Katrina M. Phillips. Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History.

Abstract

From tea-slinging members of the Sons of Liberty to American football and baseball teams, non-Natives have appropriated Native American identities for centuries. Since Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1999) laid bare these settler fantasies in the United States, scholars have discovered still more iterations of commodified Indigeneity across the globe. In Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History, historian Katrina M. Phillips focuses on Indigenous-themed outdoor dramas in Pendleton, Oregon, Cherokee, North Carolina, and Chillicothe, Ohio. These entrepreneurial small towns turned to Native American history to boost their local economies, drawing visitors to them through what Phillips defines as “salvage tourism.” Economic salvation has not necessarily been the result. But these outdoor dramas have shaped regional memory cultures, drawing tens of thousands of visitors, and have become cultural artifacts embedded, for better or worse, in the communities that created them. Staging Indigeneity proceeds chronologically, beginning with Pendleton, Oregon and the performances of Round Up (1910) and Happy Canyon (1914). Both productions were initiated by town boosters who hoped to rejuvenate the woolen mills, which began their slow decline at the turn of the twentieth century. Pendleton is adjacent to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Major Lee Moorhouse, the Indian agent appointed to CTUIR, later became the town mayor, and he turned to Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla citizens for support as he tried to boost the local economy. Moorhouse used photography and his connections with journalists to promote both events, commodifying Indigeneity for non-Native audiences. Indigenous actors, some of whom studied theater at boarding schools such as Carlisle, worked with Moorhouse to create the Round Up and Happy Canyon productions. Despite low compensation for much of its history, certain families on the Umatilla Reservation consider participation in Round Up and Happy Canyon to be a family tradition, an essential site of Indigeneity. CTUIRs Wildhorse Resort and Casino, founded in 1995, has become the real source of economic revitalization in Pendleton, but the productions of Round Up and Happy Canyon continue to attract visitors yearning for nostalgic portrayals of the American West.