa.) Daily Times, March 30, 1927 (N). A file of clippings and photographs (Caupolican: Chief) is in BRTD. Mrs. Lucy Barrangon’s obituary is in Tampa Bay Times, July 9, 1954 (N). Brief entries on Caupolican are on IMDB and Grove Music Online. The fullest account of his life, career, and politics is Garrido and Chan, “Dynamics,” which appeared while this book was in press. 169. Bordman, American, 496–97; Brideson and Brideson, Ziegfeld, 347–50. The stageplay, adapted from Owen Davis, The Nervous Wreck (1926), added musical numbers and Indians. 170. On redface and Indigenous participation in the film Whoopee!, see Rogin, Blackface, 151–56; Jenkins, What, 102, 153–84. On Harkrider’s extravagant “Indian” costumes for the stageplay, see R. and P. Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld, 150. On Berkeley choreography, see R. Carter, World, 150. 171. Clipping, Dramatic Mirror, February 11, 1914, BRTD. He produced several similar versions: e.g., clipping, New York Star, February 4, 1914, BRTD. 172. “Chief Caupolican Bids Farewell to Vaudeville,” Variety, March 16, 1917 (BRTD). 173. Manager’s Report, December 24, 1917, Managers’ Report Book, November 13, 1916–January 21, 1918 (KAC). 174. Manager’s Report, September 11, 1922, Managers’ Report Book, December 5, 1921–April 3, 1923 (KAC). 175. “Whoopee,” Typescript, [1928], FZBB, Series I: Scripts. 176. “Who’s Who in the Cast,” Program for “Whoopee,” Week Beg. September 30, 1929, Eddie Cantor Folder, Container 2, FZC. 177. “Whoopee,” Typescript, [1928], FZBB, Series I: Scripts. For a musical analysis of this scene in the film, see Pisani, Imagining, 282–85. 178. Beauvais, Kahnawake, 137. 1 st v au d evil l e n um be r 1. This reconstruction draws on “Manager’s Report, Keith’s Theatre 3 July 1905” and reviews from the Boston Herald, Boston Post, and Boston Globe (Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 168–75), and on Yagoda, Will, 91. Unlike the full chapters, which undertake considerable archival recovery work, the “Vaudeville Numbers” rely heavily on published sources. In the case of Rogers, I am especially indebted to the multivolume editing of Rogers’s papers by Arthur Frank Wertheim and Barbara Bair and the close tracing of Cherokee specificities in Rogers’s career by Daniel Heath Justice and Amy Ware.

2 9 8     n o t es to pa g e s 6 6 – 7 4 2. “A Cowboy That Lassoes an Audience” is from Richard Henry Little in the Chicago Tribune and “he ‘roped’ the house” from Charles Darnton in the New York World (Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 226, 279). 3. Justice, Our Fire, 119. 4. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 199; Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 1, 200, 388. 5. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 1, 387, 384, 389, 322. 6. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 74. 7. Ibid., 425. 8. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 1, 384; Papers, Vol. 3, 327, 292, 325. 9. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 318. 10. Ibid., 206, 207, 213, 226, 234, 236–37. 11. Ibid., 226, 231, 233. 12. Ibid., 335–37; Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 56–57. 13. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 448. 14. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 195. 15. Ibid., 231. 16. Ibid., 370. 17. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 201–2. 18. Justice, Our Fire, 93. Kirby Brown talks of how the complex contexts of Rogers’s early life in the Cherokee Nation and in Indian Territory “travelled with him” (Stoking, xv). 19. Quoted in Ware, Cherokee, 71; see also Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 291, 356. 20. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 278. 21. Ibid., 210, 355. 22. Ibid., 210. 23. Ibid., 105. 24. Ibid., 210. 25. Ibid., 247. 26. Ware, Cherokee, 194; Justice, Our Fire, 119. 27. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 338, 340; Waggoner, Starring, 84–86. 28. Ware, Cherokee, 101–9. 29. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 215, 372. 30. Ibid., 220, 357, 265, 293. 31. Other Indian-themed acts contiguous to his included Van Alstyne singing “Navajo,” composed in 1903, one of the first Tin Pan Alley tunes to exploit Indian themes, and Marion Lorne playing the deceived Indian maiden, Little Feather, in The Girl Rangers Papers (Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 332, 378). 32. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 242. 33. “The Twelve Navajo Girls and Other Features at Chase’s,” Washington Post, March 25, 1906 (N). Rogers appeared on playbills with “The Navajo Girls” on October 22, 1906, at Keith and Proctor’s Twenty-third Street Theatre in New York City and on December 31, 1906, to January 5, 1907, at the Brooklyn Star Theatre (Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 325, 345). 34. Justice, Our Fire, 128. 35. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 316.

n o t es t o p ag es 75 –79  299 36. For example, Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre Program, December 23, 1907 (Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 392). 37. George-Graves, Royalty, 20. 38. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 319. 39. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 318–19, 391–92. 40. King, “You’re,” 31–60. 41. Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 363, 396. 42. Wertheim, Will, 73. 43. Program, Ziegfeld Follies 1918, Week of September 23, 1918, Container 1, Series 1, FZC; Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 3, 397. 44. On Bert Williams as the first African American to appear in Ziegfeld Follies, see George-Graves, Royalty 4, 90–91; Sampson, Blacks, 60–61, 711. On Rogers, Cantor, Williams, Brice, and W. C. Fields together in Ziegfeld, see Wertheim, Will, 175, 177. 45. Cantor said their friendship led to Rogers’s quip “that this Cherokee cowboy had become a Jewish Indian” (quoted in Ware, Cherokee, 81); Cantor appeared in both redface and blackface in Whoopee; on Rogers proposing to play Bert Williams in blackface, see Wertheim, Will, 207; and for Cantor and Williams together on the Ziegfeld stage, see Program, Ziegfeld Follies, Week beg. November 3, 1919, Container 1, FZC. 46. Sotiropoulos, Staging, 72. 47. Rogin, Blackface, 35. 48. M. K. Johnson, Can’t, 65. 49. Quoted in Yagoda, Will, 89. 50. Justice, Our Fire, 24. 51. Ibid., 131. chap t er 2.   g o -w o n -go m o h a w k, “ a bo rig inal l y yo urs ” 1. Seneca, Cattaraugus Territory residents, and Haudenosaunee in the Seneca language are Onöndowa’ga:’; Ga’dägësgeo:nö’; Hodinöhsö:ni’ (Seneca-Iroquois National Museum website, www.senecamuseum.org). 2. Huhndorf, “American,” calls her co-author of “the earliest documented play possibly written by a Native playwright,” but also “of dubious origins” (294). To my knowledge, Hall, Performing, was the first scholar to bring attention to Mohawk and her first play; growing scholarship on her includes Bold, “Did”; Bold, “Violence”; Hall, “Cross-Dressing”; Otis, “From Iroquoia”; Rebhorn, Pioneer. 3. I first saw Mohawk using this phrase during her first press interview in England: “When I wrote to her asking for an interview, I approached her in the stiff-backed attitude usual with Britons towards strangers. . . . Miss Go-Won-Go Mohawk in her reply promptly put me to the blush by addressing me as ‘My Dear———,’ and signing herself, ‘Yours aboriginally, Go-Won-Go Mohawk’ ” (“Miss Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” Liverpool Weekly Courier, April 15, 1893, Microfilm, BL). Examples from Otis, “From Iroquoia,” 66n51, post-date this usage, including Jesse Cornplanter, a Seneca performer born in 1889, and author Chief Henry Red Eagle (Algonquin of the Maliseet), born 1885. Arthur C. Parker, whose father was Cattaraugus Seneca, used the phrase in 1911; Mohawk performer Esther Deer used it in 1913.

30 0     n o t es to pa ge s 7 9 – 8 2 4. I date her earliest performance of The Indian Mail Carrier as February 4–9, 1889, H. R. Jacob’s Lyceum Theatre, Brooklyn: see Odell, Annals, Vol. 14, 195. 5. Mohawk’s date of birth is contested; I follow Otis’s dating of August 11, 1859 (“From Iroquoia,” 60n8). 6. Lydia Hale Mohawk is listed as “Indian (Native American)” in the 1860 U.S. Federal Census (A); her daughter identifies her as “half-breed” in, among other places, “A Pretty Indian Actress,” Grand Forks (N.Dak.) Herald, September 17, 1908 (N). However, Otis and other genealogists document her as Euro-American. 7. “A Pretty Indian Actress”; see also Joe Quinn, “Indians Enriched Area in Medical, Arts History,” Binghamton (N.Y.) Press and Sun-Bulletin, July 8, 1984 (N). 8. Otis, “From Iroquoia,” 43–44. 9. “A Pretty Indian Actress.” 10. “An Indian Actress in England,” The Era (London), May 20, 1893 (N). 11. See Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Lake Erie Female Seminary, Painesville, Ohio, June 23d to 26th, 1884, Printed for the Alumnae (Cleveland: 1885), HTDL. 12. Otis, “From Iroquoia,” 60–61n19. 13. On violent confrontations by her first husband, accusing Mohawk of bigamy, see “Theatrical Chit-Chat,” Reynold’s Newspaper, October 27, 1889 (BNA), “New-Jersey,” New York Times, October 2, 1889 (N), and “An Indian Play Prevented,” Pittsburgh Dispatch, October 2, 1889 (N). For Mohawk’s characterization of her earliest roles, see “A Pretty Indian Actress.” 14. Among the plays in which she appeared were The New Magdalen; The Outcast; Whose Can It Be?; Only a Farmer’s Daughter; The New World; and Michael Strogoff (see Odell, Annals, Vol. 13, 465–67; Odell, Annals, Vol. 14, 173–75, 194–95, 303–5, 474, 764–65; Odell, Annals, Vol. 15, 527, 531–33; Otis, “From Iroquoia,” 45). 15. “Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” Des Moines Register and Leader, March 31, 1910 (N). Also as unidentified clipping (LC Envelope 1495 Mohawk, Go-Won-Go clippings folder, BRTD). 16. On March 5, 1889, Gowon,go Mohawk [sic] deposited “ ‘The Indian Mail Carrier.’ A Western Drama in four Acts” By Gowon,go Mohawk and Charlie Charles (LOC Copyright Office, Record Book, Vol. 4). On November 12, 1892, Go Won Go Mohawk deposited “Wep,Ton,No,Mah [sic], The Indian Mail Carrier” Written By Go,won,Go,[sic] Mohawk and Charlie Charles (LOC Copyright Office, Record Book, Vol. 20). On March 25, 1893, “Wep-ton-no-mah, The Indian Mail Carrier. A Drama in 5 Acts” Written by Go-Won-Go-Mohawk and Charlie Charles was deposited with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, London (BL). 17. According to New Jersey, Marriage Records, 1670–1965 (A), Gowango [sic] G. Mohawk married Charles W. Charles, May 25, 1888, in Paterson, N.J. According to New Jersey, U.S., United Methodist Church Records, 1900–1970 (A), the date was May 25, 1889. Her first marriage documented Carrie A. Mohawk marrying James E. Rider, February 28, 1879, in Cuyahoga, Ohio (Ohio, County Marriage Records, 1774–1993 [A]). That Go-won-go Mohawk’s name was gender-inclusive is suggested by the shifting pronoun usage in her copyright documents and by at least one male usage: Gowongo Mohawk renamed Paul Maze converting to Catholicism

n o t es t o p ag es 8 2–8 8   301 (“Gowongo Is A Member of the Catholic Church,” Dayton [Ohio] Daily News, January 23, 1903 [N]). 18. Singer, Melodrama, 2, 91. 19. I have read two extant typescripts, both titled “Wep-ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier written by Go-won-go Mohawk and Charlie Charles.” Here, I work with the five-act script copyrighted 1893, in The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays and Day-Books, BL. A differently paginated, but in content almost identical typescript, copyrighted 1892, is in MS-Play, Box 134, LOC. 20. “Empire Theatre,” Pittsburgh Dispatch, January 25, 1910 (LC Envelope 1495 Mohawk, Go-Won-Go clippings folder, BRTD). 21. See Hall, Performing, 5, 52. 22. “Standard Museum,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 26, 1889 (N). More harshly, another reviewer referred to “the traditional Greaser villain, the impossible Irishman, and the makeshift negro” (“Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express, June 18, 1889 [N]). 23. For example, “People’s Theater,” Chicago Tribune, December 6, 1891; “The Stage,” Houston Daily Post, February 11, 1900, The Portal to Texas History. 24. “An Indian Actress in England.” 25. Hall, Performing, 159. 26. Rebhorn, Pioneer, 8. 27. Jones, Calamity, 76–87. 28. Alice W. Eyre, “From Wigwam to Stage,” undated clipping [Metropolitan Magazine 7, no. 1 (January 1898), 101–2], LC Envelope 1495 Mohawk, Go-Won-Go clippings folder, BRTD; “Standard Museum”; “An Indian Actress in England”; “She Is the Only One,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1897 (N). 29. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 10. 30. Ibid., 67. 31. For example, “The Stage,” Houston Daily Post, February 11, 1900. 32. Gage notes Mohawk’s play as the first documented by an Indigenous playwright (“Intertribal,” 71n113). 33. Mielke, “Introduction,” 10. 34. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 30, 35. 35. For a compelling reading of complex cross-cultural meanings in the script and staging of Hiawatha, or Nanabozho in Anishinaabemowin and English from 1900, see Spry, Our War, 1–15. See also Trachtenberg, Shades, 89–97; Fenton, “Aboriginally,” 183. 36. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 7. 37. Ibid., 59, 65, 74. 38. Ibid., 64. 39. Mielke, “Introduction,” 5. 40. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 32. 41. Ibid., 33, 36. 42. Ibid., 90. 43. Ibid., 91. 44. Ibid., 57.

30 2     n o t es to pa g e s 88 – 9 7 45. Ibid., 44. 46. “Whitney’s—Go-won-go Mohawk,” Detroit Free Press, January 10, 1898 (N). 47. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 21. 48. Ibid., 70. 49. “The Stage.” Houston Daily Post, February 11, 1900. 50. “Empire Theatre.” 51. For example, “Standard Museum”; the phrase “the alleged Indian” recurred in 1889–90 (see Odell, Vol. 14, 174, 304, 764). 52. Ingraham, Go-won-go, 9. Page references are to the stand-alone dime-novel reprint (NAD). 53. Worden, Masculine, 18, 25. 54. Ingraham, Velvet, 4. Page references are to the stand-alone dime-novel reprint (NAD). 55. “Bannerettes,” Banner Weekly, February 14, 1891, 4 (DNC). 56. “Colonel Ingraham Next!,” Banner Weekly, January 31, 1891, 4; “Starts Next Week!,” Banner Weekly, February 7, 1891, 4 (DNC). 57. Ingraham, Red, 2. Page references are to the stand-alone dime-novel reprint (DNC). 58. Ingraham, Go-Won-Go, 4. 59. Ibid., 27. 60. “Colonel Ingraham Again,” Banner Weekly, January 17, 1891, 4 (DNC); “Starts Next Week!,” Banner Weekly, February 7, 1891, 4 (DNC). 61. Ingraham, Velvet, 4; “Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” Des Moines Register and Leader, March 31, 1910 (N). 62. Ingraham, Velvet, 28. 63. Ingraham, Red, 12; Ingraham, Go-Won-Go, 4. 64. Ingraham, Go-Won-Go, 4. 65. Ingraham, Red, 12. Later, Sam demotes Go-won-go down the hierarchy of entertainment venues, to a “show Indian”: having seen her two-handed gunplay, he muses, “my idee is he must hev been showed off in a cirkis” (Ingraham, Red, 18). Go-won-go disavows show business in her own voice: traveling as “The Indian Dead Shot” to support her adopted father and herself, she hates the life so much that she returns to her pony express duties and search for vengeance—that is, to participate in this dime-novel plot (Ingraham, Go-Won-Go, 7). For playful meta-narratives of this kind in dime novels, see Bold, Selling, 18–35. 66. Denning, Mechanic, 72–74. 67. Ingraham, Velvet, 20. 68. Standing Bear, Preface, My People; Lamont, Westerns, 75–99; Red Eagle, Aboriginally, xvii. 69. For example, Dean, “Calamities”; Denning, Mechanic; Worden, Masculine. 70. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 84. 71. “An Indian Actress in England.” 72. “Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” Des Moines Register and Leader. 73. “An Indian Actress in England.” 74. That is, Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora.

n o tes t o p ag es 97– 1 05   303 75. “Miss Go-Won-Go Mohawk.” 76. “By The Way,” Liverpool Weekly Courier, April 1, 1892 (BNA). 77. Programme, Pavilion Theatre, March 5, 1894 (ELTA). 78. “Miss Go-Won-Go Mohawk. Interviewed by a ‘Courier’ Commissioner.” 79. Thrush, Indigenous, 7, 9, 173–203. For one perspective on marriage between Lakota men and European women, see Warren, Buffalo, 390–96. 80. “The Elephant and Castle,” The Era (London), September 16, 1893 (BNA); “The Alhambra,” Hartlepool Mail, June 1, 1898 (BNA); “Young Woman’s Romantic Marriage,” North-Eastern Daily Gazette (Middlesbrough), May 17, 1895 (N). 81. “Wep-Ton-No-Mah,” The Era (London), April 15, 1893 (N). 82. For example, she went from performing in the Lyceum, in 1889, where Odell says prices “were 10 cents, 20 and 30 cents—‘no higher.’ It was not to be expected that attractions should reach the highest level of art” (Annals, Vol. 14, 194) to the Oneonta Theatre, in 1899, with ticket prices from 15c to 75c (Simonson, “Backtracking”). Songs include “Go-Won-Go: Indian Song,” words Will A. Boyd, music Will T. Pierson, copyrighted November 24, 1900 (LOC Copyright Office, Musical Compositions, Vol. 1) and “Go-Wan-Go Mohawk: Intermezzo Two-Step” by Dewitt Bell, 1910 (Youtube). On her being a byword for melodrama, “The Stage,” Washington Times, October 15, 1899 (N). On increased spectacle, e.g., “Bowdoin Sq Theatre,” Boston Globe, September 17, 1899 (N). 83. Singer, Melodrama, 153–61. 84. For example, “At the Play-Houses,” Des Moines Register, September 10, 1902 (N); “Empire—Go-Wan-Go-Mohawk,” Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, November 18, 1902 (N). 85. Waggoner, Starring, 83–209. 86. See “Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier,” in American Film Institute, A.17018; Advertisement, “Here They Are at Last,” Moving Picture World 4, no. 25, June 19, 1909 (MHDL); “Independent Film Releases,” New York Dramatic Mirror, June 5, 1909 (FSHN). 87. Gunning, “Cinema”; Keil and Stamp, “Introduction.” 88. Raheja, Reservation; see also R. Abel, “Our Country,” 151–74; Hearne, Native; Simmon, Invention; A. B. Smith, Shooting. 89. “An Indian Romance, A Forest Tragedy: A Drama in One Act,” by Go_Won_Go [sic] Mohawk, January 18, 1909, Typescript, LOC Manuscripts Division Microfilm; Copyrighted March 12, 1909, and March 23, 1909, LOC Copyright Office, Dramatic Compositions, Vol. 1. 90. Mohawk, “Indian,” 2. 91. Ibid., 19. 92. Eyre, “From Wigwam.” 93. Mojica quotation is from research discussion among Mojica, Michelle St. John, and Christine Bold, April 29, 2019. Quoted with permission. 94. The quotations in this section—included with permission—can be heard in “From Amazon Queen to Oscar Wilde: Two Indigenous Artist-Researchers Read Cabinet Cards of Go-won-go Mohawk,” Monique Mojica, Michelle St. John, Christine Bold, videography Jordan O’Connor, filmed April 29, 2019, The People and the Text website (thepeopleandthetext.ca/ or cwrc.ca/islandora/object/tpatt%253Atpattroot).

30 4     n o t es to pa ge s 1 0 7 – 1 1 7 95. Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 4, 10–16; M. Simpson, “Postcard.” 96. Driskill et al., “Introduction,” 3, 12. 97. “Vanity Fair,” unidentified clipping, February 1, 1901 (LC Envelope 1495 Mohawk, Go-Won-Go clippings folder, BRTD). 98. “Tamed Her Broncho,” unidentified clipping, August 6, 1899 (LC Envelope 1495 Mohawk, Go-Won-Go clippings folder, BRTD). 99. This work is ongoing, in collaboration with Monique Mojica and Michelle St. John and with the permission of the Trustees of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum. 100. For household information, see Charles, Mohawk, Hackney, Simms, and Godfried Kohler in same Edgewater household, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910 (A); also “Educated Indian,” Wichita Beacon, September 12, 1898 (N). 101. Hall notes, “this touching scene between two native performers was certainly a first for the American stage” (Performing, 158). 102. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 38. 103. “Third Avenue Theatre,” New York Clipper, January 24, 1903 (IDNC). 104. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 66. 105. J. O. Brant Sero, “Says England Is Tiring of the Stage Indian,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1913 (N). 106. Mohawk and Charles, Wep-Ton-No-Mah, 3. 107. Fenton, “Aboriginally,” 187–88. 108. Hauptman, Coming, 99, 108–9, 111. 109. Ibid., 103. 110. Fenton, “Aboriginally,” 181, 182. 111. Hauptman, Coming, 103, 130. 112. Cornplanter was with Mohawk’s show from at least August 21 to December 26, 1900: see Correspondence from Edward Cornplanter to Mrs. Harriet Maxwell Converse, August 21, August 25, September 6, October 8, November 30, December 26, 1900 (Collection 9184, Box 1, Folder C8.3, JKIP). 113. Orrin Jones to Mrs Harriet Maxwell Converse January 5, 1901, Box 2 Folder J8.6, JKIP. 114. Series 1: Frank Kenjockety “Chief Strong Fox Collection,” FJLBN. 115. Brant Sero, “Says England.” 116. “Believes that Indian Race Descended from the Jewish,” Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, July 15, 1914 (N). 117. “An Indian Actress in England (By Our Special Commissioner).” 118. “A Pretty Indian Actress”; also in “An Indian Actress,” Lincoln (Neb.) Star, September 20, 1908 (N). 119. “Indian Movie Maid May Attend Fair,” Buffalo Enquirer, September 10, 1919 (N). 120. Burich, Thomas, 21. 121. Hauptman, Coming, 26. 122. Ibid., 28, 11, 75, 77. 123. Ibid., 84. 124. P. Deloria, Playing, 66, 67. 125. Leonard, Historical, 112 (IGS). 126. “Red Men’s Outing,” Buffalo Courier, July 23, 1899 (N).

n o t es t o p ag es 1 1 7–1 23  305 127. “Red Men at Gowanda,” Buffalo Evening News, July 22, 1899 (N). Sometimes the spelling was “Go-wango-Mohawk” (“Gowanda News,” Buffalo Commercial, July 1, 1899 [N]). 128. “Red Men Now Own Gowanda,” Buffalo Times, July 23, 1899 (N); “Red Men at Gowanda,” Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express, July 23, 1899 (N). 129. “Red Men Now Own Gowanda.” 130. Hauptman, Coming, 108–11, 86. 131. “Red Men at Gowanda”; “Gowanda News,” Buffalo Commercial, July 24, 1899 (N); “Red Men to Gather on Gowanda Reservation,” Buffalo Courier, July 16, 1899 (N); “Indians Swoop Down on Gowanda,” Buffalo Sunday Morning News, July 23, 1899 (N); “Red Men’s Outing,” Buffalo Courier, July 23, 1899 (N). 132. “Red Men at Gowanda”; “Red Men’s Outing.” 133. Untitled, Tyrone (Pa.) Daily Herald, January 24, 1891 (N). 134. Untitled, Greensburg (Ind.) Standard, November 6, 1891 (NA). 135. I thank David Lintz, director, Red Men Museum and Library, Waco, Texas, for this information. 136. “Before the Footlights,” London (Ontario) Advertiser, November 30, 1892 (CO); “Wep-Ton-No-Mah,” Fort Wayne News, February 16, 1910 (N); “Go-Won-Go Mohawk,” New York Clipper, September 18 1897 (IDNC); “Go-Won-Go-Mohawk Tribe,” Hackensack (N.J.) Record, October 31, 1908 (N); “Improved Order of Red Men,” Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, February 12, 1892 (N). 137. Quoted in Hauptman, Coming, 190. 138. For example, Advertisement, Sweeney & Coombs’ Opera House, Houston Daily Post, February 11, 1900, texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth83222/m1/16/ zoom/?q=Houston%20Daily%20Post,%20February%2011,%201900&resolution =2&lat=5662&lon=1675 (PTH). 139. Thrush, Indigenous, 23. 140. Ingraham, Go-Won-Go, 19. 141. “Amusements,” Akron (Ohio) Daily Democrat, March 5, 1901 (N); “A Pretty Indian Actress.” 2n d vau d evil l e n um be r 1. This reconstruction draws on the following: “At the Capitol,” Daily (Davenport, Iowa) Times, Aug 26, 1927 (N); Murray Advertisement, Palladium-Item (Richmond, Ind.), November 4, 1927 (N); Wiggins, “Indian,” 29; “Princess Watawaso Holds Feature Position on Strand Bill First Half,” Lansing (Mich.) State Journal, August 26, 1927 (N); “Indian Princess Is Coming to Entertain Keith Theatre Patrons,” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, July 24, 1927 (N). 2. Variant press spellings include Wa-Tah-Wa-So, Wah-Ta-Waso, Watahwaso, Watawahso, Watawaso, Wattawasso, Watawasco, Watawasa, Watowaso. At other times, the troupe was called Princess Watawaso & Co. 3. Although I initiated correspondence with the tribal historian of the Penobscot Nation about protocols for applying to undertake research, pandemic conditions ultimately prevented the pursuit of this path. This “Vaudeville Number” draws only

30 6     n o t es to pa g e s 1 2 3 – 1 2 9 on published sources, as many as possible by or endorsed by members of the Penobscot Nation. I am especially indebted to Bunny McBride’s biographies of Lucy Nicolar Poolaw (“Lucy”; Princess). 4. Penobscot Nation website. 5. McBride, Princess, 5–7. 6. “City Items,” Old Town (Maine) Enterprise, March 5, 1892, DAOT; McBride, Princess, 10. 7. Carroll, “To Remove,” 103. 8. Nicolar, Life, x; Carroll, “To Remove,” 109. 9. Nicolar, Life, 95. 10. Ibid., 96. 11. Ibid., 100. 12. McBride, Princess, 8, 11. 13. Quoted in Wiggins, “Indian,” 29. 14. McBride, Princess, 13; “Society and Entertainments,” Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1915 (N). 15. McBride, Princess, 19; Wiggins, “Indian,” 29. 16. McBride, Princess, 19. 17. McBride, Princess, 16; Wiggins, “Indian,” 29. 18. “The Indian Princess Watahwaso, Who Is Coming Here on the Big Redpath Chautauqua,” Fairmount (Ind.) News, July 9, 1917 (N); “Musical Nook,” Streator (Ill.) Times, February 5, 1916 (N). See Lush, “All American,” on the prominence of white Indianists in Chautauqua. 19. “The Stage,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 3, 1927 (N). 20. “Indian Princess to Give Europe Taste of American Folk Songs,” Munster (Ind.) Times, April 28, 1927 (N). 21. Wiggins, “Indian,” 29; “The Stage,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 22. Weaver, “Ethnic,” 30. Rose Marie opened at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, September 2, 1924, and closed January 16, 1926, after 557 performances. It ran even longer in London and Paris. (See Bordman, American, 440–41; Dietz, Complete, 216–18; Hischak, “Rose-Marie.”) 23. See also Weaver, Other, 91–116. 24. Harbach and Hammerstein, Rose Marie, 36–38. 25. Ibid., 24–25. 26. Weaver, “Ethnic,” 30. For a musical analysis of “Indian Love Call,” see Pisani, Imagining, 277–82. 27. “Princess Watawaso Holds Feature Position on Strand Bill First Half,” Lansing (Mich.) State Journal, August 26, 1927 (N); “B. F. Keith’s Temple—Vaudeville,” Detroit Free Press, August 15, 1927 (N). 28. “Charming Princess of Penobscot Tribe at Capitol Theater,” Hartford (Conn.) Courant, June 12, 1928 (N); “Amusing Bill at Imperial Theatre,” Montreal Gazette, October 29, 1928 (N). 29. L. E. Smith, Horace, 48, 52. For more on Lucy Nicolar Poolaw’s relationships with the Poolaw family, see L. Poolaw, “For a Love,” 32–35.

n o te s t o p ag es 1 29–1 38   307 30. On relationships between Poolaw’s photographs (including the one discussed here) and The Daughter of Dawn, see Jerman, “Acting,” 114–17. 31. L. E. Smith, Horace, 48. 32. Ibid., 93, photographs on 102, 92; see Strathman, Through a Native, for dating of postcards and comments on the vest (91–93). 33. L. E. Smith, Horace, 55. 34. Rickard “Sovereignty,” 54. 35. See Däwes, Native, 215–21. 36. Schneider, Explicit, 170. 37. I thank Jill Carter for permission to quote at length from her Ph.D. dissertation (J. L. Carter, “Repairing,” 181–83). 38. Spiderwoman, Sun, 450. 39. Ibid., 451. 40. Haugo, “Persistent,” 68. 41. Ibid., 452. 42. Examples include Monique Mojica, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991); Daniel David Moses (Delaware, from Six Nations of the Grand River), Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991); and LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) and Roxy Gordon (Choctaw), Indian Radio Days: An Evolving Bingo Experience (1993). 43. Spiderwoman, Sun, 439. 44. Ibid., 439. 45. See McBride, Princess, 21–34; “Princess Watahwaso’s Teepee,” Penobscot Nation website. chap t er 3 .   pr i n c e s s w h i te d e e r , h e r f a mil y, and h er sh o w b lan k e t 1. See Alfred, Heeding, 59; Reid, “Illegal.” 2. Personal conversation, Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center, Kahnawà:ke, April 5, 2018. Quoted with permission. 3. Reid discusses support for Diabo’s case from local entertainers along with ironworkers and other community members (“Illegal,” 73–74). The Jay Treaty, between “His Britannic Majesty and The United States of America” was signed November 19, 1794. Among its provisions for “Amity, Commerce, and Navigation,” article 3 acknowledged the continued right of Indigenous people on both sides of the border to live and work freely in the U.S. and to carry goods duty-free across the international border. 4. Among the many meanings made by this conjunction is the fact that the “headdress and beaded buckskin outfit . . . was made by women in Kahnawake to honor” Diabo (Reid, “Illegal,” 74). The ribbon shirt also carries complex combinations of continuity and change, Nation specificity and Indigenous commonality, ceremony and resistance. 5. Teiowí:sonte Deer is also a relative of Esther Deer and her family. 6. This phrase was quoted by Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) and credited by her to Audrey Shenandoah, Clan Mother, Onondaga Eel Clan, in an interview with Christine Bold, November 9, 2015. Quoted with permission.

30 8     n o t es to pa ge s 1 3 8 – 1 43 7. For the term “brokers,” see Alfred, Heeding (22, 33), and Blanchard, Kahnawake (7). 8. A. Simpson, Mohawk, 2. 9. Alfred, Heeding, 3. 10. Blanchard, “For Your,” 99; Beauvais, Kahnawake, 138; McNenly, Native, 124–25. 11. For example, at the Prince of Wales’s visit in 1860, Mohawk performances were repeatedly represented as spectacles producing “mixed messages” of “admiration and disparagement, fascination and revulsion” (Radforth, Royal, 219, 232). 12. Esther White Deer, “An Explanation of the Wampum Belt” (Contents of Black Duotang, PWDC); Galperin, In Search, 22. 13. Esther White Deer, “An Explanation of the Wampum Belt.” I am particularly indebted to the scholarship of Patricia O. Galperin, who worked closely with Esther Deer’s niece, Sylvia Karonhiahawi Goodleaf Trudeau, in writing her biography. 14. Donaldson, Indians, 32; Galperin, In Search, 30. 15. Esther White Deer, “An Explanation of the Wampum Belt.” 16. Certificate of Registration of an American Ward, June 5, 1913, Hamburg, Germany (A); Galperin, In Search, 34. 17. Esther Deer’s notes in Family Records (PWDC). 18. Benn, Mohawks, 203. 19. Weaver points to the subtitle of Jackson’s volume—A Narrative of what was seen and accomplished by the Contingent of North American Indian Voyageurs who led the British Boat Expedition for the Relief of Khartoum up the Cataracts of the Nile—as “both descriptive of content and a clever rhetorical device to establish not just the importance of the Mohawks to the campaign but also their primacy” (Red, 107); see also Flint, Transatlantic, 275–76. 20. J. D. Deer, Canadian, 3 (MLMC). 21. J. D. Deer, Canadian, 4; Benn, Mohawks, 247n1. 22. J. D. Deer, Canadian, 28. 23. Ibid., 28–29. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Ibid., 11. 26. Ibid., 12. 27. Ibid., 15. 28. Benn, Mohawks, 164. 29. Jackson, Our Caughnawagas, 34 (MLMC). 30. J. D. Deer, Canadian, 30. 31. Horn, “Canada.” 32. Weaver, Red, 86. 33. Jackson’s was a more substantial, illustrated publication by Montreal’s prominent W. Drysdale & Co. 34. J. D. Deer, Canadian, 11. 35. Ibid., 12. 36. Ibid., 20–23. 37. Undated Memorandum from Eric Palmer (Chief James Deer, PWDC). I have not seen a finished manuscript, but what seem to be James Deer’s handwritten notes on shooting the Lachine rapids and the Nile are in Letters and Notes, PWDC.

n o te s t o p ag es 1 4 4 –1 5 0  309 38. Benn, Mohawks, 185. 39. Lily Deer seems to be either his daughter Lydia or the wife of John Deer (see New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 for J John Deer [A] and New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 for Lilly Deer [A]). Esther Deer seems to carry the same Mohawk name as her aunt Lily. 40. For these details of dress, see Gabor, Costume, 18, 35 (KORLCC). 41. In 1880, Georgette Osborne, age 9, debuted as Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, with Fred R. Wren’s Dramatic Company (Galperin, In Search, 41–42); by 1881, she was performing Eva in the same production (“The Theatre Royal,” Montreal Gazette, December 6, 1881 [N]). 42. “A Crowded Theatre,” Altoona (Pa.) Times, October 19, 1888 (N). 43. Galperin, In Search, 43–44. 44. See photograph in Galperin, In Search, 48. 45. “Heuck’s This Afternoon,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 25, 1895 (N); “Heuck’s,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 18, 1895 (N). McNenly, Native, quotes Sylvia Trudeau detailing, and marveling at, Georgette’s riding skills (128). 46. “Theatrical,” Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star, August 31, 1918 (N); “Indian Princess to visit Ambulance Camp,” Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, August 18, 1917 (N). 47. LOC Copyright Office, Record Book, Vol. 17, August 17, 1892, November 28, 1892; LOC Copyright Office, Dramatic Compositions, Vol. 1, 1069. 48. “The Famous Deer Brothers Champion Indian Trick Riders of the World” (Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). 49. On The Midway, white entrepreneur Frederick T. Cummins ran a massive Indian Congress of “42 Tribes, 700 Indians,” accomplishing “that which a few years hence will be impossible of achievement, owing to the fact that the Indians are fast disappearing and will soon be a memory” (Cummins, “Historical,” 1). The Six Nations Village was designed by a white military man, Captain R. E. Lawton, who selected “pagan Indians”—Oneida and Seneca—to “live just as they did in the olden days, when the red men ruled the continent” (“Indians to Build Their Village,” Buffalo Courier, January 15, 1901 [N]). 50. Carter, “Negotiating,” 6. 51. Beauvais, Kahnawake, 136. On the gus-to-weh, see Gabor, Costume, 6. 52. Esther Deer wrote, “Father had made all our costumes by hand they were beautiful” (Letters and Notes, PWDC). See also “The Indian Women of New York,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, April 18, 1909 (N). Nicks and Phillips report Sylvia Trudeau remembering “a Western Indian named Sheet Lightning visiting Esther and her mother in New York to measure them for clothing” (“From Wigwam,” 158). 53. Robinson, “Welcoming,” 5. 54. I owe this reading to Vernon Goodleaf, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke (personal conversation, 2 December 2018, acknowledged with permission). 55. Robinson, “Welcoming,” 5. 56. Ibid., 16. 57. See, for example, Blackstone, Buckskins; P. Deloria, Indians; V. Deloria, “Indians”; McNenly, Native; Moses, Wild; Standing Bear, My People. 58. Mayer and Mayer, “Secondary,” 222.

310     n o t es to pa ge s 1 50 – 1 54 59. Esther White Deer, “An Explanation of the Wampum Belt.” 60. “Indians in Town,” Boston Globe, November 2, 1896 (N). 61. The 1896 and 1897 versions of the script are in BRTD. 62. Monique Mojica, interview with Christine Bold, April 15, 2017. Quoted with permission. 63. Galperin, In Search, 55; Bold, “Early,” 229–31. 64. “Texas Jack’s Great Combined Show,” clipping, Diamond Fields Advertiser, July 4, 1904 (Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). 65. Green, “Tribe,” 33; Thrush, Indigenous, 10. 66. “East London, Dec. 15, 1903,” The Era, January 23, 1904 (BNA); “Redskins on the War Path,” Cape Argus, undated clipping (Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). I assume James Deer is Arakentiake, “Cutting the Forest”; George Deer is Anatakeros, “Destroyer of the Villages”; Georgette is Ethjackalni, “Wild Rose”; Esther is “Little Deer”; and Phillip Big Tree is Tehakarerens, “Split Bark.” Rateriios, “War Eagle,” could be Black Eagle and Atsientanone, “Wounded Buffalo,” could be Jake Paul. 67. “Texas Jack’s Circus,” unidentified clipping (Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). 68. “East London, Dec. 15, 1903”; “Texas Jack’s Circus.” 69. “Texas Jack’s Great Combined Show.” 70. O’Brien, Firsting, xxi. 71. Their performance at the Aberdeen Palace, March 1905, was praised as “a capital show of the Buffalo Bill order” (“A Capital Show,” Entr’Acte, March 25, 1905 [BNA]). Newspapers in Dortmund, Germany, billed them as “Orig. Indianer-Truppe ‘Deer’ à la Buffalo Bills Wild-West” (Walhalla advertisement, November 1, 1905 [DB]) and as “Der letzte vom Stamme der ‘Mohawks’ ” (Walhalla advertisement, November 3, 1905 [DB]). 72. Undated Memorandum from Eric Palmer; Walter L. Main, “To whom it may concern,” May 18, 1938 (Chief James Deer, PWDC). 73. Neiman was an officer of the Terriers’ Association, which resisted “the expansion of ever mightier and more powerful managerial combines” of the late nineteenth century (Nicoll, English 36–37); Classified Ad, The Era, January 28, 1905, and February 11, 1905 (BNA). 74. Alhambra Theatre of Varieties, Grove Street, Edinburgh, April 20, 1908; see Galperin, In Search, 63–64. 75. The final quotation concerns their appearance at the Royal Hippodrome in Salford (“Royal Hippodrome,” The Era, May 25, 1907 [BNA]). Other examples include “they produced the sensational performance, ‘Indians of the Past’ ” at the Hull Hippodrome (“Indians at the Hippodrome,” Hull Daily Mail, December 5, 1905 [BNA]); and “the Deer Family presented a most interesting sketch, Indians of the Past” at the Liverpool Tivoli (“Tivoli,” The Era, Oct 26, 1907 [BNA]). “Indians of the Past” seems to have been the Deers’ refinement of their sketch first publicized by Texas Jack as “The Discovery of the Spy” and “Bigfoot Wallace,” titles that emphasize white American heroism. 76. On contemporary Indigenous artists’ responses to Catlin, see McMaster, “Double Entendre.”

n o tes t o p ag es 1 5 4 –1 5 7  31 1 77. As on the playbill, Alhambra Theatre of Varieties in Edinburgh in 1908 (Programs & Playbills, PWDC), and in Galperin, In Search, 63–64. 78. See, e.g., coverage in London: “A novel feature of the evening’s entertainment is provided by the Deer Family of Real North American Indians, who, in the short space of a quarter of an hour or so, contrive to present a very vivid and exciting little picture of various episodes connected with the wild American frontier life of the past. Their entertainment, interlarded, as it is, with clever songs and dances, should prove an acceptable item in the best of programmes” (“The Standard, Pimlico,” The Stage, January 19, 1905 [BNA]). 79. “The Palace,” Northern Whig, December 10, 1907 (BNA); “The ‘Empire,’ ” Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, January 1, 1906 (BNA); “Variorum,” Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, April 22, 1905 (BNA). 80. Their first appearance seems to have come on the heels of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’s second German tour in 1906, which included a stop in Dresden. 81. Lutz, “German”; see also Penny, Kindred; Sieg, Ethnic; and essays on German and European contexts in Calloway et al., Germans; Feest, Indians; Fitz, Visual. 82. Penny, Kindred, 57. For a comparison between display and “exotic performance,” see Balme, “New Compatriots.” 83. Kreis documents May seeing the Deer family in Dresden (“German Postcard,” 88; “Indians,” 198; “Prinzessin,” 20–22). A great deal of Indianer activity in and around Dresden in 1910 included the founding of Club Manitou in Radebeul, according to King (Inconvenient, 74) and Weaver (Other, 84). 84. For example, a group of Indians was displayed in Dresden Zoo in 1879 (Kreis, “Indians,” 200). 85. “Grosse Indianer-Schauspiele aus dem Wilden Westen Nordamerikas in Szene gesetzt von *Paul Schultze, Direktor und Unternehmer,” undated program (Foreign Language Text, PWDC). 86. Penny, Kindred, 131; Kreis, “Blasmusik,” 147, 151–52. 87. “Zoological Gardens, Dresden. January 10th and 13th [1910] at 8 p.m., January 15th at 3 and 8pm,” unidentified clipping, Programs & Playbills, PWDC. 88. “The first Indian performance . . .,” unidentified clipping, [January] 13, 1910, Newspaper Clippings, PWDC—possibly the Daily Record, published in Dresden 1906–10 and the only English-language daily newspaper in Germany (see Zimmerli, “Elite,” 133). 89. “Wir sehen, wie die Indianer ihre Toten begraben, wir erleben eine Skalpierungsszene . . .” [We see how the Indians bury their dead, we experience a scalping scene . . .] (“Echte Indianer auf einer Saalbühne,” unidentified clipping, Foreign Language Text, PWDC); see also Däwes, Native, 52–53. 90. “The first Indian performance . . .,” unidentified clipping, [January] 13, 1910. 91. “Echte Indianer auf einer Saalbühne,” unidentified clipping. 92. Lutz has characterized Indianthusiasm as anti-modernist (“German,” 169). 93. P. Deloria, Indians, 14. 94. This is another example of brokerage under pressure. The Deers made their own arrangements and carried their own papers country by country. In contrast, Will Rogers traveled on a U.S. passport; on the other hand, Oglala Lakota performers

312     n o t es to pa g e s 1 57 – 1 6 3 with Sarrasani in Germany were dependent in their overseas travel on a “guardian” from the 101 Ranch and treated humiliatingly at European borders (Fields, “Circuits,” 455–58). 95. Quoted in Weaver, Red, 108. 96. The term “enfreakment” was originated by Hevey, Creatures. On the word “novelty” in the publicity and reception of Russell Hill’s Indian Band, see Kreis “Blasmusik,” 148. The shorthand in Germany was the constant exclamationpointed “echte Indianer!” [real Indians]; Kreis writes: “Was bot die Kapelle in Europa? Zunächst einmal: ‘echte Indianer’!” [What did the band offer Europe? Above all: “real Indians”!] (“Blasmusik,” 152). 97. “Zoological Gardens, Dresden. January 10th and 13th [1910] at 8 p.m., January 15th at 3 and 8pm”; Marinetti, “Variety,” 126. 98. Francis, Imaginary, 59. 99. “Angelo Circus Indian to Wed Mme. Atalide,” Wichita Beacon, April 15, 1910 (N). 100. U.S., Index to Alien Arrivals at Canadian Atlantic and Pacific Seaports, 1904–1944 for Georgetta White-Deer (A), Canadian Passenger Lists, 1865–1935 for Georgette White-deer (A). 101. Paul Coze, “L’aigle à l’aile brisée,” unidentified and undated clipping, Foreign Language Text, PWDC. 102. See, e.g., the caption on a press photograph of Esther Deer’s Plains-style headdress: “the latest headgear invented by Nespa Hampa, ‘the Sioux mystery’ ” (“Mohawk Actress a Hit in Europe,” Los Angeles Sunday Times, December 28, 1913 [N]). Hampa Naspa was a Lakota performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (see Moses, Wild, 66–68). 103. Kapoun, Language, 73–129. 104. Standing Bear, Land, 79; Rebecca Belmore, “The Blanket” (2010), vimeo. com/19913747. See also issue 1, Going Places: The Realities of Being Native American, a zine by Diné artist and author Kesheena on multiple dimensions of “The Pendleton Question.” 105. P. Deloria, Indians, 28, 30. 106. Kapoun, Language, 77. 107. Galperin says that Lauder at some point became Esther Deer’s manager (In Search, 65). 108. See, e.g., unidentified program November 1912 and Program, “APOLLO” Variety Theatre, Ekaterinoslav, December 12, 1912 (Foreign Language Text, PWDC). In addition to programs in PWDC, I traced Princess White Deer’s solo tour through advertisements and address lists in issues of Das Programm 1913–14 (SSB), and Galperin, In Search. For translation from Cyrillic, I thank Evgenia Timoshenkova. 109. Advertisement, Princess White Deer, Das Programm November 23, 1913 (SSB). 110. See J. O. Brant Sero, “Says England,” and “Mohawk Actress a Hit in Europe,” Los Angeles Sunday Times, Dec 28, 1913 [N]. 111. On verso of photograph of George Deer from Dresden, Esther Deer wrote “June 4th 1884–1913//My dear uncle George Passed April 7th 1913 in Hamburg Germany Ever lovingly[?] Remembered” (Personal Collections, PWDC). 112. See Galperin, In Search, 74–81.

n o tes t o p ag es 1 63–1 68   31 3 113. Verso of photograph in Showbiz and Glamor Photos, PWDC. “Princess White Deer Is Countess Krasksiska, Wife of Russian Nobleman,” Buffalo Times, October 14, 1915 (N). 114. After Esther Deer returned to the United States, numerous newspaper stories covered her career: combining the materials in PWDC and newspaper databases, I read more than two hundred pieces. 115. North American publicity played on Esther Deer’s European and Russian successes and her performances before royalty. 116. “Indian Princess White Deer,” Buffalo Times, December 4, 1919 (N). 117. “Princess White Deer and Her Indians at Lyric,” Richmond (Va.) Times Dispatch, December 9, 1917 (N). See, e.g., Poli’s advertisement, Bridgeport (Conn.) Times and Evening Farmer, August 6, 1917 (N); “Indian Princess to Visit Ambulance Camp,” Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, August 18, 1917 (N); “Princess White Deer and Co. (3),” Variety, September 7, 1917 (IA); “ ‘Mind Your Own Business’ Orpheum’s Feature Act,” Allentown (Pa.) Democrat, August 18, 1917 (N). 118. See Galperin, In Search, 86, 87; “Princess White Deer and Co. (3).” 119. Advertisement, Towers, Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, March 22, 1919 (N). 120. “Princess White Deer and Co. (3).” 121. “Patsy” Smith, “Among the Women,” Variety, September 7, 1917 (IA). 122. H.G., “Princess White Deer,” New York Clipper, September 12, 1917 (IA). 123. H.G., “Harlem Opera House (Last Half),” New York Clipper, September 19, 1917 (IA). 124. See, e.g., society names attending Ziegfeld’s Nine O’Clock Frolic: “ ‘Midnight Frolic,’ Like Earlier One, Runs to Athletics: Well Known Persons in First Night Audience on New Amsterdam Roof,” New York Herald, February 10, 1921 (N). 125. In early August 1919, Princess White Deer was listed as one of “the women in the company”: “[She] is a genuine Iroquois and will be assisted by a ballet of redskin maidens fresh from the reservation, it is said” (“Attractions at the Theatres,” Boston Globe, August 3, 1919 [N]). Os-Ko-Mon and Eagle Horse were also engaged for Hitchy-Koo, 1919 but not, as I understand it, as Esther Deer’s partners (“Raymond Hitchcock Presents Hitchy-Koo, 1919, at the Liberty,” New-York Tribune, October 7, 1919 [N]; “ ‘Hitchy-Koo 1919’ at the Colonial,” Boston Globe, August 26, 1919 [N].) 126. “ ‘Hitchy Koo, 1919’ Joy Kaleidoscope,” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, January 2, 1920 (N). 127. “ ‘Hitchy-Koo 1919’ at the Colonial,” Boston Globe, August 26, 1919 (N). 128. See Philip Deloria’s thesis about “Natural Indians and Identities of Modernity” (Playing, 95–127). 129. “ ‘Hitchy-Koo 1919’ at the Colonial.” 130. “Hitchcock’s ‘Hitchy-Koo,’ ” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 7, 1919 (N); “ ‘Hitchy Koo, 1919’ Joy Kaleidoscope.” 131. Anderson, Recognition, 81–82, 87. See also, among many Indigenous women’s trenchant critiques, Acoose, Iskwewak; Bird, “Savage”; Green, “Pocahontas”; Mithlo, Our Indian; Mojica, Princess. 132. “Real Indian Ballet,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, November 24, 1919 (N).

314     n o t es to pa ge s 1 6 8– 1 7 2 133. See Galperin, In Search, 109; the New York Tribune, among others, reported Princess White Deer bringing from Caughnawaga “two full-blooded Indian maidens to appear with her. The names of the recruits are Miss Bauveis [sic] and Miss Sky [sic]” (“Plays and Players,” July 21, 1919 [N]). Two additional dancers are named as Bluebird and Chasing Rainbow (“Indians Are Shown,” New York Herald, October 7, 1919 [N]). Beauvais lists several performers from the Skye and Beauvais families (Kahnawake, 141–46). 134. “Real Indian Ballet”; “The Call Boy’s Seashore Chat,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 24, 1919 (N). 135. For example: “One of the real novelties is an Indian ballet, led by a genuine Indian maiden, Princess White Deer. Her father, Running Deer, is proprietor of a hotel on the St. Regis reservation, near Malone, N.Y. She has played in Europe, but this is her first appearance in musical comedy” (“Apropos the Theater in Indianapolis,” Indianapolis Star, December 21, 1919 [N]). 136. Galperin, In Search, 92. 137. For various combinations of these performers, see Ziegfeld Follies programs 1910–1930 in FZC. See also Ommen van der Merwe, Ziegfeld, and, for relevant developments on Broadway, Hoffman, Great. 138. The publicity covering her dances in Lucky used a different spelling—“Kentro-kwi-osta”—and includes a photograph in a skimpy mash-up that seems to signal South Asian as much as Native American (unidentified clipping, May 3, 1927, Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). 139. “Would Stop Magazine,” Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express, March 6, 1921 (N); “Making White Scarlet,” Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, March 12, 1921 (N). 140. Program, Ziegfeld Nine O’Clock Frolic, week beginning February 21, 1921 (Programs & Playbills, PWDC). 141. Sonita Sarker, “Zitkála Šá and Grazia Deledda: Hybrid. Indigenous. Modernist,” Paper at the Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, October 19, 2019. 142. James Henle, “Indian Tomtoms Started Jazz on Its Syncopated Flurry,” Muskogee County Democrat, February 26, 1920 (N), among many other places. 143. Patterson, Rhythm, xix. 144. Ibid., 6, 86, 89, 7 (in this last quotation, Patterson quotes J. C. Fillmore). 145. Blackhawk and Wilner, Indigenous, x. 146. Wilner, “Transformation,” 4. 147. Boas watched Nuxalk dancers brought from Bella Coola by Carl Hagenbeck to Krolls Etablissement, Berlin, in 1885 and in 1893 met with George Hunt at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (Wilner, “Transformation,” 8–21; Ames, Carl, 45–46, 53, 56–57, 107–10). 148. For example, “In Vaudeville,” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, November 16, 1924 (N). 149. Evans, “ ‘Racial Cross-Dressing’ in the Jazz Age,” 409. 150. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 20, 26, 94. 151. Walter Kingsley, “Whence Comes Jass [sic]?” New York Sun, August 5, 1917 (N). 152. Amy Abbott, “Her Day of Work and Play,” Albuquerque Journal, May 16, 1927 (N).

n o t es t o p ag es 1 72–1 79  31 5 153. On Rinker, see Hamill, “American”; Advertisement, Charles Dillingham’s Lucky includes Princess White Deer and Paul Whiteman and his band (New York Daily News, March 20, 1927 [N]); “The Day Book of a New Yorker” (Akron [Ohio] Beacon Journal, July 12, 1927 [N]); Amy Abbott, “Her Day of Work and Play.” 154. Rogin, Blackface, 137–42, includes one photograph of the band in redface. 155. Among the many 1920s press notices for “Indian jazz bands” and “Indian jazz revues” are groups led by Joe Shunatona (Pawnee-Otoe), Howling Wolf (selfidentified as Coahuilla), Princess Watawahso (Penobscot Nation), and Princess Watura (Cherokee). See also Troutman, “Joe.” 156. On more recent Indigenous jazz collaborations, see Audrey Goodman, “Native/ Black Birds: Voicing the Ruptures of Modernity Through Indigenous Jazz Poetics,” Paper at the Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, October 18, 2019. 157. Nicks and Phillips, “From Wigwam,” 153–54, and Phillips and Nicks, “From Wigwam,” 166–68, read this performance differently than I do. 158. For a description of the revue, see Galperin, In Search, 97–98; “Princess White Deer (2),” Variety, January 21, 1925 (IA). Retroactively, “From Wigwam to White Lights” is described as having been “a sensational [success] at the Hippodrome and Eighty-first [Street] Theatre” in “Princess White Deer Suffers Breakdown [While] Preparing Big [Act],” Morning Telegraph, March 7, 1925 (Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). 159. “Princess White Deer Suffers Breakdown [While] Preparing Big [Act].” 160. For example, “Votes for Squaws, Slogan of Indian Princess, Dancer and Star of Broadway,” Pittsburgh Press, March 19, 1921 (N). 161. One entry in the “Princess White Deer (PWD) Chronology” records that in 1959 “John and Mitchell Deer perform in ‘The Nile Voyageurs’ ” (Newspaper Clippings, PWDC). 162. For coverage of this moment in Esther Deer’s career, see, for example, “Theatrical,” Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star, August 31, 1918 (N), and Galperin, In Search, 89. 163. Program in Programs & Playbills, PWDC. 3rd vau d evil l e n um be r 1. Title card, 7:34, The Iron Horse, directed by John Ford (Fox, 1924). 2. Title card, 10:30, The Iron Horse. 3. Advertisement, Loew’s, Nashville Tennessean, January 17, 1926 (N). This reconstruction is also based on “ ‘Iron Horse’ at Loew’s Is Great Historical Film,” Nashville Banner, January 17, 1926 (N); “ ‘Sheet Lightning’ Tells One,” Daily (Long Branch, N.J.) Record, May 21, 1926 (N). 4. On “cinematic space,” see Hansen, Babel, 25, 40–41; on moving beyond the screen to consider exhibition practices, see Musser, “Cinema.” 5. For the same reasons indicated in note 3 for the 2nd Vaudeville Number, this Number draws entirely on published sources, as many as possible by or endorsed by members of the Penobscot Nation. I am especially indebted to Bunny McBride’s

316     n o t es to pa g e s 1 7 9 – 1 87 biography, Molly Spotted Elk, for which she worked closely with members of the family and community. 6. Barber, “Skladanowsky”; Musser, “Cinema,” 159. 7. Gunning, “Cinema.” 8. Jenkins, What. 9. Griffiths, “Playing,” 100. 10. Alison Fields, “Circuits,” 463. 11. Hansen, Babel, 16. 12. Ibid., 37. 13. McBride, Molly, 32, 36. 14. Quoted in McBride, Molly, 40. 15. Advertisement, Universal, Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel, November 5, 1921 (N). 16. “Two Indian Canoeists Welcomed in Boston,” Boston Post, June 29, 1921 (N). For more historical coverage and photographs, see Biron, “Wabanaki.” 17. “Indians Dare Perils of Ocean in Canoe,” Boston Post, June 12, 1921 (N). 18. McBride, Molly, 69; “Sportsmen’s Show,” Buffalo Commercial, March 8, 1901 (N). 19. Senier, Dawnland, 268; McBride, Molly, 69. 20. See Senier, Dawnland, 268n6. 21. See, for example, “At the Orpheum,” Madison (Wisc.) Capital Times, October 20, 1923 (N). 22. Advertisement, New Jewel Theatre, Lowell (Mass.) Sun, June 23, 1922 (NA). 23. McBride, Molly, 69–70. 24. McCoy, Tim, 183. 25. Ibid., 183. 26. “Chief Clear Sky Attraction on Criterion Bill,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1925 (N). 27. “Indian Actor Makes Circuit by Automobile,” Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, January 23, 1927 (N); Norman, “Race,” 207–13; Rennard, “First”; Turtle Gals, Scrubbing, 337. 28. Hearne, Native, 268. See also Raheja on “films—particularly westerns and ethnographic films—that situate Native Americans in the nineteenth-century past with no viable future” (Reservation, 208). 29. “Aztec Theater, Soon to Open, Only One of Its Kind in U.S.,” San Antonio Express, May 23, 1926 (NA). 30. “Beautiful New Playhouse in Debut,” San Antonio Light, June 6, 1926 (NA). 31. “Aztec—‘The Last Frontier,’ ” San Antonio Express, Aug 23, 1926 (NA). 32. “Epic of West Holds Aztec Screen,” San Antonio Light, Aug 22, 1926 (NA). 33. “ ‘The Last Frontier’ on Screen at the Aztec,” San Antonio Express, Aug. 22, 1926 (NA). 34. Aztec Theatre, San Antonio website. 35. On ongoing adherence by Indigenous popular performers to the Ghost Dance religion, see Maddra, Hostiles?, 186–90. 36. “Epic of West Holds Aztec Screen.” 37. McBride, Molly, x. 38. Quoted in McBride, Molly, 77. 39. Senier, Dawnland, 223–26.

n o tes t o p ag es 1 8 8 –1 95   31 7 40. By March 1927, she was with Princess Wantura and Her Tribesmen; by July 31, 1927, the troupe was named Princess Watawaso and Her Royal Americans; by October 26, 1927, Princess Golden Rod (Penobscot Nation) had replaced Molly Spotted Elk. 41. The Flaming Frontier, directed by Edward Sedgwick (Universal Pictures, 1926). 42. Advertisement, Feeley Theatre, Standard-Sentinel (Pa.), March 12, 1927 (N). 43. Diary, January 31, 1927, quoted in McBride, Molly, 83. 44. Ibid., 203. 45. Rifkin goes beyond critiques of dominant history to examine “the principles, procedures, inclinations, and orientations, that constitute settler time as a particular way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality” (Beyond, viii). In one contrast relevant here, Rifkin discusses the “complex cross-temporal communications, impressions, and relations” at work in contemporary Indigenous authors’ invocations of the Ghost Dance (131). 46. Diary, April 25, 1930 (quoted in McBride, Molly, 136). 47. Diary, May 30, 1930 (quoted in McBride, Molly, 136). Working for Nils T. Granlund in what the press called a “girlie-girlie revue” may have brought further humiliation, with “N. T. G. acting as the auctioneer who sells his singers, dancers and accordionists to the audience” (“Earle Has ‘Miss Pacific Fleet,’ ” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 28, 1935 [N]). 48. See Morris, Shifting, 128–30. 49. Quoted in Besaw, “Re-Framing,” 159. 50. Monkman, “Tonto.” 51. Monkman, “Miss Chief,” 46–47; Monkman, “Tonto.” See also Hannon, “Pink”; Morris, Shifting, 134. 52. Monkman, Emergence. ch ap t er 4 .   h o w pr i n c e s s c h i n q ui l l a f o und h ers el f in mo n t an a 1. Ewen and Wollock, “Chinquilla, Mary.” 2. Lisa Vipola’s “choice to become Saami . . . mirrors that of the fraud Chinquilla who pretended to be Native American in the early 20th century . . .” (McGuinne, “Authentically”). 3. “Here’s Your Chance,” St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press/Gazette, October 16, 1885 (N). 4. “Eloquent Talk,” St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette-Herald, October 18, 1885 (N). 5. “Museum Notes,” Memphis (Tenn.) Public Ledger, December 28, 1885 (N); “Princess Chinquilla,” Pittsburgh Press, February 6, 1886 (N). 6. “Wanted—10,000 respectable young men to compete for the hand and fortune of Minnehaha, the Indian Princess, now exhibiting at Gregory’s Dime Museum” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 29, 1884 [N]). 7. Cole, St. Louis Birth Records, “C,” July 1, 1886 (which wrongly gives Mississippi as Eugene Cole’s birthplace) (AG). 8. For a description of each act, see “Indian Princess A Banjo Expert,” New York Sunday World, August 29, 1897 (NA); Newell, Chinquilla; Fantasio [Paré Edmond],

318     n o t es to pa ge s 1 9 5– 2 0 1 “Chronique,” Novembre 2, 1888, Chroniques Littéraires Publiées dans “L’Union Liberale” de Quebec en 1888 (Québec: Dussault & Prouls, 1899), 175 (CO). 9. “Northfield,” Northfield (Vt.) News, September 7, 1892 (N); “Retired Circus Trouper,” unidentified clipping (Long Island newspaper), circa 1943 (Wyles Mss 163, PCPC). 10. “Around Town,” Bar Harbor Record, July 31, 1901 (NA); “Northfield.” 11. Newell (Santasma), Town Hall, 22. 12. Ibid., 9, 10. 13. Ibid, 27. 14. Ibid., 30. 15. “Tit for Tat,” Minneapolis Journal, July 16, 1903 (N). 16. “Indian Princess a Banjo Expert.” 17. “Ninth and Arch Museum,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 5, 1897 (N). 18. “Amusements,” Richmond (Va.) Times, September 11, 1900 (NA). 19. Chinquilla, Old Indian’s Almanac, 16. Louis Mofsie, Hopi and Winnebago director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, remembers being taken as a child to social gatherings at Chinquilla’s place in Idlewild; this must have been toward the end of her life and in the years after her death, when Newell continued to host visitors (interview with Christine Bold, July 22, 2013). Cited with permission. 20. “Around Town,” Bar Harbor Record, July 17, 1901 (NA); Buffalo Bill, Letter introducing Princess Chinquilla, a performer, May 3, 1902 (ML). 21. As “soubrette and skirt dancer,” untitled, Bessemer (Mich.) Herald, August 20, 1898 (N); “skirt dancer and vocalist” untitled, Cresco (Iowa) Twice-A-Week Plain Dealer, December 9, 1898 (NA); “Sioux War Dance” New Theatre Advertisement, Baltimore Sun, April 12, 1914 (N). 22. “Chinquilla a Remarkable Indian,” Boston Globe April 13, 1903 (N). 23. “Offerings at the Local Playhouses,” Syracuse (N.Y.) Post-Standard, January 19, 1902 (NA). 24. “Princess Chinquilla,” Hamilton (Ontario) Evening Times, January 6, 1905 (CO). 25. Letter, Princess Chinquilla to Owen Wister, November 4, 1904 (Box 78, OWP). 26. “Amusements of the Week,” New York Times, October 23, 1904 (NA). 27. On January 29, 1912, Harry K. Cole wrote to Supt. M. Friedman: “I went to public school in the east before I went to the Carlisle school, but I did not learn very much, as the public school teachers do not understand the Indian, & being the only Indian in the school, I was subject to all kinds of torment, which will spoil the temper of any child of any nationality” (Harry Cole [Kysyplen] Student File, CISDRC). 28. D. B. Smith, Long, 15. 29. “The Season Opens,” Richmond (Va.) Dispatch, September 2, 1900 (N). 30. Untitled, The Arrow, May 11, 1905, 2 (CISDRC); “Retired Circus Trouper,” unidentified clipping, PCPC. 31. Zitkala-Ša, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux”; on Pratt’s response, see Katanski, Learning, 128. 32. “Penn Yan Chief of Police Appealed to by Anxious Indian Princess,” Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, January 15, 1902 (N). 33. “Chief’s Grandson Missing,” St. Louis Republic, Jun 15, 1902 (N). See also “Indian Princess Seeks Son,” New York Sun, November 10, 1901 (N); “Indian Princess

n o tes t o p ag es 201 –205   31 9 Mourns Lost Son,” Trenton (N.J.) Times, November 11, 1901 (NA); “Princess Seeks Missing Son,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 14, 1901 (N); “Indian Princess Seeks Her Son,” Boston Globe, November 19, 1901 (N). 34. Archie L. Clark, “The Theater in Butte: A Short History” (Ts, 1936, MHS), 1. Butte’s greatest theatrical expansion “occurred from about 1885, when the first permanent theatre was built, until about 1912” (Kershner, “Best,” 30). 35. Reisdorfer, “Stages,” 82; see also Wertheim and Bair, Papers, Vol. 2, 433. 36. See Kershner, “Best,” 29, 33, 34, 38. Butte’s first variety halls appeared in the early 1880s, morphed from box-houses to family variety in the 1890s, and then became established as vaudeville in 1904. See also Clark, “Theater,” 4; Roger DeBourg, “A History of Theater in Butte, Montana 1890–1910,” M.A. Thesis, Montana State University, 1963 (BSB); Little, Casino. 37. R. L. Polk & Co’s Butte City Directory for 1905 gives the population as approximately 70,000; for 1906, over 75,000; and for 1907, over 86,000. For “a multitude of theaters,” see Crain and Whitney, Butte, 7. 38. “Princess Chinquilla, Daughter of Lone Star, Chief of the Cheyennes, Now at the Grand Opera House,” Butte Evening News, March 15, 1905 (BSB). 39. “New Bill at the Grand,” Butte Evening News, March 13, 1905 (BSB). 40. Letter, January 29, 1912, Harry K. Cole to Supt. M. Friedman, Harry Cole (Kysyplen) Student File, Carlisle Indian School (CISDRC). 41. See, inter alia, “Butte Manager Is Married to an Indian Princess,” Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, April 27, 1905 (BSB); “Had No Idea of Being Married,” Ogden (Utah) Standard, April 27, 1905 (N); “Cut to the Quick,” Defiance (Ohio) Daily Crescent-News, May 10, 1905 (NA); “Weds Indian Princess,” Eau Claire (Wisc.) Leader, May 11, 1905 (NA); “Barbour-Chinquilla,” New York Dramatic Mirror, May 13, 1905 (FultonSearch); untitled, Wichita (Kans.) Daily Eagle, May 21, 1905 (N); “Two Love Romances Stranger than Fiction,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 2, 1905 (N). 42. The marriage certificate, issued in Ogden City, Weber County, State of Utah on April 25, 1905, was signed by John V. Bluth (identified as “a Mormon Elder” in “Real Life Romances that Rival Those of Fiction,” Washington Post [D.C.], July 2, 1905 [N]) and witnessed by Ed Newell (identified as Chinquilla’s “guardian” in “Real Life Romances”), whom she would later marry. 43. I thank Brian Cannon, Brenden W. Rensink, and Amy Carlin for raising this intriguing possibility in a 2018 conversation. 44. “Real Life Romances that Rival Those of Fiction”; “A Protegé of Buffalo Bill, Reno Nevada State Journal, May 3, 1905 (N). 45. “Two Love Romances Stranger than Fiction.” 46. Advertisement, His Majesty’s Theatre, Auckland (N.Z.) Observer, August 5, 1905 (PP); “The Curtis Novelty Company,” Wellington (N.Z.) Evening Post, August 23, 1905 (PP). On Curtis, see Erdman, “M. B. Curtis.” 47. “Carva Carva and Fijians,” Butte Miner, October 18, 1905 (N). 48. Imada, Aloha, 74; see also Troutman, Kīkā, 69. 49. Imada, Aloha, 101–2; Troutman, Kīkā, 76–88, 159.

32 0     n o t es to pa g e s 2 0 5– 2 0 8 50. See, e.g., Orpheum Theatre advertisement, Honolulu (T.H.) Evening Bulletin, June 21, 1905 (N); “At the Orpheum” and Orpheum Theatre advertisement, Honolulu Hawaiian Star, June 26, 1905 (eV). 51. “All Sorts of People,” Wellington (N.Z.) Free Lance, September 2, 1905 (PP). 52. “Carva Carva and Fijians.” 53. “Bead Money Tough Blow to Theater Man on Long Tour,” unidentified clipping (BSB); “From Fiji to Butte a Trail of Diamonds,” Anaconda Standard, October 18, 1905 (BSB); “ ‘Sam’l of Posen’ Again in Town,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 19, 1905 (N). 54. “Butte Manager Is Married to an Indian Princess.” 55. E. L. Barbour was Plaintiff in his divorce from Mary C. Barbour, date of judgment October 24, 1907, General Index Plaintiffs, Lewis and Clark County (Q.111 in Judgment Book) Clerk of Courts Office, Court House, Helena, Montana. 56. The earliest record of Harry Cole and Anna De Bride/Hastings’s “Indian songs and picturesque dances” I have seen is in the York (Pa.) Daily, December 13, 1910 (N); then Cole and Hastings, “Indian Scenes, Dances and Humorous Stories of the Plains” at the Family Theatre, Ottawa, Ontario (Ottawa Citizen, April 1, 1911 [N]); Cole and Hastings “have made an enviable reputation in vaudeville, starting at the bottom of the vaudeville ladder and by sheer force of merit working their way to the top, a task that is by no means easy. Their work is the best offered by any Indians to the amusement loving public,” Barre (Vt.) Daily Times, May 22, 1911 (N); “Son of Princess Weds Here,” Long Branch (N.J.) Daily Record, June 8, 1911 (N); Anna Debride in the New Jersey Marriage Index, 1901–1914 (A). 57. “News of Dramatic World,” Washington Times, February 8, 1914 (N); “Indians at the New,” Baltimore Sun, June 24, 1913 (N); “Gayety,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 3, 1914 (N). 58. In addition to the above, see “At the Nesbitt,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, February 2, 1912 (N). 59. “Overcoming Obstacles,” unidentified clipping, 1912; Record of Graduates and Returned Students for Harry K. Cole, February 27, 1912; Letter, Harry K. Cole to Supt. M. Friedman, January 29, 1912 (Harry K. Cole [Kysyplen] Student File, Carlisle Indian School, CISDRC). 60. Letter, March 6, 1912, Harry K. Cole to Supt. M. Friedman, Harry K. Cole (Kysyplen) Student File (CISDRC). 61. He died January 14, 1915, in Queens, N.Y.: Harry K. Cole, New York, New York City Municipal Deaths, 1795–1949 (FS); Harry K. Cole, New York, New York Index to Death Certificates, 1862–1948 (A). 62. Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 269; Anna Cole, New York, New York, Extracted Death Index, 1862–1948 (A). 63. “Music,” Akron (Ohio) Evening Times, November 21, 1918 (N). The press softened the poem’s title to “An Indian Wife’s Appeal.” 64. For more on Red Fox, see Willetts, King, 121–25. 65. “Club for Indians Opened,” New York Times, December 1, 1926 (PHN); “New York Indian Colony Now Has Its Own Club,” New York Times, February 6, 1927 (PHN). 66. For more on the NCAI, see Hafen, “Help,” and M. Taylor, “Writing,” 90–107.

n o te s t o p ag es 208 –21 2  321 67. Letter, G. S. Lackland to Rev. E. E. Higley, January 16, 1923 (GRB Box 2, Folder 17). There is voluminous correspondence in GRB between the Bonnins and others in New York City and Oklahoma about the identity of Chinquilla and Red Fox St. James. For published versions of this story, see Carpenter, “Detecting”; Vigil, Indigenous, 212–14. 68. On Bonnin’s experience of the pressures of expectation and representation, see Vigil, Indigenous, 199–209. On Sun Dance Opera, see Hafen, Dreams. 69. Letter, Gertrude Bonnin to Charlotte A. Jones, May 17, 1927 (GRB Box 3, Folder 17); see also Carpenter, “Detecting,” 148. 70. Letter, Gertrude Bonnin to Charlotte A. Jones, May 12, 1927 (GRB Box 3, Folder 17); see also Carpenter, “Detecting,” 139, 145. 71. Letter, Raymond Bonnin to Sam Bonnin, May 25, 1927 (GRB Box 3, Folder 17); Letter, Sam Bonnin to Raymond, Gertrude, and Ohiya Bonnin, June 20, 1927 (GRB Box 3, Folder 18); Letter, Sam Bonnin to Raymond Bonnin, March 15, 1926 (GRB Box 3, Folder 3); Handwritten note, unsigned, March 14, 1928, saying neither Eugene Fisher nor John Stands-in-Timber, Northern delegates to NCAI, recognizes Princess Chinquilla from her picture as Northern Cheyenne, while Fisher believes the picture is of “Lillian Sincere [St. Cyr] of Winnebago” (GRB Box 4, Folder 11). 72. Kehoe, Passion, 71. 73. Investigation Report of Indian Field Service, Field Reports by C. R. Thornbridge, of Wilhelmina K. Hohnsbeen, September 7, 1929 (24) and of unknown male, September 9, 1929 (31) (Central Classified File 1907–1939 Blackfeet Agency 150, RG75); Letter, Miss Chinquilla to Captain Thornbridge, Browning, Montana, September 25, 1929, on her relationship with Family, Montana (Central Classified File 1907–1939 Blackfeet Agency 150, RG75). 74. Chinquilla, Natives, n.pag. 75. “Indian Teacher, Taken by Whites When Baby, Seeks to Discover Her Identity,” Butte (Mont.) Standard, May 5, 1929 (N). 76. Letter, Mrs. Rodolphe Petter to [Dudley White], January 8, 1954, MSC. According to John Stands In Timber, Black Horse was Northern Cheyenne but traveled frequently to and from the Southern Cheyennes (Cheyenne, 199). 77. Chinquilla, Natives, title page. Ho′ėstáónó’e means Fire Stick (word or name), according to Cheyenne Dictionary, Dull Knife College, 2013–17, cdkc.edu/cheyennedictionary/lexicon/main.htm. 78. “Indian Teacher, Taken by Whites When Baby, Seeks to Discover Her Identity.” 79. Letter, Mari Sandoz to Dudley White, March 18, 1954 (MSC). 80. May, “Cantonment.” 81. White Shield, Rudolph, Second Interview, Legend & Story Form, Works Progress Administration (WPA), Indian-Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, 5 March 1938 (UODC). 82. Chinquilla, Natives, n.pag. 83. Letter, Mari Sandoz to Mr. [Dudley] White, February 13, 1954 (MSC). 84. Chinquilla, Natives, n.pag. 85. “A Speech by Red Jacket,” August 5, 1935 (NYHS). 86. “My Heart Would Plumb Break with Love,” unidentified clipping (PCPC).

32 2     n o t es to pa ge s 2 1 3 –2 1 7 87. “Retired Circus Trouper,” unidentified clipping (PCPC). 88. Letter, Mari Sandoz to Dudley White, March 18, 1954 (MSC). 89. Mary Star Chinquilla, Record of Marriage, November 5, 1910, New York, County Marriage Records, 1847–1849, 1907–1936 (A); White Shield, Rudolph; “Indian Princess a Banjo Expert.” 90. I thank Tonya Robinson for pointing me to this information. 91. Grinnell, Fighting, 278–79; Stands In Timber and Liberty, Cheyenne, 358–59. 92. The WPA interviewer associates the event with the Battle of Little Bighorn, but its details do not fit that identification; when Abraham Newell was asked about the connection, he chuckled that by 1876 Chinquilla was already on the road. 93. The cabinet card is reproduced in Three Ring Auction: The Collection of John & Jan Zweifel, Potter & Potter Auctions, July 23, 2016, 106; for her riding and high-wire acts, see “Indian Princess a Banjo Expert” and “Retired Circus Trouper.” 94. “Indian Princess a Banjo Expert.” 95. Chilocco Indian School Index (OHS, www.okhistory.org/research/chiloccosearch) shows Edgar Night [Knight] Killer/Flying Bear, born 1891, son of Night Killer and Duckey, attending Chilocco 1907–1910 (Rudolph White Shield, Cantonment, Okla., attended 1917–1922). The U.S. Indian Census Rolls 1885–1940 (A) include Night Killer (Da a ve na ha), born about 1861, and his wife, Duckey/Ducky Killer (Ha uk ne), born about 1862, both Tsetchestahase/Cheyenne, Cantonment Agency, in records fourteen times between 1895 and 1924; Flying Bear, their son, born about 1890, appears eight times between 1895 and 1916; their child Haygood Killer (Pa ve na ah ne), identified as both male and female, born February 25, 1898, appears twelve times between 1898 and 1916. 96. “The Indian Industrial School,” Arkansas City Weekly Traveler, January 23, 1884 (N); Lomawaima, They, 10. 97. “This school is to be conducted on the same plan as is the one at Carlisle, Pa., and is in every way equal to that institution” (“The Indian Industrial School”). 98. “The Chilocco School,” Wichita Eagle, July 10, 1885 (N). 99. Lomawaima, They, 94. 100. H. J. Minthorn, Chilocco Industrial School, July 15, 1885, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the year 1885 (Washington, D.C.: GPO., [1885]), 221–22. 101. E. DeK. Smith, “Reminiscences,” 61 (HTDL); Emma H. DeKnight, Diary, 1886–1892 (EHDK); Lomawaima, They, 23–24. 102. Lomawaima, They, 41. 103. “Museum,” Wichita Daily Eagle, October 1, 1887 (N); “Wichita Museum,” Wichita Daily Eagle, October 7, 1887 (N). 104. For example, “The Vanishing Race,” Oak Leaves (Oak Park, Ill.), February 1, 1930 (LOC). 4 t h v au d e v i l l e n um be r 1. “What Variety—World’s Best Stage Authority Says About U.S. Indian Reservation Band,” Scranton Republican, March 29, 1929 (N).

n o te s t o p ag es 21 7–224   323 2. “Indian Revue at Colonial,” Lancaster New Era, October 15, 1935 (N); “Famous Indian Band on Runnemede Stage,” Camden (N.J.) Morning Post, October 26, 1935 (N). At this stage, the troupe also included Blue Bird, “The Stage’s Greatest Indian Tenor”; Bernie Mohawk, “one of the outstanding versatile musicians of the Indian Race”; and “the Pawnee Indian Troupe of Dancing Girls” with their director, Arlene Lee. 3. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 34–36. 4. The American branch followed in 1885 at Harvard University; Luckhurst, Invention, 1–2, 51–59, 70–72. 5. Philip Jenkins discusses spiritualists’ and Theosophists’ use of Indians as spirits along with settler admiration for and appropriation of Indigenous belief systems during industrialization, urbanization, anomie, and world war (Dream, 136–37). 6. “Lolo, The Mystic, at Majestic,” Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette, November 20, 1909 (N); “Lolo Mystifies and Shoots Well,” Harrisburg (Pa.) Daily Independent, October 4, 1910 (N); “Temple Theater,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, May 7, 1911 (N); “At The Orpheum,” Des Moines Register, November 11, 1912 (N). 7. “Human Ouija Tells ‘Your Right Name,’ ” Tampa Tribune, November 8, 1921 (N). 8. “Many Queries for Princess,” Shreveport (La.) Times, October 4, 1924 (N). 9. Program, Ziegfeld Nine O’Clock Revue, Week beg. March 15, 1920, Container 1, FZC. Fannie Brice is No. 8, Princess Wahletka No. 10. 10. Advertisement, “The Amazing Princess Wahletka,” Nottingham (U.K.) Evening Post, June 2, 1925 (BNA). 11. “Finsbury Park Empire,” The Stage (London), July 7, 1921 (BL). 12. Eastman set designs for Princess Waletka [sic] are in Box 2, Eastman Design Collection. 1920–56, BRTD. 13. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 37. 14. Sieg, Ethnic, 3, apropos West German ethnic drag. 15. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 22; “Princess Wahletka, Indian Maiden, Tells Interviewer of Childhood,” Birmingham (Ala.) News, September 16, 1924 (N). 16. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 22. 17. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 22. This account might have drawn on Cherokee knowledge of their shared language and lands with peoples of the Iroquois League (see Justice, Our Fire, 52–53); however, the faux-autobiography’s tenor does not suggest this level of knowledge. 18. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 22–23, 25. 19. Ibid., 26. 20. Ibid., 23, 27. 21. Kibler, Rank, 168. 22. I thank Eric Colleary for this suggestion. 23. Sieg, Ethnic, 2. 24. See Ferris, “Introduction,” quoting Jill Dolan and Peggy Phelan (8–9); Phelan, “Crisscrossing,” 163–77. 25. P. Deloria, Playing, 6–7, 34–37. 26. For example, the book explains “What Dr. Hudson Thinks” compared to “What I Think” (Wahletka, Lifting [1923], 69–72).

32 4     n o t es to pa g e s 2 2 5– 2 2 8 27. Ibid., 142, 141, 83–84, 99–100. 28. This anticipates the technique adopted by Asa Carter fifty-odd years later in his fauxautobiography as a Cherokee orphan, The Education of Little Tree, which even more invasively pretended to intimate details of Cherokee family life to sell his vision of “the Way of the Cherokee” for the benefit of white folks. On Carter, see Huhndorf, Going, 129–61. 29. Flint, Transatlantic, 12, 24. 30. Thrush, Indigenous, 175, 177–84. 31. See Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain, University of Kent, research.kent.ac.uk/beyondthespectacle. 32. Slotkin, Gunfighter, 253–54; Glancy, Hollywood, 183–90. 33. Wahletka, Lifting (1925), 21. 34. Sieg, Ethnic, 85. 35. “Romance of a Seeress,” by Princess Wahletka, The Era (London), July 11, 1925 (BNA). 36. R. H. S., “The Palace,” The Guardian (London), July 19, 1921 (N). 37. L. B. Simpson, As We, 201–02. 38. I thank Rick Grassley, Genealogical Society of Monroe County, Michigan, for providing much of this information and pointing me to more. A selection of documents follows Loretta Navarre from birth to marriage: Lotty May Navarre, Female, white, born Monroe town, August 14, 1885, Return of Births in the County of Monroe, Secretary of State Michigan (GSMC); Loretta May Navarre, d.o.b. Aug 4, 1885, Monroe town, father Isadore G. Navarre, farmer; mother Margie Navarre, both born Michigan, Monroe County, Mich., Births, 7 May 1886 (GSMC); Marjorie O’Connor Navarre obituary, Monroe Evening News, March 16, 1905 (GSMC); Marjorie Navarre’s death certificate, March 13, 1905, signed by Loretta Navarre, Certificate of Death, State of Michigan (Seeking Michigan, michiganology.org/ uncategorized/IO_2da42146-5e40-4e7c-978e-0907836f0369). In 1904 Toledo City Directory, Loretta M. Navarre is Stenographer for Davis Bros. Co. (U.S. City Directories 1822–1995, A). On September 21, 1905, Loretta M. Navarre marries John H. Rhoads, clerk from Toledo, Monroe, Michigan Marriage Records, 1867–1952 (A). In 1907 Toledo City Directory, Loretta M. Rhoads is Bookkeeper and John H. Rhoads is Clerk, living at different residential addresses in Toledo (U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995 [A]). In the 1908 Toledo City Directory, only John H. Rhoads, clerk, appears (U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995 [A]). 39. Ignatius Gregory “Nig” Navarre is mentioned in “An Amateur Game,” Bartlesville (Okla.) Examiner-Enterprise, July 30, 1907; “Local News,” Bartlesville (Okla.) Enterprise, August 7, 1908 (N). Neal Navarre is mentioned in “Snap Shots at Home News,” Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, September 4, 1908 (N); Neal Navarre is listed as living in Bartlesville, a clerk in an oil company, in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census (A); Neal Navarre is listed as Office Boy for Barnsdall Office Co., in Bartlesville City Directory for 1910 (A). 40. Justice, Our Fire, 60, 91, 21. 41. Brown, Stoking, xi, 11.

n o tes t o p ag es 228 –231   325 42. Daniel Heath Justice, in personal conversation with the author, November 22, 2019. Cited with permission. 43. Among the Spybucks listed on the Dawes Final Rolls 1898–1914 are Minnie Spybuck, 18 yrs. old, Roll No. 31270, Cherokee by Blood, Card 10533, Note: Adopted Delaware, Daughter of Mary Spybuck (Delaware Card #100) and Henry Spybuck (Cherokee by Blood Card #4346); Henry Spybuck, 60 yrs. old, Roll No. 10410, Cherokee by Blood, Card 4346, Note: Adopted Shawnee; Married to Mary Spybuck listed on Delaware Card #100, Children listed on Cherokee by Blood Card #10533 (OHS, www.okhistory.org/research/dawes). 44. Wright, “Collinsville.” 45. “Full Bloods Hold Final Pow Wow,” Arkansas Democrat, October 14, 1907 (N). 46. “Various Field Notes,” Independence (Kans.) Daily Reporter, July 19, 1907 (N). 47. Rifkin, Beyond, 102. 48. “Restrictions Are Removed,” Muskogee (Okla.) Times Democrat, July 16, 1909 (N); “To Enable Osages to Sell Their Surplus Lands,” Vinita (Okla.) Weekly Chieftain, February 26, 1909 (N). 49. Brown, Stoking, 15–16. 50. “Ask for Divorce,” Pawhuska (Okla.) Capital, August 11, 1910 (N). 51. Ware reports: “Both Will and his father were regularly featured in local tribal newspapers, such as the Vinita Indian Chieftain and the Claremore Progress” (Cherokee, 44). 52. “Ordinance No. 386,” Bartlesville Morning Examiner, December 21, 1910 (N). 53. “Special Arrival of Madame Loretta,” Bartlesville Enterprise, October 18, 1907 (N). 54. Victor Rothstein (and eleven family members) in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census (A). 55. Bell, East Harlem, 12. 56. “Indian Princess Crashes Hubby’s Tepee for Divorce,” New York Daily News, June 21, 1931 (N). 57. Victor Royal marriage to Twilight Roads, May 15, 1912, Office of County Judge, Duval County, Florida, County Marriages, 1830–1957 (FS). 58. “Wah-Letka Indian Girl of Mystery Seen Today at the Alamo Theater,” Macon Telegraph, August 1, 1912 (MTA). 59. “Vaudeville at The Athens,” New Bern (N.C.) Daily Journal, August 9, 1912 (N); “Wah-letka, Indian Girl of Mystery,” New Bern (N.C.) Daily Journal, August 11, 1912 (N). 60. Sturm, Becoming, 5. 61. Ibid., 10–11. 62. In the 1930 U.S. Federal Census (A), Princess Royal Wahletka appears “Race: Native American,” “Birthplace: Oklahoma.” Traveling from Southampton, U.K., back to New York, she appears as Wahletka Royal, “American Indian,” Victor Royal as Russian, and Neal V. Royal as “U. S. Born, Actor [?] son[?]” on the List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for The United States, August 5, 1925 (A). “Wahletka” becomes her first name on all official documents I have seen from 1921 forward. 63. Thissen, “Film,” 42–56; see also Nahshon, “Entertaining.” 64. Slobin, Tenement, 62. I thank Richard Slotkin for pointing me toward this source. 65. Thissen, “Liquor,” 184–201.

32 6     n o t es to pa ge s 2 3 1 – 2 3 8 6. See Nina Warnke, “Immigrant,” 332. 6 67. Klapper, “Yiddish Music Hall,” republished in Nahshon, New York’s Yiddish Theater, 196. 68. Slobin, Tenement, 100. 69. “Ask All Sorts of Questions,” Altoona (Pa.) Tribune, September 13, 1920 (N). 70. Slobin, Tenement,108–15. 71. Antelyes, “Haim,” 16. 72. Rudolph Wahletka (and mother), Queens, N.Y., in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census (A). 73. Ibid., 16–17. 74. Isadore G. Navarre death April 3, 1894, Monroe Town, Michigan, Return of Deaths in the County of Monroe to the Secretary of State, Michigan (GSMC). 75. Wahletka, Lifting (1923), 168. 76. Victor A. Royal is listed under “Booking Agents,” 1933, at 1560 Broadway, Manhattan (U.S. City Directories 1822–1995 [A]). 77. Neal V Royal, born May 12, 1918, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (New York State, Birth Index, 1881–1942 [A]). After his mother married Edwin Buhler, Neal changed his surname to Buhler. By 1944, Neal V. Buhler is listed as an actors’ agent in L.A. (California, Voter Registrations, 1900–1969 [A]). 78. “Princess Wahletka, Indian Maiden, Tells Interviewer of Childhood.” 79. “Chief Sheet Lightning and Princess Wahletka Plan Nationwide Organization of Indian Tribes,” Munster (Ind.) Times, May 27, 1926 (N). 80. “Indian Seeress to Meet Women,” Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, February 2, 1928 (N); “Seeress Appears Garbed as Indian,” Brooklyn Times Union, September 5, 1930 (N). 81. “Mayor Rechristened,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 20, 1931 (N). 82. “Seeress to Answer Journal Readers,” Wilmington (Del.) Evening Journal, January 26, 1928 (N). 83. Quoted in Penny, Kindred, 10. 84. Troutman, “Joe,” 28. 85. Lapier and Beck, City, 136, 139, 154–58. See Troutman, Indian, on the impact of Indigenous popular music and creative expression on federal Indian policy. 86. Quoted in Lapier and Beck, City, 154–55. chap t er 5 .   c h e s te r d i e c k, “ w i n n e to u o n a b icycl e” 1. Sieg, Ethnic, 75; see also Weaver, Red, 249. 2. Jelavich, “Modernity,” 98. 3. For multiple European instances, see Feest, ed., Indians. 4. For example, Feest, “Germany’s,” 29. 5. Ames, “Seeing.” 6. For details of how Buffalo Bill’s Wild West impacted Germany, see Stetler, “Buffalo.” 7. Ames, Carl, 129–32; Ames, “Seeing,” 224–25. 8. Fields, “Circuits,” 455–58; Otte, “Sarrasani’s”; Penny, Kindred, 131–33. 9. Kreis, “German Wild West”; Lutz, “German,” 175–77; Penny, Kindred, 35; Usbeck, Fellow, 29–31.

n o te s t o p ag es 238 –24 7  327 10. Lutz, “German,” 167, 168; see also Lutz, Strzelczyk, and Watchman, eds., Indianthusiasm, 12–16. 11. Otte, Jewish, 136. 12. Jelavich, “Modernity,” 97, 98. 13. “What We Want!,” Das Programm No. 1 (1902), n.pag. (SSB). 14. “For Our English Readers,” Das Programm, April 4, 1926 (SSB); “On Leicester Square,” Das Programm, October 20, 1907 (SSB). 15. “For Our English Readers,” Das Programm, April 4, 1926 (SSB). 16. “A Professional Information Bureau,” Das Programm, January 8, 1911 (SSB). 17. “How the I.A.L. Was Founded,” Das Programm, April 2, 1911 (SSB). 18. Buchner, Variété. 19. Advertisement, “Neu für überall!,” Das Programm, November 23, 1913 (SSB). 20. Advertisement, Chester H. Dieck, Ausstellungs-Variété Reichenberg, Das Programm, July 8, 1906 (SSB). 21. Stuttgart, Friedrichsbautheater, Das Programm, November 4, 1906 (SSB). 22. Advertisement, Chester H. Dieck, Das Programm September 29, 1907 (SSB). 23. Advertisement, Chester Dieck, Das Programm, December 28, 1913 (SSB). 24. Front cover, Das Programm, October 27, 1912 (SSB). 25. Poul Bender-Pedersen, “Verdens højste betalte artist—bor I Valby” [The World’s Highest Paid Artiste—Lives in Valby], unidentified clipping, December 4, 1954 (SSB). Many thanks to Harry Lane for translations from Danish and Swedish. For exchange rate, see Das Programm, November 5, 1911 (SSB). 26. In 1906, Max Berol Konorah, representing the IAL, stated: “Neither do we accept as members artistes who receive less than 30 dollars weekly. There are no reputable places in Germany paying less than that figure” (“American Notes,” Das Programm, September 23, 1906 [SSB]); shifts in policy begin to appear in “Current Continental Comment,” Das Programm, April 6, 1913 (SSB). 27. Quoted in Otte, Jewish, 83. 28. “Perhaps it may be pointed out that with the intolerant prejudice held by many people in all countries against Jews, it is not even always advisable to retain for professional purposes a name, be it ever so honourable, that smacks of Hebrew origin” (“For Our English Readers,” Das Programm, January 8, 1928 [SSB]). 29. Otte, Jewish, 256. 30. Usbeck, Fellow, 4; Penny, Kindred, 141. 31. C. Taylor, “Indian.” 32. Scholars making the link between Indigenous performers and German hobbyists include Bolz, “Life”; Kreis, “Indians,” 201; Penny, Kindred, 145–46. 33. On post–World War II hobbyism, see Sieg, Ethnic. 34. Examples include Ruth Denis at Metropol-Varieté Berlin whose feather crown bore no obvious relationship to her body-revealing costume (advertisement, Das Programm, March 13, 1921 [SSB]); the comic Hiawatha Troupe at Berlin’s “AdmiralsPalast” (front cover, Das Programm, June 17, 1923 [SSB]); and the Harringtons—he in full cowboy gear, she in leg-revealing “Indian” dress—presenting “A Juggling Scene in an Indian Camp,” with an American flag, tipi, African-looking spear, and

32 8     n o t es to pa g e s 2 47 – 2 52 palm trees, at the Flora-Theater, Altona a. Elbe (advertisement, Das Programm, March 18, 1928 [SSB]). 35. American Show Coblenz, Programm vom 1. bis 15. März, Das Programm, March 6, 1921 (SSB). For more on Hailstorm’s background, see chapter 1, note 118. 36. Advertisement, “Cherokee-Häuptling,” Das Programm, April 10, 1921 (SSB). 37. Advertisement, “Der weltumreisende Cherokesenhäuptling,” Das Programm, August 21, 1921 (SSB). 38. Penny, Kindred, 135. 39. Sarrasani, Hannover 1927, Programm; Sarrasani’s Illustrierte, no. 579, 1930 (Sarrasani Collection, SSB). 40. Quoted in Sieg, Ethnic (128); see also Ames, Carl, 129; Penny, Kindred, 132. 41. Penny, Kindred, 135. 42. For publicity and photographs of Kenjockety’s troupes in North America, see FJLBN. 43. Full-page advertisement, Das Programm, June 19, 1927 (SSB). 44. J. Busch Der Klassische 4-Masten-Zirkus Playbill, Das Programm, June 24, 1928 (SSB). Others included the Anena-Family, led by “Chief Tahiska,” and “Prinzess Ah-Pa-Ce” with her baby in a cradleboard on her back. 45. There is a large file of photographs and other materials on Melenzias Indianer Show in SSB and many advertisements in Das Programm 1924–1939 for lassoing, whip-cracking, and “sensational rifle-shooting.” Cited advertisement is Das Programm, December 24, 1930 (SSB). 46. Full-page advertisement, Das Programm, February 20, 1927 (SSB). 47. Advertisement, Melencias Indian-Show, Das Programm, February 28, 1926 (SSB). 48. “ ‘Gong’ bringt Melencias und Partnerin,” undated flyer, Melenzias Indianer Show collection, SSB. 49. Terri Melencia’s backstory had him in Indian reservations in America as a young man learning Indian languages; after returning to Germany, he retained Indian clothes, long braids, grease paint, and lifeways; he died in Berlin in 1938 (see Wilschke, Im Lichte, 163). 50. Dieck’s first postwar engagement seems to have been at Berlin’s Wintergarten, Das Programm, May 12, 1918 (SSB). 51. Front cover, Das Programm, November 2, 1919 (SSB). 52. WinterGarten Berlin, Progr., Dienstag, den 20. April 1920, Wintergarten Programs, SSB. 53. “Current Continental Comment,” Das Programm, August 1, 1926 (SSB). 54. Advertisement, Wirth Bros., The Age (Melbourne, Australia), October 13, 1928 (N). 55. Advertisement, Wirth Bros., The Age (Melbourne, Australia), October 26, 1926 (N); “New Thrills at Olympia,” The Age (Melbourne, Australia), October 19, 1929 (N); Advertisement, Wirth Bros, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), October 13, 1928 (N). Bender-Pedersen, “Verdens.” 56. Advertisement, Wirth Bros., The Age (Melbourne, Australia), October 23, 1926 (N). 57. Otte says: “National Socialists began to organize boycotts of Jewish enterprises in 1927,” including the German Jewish Blumenfeld circus family, with whom Dieck had worked (Jewish, 102).

n o te s t o p ag es 25 3–262  329 58. “Circorevudeville by ‘Jug,’ ” Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic, May 28, 1932 (BNA). 59. “Where to Go this Week,” Gloucestershire Echo, May 31, 1932 (BNA); “Super-Circus, Zoo and Revue,” Bath Chronicle and Herald, June 18, 1932 (BNA). 60. Penny, Kindred, 152–53. 61. Usbeck, Fellow, 11, 12. 62. Usbeck, Fellow, 32; Penny, Kindred, 172. 63. Weber, Blood, 48–49; Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 251–54. 64. Penny, Kindred, 172. 65. “Important!” Das Programm, April 2, 1933 (SSB). 66. Die Deutsche Artistik, January 12, 1936 (SSB). 67. “Fröhliche Weihnachten! Prosit Neujahr!” The Hanel Comp., Die Deutsche Artistik, December 22, 1938 (SSB). 68. Advertisement, Melencia-Indianer-Aristokraten, Die Deutsche Artistik, June 22, 1939 (SSB). 69. Winnetou and Charly The White Eagles, Das Programm, September 28, 1930 (SSB); Winnetou & Charlie Revolutionäre der Akrobatik, Das Programm October 25, 1931 (SSB); Texas-Jack and Winnetou, “Die Unerreichten in diesem Genre,” Das Programm, September 30, 1934 (SSB); Winnethou & Charly, Indianische Kampfspiele, Die Deutsche Artistik, December 25, 1937 (SSB). Young Eagle’s horse was named Winnetou (full-page advertisement, Das Programm, November 8, 1931 [SSB]). 70. Tauentzien-Variété Berlin Februar 22, Playbill, Das Programm, February 19, 1922 (SSB). 71. Lutz, “German,” 167, 175, 179; Penny, Kindred, 168. 72. For example, #5 on Sarrasani Programm 1938, Sarrasani Collection, SSB. 73. Kreis, “German Wild West,” 268; Otte, “Sarrasani’s,” 538–41; for Jenkins at the stake, advertisement Das Programm, June 23, 1929 (SSB). 74. Full-page advertisement, Chester Dieck, Das Programm, October 25, 1931 (SSB). 75. For example, full-page advertisement, Chester Dieck and Comp., Das Programm, December 17, 1933 (SSB); Chester Dieck, double-page spread in WinterGarten Berlin Program July 1940, Wintergarten Programs, SSB. 76. Carlson, “Germans,” 215. 77. Full-page advertisement, Chester Dieck and Co., Die Deutsche Artistik, December 25, 1937 (SSB); “Der Mann, den man mit Goldklumpen bewarf . . .,” undated clipping [1941?], Chester Dieck collection, SSB. 78. Green, “Tribe,” 31. 79. Chester Dieck & Co., Eine Karl-May-Vision 1939, Plaza, March 1939 program, Plaza Programs, SSB. 80. “Die ‘Rothaut’ aus Essen,” unidentified clipping [1940?], Chester Dieck collection, SSB. 81. “Der Mann, den man mit Goldklumpen bewarf . . .” 82. Ibid. 83. “Die ‘Rothaut’ aus Essen.” 84. “Der Mann, den man mit Goldklumpen bewarf . . .”; in “Chester Dieck, the World’s Most Daring Cyclist” advertisement, his assistant is called “Cowboy” but is dressed “Indian,” Das Programm, January 19, 1913 (SSB).

330     n o t es to pa g e s 2 6 2 – 2 6 6 85. Quoted in Conrad, “Mutual,” 464. Around World War I, Sarrasani also had to resort to “dressed-up Dresdeners” (quoted in Stetler, “Buffalo,” 282). 86. Chester Diecks Kreftradakt (no. 11 spot in playbill of 21 acts), Sarrasani am Carolaplatz, Dresden, Programm 1938, Sarrasani Collection, SSB. The program also prominently advertises Karl May novels. 87. Bender-Pedersen, “Verdens.” 88. Letter, Chester Dieck u. Frau to Robert Wilschke, June 24, 1949, Chester Dieck collection, SSB. 89. Publicity photographs, circa 1949, Chester Dieck collection, SSB. 90. Stetler, “Buffalo,” 263. 91. Kreis, “Indians,” 195, 196. 92. For this event and much more on Oskomon, see Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon.” See Weber, Blood, 49, for memories of Oskomon dancing in medicine-man regalia. 93. Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” includes many genealogical details. On Oskomon’s early identification as Micmac, see “Papoose Baptized,” St. Joseph (Mo.) Catholic Tribune, January 29, 1916 (N), and on a reference conflating Sioux and Yakima, see “Funeral of Indian Chief, with All Tribal Customs, in Boston,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1916 (N). 94. Oskomon and Red Feather [Anna Cole], “Scollay Square,” New York Clipper, November 27, 1915 (IDNC); “Tivoli Theatre,” Table Talk (Melbourne, Australia), July 13, 1916 (T); “Tivoli Roof Garden, Telegraph (Brisbane, Australia), September 19, 1916 (T). 95. Appearances with Princess White Deer include “ ‘Full of Pep’ at the Keystone,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 1, 1919 (N); “Raymond Hitchcock Presents Hitchy-Koo, 1919, at the Liberty,” New-York Tribune, October 7, 1919 (N); “Fine Bill at Orpheum,” Munster (Ind.) Times, March 19, 1921 (N). For his choreography, see “A Dancer From Out the Primitive,” unidentified clipping, BRTD, and for his modeling, “Chief Oskomon posing for W. Langdon Kihn, circa 1930, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/ detail/chief-oskomon-posing-w-langdon-kihn-6262, and Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 259–63. 96. Wilschke, Im Lichte, 162–63. 97. Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 263–65. 98. Ibid., 257–59, 261–62, 279–84. 99. McBride, Molly, 193. 100. Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 274. 101. Ibid., 248. 102. Ibid., 246; Penny, Kindred, 172. 103. Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 274–75; Usbeck, Fellow, 97. 104. Götz von Olenhusen, “Os-ko-mon,” 285. 105. For example, on November 5, 1911, they were both performing in St. Petersburg, Chester Dieck at the Cirque Moderne and Princess White Deer at the Theater Jardin d’Hiver (Playbills in Das Programm, November 5, 1911 [SSB]). At different times, they performed at Zirkus Ciniselli, Warsaw; they were in Kiev on the same date, in different houses; they missed each other by about a week in Moscow.

n o te s t o p ag es 266–279  331 1 06. “Versammlungslokale der I.A.L.,” Das Programm, November 19, 1911 (SSB). 107. Only on an organized camp tour did German journalists notice Indigenous women in Buffalo Bill’s 1890 troupe (Stetler, “Buffalo,” 188); Italian journalists reported that the 1906 tour included about three Indigenous women (Magrin, “Wild,” 254). 108. “Der Mann, den man mit Goldklumpen bewarf . . .” 109. Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas, The Story of Apanatschi and Her Redheaded Wrestler, Sawvideo Media Arts Centre, www.sawvideo.com/mediatheque/video/storyapanatschi-and-her-redheaded-wrestler; see also Perry, “Reconsidering.” co n clu s io n 1. Ramirez, Native, 1. 2. Ibid., 8, 2. 3. Gebhardt, Vaudeville, 33; Cullen, Vaudeville, 280–85. 4. Powless, Who, 49, 55. 5. Justice, Our Fire, 93; Ramirez, Native, 12. 6. Willetts, King, 179. 7. Ibid., 179–98. 8. R. C. Allen, Horrible, 189; R. C. Allen, Vaudeville, 50. 9. Palmer, Vaudeville, 2m 03sec. 10. Marinetti, “Variety,” 126; Davis, Exploitation, 33. 11. Advertisement, “Go to The Wild West Indian Show,” New Philadelphia (Ohio) Daily Times, September 30, 1909 (N). 12. Waggoner, Starring, 250–51. 13. “Rex,” Arkansas City (Kans.) Daily Traveler, September 8, 1922 (N); Waggoner, Starring, 262–67. 14. Advertisement, Runnemede, Camden (N.J.) Morning Post, October 26, 1935 (N). 15. Galperin, In Search, 55. 16. “The Novelty,” Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, May 9, 1905 (N). 17. “Screen Stories,” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, October 30, 1921 (N). 18. Hearne, Native, 284. 19. Beauvais, Kahnawake, 137. 20. See Floyd, “On Hollywood”; Vigil “Warrior.” 21. Hearne, Native, 289. 22. “About Plays and Players,” Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, January 12, 1913 (BSB). 23. “Jamaica’s Indian Pow-Wow,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 30, 1913 (N). 24. Letter, Louis White Moon to Dept. of the Interior Indian Affairs, May 10, 1909 (CISDRC). 25. “New Airport to Engulf Museum of Old West Run by Indian Prince-by-Marriage in Queens,” New York Times, August 9, 1944 (PHN). 26. Quoted in McBride, Molly, 36. 27. Gloria Miguel, interview by Christine Bold, May 9, 2017. Quoted with permission. 28. See Sotiropoulos, Staging, 52–62; Troutman, Kīkā, 86–90; Waggoner, Starring, 269–86. 29. “Indian Council in Town,” New York Sun, November 27, 1904 (N).

332     n o t es to pa ge s 2 8 0 – 2 81 30. “Unification to Preserve Identity of Indian Race Urged at Park Conclave,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 30, 1929 (N); “Tom-Toms Beat When Injuns War Dance in Prospect Park,” Brooklyn Times Union, September 30, 1929 (N). 31. “Indians Make Bid of $30 for Island of Manhattan,” Harrisburg (Pa.) Evening News, November 20, 1937 (N). 32. “Tom-Toms Beat When Injuns War Dance in Prospect Park.” See Cook, “Scandal.” 33. “Red Men Ask Holiday at Borough Pow Wow,” Brooklyn Standard Union, September 30, 1929 (N). 34. “Tom-Toms Beat When Injuns War Dance in Prospect Park.” 35. “Sale of Manhattan,” Spokane (Wash.) Chronicle, May 3, 1937 (WSU). 36. “Politics Disturbs Indian Fete Here,” New York Times, September 29, 1928 (PHN). 37. “Red Men Ask Holiday at Borough Pow Wow.” 38. “Indians Make Bid of $30 for Island of Manhattan.” 39. “Chiefs Make Heap Grunt, Smoke Pipe, Chew Rag,” New York Daily News, October 2, 1933 (N).

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b ib l io g rap h y  35 3 Worden, Daniel. Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Wright, Ted W. “Collinsville.” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society. www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=CO029. Wright-McLeod, Brian. “Songs of Transformation: Music from Screech Songs to Hip Hop.” In The World of Indigenous North America. Ed. Robert Warrior. New York: Routledge, 2015, 265–90. Yagoda, Ben. Will Rogers: A Biography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Zellers, Parker. Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage. Eastern Michigan University Press, 1971. Ziegfeld, Florenz. “Preface.” In Revues: A Book of Short Sketches. Ed. Kenyon Nicholson. New York: Appleton, 1929. Ziegfeld, Richard, and Paulette Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld Touch: The Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Zimmerli, Nadine. “Elite Migration to Germany: The Anglo-American Colony in Dresden Before World War I.” In Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000. Ed. Jason Coy, Jared Poley, and Alexander Schunka. New York: Berghahn, 2016, 131–50. Zitkala-Ša. “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” In American Indian Stories. 1921. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ———. “The Soft-Hearted Sioux.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 102 (March 1901): 505–8.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Abbott, Amy, 172 Abel, Jordan, 10 African American performers: exclusion from polite vaudeville, 34; and jazz music, 76, 172; of vaudeville, 3, 22, 28, 150, 279; as vaudeville Indians, 51, 75 Aglassinger, Andreas, 249 A-hote, Harry/Kau-tau-a-hote-tau, 131 Albee, Edward F., 38, 52, 53, 56. See also Keith-Albee circuit Albrew, Peppy de, 168 Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake, 138 Ali Brothers, 39 Allegany Reservation, 116 Allen, Dick, 50 Allen, Robert C., 273 allotment policies, 70, 228, 229 American Horse, 212 American Indian Alliance, 270 American Indian Association (AIA), 208 American Indian Club, 208 American Indian Community House, 132 American Indian Day, 17, 26, 234, 279–81

American Indian Movement, 286n16 American Novelty Company, 204–5 American Revolution, 116 American Samoa, 204–5 Amiotte, Arthur, 10 amusement parks, 8, 29 Anderson, Kim, 21, 168 Anishinaabe communities, Hiawatha plays of, 86 Antelyes, Peter, 60, 232 antimodernism, 239 Aotearoa New Zealand, 13, 53, 68, 205–6 Archambaud, Jean, 188 Archambaud, Mary Alice Nelson. See Spotted Elk, Molly/Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud archives, 15, 23–24, 276, 288n54, 289nn68–69; historical Indian as captive of, 13, 17, 18, 288n51; and relations of research exchange, 12–22, 23, 24, 288n54 Asian performers, 3 assimilation, 43, 161, 174, 200, 213–14, 216, 229, 293n79

35 5

35 6   In d ex d’Atalide, Solange, 158 audiences: and Princess Chinquilla, 196, 202; and Esther Deer, 22–23, 169; and Deer family, 152, 153, 154, 156–57, 174, 277, 311n89; and Chester Dieck, 243; and European Variété, 237; expectations of, 55, 72, 158, 166, 179–80; growth of, 40, 292n66; immigrants as, 36; and Indian masquerade, 218; Indigenous performers’ relations with, 24, 55, 129, 174, 220, 274, 277; Indigenous presence in film audiences, 277–78; Indigenous presence in vaudeville audiences, 12, 73, 95, 115–16, 132; managerial surveillance of, 55; mass audiences of vaudeville, 2–3; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 115–16; perceptions of Indigenous performers, 11–12, 22–23, 63–64; of polite vaudeville, 27, 33–34, 36–37, 38, 239, 292n52; and revues, 167; Will Rogers’s relationship with, 66, 72, 73, 75–76, 298n2; and role of live Indigenous performance in cinematic space, 179, 184, 188; segregation of, 76; training in spectator practices, 179–80, 277; and Princess Wahletka, 217, 218–19, 220, 226; of wild west shows, 202; women of, 37, 292n52; and Yiddish vaudeville, 231 Australasia, 40 Australia, 53, 68, 252 Avonmore, Lord, 142 Aztec Theatre, San Antonio, 185–86, 187 Bailey, Mildred, 9, 172 Bair, Barbara, 297n1 Banner Weekly, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98 Barbour, Ernest, 202, 203, 204–6, 319n42, 320n55 Barbour, Mary C., 320n55. See also Chinquilla, Princess Barnum, P. T., 3, 32, 33, 139, 291n26 Baron, Julius, 239 Barrangon, Emile/Chief Caupolican, 56, 61, 166; and Chautauqua circuit, 61, 62,

296–97n168; as vaudeville Indian, 29, 49, 61–64, 187, 296n168 Barrangon, Lucy, 297n168 Barris, Harry, 172 Battice, Walter/Chief Sheet Lightning, 48–49, 177–78, 185, 234, 235, 279–81, 309n52 Battle of Beecher’s Island, 214 Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), 35, 187, 201, 322n92 Bay, Lydia, 30 Beadle and Adams, 25, 89, 91–93, 95–96, 98, 105 Bear Witness, 11, 268, 281 Beauvais, Johnny, 65, 148, 277, 314n133 Beauvais family, 168, 314n133 Beaver, James/Uncle Beaver, 29–31, 32, 41, 64, 271 Beck, Martin, 52, 53 Bellamy, Madge, 178 Belmore, Rebecca, 160 Bender, Charles, 47 Benn, Carl, 141, 142 Bennett, Lewis/Deerfoot, 114 Berkeley, Busby, 62, 64 Betjeman, John, 55 Big Tree, Phillip, 145, 151, 152, 310n66 Bill, William, 31 Black, Sid, 262 Black Eagle, 144–45, 145, 151, 310n66 Black Eagle, Mary Ann, 144, 145 Black Hawk, 291n26 Blackhawk, Ned, 171 Black Horse family, 210–11 Black Kettle, Peace Chief, 214 Blackstone, Tsianina Redfeather, 126, 287n23 Blake, Betty, 69 Blanchard, David, 31 “Blanket Indians,” 160–61 Blue Bird, 323n2 Blue Cloud, Chief, 51–52, 183 Blue Cloud, Princess, 52, 183 Blumenfeld circus family, 328n57 Bluth, John V., 319n42 boarding and residential schools, 42–44, 53, 54, 55, 216, 293n79

I ndex  35 7 Boas, Franz, 170–71, 207, 314n147 Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons/Zitkala-Ša, 50, 55, 208, 210; on Carlisle Indian School, 200, 216; on Princess Chinquilla, 25–26, 193, 207, 208, 211, 213, 321n67; as Indigenous performer, 7, 11, 112, 208, 287nn23 and 42 Bonnin, Raymond, 208, 210, 213, 321n67 Bonnin, Sam, 208 border crossings: Canada-U.S. border, 136–37, 139, 307n3; Deer family, 137, 138, 139–40; Mohawk Nation, 136–39 Borst-Tarrant, Murielle, 21, 289n59 Boston Tea Party, 223 Boyd, William, 185 Brant, Joseph/Thayendanegea (Mohawk Chief), 30, 139 Brant Sero, John Ojijatekha, 114, 115 Brice, Fanny, 59–60, 168, 175, 176, 220, 232, 273 Brice, Pierre, 263, 268 Britain, 225, 226, 271; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in, 98, 115; Deer family in, 57, 138, 152–54, 273, 277; Chester Dieck in, 252–53; Go-won-go Mohawk in, 96–98, 100, 102, 115, 273; Princess Wahletka in, 220, 223, 225–27, 253, 273 Bronx, N.Y., Deer family in, 37 Brooklyn, N.Y., 79; “Brooklyn Indians” photographs, 17–21; Canarsie Carnival of, 8, 20, 22; Indigenous performers of, 8, 19, 54, 132, 208, 280; “Little Caughnawaga” community in, 37; Will Rogers in, 70 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 204 Brooks, Lisa, 29, 271 Brougham, John, 168 Brown, Kirby, 228, 229, 298n18 Buffalo Bill Historical Pictures Company, 294n119 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: in Britain, 98, 225; and descriptions of Deer family, 152, 310n71; films of, 180; in Germany, 158, 238, 243, 264, 267, 311n80, 331n107; Indigenous performers of, 38, 180; and Annie

Oakley, 39; and Sioux warrior image, 91, 97, 136, 150; Luther Standing Bear in, 11; and Florenz Ziegfeld, 58 Buhler, Edwin, 326n77 Buhler, Neal V., 326n77 Butler, William F., 144 Butte, Montana, 201, 319nn34, 36, and 37 cabinet cards, 1o7; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 14, 79, 84, 93, 100, 105, 107–12; and Princess Chinquilla, 8, 215. See also sell cards Cadman, Charles Wakefield, 26 Calamity Jane, 83–84 Camp, Margaret/Dove Eye, 41 Camp Supply, Indian Territory, 194, 214 Canada, Wallbank Survey, 140 Canada-U.S. border, 136–40, 307n3 Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, 140 Cantor, Eddie, 62, 63, 76, 168–69, 232, 299n45 Capitaine, Louis, 142, 143 capitalism, 32, 54, 70, 79, 227, 237, 273, 282 caricature: of African Americans, 83, 86, 88, 103, 106; of immigrant communities, 34, 35–36, 83, 86, 88, 106, 301n22 —of Indians, 1; in dime novels, 95; in German culture, 155; “Indian Princess,” 50–51, 102, 223, 231, 236; in mass culture, 1–2; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 86; in polite vaudeville, 35–36; in popular culture in the West, 71; and redface performers, 9–10, 62, 63; and Will Rogers, 68; in Rose Marie, 128; and stage Injun speech, 60, 63, 86, 87, 103, 106, 128, 150; in Whoopee!, 62, 63; in Winnetou novels, 155 Carleton, William, Go West, 35–36, 291n37 Carlisle Arrow, 47 Carlisle Indian Band, 11, 46–48, 50, 74, 102 Carlisle Indian Industrial School: and Harry K. Cole, 43, 200, 202, 206, 215, 216, 318n27; family separation principle, 44, 216; and Indigenous networks, 42–47; and Joseph H.

35 8   In d ex Carlisle Indian Industrial School (continued) Morris, 45, 290n71; and playing Indian, 43; and vaudeville Indians, 47, 102; and Princess Wahletka, 221, 233 Carlson, Marta, 256 Carson Film Company, 102–3 Carter, Asa, 323n28 Carter, Jill, 1, 6, 133–35, 147, 164, 287n42 Carter, Lincoln J., 102 Casey, Pat, 69, 71 Catholic church, 125, 181, 191, 264, 300n17 Catlin, George, 153–54, 191 Cattaraugus Reservation, 30, 49, 113, 114–18 Caughnawaga and St. Regis Mohawks, 37, 41, 139; and James Beaver, 30, 31; and Esther Deer, 168, 314n133; and vaudeville Indians, 11, 25, 102 Caupolican, Chief. See Barrangon, Emile/ Chief Caupolican Chamberlain, Montague, 125 Chan, Carol, 297n168 Chaplin, Charlie, 252 Charging Hawk, Chief. See Standing Bear, Luther/Chief Charging Hawk Charles, Charles W., 82, 83, 88, 111, 113 Chautauqua circuits, 61, 62, 125, 126, 296–97n168 Chekhov, Anton, 132, 134 Cher, 189, 191 Cherokee Nation, 229, 234; Indian Territory as Oklahoma, 71, 228; land theft by federal government, 70, 73, 228; and Will Rogers, 68, 69, 70–72, 73, 74, 77, 298n18 Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation, 214 Cheyenne Nation, 201, 213 Chief Blue Cloud and his Indian Syncopators, 51–52, 183 Chief White Moon’s Indians, 52 Child, Brenda J., 43 Child, Lydia Maria, 291n26 Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, 47 Chilocco Indian Industrial School, 215–16, 322nn95 and 97 Chinquilla, Princess, 197, 198, 287n26; and backwoods entertainment circuit, 195–96, 200; and banjo, 196–97, 199,

205; Ernest Barbour’s marriage to, 202, 203, 204–5, 319n42; birth at Camp Supply, 194, 214; cabinet card photographs of, 8, 14, 215; and claims to Indigeneity, 25–26, 50, 193, 194, 196–98, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208, 210–13, 280, 317n2, 321nn67 and 71; Harry K. Cole as son of, 194, 195, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 215; costumes of, 195, 196, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213; death of, 213; education of, 200, 207, 210, 213, 215–16; gender identity of, 196; as Indian authority, 196, 205–6, 207, 272; and Indian Reorganization Act conference, 210; “Indian Songs and Dances,” 199; and kinship relations, 54, 199, 201, 202–3, 204, 206, 207, 210–16; and lecture circuit, 207, 210, 216; letter to Owen Wister, 4, 5, 7, 12–13, 193, 199–200, 201, 206; in Montana, 201–6, 210–11, 212; Natives of N. America, 211–12; newspaper coverage of, 196–97, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211; The Old Indian’s Almanac, 212; and Charlie Oskomon, 51, 54, 165, 265, 272; as political organizer, 207–8, 209; in Queens, 37, 199, 204, 207, 212, 278; reconstruction of story, 8, 193–94, 196–97, 199, 200, 204, 207, 210–11, 213–16; repertoire of, 195, 199, 210, 215; self-published booklets of, 211–12; as Southern Cheyenne, 25, 37, 39, 50, 194, 199, 201, 204, 208, 210–12, 213–14; South Seas tour of, 204–6, 272, 276–77, 295–96n144; vaudeville performances of, 4, 6, 25, 39, 193–201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212, 216 Chinquilla’s Indian Museum (New York), 199, 207, 278 circuses: and Princess Chinquilla, 195, 197, 215; in Germany, 240–41, 243, 248–49, 252; Indigenous performers of, 29, 31; and Tony Pastor, 33, 39 Circus Krone, 248, 264 Circus Schumann, 266 Civil War, 116

I ndex  35 9 Clark, Sylvia, 167 Clear Sky, Chief. See Morris, Joseph Henry/ Chief Clear Sky Cody, Buffalo Bill, 7, 13, 32, 91, 185, 287n26; and Princess Chinquilla, 199, 200, 204, 210; costume of, 244; and dime novels, 98, 100; Go-won-go Mohawk and, 96–97; retirement of, 243 Colby, Margaret Elizabeth “Zintka”/ Zintkála Nuni, 50 Cole, Anna De Bride, 206, 207, 264–65, 272, 320n56 Cole, Arthur W., 194 Cole, Clarence Eugene, 194, 195, 204 Cole, Harry K.: as Princess Chinquilla’s son, 194, 195, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 215; death of, 207, 320n61; Anna De Bride’s marriage to, 206, 320n56; education of, 43, 200, 201, 215, 216, 318n27; on father’s death, 195; as vaudeville Indian, 43–44, 47, 202, 206–7 Cole and Hastings/White Hawk and Red Feather/Cetah Ska and Wakaya Luta, 43–44, 47, 206, 206–7, 320n56 Cole’s Dime Museum (St. Joseph, Mo.), 194, 213, 214 Collier, John, 207, 210 Columbia University, 170–71 concert saloons, 29, 33 containing myths, 3, 11–12, 152, 282 Cooper, James Fenimore, 34, 155–56, 205, 238 copyright, 146–47, 153, 274 Cornplanter, Edward/Sosondó:wa, 114–15, 304n112 Cornplanter, Jesse, 115, 299n3 Cornwall, Anne, 188 Corson, Cora Youngblood, 56, 286n10, 295n139 Cortés, Hernán, 185 Coué, Émile, 224 Coutts-Johnstone, Mathilde A./Mlle. Toona, 44–47, 45, 54, 56 Cowboy and Indian clubs, 8, 279 Coze, Paul, 158

Crawford, Jack, 119 Crazy Bull, Chief, 281 Crosby, Bing, 172 cultural appropriation, 10, 13, 52, 61, 64, 89, 104, 126, 128, 191, 234, 235, 261, 269. See also extraction; Indian masquerade; wannabee cultural relativism, 171 Cummins, Frederick T., 309n49 Curtis, Charles, 47 Curtis, M. B., 204, 206, 295–96n144 Custer, George Armstrong, 185, 187, 188, 201, 211, 214 Darnton, Charles, 298n2 d’Arville, Camille, 46 The Daughter of Dawn (film), 129, 131 Daughters of Sacajawea, 208 Davis, Indian Joe/White Eagle Jr., 42 Davis, Owen, 297n169 Dawes Act (1887), 70 Dawes Rolls, 228 Dayton, Professor W. W., 195–96 Deer, Esther/Princess White Deer, 54, 56, 151, 159, 161–62, 162, 164–66, 165, 175, 220, 280, 309n39, 312n108; and “Aboriginally yours” phrase, 162–63, 162, 272, 299n3; audiences of, 22–23, 169; beaded vest of, 149, 158, 164; birth of, 146; Broadway appearances of, 25, 163–73; celebrity of, 164, 168; choreography of, 11, 25, 59, 164, 168–69, 172, 173; costumes of, 158–59, 161, 163, 164; and Deer’s Indian Village, 147, 148, 148, 160, 309n52; “From Wigwam to White Lights” revue, 171–72, 173, 315n158; in Germany, 241, 267; headdress of, 158, 164, 175, 312n102; Hitchy-Koo, 1919, 167–68, 313n125, 314nn133 and 135; and hybrid flapper fashion, 59, 170, 175, 273; and Indian novelty, 165–66, 167; “Indian Song and Dance,” 175; and Indigenous modernities, 59, 169–73, 266; on jazz, 169–73, 296n157; jewelry of, 158, 164; kinship ties of, 158, 161, 164–68, 175; and

36 0   In d ex Deer, Esther/Princess White Deer (continued) Harry Lauder, 57, 161, 312n107; Lucky, 169, 314n138, 315n153; Midnight Frolic revue, 169, 175, 176; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 162–63; nervous breakdown of, 173; and Charlie Oskomon, 165–66, 173, 265, 330n95; performance strategies of, 12, 137, 154, 156, 161, 164, 165–69, 171, 174–75, 199; and Pocahontas, 11, 59, 167–68; and power of material culture, 131, 136; press coverage in U.S., 168–69, 313n114, 314n135; public image controlled by, 169, 175; Queen of the Highway, 158; revues and musical comedy of, 163, 166–69; show blanket of, 138, 147, 148, 159–60, 159, 161, 164, 165, 175–76, 176, 184, 272; solo career of, 158–63; in South Africa, 151, 152, 310n66; studio portraits of, 164, 165; and trans-Indigenous community, 159, 161, 162–63, 169; and Florenz Ziegfeld, 60, 167, 169, 175 Deer, George: beaded vest of, 149, 164; death of, 163, 312n111; and Sarrasani’s Circus, 158; in South Africa, 151, 310n66 Deer, Georgette Osborne, 151, 154, 161; death of, 174; and Deer’s Indian Village, 147, 148, 309n45; and Esther Deer’s solo career, 158, 161, 163; in South Africa, 151, 310n66; in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 146, 309n41 Deer, James/Ar-Ha-Ken-Kia-Ka, 139, 143, 150, 158, 281; beaded vest of, 149, 164; birthplace of, 140; copyright for trick riding act, 146–47, 153; and Deer’s Indian Village, 147, 148; and family theatrical troupe, 144, 153; as manager and publicist, 57, 153, 164; memoir of Nile expedition, 138, 140–44, 153, 174, 308n37; picture house owned by, 277, 278; show blanket of, 164, 173, 175–76; in South Africa, 151, 152, 153, 310n66 Deer, John/Ta-Ka-Lo-Lus, 139, 150, 151; beaded vest of, 149, 164; copyright for

trick riding act, 146–47, 153; and Deer’s Indian Village, 147, 148; and family theatrical troupe, 144; and Nile expedition, 140, 153 Deer, Lily, 144, 145, 309n39 Deer, Thomas/Teiowí:sonte: on costume details, 23, 136–37, 175, 307n4; as cultural liaison and archivist, 136, 289n69 Deer family, 37, 41, 137, 164, 168, 174; and audience relations, 152, 153, 154, 156–57, 174, 277, 311n89; authority over performance space, 137, 140, 144, 149, 152, 153, 174; and British circuit, 57, 138, 152–54, 273, 277; and creative and managerial control, 144–51; Deer’s Indian Village, 147–49, 148, 309nn45 and 52; and Chester Dieck, 266, 267; and European Variété, 38, 152, 153–57, 310n71; family theatrical troupe of, 41, 54, 139, 144, 146; in Germany, 154–57, 241, 311nn80 and 83; government papers required of, 157, 311n94; and The Great Train Robbery, 149–51, 276; and Improved Order of Red Men, 149, 235; Indians of the Past, 153–54, 165, 310n75; international borders crossed by, 137, 138, 139–40; overseas career of, 151–58; in performance, 138–51; performance regalia of, 137, 147–49, 150, 158; and Plains Indian style, 148–49; self-determined mobility of, 144, 157, 271; in South Africa, 151–52, 272, 310n66; and Texas Jack’s Wild West Show, 68, 151, 152, 310n75; and vanishing Indians, 154, 155–56, 175; and vaudeville as cultural brokerage, 25, 137–38, 154, 311n78 Degree of Pocahontas (lodge), 118 De La Motte, Marguerite, 185 Deloria, Philip J., 2, 13, 22, 27, 117, 157, 166 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 12, 235 democracy, 3, 64, 274 Denis, Ruth, 327n34 Denning, Michael, 95

I ndex  361 Diabo, Paul K., 136–37, 143, 149, 160, 175, 307nn3–4 Dieck, Chester: in Australia, 252; backstory as true Indian, 259, 260, 261–62, 263, 264, 266, 267–68; in Britain, 252–53; “Chester Dieck Girls,” 263; contact with live Indigenous performance, 238, 264, 266, 267, 273; costumes of, 244–45; as German redface trick cyclist, 26, 237, 244–45, 245, 250, 251, 252, 253, 256, 257, 258–62, 258, 263, 266–68, 328n57; German state power as pressure on, 238; and myths of Indian primitivism, 237–38, 264, 266; and National Socialism, 253, 256, 258–62, 268; in Russia, 241, 243, 245, 266, 330n105; as trick cyclist, 241, 243–44, 244, 249–50, 328n50; as Winnetou, 256, 258–62, 264 Dieck, William, 249 Dillingham, Charles, 167, 169, 315n153 dime museums: and Princess Chinquilla, 194–95, 200, 213, 214, 216; Indigenous performers of, 29, 38, 42; and Tony Pastor, 33, 39; redface performers of, 36 dime-novel industry: in Germany, 238; Indigenous readership of, 95; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 25, 79, 89–96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 114, 119, 302n65; and Tony Pastor, 34, 291n35; plotlines of, 103, 105, 269 Do-Hum-Me, 32, 291n26 Double, Oliver, 292n66 Du Bois, W. E. B., 207 Duckey/Ducky Killer (Ha uk ne), 322n95 dumb acts, 40, 241 Dumont, Gabriel, 286n16, 287n26 Dunifrio, Salvatore, 198 Dunlop Pneumatic, 245 Eagle Eye, Chief, 8, 15, 17–20, 19, 281 Eagle Horse, Chief, 165, 167, 173, 313n125 Eastman, Irving, 233 Eastman brothers, 220, 222, 232 Eddy, Nelson, 132, 133, 134 Edison, Thomas, 150, 180

education. See boarding and residential schools Edwards, Leo, 296n159 Ellis, Mary, 128 Empire State Building, 267–68 Enya, Lou Scha, 62 Erdrich, Louise, 53 Erlanger, A. L., 167, 169 European Variété, 2, 36, 40, 46, 53, 205; and Deer family, 38, 41, 152, 153–57, 161, 310n71; and Chester Dieck, 26, 245; and film, 179; in Germany, 237, 239–41, 243, 246, 247–52, 254, 256, 263, 267–68, 273; Indianerakts of, 237, 238, 240; novelty of, 40, 237; in Paris, 265, 273; and redface performers, 26; and vaudeville Indians, 25, 39, 40, 174, 237–38; and western modernity, 237, 239, 252 Evans, George, 205 extinction narrative, 49, 64, 152, 174, 293–94n104 extraction, 26, 37, 218, 227, 228, 229, 235, 269 Eyre, Chris, 277–78 Farnum, Dustin, 188 federal and state governments, Indigenous transactions with, 69, 70, 73, 157, 228, 271, 288n51, 311n94 Fernandez, Alexandrina Marjorie/Princess Winona, 50–51 Fields, Alison, 180 film, and western modernity, 179, 275 films, 103; and direct audience address, 180, 277; in Germany, 263, 268; Indian figures in, 177, 180, 188, 225, 275; Indigenous framing of cinematic space, 278–79; Indigenous performers in, 179, 184, 185, 188, 277; Indigenous presence in audiences of, 277–78; and melodrama, 102; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 78, 102–3; and Will Rogers, 71, 74, 77; role of live Indigenous performance in cinematic space, 26, 177–79, 184, 274–79; role of vaudeville in shift to, 3, 10, 151,

36 2   In d ex films (continued) 179–80; and Lilian St. Cyr, 42, 102, 126, 275–76, 280; shift from live presentation to cinematic representation, 10, 42; vaudeville-film combination houses, 179–86, 187, 188, 235, 275–76, 278; westerns, 10, 179, 180, 184, 188, 225, 235, 269, 275 Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes, 70 Fisher, Eugene, 321n71 The Flaming Frontier (film), 188, 317n41 flappers, 59, 60, 170, 175, 273 Flint, Kate, 225 Folies Bergère, 58 Ford, John, 177, 191–92 Forrest, Edwin, 34 Fort Stanwix, 271 Fourmile, Henrietta, 13, 288n51 Francis, Daniel, 158 Frank Starr Company, 96 Frazier, Lynn Joseph, 235 freak shows, 33, 153, 157, 158, 202, 215, 312n96 Frederick T. Cummins’s Wild West Indian Congress and Rough Riders of the World, 68 Fred R. Wren’s Dramatic Company, 309n41 Friedman, Moses, 44, 207, 318n27 Friml, Rudolf, 128 Fuller family, 53 Futurists, 274 Gage, Justin Randolph, 86, 301n32 Galperin, Patricia O., 30, 163, 175–76, 276, 308n13, 312n107 Ga-ne-gua, Chief, 113–14 Garrido, Francisco, 297n168 Gebhardt, Nicholas, 56 genocide, 119, 160, 214; and boarding and residential schools, 43, 293n79; of National Socialism, 268; policies and practices of, 1, 138–39, 229; in The Scrubbing Project, 1, 4, 6 George, Dudley, 5, 286n16 George-Shongo, David L., Jr., 289n69

Germany: Americanization resented in, 246; circuses in, 240–41, 243, 248–49, 252; colonialism of, 205, 238, 246, 253; commercialized ethnographic displays in, 3, 155, 169, 237, 238, 311n84; Deer family in, 154–57, 241, 311nn80 and 83; Esther Deer in, 241, 267; films in, 263, 268; fixation on North American Indigenous peoples in, 156, 237, 238, 246–47, 253, 261–62, 270; ideological context of Indianerakts, 237–38, 240, 241, 247, 250, 253, 254–55, 256; Indian hobbyist movement in, 247–49, 250, 263, 265, 267, 270; Indianthusiasm in, 155, 238–39, 241, 247, 253, 255, 265, 267, 268, 311n92; Indigenous performers in, 56–57, 241, 247, 248, 252, 254, 262, 264, 265–66; Kabarett in, 239, 246; Karl-May-Festspiele (Karl May Festivals), 254, 256, 264, 265; and National Socialism, 256, 258–62, 265, 266, 268; non-Indigenous performers of, 241, 242, 247, 267; Charlie Oskomon in, 242, 264, 265–66; performance circuits of vaudeville Indians in, 13, 26, 51, 237, 311n80; post–World War II, 263; shifts in socio-political climate, 237, 239; TingelTangel in, 239; Variété in, 237, 239–41, 243, 246, 247–52, 254, 256, 263, 267–68, 273; weiße Indianer (white Indian) Variété performers in, 26, 51, 247, 248–49, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256, 267, 273, 330n85; Weimar years, 246–53; wild west shows in, 153, 155, 237, 238, 247, 248, 255–56, 264, 267, 331n107 Geronimo, 10, 11, 228, 287nn26 and 42 Ghost Dance, 91, 186, 317n45 Gibson, Hoot, 188 Glenn, Susan, 292n52 Goebbels, Joseph, 254 Golden Rod, Princess, 127, 317n40 Goldwyn, Samuel, 62 Gordon, Charles George, 140

I ndex  363 Gordon, Roxy, Indian Radio Days, 307n42 Gordon, Taylor, 76 Gorman, Tom, 126 Götz von Olenhusen, Albrecht, 265 Gough, Hope, 34 Grand River Reserve, 30, 31 Granlund, Nils T., 317n47 Great Depression, 235 The Great Train Robbery (film), 10, 149–51, 276–77 The Great Train Robbery (stage play), 149–50, 276 Green, Rayna, 9, 27, 50, 151, 217–18, 256 Green Bar Reservations, Michigan, 278 Greenwald, Aaron/Chief Shee-Noo, 51 Greenwich, Manhattan, “Indian Village” in, 37 Gregory, Paul, 63 Griffiths, Alison, 180 Grinnell, George Bird, 214 Guinan, Texas, 189 Gunning, Tom, 179 H. A. Brunswick’s Wild West Indian Vaudeville and Western Picture Show, 52, 275 Hackney, Guy, 113 Hagan, William T., 288n51 Hagenbeck, Carl, 3, 155, 238, 248, 314n147 Hailstorm, Chief. See Van Noy, Jarrette Talmadge/Chief Hailstorm Hall, Roger A., 83, 299n2, 304n101 Hamill, Chad, 9 Hammerstein, Oscar, 52 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 128 Handsome Lake (Seneca prophet), 115 Hansen, Miriam, 3, 180 Harbach, Otto, 128 Harjo, Joy, “We Were There When Jazz Was Invented,” 172 Harkrider, John, 62 Harringtons, 327–28n34 Harris (commissioner of U.S. Interior Department), 46 Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas), 17 Hart, Max, 69, 71

Haskell Indian Industrial School (Lawrence, Kansas), 215 Hathaway’s Indian Tableaux, 39 Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 30, 108, 116, 271 Hauptman, Laurence, 116 Hawaii, 204, 205 Hayward Indian School, Wisconsin, 44 Heap of Bear, 131 Hearne, Joanna, 185, 277–78 Henle, James, 169–70 Hensel, A., 40 Hevey, David, 312n96 Hiawatha Troupe, 327n34 Hickok, Bill, 185 Hill, Russell, 47–48, 156, 312n96 Hitchcock, Alfred, 276 Hitchcock, Raymond, 167–68 Hitler, Adolf, 254, 265 Hitler Youth, 254, 265 Holmes, Richard Eugene, 44, 47 Hoover, Herbert, 47 Houdini, Harry, 74, 173 Howe, LeAnne, 22, 307n42 Howling Wolf, Frank, 14, 15, 288–89n55, 315n155 Høyer, Ellen Marie, 250, 252, 256 Huber’s Museum, 36, 39, 292n59 Hudson, Hendrick, 279 Huhndorf, Shari M., 299n2 human zoos, 3, 155, 169, 183, 237, 238, 311n84 Hunt, George, 171, 314n147 Imada, Adria L., 205, 296n144 Improved Order of Red Men (IORM), 51, 117–18, 119, 149 Indian Acts, 138, 146 Indian Advancement Act (1884), 144 Indian Country, 26, 27, 218, 234–36, 271–74 Indian Fellowship League, 48 Indian Island, Maine, 123–25, 135, 180–82, 272 Indian Island Penobscot Band, 181, 182 Indianists, 61–63, 126, 127, 158, 173, 273, 306n18

36 4   In d ex Indian jazz revues: and Chief Blue Cloud and his Indian Syncopators, 51–52, 183; and Esther Deer, 170–72; and Frank Howling Wolf, 14, 315n155; and Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, 127; and Joe Shunatona, 47, 315n155 “Indian Love Call,” 121, 127–29, 131–35 Indian masquerade, 218, 227, 235, 270, 272 Indianness: British images of, 225, 226; and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 91, 97, 136, 150; and Paul K. Diabo, 136–37, 307n3; dime novel’s reliance on stereotypes of, 89, 91; entertainment economy’s debt to, 41; and federal Indian policy, 235–36, 326n85; in Germany, 247, 255; and Improved Order of Red Men, 117; Indigeneity contrasted with, 75, 270; and musical revues, 58–60; Tony Pastor’s discourse of, 27, 28, 38–39; in publicity portraits, 13–14, 15, 18, 105–12; range and scale of, 9; and spiritualism, 219–20, 323n5; and stage Injun speech, 60, 63, 86, 87, 103, 106, 128, 150; vaudeville’s reliance on stereotypes of, 12, 28, 86, 87, 129, 202, 222, 232, 270, 272; white camp appropriation of, 64; Florenz Ziegfeld’s use of, 29 Indian novelty, 157, 165–66, 167 Indian Reorganization Act, 210 Indian spectacles, 2, 155, 268, 276 Indianthusiasm, in Germany, 155, 238–39, 241, 247, 253, 255, 265, 267, 268, 311n92 Indigeneity: Princess Chinquilla’s claims to, 25–26, 50, 193, 194, 196–98, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208, 210–13, 280, 317n2, 321nn67 and 71; connections with vaudeville, 2; entertainment economy’s debt to, 41, 269; flapper origins in, 59, 60, 170, 273; as frame for novelty, 165–66; Indianness contrasted with, 75, 270; Charlie Oskomon’s claims to, 51, 264–65; overwriting with colonialist fantasy, 14; polite vaudeville entangled with,

24, 25, 27, 35, 49; settler appropriation of, 13; trade blankets representing, 160; Princess Wahletka’s claims to, 221–25, 230–31, 234, 235; and western modernity, 61–62, 171, 238, 250, 252, 253, 262, 263 Indigenous agency: and Deer family, 154; in film, 103; and Indigenous performers absorbing and adapting cultures, 32–33, 174; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 82, 95–96, 102; revisionist scholarship on, 13; and Will Rogers, 68, 76–77; and wild west shows, 3, 55, 149 Indigenous art and artists, 10–11, 15, 23, 29, 79, 131, 172 Indigenous athletes, 14 Indigenous belief systems, 323n5 Indigenous bricolage, 10–11, 216 Indigenous creativity, 10, 78, 83, 160, 173; and novelty in vaudeville, 12, 156, 157–58 Indigenous culture: appropriation of, 128, 135; and Indianists, 61–63, 126, 127, 158, 173, 273, 306n18; and syncopation of jazz, 169–73 Indigenous erasure, 132 Indigenous film-makers, 103 Indigenous-identifying performers: demand for, 28; faux-Indian identity as extraction from Indigenous lives, 218, 227, 234, 235, 269; and itinerant entertainment, 29; and lack of community ties, 25, 272, 282; and union efforts, 56; and vaudeville Indians, 39, 42, 270; as wannabees, 24, 25, 41, 50, 56, 118, 149, 161, 193, 217–18, 226, 249, 270, 276, 282; Yiddish Indians, 232 Indigenous identity: appropriation of, 191, 193, 223, 230–31, 235, 238, 247, 250, 252, 269; Indian in historical identity, 288n51; of Go-won-go Mohawk, 49, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 91; and racial shifters, 230–31; self-identifying as white for census, 37; and Two Spirit, 111; of vaudeville Indians, 9, 39 Indigenous irony, 58, 63–64

I ndex  365 Indigenous literacy, 83, 86 Indigenous modernities, 2; and Esther Deer, 59, 169–73, 266; and Chester Dieck, 26, 238, 250, 252, 253, 262–64, 266, 267–68; evidence of, 270; Dylan Robinson on, 285n5 Indigenous networks: and Princess Chinquilla, 54, 199; demand for, 28; geographies of, 64, 269, 270–71; and intergenerational solidarity, 42; and kinship relations, 41–50, 52, 54, 56, 65, 282; and non-Indigenous performers, 50–52; as processes of change and continuance, 2; and Molly Spotted Elk, 42, 272; and working conditions of vaudeville circuits, 53–54 Indigenous performers: agency in absorbing and adapting cultures, 32–33, 174; audience perceptions of, 11–12, 22–23, 63–64; and audience relations, 24, 55, 129, 174, 220, 274, 277; and colonially enforced communities, 41, 42–43; community ties of, 25, 26, 31–33, 64, 79; and conditions of vaudeville employment, 24, 28, 53–54, 59, 65, 68, 70, 73, 295n130; and containing myths, 152; exclusion from polite vaudeville, 34; exploitation of, 22, 23, 54–55, 56; in film, 179, 184, 185, 188, 277; and forms of cultural employment, 24, 125, 126, 269; in Germany, 56–57, 241, 247, 248, 252, 254, 262, 264, 265–66; as “Indian ghosts,” 9, 41, 50, 58, 272; as itinerant entertainers, 28, 29–33, 238; and managerial relationship, 56–57, 63; and musical revues, 57–64, 166–67; overseas travel arrangements of, 311–12n94; as playing Indian, 18, 22; playing music in vaudeville, 46–47, 286n10; and power of material culture, 131, 136–37; power relations reoriented by, 218, 274; reciprocal looking of, 129, 131; redface performers compared to, 270, 273; role of live Indigenous performance in

cinematic space, 26, 177–79, 184, 274–79; as seasonal workers, 37; selfdetermination of, 56–57, 79, 106, 143, 144, 157, 213; shared Native space created by, 31, 271; Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s archive of, 7; and union efforts, 55–56, 69, 239; use of vaudeville stage, 2, 8–9, 28, 54–55, 65, 68, 174, 176, 269, 281–82; vaudeville as transitional space for, 10, 65; in vaudeville-film combination houses, 179, 181–86, 187, 188, 235, 275, 278; veiled language of, 205; visual sovereignty of, 2, 55, 103, 144, 269, 282 Indigenous Research Methodologies, 13, 288n54 Indigenous resurgence, 6, 21, 29, 160 Indigenous scholars, 285n5 Indigenous self-determination, 208, 281; of Indigenous performers, 56–57, 79, 106, 143, 144, 157, 213 Indigenous survivance, 1, 6, 33, 53, 64, 133, 160, 216, 269, 282, 285n4; and Deer family, 138, 161, 176; strategies of, 229, 274; and western modernity, 2, 276 Indigenous time, 24, 188, 269, 274, 285n5, 317n45 Indigenous women: Princess Chinquilla on naturalness of dress, 196, 205–6, 272; Esther Deer on voting rights for, 174; at Wounded Knee massacre, 5, 50, 91, 104, 186, 212, 286n16 —performers, 6, 20–21, 126, 192; “Indian Princess” caricature of, 50–51, 102, 223, 231, 236; and musical revues, 59, 167–68, 314n133 Ingraham, Prentiss, 90–93, 99, 100, 101, 119, 302n65 Internationale Artisten Loge (IAL), 55–56, 239–40, 243, 245–46, 252, 254, 327n26 Irish performers, 28, 33, 35–36, 74, 103 The Iron Horse (silent western), 177–78, 178, 184 Iroquois Agricultural Society, 116

36 6   In d ex Iroquois Confederacy, 116. See also Haudenosaunee Confederacy Iroquois performers, 248, 264, 273 Iserhoff, Erika A., 147 Jackson, Louis, 141, 142, 144, 308nn19 and 33 Jacob, H. R., 79 Jay Treaty (1794), 136, 307n3 jazz music, 60, 274; and African American performers, 76, 172; Esther Deer on, 169–73, 296n157; Paul Whiteman and, 171–72. See also Indian jazz revues J. Capps and Sons, 160, 161 Jelavich, Peter, 246 Jenkins, Billy, 255–56 Jenkins, Henry, 11, 180 Jenkins, Philip, 323n5 Jewish peoples, in The Scrubbing Project, 1, 4 Jewish performers: prejudice against, 246, 252, 254, 255–56, 327n28, 328n57; Will Rogers on, 74, 299n45; of vaudeville, 28, 59–60, 168, 231, 232 Johnson, E. Pauline/Tekahionwake, 7, 14, 49, 112, 207, 287n23, 320n63 Johnson, Falen, 189, 285n1, 287n23 Johnson, James Young/James Young Deer, 42, 73, 102 Johnson, Michael K., 76 Johnson, Rosamond, 76 Jolson, Al, 5, 185 Jones, Orrin, 115 Justice, Daniel Heath, 6–7, 68, 72, 73, 77, 228, 272, 297n1 Kahnawake Indians, 277 Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center, 136, 175, 289n69 Katanski, Amelia V., 46 Kattwinkel, Susan, 37, 291n37 Kawbawgam, Carlisle, 46 Keaton, Buster, 275–76 Keith, Benjamin Franklin: and polite vaudeville, 34, 38; theaters of, 163; vaudeville

circuits of, 24, 38, 52, 63, 69, 171, 172, 199 Keith-Albee circuit, 55, 71, 127, 271; and competition, 52, 71; and Esther Deer, 173, 265; working conditions of, 53, 69, 70 Keith-Orpheum circuit, 127 Keith’s Theatre, Boston, 46, 50, 66 Keith Theatre News, 71 Kels, Margaret Ruby/Princess White Cloud, 50 Kenjockety, Frank L., 115, 248, 271 Keogh and Davis, 150 Kesheena, 312n104 Kibler, M. Alison, 56, 286n10 Kihn, W. Langdon, 330n95 Killer, Haygood (Pa ve na ah ne), 322n95 Killey, William Henry, 113 kinetoscopes, 180 King, Dennis, 128 King, Thomas, 75, 311n83 Kingsley, Walter, 172 kinship relations, 21, 77, 286n6; and Princess Chinquilla, 54, 199, 201, 202–3, 204, 206, 207, 210–16; and Esther Deer, 158, 161, 164–68, 175; and Deer family, 168; and Indigenous networks, 41–50, 52, 54, 56, 65, 282; Indigenous performers and, 24, 29, 30–31, 274; and photographs of Indigenous performers, 13, 17–21; and relationship between costume and interiority, 15, 17 Konorah, Max Berol, 327n26 Kovach, Margaret, 289n68 Krasicki, Joseph, Count, 163 Kreis, Karl Markus, 311n83, 312n96 Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, 171 La Belle, Andrew, 201 Lackteen, Frank, 185 Lake Mohawk, New Jersey, 173 Lakota Ghost Dancers, 32 Lakota performers, 248, 264, 273 La MaMa, 20, 21, 135 land: and Go-won-go Mohawk, 116–17; and Indigenous entertainment routes,

I ndex  367 29-32, 271–72; Indigenous land dispossession and vaudeville circuits 53, 69–73, 271; and “Native hubs,” 270–71. See also allotment; extraction Laplante, Edgar/Chief White Elk, 273 LaRue, Grace, 58 The Last Frontier (film), 185–86, 187 Lauder, Harry, 57, 161, 312n107 Laurel and Hardy, 134 Lauzon, Jani, 1, 6, 285n1, 287nn23 and 42 Lawrence, Professor, 195 Lawton, R. E., 309n49 Lax Kw’alaams Band, 40 Lay, C. C., 117–18 Lee, Arlene, 323n2 Levolo and Reed, 121 Lieurance, Thurlow, 126 Lili’uokalani, Queen, 205 Lillian, Princess, 288–89n55 Little, Richard Henry, 298n2 Little Chief, Tommie, 122, 127 Little Elk, Darly, 280 Little Moose, Chief, 281 Liverpool Weekly Courier, 97 living curiosity shows, 96, 169, 194, 202 Loew, Marcus, 24, 53 Loft, Esther Martin/Ka-Nas-Ta-Ge, 139, 159 Lolo the Sioux Seeress and Sure-Shot, 220 Lomawaima, Tsianina K., 43, 215–16 Lone Horse, Chief, 215 Long Feather, 150 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 43, 86 Long Lance, Buffalo Child, 280 Lord, Lucy, 63 Lord John Sanger’s Circus Revue, 252 Loring, Donna M., 33 Loring, Frank/Big Thunder, 31–32, 33, 41, 124, 272, 291n26 Loring, Mary, 32 Lorne, Marion, 298n31 Lovell, John, 143 Lutz, Hartmut, 155, 238, 255, 311n92 Lyons, Scott Richard, 24 Mabie’s Menagerie, 33 McBride, Bunny, 31, 125, 186, 306n3, 315–16n5

McBride, Mary Margaret, 172 McCoy, Tim, 184 MacDonald, Jeanette, 131–32, 133, 134 McKee, Buck, 66, 72 McKinley, Mabel, 199 McNenly, Linda Scarangella, 309n45 McSpadden, Theodore, 69 Madame Loretta “Clairvoyant and Palmist,” 230 Maddox, Lucy, 23 Manhattan Arts and Crafts Studio, 220 Manhattan Bowery, 33, 34, 37 Manone, Wingy, 52, 183 Maori women, 205–6, 272 Maracle, Cheri, 285n1, 287n23 Marble, Scott, 150, 276 Marinelli, H. B., 53, 69 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 3, 6, 55, 158, 274 Marks, Maurice, 60 Marx, Harpo, 53 Marx Brothers, 4–5, 134 mass culture, 1–2, 28 mass media, 13 Mathews, John Joseph, 22 May, Karl: and Deer family in Germany, 311n83; festivals in Germany honoring, 254, 256, 264, 265; Winnetou novels of, 155, 237, 238, 250, 253–54, 255, 256, 258–59, 263, 264, 267, 268, 311n83, 329n69 Mayo, Lisa, 8, 15, 132, 133–35. See also Miguel, Elizabeth Maze, Paul, 300–301n17 Medicine Lodge Treaty, 214 medicine shows, 29, 30 Melencia, Terri, 249, 328n49 Melencia’s Indian Family, 51, 242, 249, 255, 328n45 memory work, 131, 134 Meredith, Minnie, 75 Meredith Sisters, 74–75 Merrill, Blanche, 296n159 Mestayer, William A., The Tourists in the Pullman Palace Car, 291n37 Métis people, Batoche attack on, 5, 286n16 Middlemore, Charlotte, 186, 187

36 8   In d ex Mielke, Laura L., 33, 87 Miguel, Antonio, 8, 15, 17–20, 19, 281 Miguel, Elizabeth, 7–8, 132–35, 281 Miguel, Elmira, 8 Miguel, Gloria, 7–8, 20, 22, 132–35, 279; Antonio Miguel as father of, 15, 18–20, 281 Miguel, Muriel, 20–21, 132–35, 189; Antonio Miguel as father of, 15, 18, 20–21, 281; and Spiderwoman Theater, 8, 10 Miguel family, 13, 15, 17–21, 23, 133 Mi′kmaq vaudevillians, 56 Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show, 31, 48, 248 Minikes, Khanan-Yakov, 232 Minnehaha, Indian Princess, 194, 317n6 minstrelsy, 6, 33, 88, 103, 114, 196, 291n30 Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle (Kent Monkman), The Emergence of a Legend, 189, 190, 191–92 Mitic, Gojko, 263 Mlle. Toona’s Indian Novelty Co., 44–47, 45, 54, 56 Moctezuma, 185 modernity: as concept, 2, 269, 285n5; cinematic, 188, 275; cross-racial, 156; Indigenous, 26, 263, 266, 268; settler, 227; western, 2, 4, 10, 26, 41, 102, 137, 167, 170, 171, 173, 175, 185, 214, 246, 250, 266, 268, 269, 274, 276, 281; and Indianness, 58, 64, 219, 238, 250, 252, 253, 261–62, 267; and melodrama, 82; and telepathy, 219–20; and Variété, 237; and vaudeville, 2, 156, 179, 218, 252, 269 Moffett Studios, 164 Mohawk, Allen/Ga-ne-gua, 80, 113, 116 Mohawk, Bernie, 323n2 Mohawk, Go-won-go, 14, 80; and audience relations, 115–16; and Beadle and Adams, 25, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95–96, 98, 105; birth of, 79–80, 116–17, 300n5; British tours of, 96–98, 100, 102, 115, 273; cabinet cards and postcards, 79, 81, 84, 85, 100, 105–12, 106, 119;

cabinet cards signed “Aboriginally Yours,” 14, 15, 16, 79, 93, 94, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 162, 299n3; and Esther Deer, 162–63; and dime-novel industry, 25, 79, 89–96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 114, 119, 302n65; entertainment routes of, 271, 272; and film, 78, 102–3; The Flaming Arrow, 102, 105, 113, 114, 115, 304n112; gender identity of, 82, 83–84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92–93, 94, 94, 95, 97–98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 109, 111, 112, 119, 300–301n17; gravestone of, 113; and Improved Order of Red Men, 117–18, 119; An Indian Romance, 103–5, 113, 118; Indigenous identity of, 49, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 91; Indigenous self-determination of, 79, 106; and kinship relations, 54; marriages of, 80, 82, 300–301n17; and melodrama, 25, 32, 49, 79, 81, 82–83, 87, 88, 90, 100, 102, 119; Monique Mojica on, 25, 79, 105–9, 111–12, 113, 303n93, 304n99; on mother’s identity as “half-breed,” 300n6; and non-normative public identity, 78, 79, 83, 92; as playwright, 78, 79, 83, 91, 97, 103–5, 106, 299n2, 301n32; and popular print culture, 78, 79, 93, 95–96, 107; and “Princess” label, 102; rope tricks of, 77, 88; Michelle St. John on, 25, 79, 105–9, 111–12, 303n93, 304n99; sand-dancing in her show, 98; self-presentation of, 96–97; and Seneca Nation, 78, 80, 82, 113–19; stage career of, 80–82, 83, 94–95, 97, 102, 119–20; studio portrait, 108–9, 109, 112; theatrical troupe of, 25, 32, 77, 78, 82, 96–102, 113–14, 123; Wep-Ton-No-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier, 49, 81, 82–84, 86–89, 96, 97–98, 100, 102–3, 105, 113, 114, 115, 118, 301nn19 and 22, 304n101; white husband as manager of, 57 Mohawk, John, 118 Mohawk, Lydia Hale, 80, 300n6 Mohawk Institute, 140

I ndex  369 Mohawk Nation Territory, 136–39, 143, 151, 158, 171 Mohica Medicine Shows, 133 Mojica, Monique, 15, 22, 150, 289n69, 307nn6 and 42; family archive of, 15, 17–18, 23; grandfather of, 281; on Go-won-go Mohawk, 25, 79, 105–9, 111–12, 113, 303n93, 304n99; on reading signs of Indianness in publicity portraits, 13–14, 15, 18, 107–8; Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, 1, 6, 7, 14–15, 285n1, 287n31 Monkman, Kent, 189, 190, 191–92, 268 Monod, David, 37 Montana: Butte’s Golden Age of the Theater, 201, 319nn34, 36, and 37; Princess Chinquilla in, 201–6, 210–11, 212 Montezuma, Carlos, 48–49 Monture, Rick, 30 Moody Studios, 164 Morris, John C., 45 Morris, Joe (Joseph H.), 24, 44–45, 290n71 Morris, Joseph Henry/Chief Clear Sky, 184–85, 281 Morris, William, 69 Moses, Daniel David, Almighty Voice and His Wife, 307n42 Moss Empires, 53 Mourning Dove, 10, 95 musical revues: and Indigenous performers, 57–64, 166–67; and Indigenous women performers, 59, 167–68, 314n133; and Pocahontas, 58–59, 62, 167–68; of Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, 121, 127–31; and Will Rogers, 75–76, 166, 299n45; of Florenz Ziegfeld, 58, 273 Nagiyanpe (Robert Bruce), 46 Naspa, Hampa, 312n102 National Council of American Indians (NCAI), 208, 321n71 National Indian Day, 281 National Vaudeville Artists, 56 Native Hawaiian performers, 22, 205, 272, 279

The Navajo Girls, 74, 298n33 Navarre, Ignatius Gregory, 227–28, 233, 324n39 Navarre, Isadore G., 227, 233, 324n38 Navarre, Marjorie O’Connor, 227, 233, 324n38 Navarre, Neal Bernard, 227–28, 229, 324n39 Neiman, Fred, 57, 153, 310n73 Nelson, Apid, 181, 183 Nelson, Horace, 180 Nelson, Philomene Saulis, 180 Nelson-Bauman, Eunice, 186 Newell, Abraham Bliss, 197, 215, 319n42; and banjo duet, 196–97; on Princess Chinquilla’s death, 213; as Princess Chinquilla’s partner, 8, 195, 196, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 212, 322n92; as cowboy juggler, 196, 202, 205 New York City: American Indian Day in, 17, 26, 234, 279–81; Indigenous community of, 37–38, 51, 54, 126, 208, 279; Palace in, 70 New York Clipper, 100 New York Hippodrome, 73, 126, 173 New York Journal-American Photographic Morgue, “Brooklyn Indians,” 17–21 New York Times, 208 nickelodeons, 102, 180 Nicks, Trudy, 309n52 Nicolar, Elizabeth Josephs, 124 Nicolar, Joseph, 123–25, 187 Night Killer (Da a ve na ha), 211, 214, 215, 322n95 Night Killer, Edgar/Flying Bear, 215, 322n95 Nolan, Yvette, 287nn23 and 26 non-Indigenous performers: of Germany, 241, 242, 247, 267; and “Indian Princess” caricature, 50–51, 102, 223, 231, 236; and musical revues, 58–60; as playing Indian, 50, 256, 282; as redface performers on film, 185, 225; as redface performers on stage, 9–10, 24, 25, 33, 34, 35, 51–52, 58, 62–63, 161, 167, 168, 172, 282, 299n45, 315n154; as redface performers on

370   In d ex non-Indigenous performers (continued) and off stage, 9–10, 208, 287n38, 321n67; as vaudeville Indians, 50–52, 183; Princess Wahletka as, 51, 217–18, 221, 222 non-Indigenous scholars, 7, 13, 22, 106, 288n51. See also settler scholars No-Nos-See, the She Wolf, 291n26 Norman, Karyl/George Peduzzi, 222 Northern Cheyenne Tongue River Reservation, 201, 210–11 novelty: and Indigeneity, 71, 89, 157–58, 164, 165–66, 174, 218, 241, 282, 312n96; and vaudeville, 2, 3, 11, 12, 40, 44, 156, 179, 204, 205, 237, 240; novelty Indians, 241, 243, 245, 247, 254, 263, 267, 270, 273. See also Indian novelty Nuñez, Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw, 32, 290–91n31 Nuxalk dancers, 314n147 Oakley, Annie, 39, 83 O’Brien, Jean M., 34, 49, 152, 293–94n104 Odell, George, 35 Oglala Lakota performers, 238, 311–12n94 Ohio River Valley, 271 Ohomah Society, 131 Oil Springs Reservation, 116 Oklahoma, 71, 227, 228–29, 230 O-lo-cowah-la of the Osage, 228 Olson, Michelle, 189 101-Bison films, 180 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show, 31, 48, 180, 183–84, 186, 229, 248, 277 Onondaga Nation, 271 Orpheum Circuit, 47, 52, 69 Ortley, Samuel, 201 Osage Nation, 229 Oskenonton, 207 Oskomon, Charlie/Chief Os-Ko-Mon: and Princess Chinquilla, 51, 54, 165, 265, 272; claims to Indigeneity, 51, 264–65; and Anna Cole, 207, 264–65, 272; and Esther Deer, 165–66, 173, 265, 330n95; in Germany, 242, 264, 265–66; and Hitchy Koo, 1919, 167,

313n125; modeling of, 265, 330n95; in Paris, 265, 273 Otis, Melissa, 300nn5–6 Otte, Marlene, 246, 255, 328n57 Owens, John Edward, 34 The Paleface (film), 275 Pan-American Exposition (Buffalo, 1901), 147, 199 Paris Exposition (1931), 47, 54, 217 Park Circuit, 271 Parker, Arthur C., 299n3 Parker, Quanah, 228 Pastor, Frank, 33 Pastor, Tony, 34–35, 239, 291nn26 and 35; afterpieces of, 33, 34, 86; audiences of, 36–37, 292n52; and Princess Chinquilla, 195, 199; and competition, 38–39, 52; European vaudeville featured by, 36, 39; as father of polite vaudeville, 3, 27, 33–39, 78; Fourteenth Street Theater of, 36–39, 64, 187; Indianness discourse of, 27, 28, 38–39 Paté, Bernard, 183 Patterson, William Morrison, 170–71, 172 Paul, Jake, 145, 310n66 Paul Whiteman Band, 172, 315n153 Pawnee Indian Troupe of Dancing Girls, 323n2 Pendleton blankets, 160, 173 Pennington, Ann, 75 Penny, Glenn, 246–47, 255 Penobscot Nation, 41, 42, 123–25, 182, 272, 305–6n3, 315–16n5 The People and the Text (Indigenous digitization site), 289n69 Petter, Bertha, 210, 211 Petter, Rodolphe, 210, 211–12 Phillips, Ruth B., 309n52 Pictorial Review, 169 Piels, Chester, 241 Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, 42, 73, 248, 278 “Plains Indian” image, 3, 108, 183; and Princess Chinquilla, 196; and Deer family, 148–49, 159; and Chester

I ndex  371 Dieck, 244–45; and Molly Spotted Elk, 177 “playing Indian,” 18, 27, 28, 35–36, 50, 128, 132, 151, 161, 221, 256, 270, 272 Pocahontas: Esther Deer and, 11, 59, 167–68; in popular mythology, 32, 58–59, 62, 100, 168; “Pocahontas, Tammany’s sister” (song), 58 Pocahuntas, in German Variété, 241, 267 Poli, Sylvester A., 52, 199 polite vaudeville, 52, 172; African American and Indigenous performers excluded from, 34; blackface in, 34, 76, 103, 113, 169, 299n45; in Butte, Montana, 201, 319n36; and Princess Chinquilla, 201; family audience of, 27, 33–34, 36–37, 38, 239, 292n52; immigrant caricatures in, 34, 35–36, 83, 86, 88, 106, 301n22; Indigeneity entangled with, 24, 25, 27, 35, 49; and Go-won-go Mohawk, 79; Tony Pastor as father of, 3, 27, 33–39, 78; Will Rogers on, 72 Pomeroy, Louise, 80 Poolaw, Bruce/Young Chief Poolaw, 26, 122, 214, 280; and “Indian Love Call” duet, 121, 123, 127–29, 130, 131; musical revue of, 121; and Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, 127, 129, 135; vest of, 131, 272 Poolaw, Horace, 129, 131 Poolaw, Linda S., 129 Poolaw, Lucy Nicolar/Princess Watahwaso, 21, 41–42, 122, 125–27, 129, 214, 280, 287n26, 315n155, 317n40; biographies of, 125, 306n3; “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” 126; and Chautauqua circuits, 125, 126; “The Courtship of Rippling Water,” 121, 127–28; education of, 181; family lineage of, 123–25; and “Indian Love Call” duet, 121, 123, 127–29, 130, 131, 135; musical revue of, 121, 127–31; performance career of, 125–29, 131, 180, 199; “Princess Wantura and Her Tribesmen,” 187, 317n40; Princess Watawaso and Her Royal Americans vaudeville troupe,

121, 122, 123, 127–31, 135, 305n2, 317n40; and Molly Spotted Elk, 127, 187–88, 317n40; and symbiosis of politics and entertainment, 123, 124, 135; and trans-Indigenous community, 26, 123, 126–27, 135, 272; and vaudeville act, 126–29, 131; and westerns, 188, 235; white husband as manager of, 57, 126 popular culture, 169–73; and genocide, 214; and images of Indians, 13, 71; Indigenous work in, 2, 13, 269; and Yiddish vaudeville, 231 Porter, Edwin, 150, 276 Port Simpson Indians, 46–47 Powers, William, 58 Powless, Chief, 271 Prairie Flower, Princess, 278 Pratt, Richard Henry, 43, 44, 201 “Princess White Deer: A Woman, A Mohawk, and A Legend” (exhibition, 2017), 175–76 Prins, Harald, 31, 291n26 Proctor, F. F., 38, 52 Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, 74, 199 Das Programm, 251–52, 254, 328n45; and Esther Deer, 266; and Chester Dieck, 243, 245, 245, 250, 251, 257, 266; and Internationalen Artisten-Loge, 56, 239–41, 242, 246 Queens, N.Y., Princess Chinquilla in, 37, 199, 204, 207, 212, 278 queer spaces, 25, 90, 95, 100, 222 racial play: of Esther Deer, 164; of Will Rogers, 68, 73–74, 75 Raheja, Michelle, 2, 9, 50, 103, 287n38, 316n28 Ramirez, Renya K., 26, 270–71, 272, 274, 277 Ranco, John, 182 Red Cloud Dance Troupe, 31 Red Eagle, of New York City, 41, 57 Red Eagle, Henry, Chief/Henry Perley, 95, 299n3 Reder, Deanna, 289n69

372   In d ex redface performers on stage: and Indigenous performers, 270, 273; non-Indigenous performers as, 9–10, 24, 25, 33, 34, 35, 51–52, 58, 62–63, 161, 167, 168, 172, 282, 299n45, 315n154 “Red Indian,” 152, 225, 253 Red Jacket, Chief, 212 Redpath Chautauqua circuit, 125 Red Shirt, in The Only Good Indian . . . , 287n26 Red Wing. See St. Cyr, Lilian/Red Wing Red Wing, “The half cast Indian Girl,” 241, 242, 267 Reid, Gerald F., 307n3 Reid, Mayne, 155–56 Remington, Mayme, 74 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 43, 293n79 reservations, 11–12 Rhoads, John Hissem, 227, 324n38 Rhoads, Loretta Navarre, 227–31, 233, 234, 324n38. See also Wahletka, Princess Rice, Lawrence, 44 Rice, Mary Morris, 44–45 Richmond, N.Y., 37 Rickard, Jolene, 131 Rickards, Harry, 53 Rider, James E., 300n17 Riel, Louis, 286n16 Rifkin, Mark, 188, 229, 285n5, 317n45 Rinker, Alton, 172 Roads, Twilight, 230, 234. See also Wahletka, Princess Roberts, Laverne, 270–71 Robinson, Dylan, 149, 285n5 Rogers, Betty Blake, 70 Rogers, Chief of the Cherokee, 228 Rogers, Will, 67, 70, 131, 169, 229–30, 311n94, 325n51; and Cherokee pride, 68, 69, 70–72, 73, 74, 77, 298n18; film career of, 71, 74, 77; Indianthemed acts contiguous to, 74, 298nn31 and 33; on land dispossession, 69, 73; on management of own bookings, 24, 57, 69, 290n71; and musical revues, 75–76, 166, 299n45;

and The Navajo Girls, 74, 298n33; performative agency of, 68, 76–77; political commentary of, 73, 77; racial play of, 68, 73–74, 75; relationship with audience, 66, 72, 73, 75–76, 298n2; roping act of, 11, 26, 50, 66, 68, 69, 72–75, 88, 272, 298n2; touring schedule of, 68, 69–70, 151, 252, 272; as vaudeville Indian, 49, 66, 68–69, 75, 76, 77, 102, 230, 272–73 Rogin, Michael Paul, 76 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 207 Roosevelt, Theodore, 73, 119 Rose Marie (Broadway musical), 121, 128, 306n22 Rose Marie (film versions), 131–35 Rosenthal, Erich Rudolf Otto, 255–56 Ross, John, 234 Royal, Neal Vernon, 234, 325n62, 326n77. See also Buhler, Neal V. Royal, Victor (Victor Rothstein), 218–21, 225–27, 230–33, 234, 235, 325nn54 and 62 Running Deer, Chief/Ennias Ta-Si-Tai-Ari Os-Ka-Non-Do, 139, 144, 145, 150, 151, 159; and Deer’s Indian Village, 147–48, 148; and Esther Deer’s solo career, 161–62, 168, 314n135; family troupe of, 41, 54, 139; performance career of, 30, 164, 272 Running Elk & Wanna, 39 Russia, 231; Esther Deer in, 158, 161, 163, 266, 313n115, 330n105; Chester Dieck in, 241, 243, 245, 266, 330n105; and Das Programm, 239, 240, 266; vaudeville in, 40, 246, 274 Saami people, 193, 317n2 St. Cyr, Lilian/Red Wing, 21, 43, 73, 234, 280, 289n59; Princess Chinquilla mistaken for, 208, 321n71; and film, 42, 102, 126, 275–76, 280 St. James, Red Fox, 207–8, 321n67 St. John, Michelle, 289n69; on Go-won-go Mohawk, 25, 79, 105–9, 111–12, 303n93, 304n99; and Turtle Gals

I ndex  373 Performance Ensemble, 1, 7, 285n1, 287nn23 and 42 St. Louis World’s Fair, 68 St. Regis Indian Show Company, 144, 145, 147 Salons du Cercle Internationale des Arts, 188 Salsbury, Nate, 38 Sandoz, Mari, 193, 211, 213 Sanger, Margaret, 207 Sarker, Sonita, 169 Sarrasani, Hans Stosch-, 238, 248, 262, 264, 312n94, 330n85 Sarrasani’s Circus, 158, 238, 254, 264 Schneider, Rebecca, 134 Schultze, Paul, 155 scientific racism, 171 seances, 220 The Searchers (film), 191–92 Sedgwick, Catharine, Hope Leslie, 100 Sedgwick, Edward, 317n41 sell cards, 8, 54, 145 Seneca Indian Band, 117 Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, 289n69, 304n99 Seneca Nation, 78, 80, 82, 86, 96, 108–9, 112, 113–19 Seneca Revolution (1848), 116 settler scholars, 12, 14, 22–24, 285n5, 288n54, 289n68 Sharpley, Sam, 291n32 Shay, Charles Norman, 124 Shea, Mort, 69 Sheet Lightning. See Battice, Walter/Chief Sheet Lightning Shenandoah, Audrey, 307n6 Sheridan, Philip, 119, 214 Sherman Institute, 14 Sherwood, Charles, 33 Shield, Alix, 289n69 Shunatona, Joe, 14, 47, 48, 51, 54, 280, 315n155; “All-American Indian Revue,” 217, 235, 323n2; as leader of U.S. Indian Reservation Orchestra, 12, 47, 54; and Molly Spotted Elk, 47, 48, 54, 64, 217; U.S. Indian Band of, 217, 276; as vaudeville Indian, 47–48, 64, 272;

and Princess Wahletka, 26, 217–18, 235, 276 Shunatona, Mifawny, 217 Sieg, Katrin, 222, 226 The Silent Enemy (film), 188, 280 Silvercloud Singers, 289n59 Simms, Albert, 113 Simpson, Audra, 139, 142 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 227, 235 Singer, Ben, 82 Sioux, 10–11, 186–87, 253; audience expectations for, 148–49, 159, 177, 248; and dime museums, 36, 42; and dimenovel industry, 91–92, 93, 100, 114; and vaudeville Indians, 46, 49–50, 73, 248, 254, 264; and warrior image of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 91, 97, 136, 150 Sitting Bull, 35, 287n26; Beadle and Adams’s attacks on, 91, 93; death of, 36, 91, 93 Skins (film), 277–78 Skye family, 168, 314n133 slave narratives, 83 Slobin, Mark, 232 Smily, Owen, 49 Smith, Emma DeKnight, 216 Smith, John, 32, 58, 100, 167 Smith, Laura E., 129 Snake, Reuben, 288n51 Society for American Indians, 208 Society for Psychical Research, 219, 224, 323n4 Sotiropoulos, Karen, 22 Soule, Ralph, 186 Sousa, John Philip, 46 South Africa: Deer family’s tour through, 151–52, 272, 310n66; Will Rogers’s tour through, 68, 70, 272; and vaudeville Indians, 75 South Asian performers, 68, 74 Southern Cheyenne Agencies, 208 Speck, Frank, 181 Spiderwoman Theater: dramaturgical and performative methodology of, 8, 10, 20, 287n31; and Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, 123, 132; Sun Moon and Feather,

374   In d ex Spiderwoman Theater (continued) 132–35; Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City, 268 spiritualist discourse, 219–20, 323n5 Splicer, May (Marie Kaienens), 168 Spotted Elk, Molly/Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud, 21, 54, 179, 180–81, 187, 189, 191–92, 273, 279, 280; and Aztec Girls of Aztec Theatre, San Antonio, 185–86, 187; and Walter Battice, 177–78, 185, 234; birth of, 180; choreography of, 186–87; and club circuit, 189, 191, 317n47; costumes of, 182, 188–89, 191; exploitation of, 179, 189; “Ghost Dance of the Sioux,” 186–87; and Indigenous networks, 42, 272; Katahdin, 188; in 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show, 183–84, 186; and Charlie Oskomon, 51, 165, 265; performance with The Flaming Frontier, 188; performance with The Iron Horse, 177–78, 178, 184, 185; performance with The Last Frontier, 185–87; and Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, 127, 187–88, 317n40; as Princess Nee-Ber-Ben, 181, 182–83; repertoire of, 199; role of live Indigenous performance in cinematic space, 26, 177–78, 184, 185–87, 188, 235, 274; and Joe Shunatona, 47, 48, 54, 64, 217; in The Silent Enemy, 188, 280; Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble on, 7, 287n23; and vaudeville circuits, 188–89, 272; in vaudeville-film combination houses, 179, 181–86, 187, 188, 235 Spybuck, Henry, 228, 229, 325n43 Spybuck, Mary, 325n43 Spy Buck, Minnie (as mother of Wahletka), 221, 222, 224, 226, 233–34 The Squaw Man (film), 280 Standing Bear, Luther/Chief Charging Hawk, 11, 42, 52, 73, 95, 160, 275 Stands-in-Timber, John, 214, 321n71 Star (warrior), 214 Stewart, J. C., The Three Chiefs, 35, 291n36 Stone, Fred, 71 Stone, John Augustus, 34

Stoney Point First Nation, 286n16 The Story of Apanatschi and Her Redheaded Wrestler (video), 268 Stubbs, Tecumseh, 11, 287n42 Sturm, Circe, 231 Sullivan and Considine, 53 Sun, Gus, 53 survivance. See Indigenous survivance Sutton, Richard P., 201, 202 “Syncopation” vaudeville jazz act, 76 Tahamont, Elijah/Chief Dark Cloud, 41 Tallbear, Kim, 12 Tamanend (Lenni-Lenape leader), 27, 59, 64, 187 Tammany, Saint, 27, 36–37 “Tammany; or the Indian Chief” (Broadway musical), 128 Tammany Hall, New York, 27 Tanner, W. S., 145, 145 Tarrant, Henu Josephine, 21, 289n59 Tarrant, Kevin, 21, 289n59 telepathy, 219–21, 226, 230, 232 Tendehoa, “Aerial Indian,” 6, 9 Terkel, Studs, 55, 274 Terriers’ Association, 310n73 Tewes, Alvine Emma Maria, 248, 294n118 Texas Jack’s Wild West Show and Dramatic Company, 68, 70, 74, 151, 152, 169, 310n75 Theatre Owners Booking Association, 28 Theosophy, 323n5 They-Yan-Da, 54, 115 The 39 Steps (film), 276 The 3 Arizonas, 241, 242, 267 Thissen, Judith, 231 Thorpe, Jim, 14 Thrush, Coll, 2, 119, 151, 225 Thunder, Frank T., 40 Tinker, Minnie Spybuck (daughter of Henry Spybuck), 229, 233, 234, 325n43 Tin Pan Alley tunes, Indian themes of, 298n31 Tivoli circuit, 53 Tomar, Newell, 182 Toona Indian Company, 44–47, 45, 54, 56

I ndex  375 Trachtenberg, Alan, 273 trade blankets, 160–61 trans-Indigenous community: and Esther Deer, 159, 161, 162–63, 169; and Deer family, 137; Indigenous performers sustaining, 24, 54, 79; as “Native hubs,” 26, 56, 270–71, 277, 278, 279; and Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, 26, 123, 126–27, 135, 272; solidarity of, 43, 272; and Molly Spotted Elk, 188 Treaty of Canandaigua, 116 A Tribe Called Red (Indigenous DJ collective), 11, 268 tribes, and land claims, 288n51 Troutman, John, 22, 47, 326n85 Trudeau, Sylvia Karonhiahawi Goodleaf, 276, 308n13, 309nn45 and 52 Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, 8, 13, 15, 285n1; The Only Good Indian . . . , 6–7, 10, 14–15, 105–6, 119, 189, 287n23; The Scrubbing Project, 1, 4–6, 10, 185, 286n16 Two-Two, 264 Tyler Indian Exhibition United, 33 Tyndall, Norman, 42, 275 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (film), 179 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, popular stage version of, 146, 309n41 Union Square Theatre, New York, 38, 69, 74 Union Syndicale des Artistes Lyriques, 55, 239 United Booking Offices (UBO), 52–53, 56, 71 United Kingdom, 13, 225. See also Britain Usbeck, Frank, 253 U.S. Indian Field Service, 208 U.S. Indian Reservation Orchestra, 12, 47, 54 U.S. Interior Department, Indian Bureau, 171, 172, 229 U.S. National Museum, 171 U.S. Supreme Court, 117 Van Alstyne, Egbert, 298n31 vanishing Indians: James Fenimore Cooper on, 34, 155–56; and Deer family, 154,

155–56, 175; in dime-novel industry, 114; in Germany, 267; ideologies of, 11, 174, 274, 275, 282; at Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, 147, 309n49; in Whoopee!, 64. See also extinction narrative Van Noy, Jarrette Talmadge/Chief Hailstorm, 51, 242, 247–48, 272, 294nn118–119 Variety, 62, 71, 166 Variety Artistes’ Federation of Great Britain, 55, 239 vaudeville, 2–4, 6, 11, 50, 73, 77; African American performers of, 3, 22, 28, 150, 279; centralized booking systems of, 56, 69; competition of, 38–39, 52–57, 69, 71; early films incorporated into, 3, 10, 11, 177–80; ethnographic narrative for, 169–73, 274; female impersonators of, 222; growth of, 39–40; and Indigenous bricolage practices, 10–11, 216; and Indigenous creative control, 78; Indigenous performers using stage of, 2, 8–9, 10, 28, 54–55, 65, 68, 174, 176, 269, 281–82; intermedial relationship with film, 179–86, 187, 188, 235, 275–76, 278; Jewish-run and Yiddish, 28, 231–32; national circuits of, 56, 69, 273; novelty of, 12, 40, 156, 157–58, 164, 165–66, 174, 179, 270, 282; playbills of, 40, 73; in The Scrubbing Project, 1, 4–6; and telepathy acts, 219–20, 230, 232; unionization of performers, 55–56, 69, 239; working conditions of, 24, 28, 53–54, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 240, 295n130. See also European Variété; polite vaudeville vaudeville Indians, 9, 11–12, 28, 174, 280, 282; African American performers as, 51, 75; attire of, 15, 17, 23, 136–37, 147–50, 158, 163–64, 175, 182, 188–89, 191, 195–96, 207–8, 211–13, 221–22, 244–45, 307n4; audience perceptions of, 11–12; and bridging of vaudeville and early film, 10, 11, 177, 179; community made by, 10, 51, 64, 79;

376   In d ex vaudeville Indians (continued) and employment conditions, 24, 28, 53–54, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 295n130; global circuits of, 2, 11–12, 24, 26, 54, 64, 270, 271, 282; inclusion of, 3, 286n10; Indian stereotypes juggled by, 3, 12, 28, 86, 87, 108, 131, 144, 202, 222, 235–36; Indian vaudeville as term, 40, 292n69; Indigenous identity of, 9, 12, 39; and Indigenous networks, 41–50; managers’ use of Indianness, 28; Go-won-go Mohawk as mother of, 78; non-Indigenous performers as, 50–52, 183; performance circuits of, 12–13, 23, 38, 52–54; promotion as soloists or exceptions, 49; recovering community of, 1, 8–9, 10, 151; resistance to surveillance systems, 54–55; and Will Rogers, 49, 66, 68–69, 75, 76, 77, 102, 230, 272–73. See also Indigenousidentifying performers; Indigenous performers; non-Indigenous performers Victor Talking Machine Company, 126 Vipola, Lisa, 317n2 Virtual Fighter 5 (video game), 268 visual sovereignty, 2, 103, 144, 269, 282 Vizenor, Gerald, on survivance, 285n4 Waggoner, Linda, 42, 52, 275 Wahletka, Princess, 222, 223, 224, 234, 280; British tours of, 220, 223, 225–27, 253, 273; as “Cherokee Princess Psychic,” 217, 218–21, 224–25, 226, 227, 276; claims to Indigeneity, 221–25, 230–31, 234, 235; costumes of, 221, 222; gender identity of, 222; in Indian revue, 26, 217; Lifting the Veil, 217, 219, 221–27, 224, 232–33; as nonIndigenous performer, 51, 217–18, 221, 222; official identity of, 231, 325n62; reconstruction of story, 218, 221–22, 224–31, 232, 233, 234–35, 323n17; Victor Royal as partner of, 218–21, 225–27, 230–33, 234; set designs of,

220–21; and Joe Shunatona, 26, 217–18, 235, 276 Wahletka family, 232 Wales, Prince of, 139, 308n11 Walter, Gustav, 34 wannabee, 7, 8, 9, 25, 26, 41, 50, 56, 118, 149, 160, 161, 193, 218, 226, 249, 264, 276, 282 Wantura, Princess, 122, 127 War Cloud, Chief, 278 Ware, Amy, 73–74, 297n1, 325n51 Warner, Penny L., 30 Warrior, Robert, 157 Washburn, William, 30 Washita River massacre (1868), 214–15 Watahwaso, Princess. See Poolaw, Lucy Nicolar/Princess Watahwaso Watura, Princess, 315n155 Wayne, John, 20, 279 Weaver, Jace, 54, 128, 308n19, 311n83 Weber, Carl Maria von, 46 Weber, Harry, 63 Wertheim, Arthur Frank, 40, 297n1 western pioneering, national myths of, 172 westerns, 10, 179, 184, 188, 225, 235, 269, 275 Western Vaudeville Managers’ Association circuit, 14, 47 Wheelock, Dennison, 46, 47, 48, 49, 74 White, Louellyn, 43 White Deer, Princess. See Deer, Esther/ Princess White Deer White Elk, Chief, 281 White Fawn, 41 Whiteman, Paul, 171–72, 315n153 White Moon, Louis/Chief White Moon, 52, 278, 280 White Rats Actors’ Union of America, 55, 56, 69, 239 White Shield, Rudolph, 211, 214–15 white supremacy, 155 Whitman, Walt, 212 Whoopee! (film), 58, 62, 64, 299n45 Whoopee! (stage play), 61, 62, 63–64, 297n169 Wilde, Oscar, 109, 111, 112

I ndex  377 wild west shows, 13, 83, 180; Princess Chinquilla and, 195, 202; in Germany, 153, 155, 237, 238, 247, 248, 255–56, 264, 267, 331n107; Indigenous performers and, 3, 29, 30, 31, 33, 55, 149, 238; Indigenous women performers of, 6; Will Rogers’s performances at, 68; role of white patriarchal figures in, 3, 149 Willetts, Paul, 273 Williams, Allen Samuels, 37 Williams, Bert, 76, 169, 175, 176, 299n45 Williams, Fred, Sr., 31 Williams, Percy, 52 Wilner, Isaiah Lorado, 171 Wilschke, Robert, 56–57, 263, 265 Wind River Reservation, 184 Winnebago Reservation, 40 Winnemucca, Sarah, 86 Winnetou. See May, Karl Winnetou und Das Halbblut Apanatschi (film), 268 Wirth Brothers’ Circus, 68, 252 Wister, Molly, 4 Wister, Owen: Princess Chinquilla’s letter to, 4, 5, 7, 12–13, 193, 199–200, 201, 206; The Virginian, 4, 71, 90 Wolseley, Garnet Joseph, Lord, 141, 153 women: in vaudeville audiences, 37, 292n52; voting rights of, 174. See also Indigenous women

Worden, Daniel, 90 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 322n92 World War I, 161, 163, 175, 246, 253, 268 World War II, 54, 256 Wounded Knee massacre (1890), 5, 50, 91, 104, 186, 212, 286n16 Wyandots, 96 Yagoda, Ben, 66 Yellow Bird, 278 Yellow Robe, Chancey, 280, 287n26 Yiddish Indians, 232 Young Deer, James, 42, 73, 102 Yowlache, Chief, 49 Ziegfeld, Florenz: and Emile Barrangon, 29, 61–62; and Esther Deer, 60, 167, 169, 175; Follies, 58–60, 62, 75; Indianness used by, 29; Midnight Frolic, 75, 169, 175, 176; and musical revues, 58, 273; Nine O’Clock Frolic, 169; 9 O’Clock Revue, 60, 220; racial segregation of audiences, 76; and Will Rogers, 75; Whoopee!, 58, 61, 62, 187, 297n169, 299n45 Zirkus Ciniselli, 330n105 Zirkus-Variété, 26 Zulu performers, 68, 74