Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832 ed. by Joshua David Bellin, Laura L. Mielke, and: Ceremony, Spirituality, and Ritual in Native American Performance: A Creative Notebook by Hanay Geiogamah (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832 ed. by Joshua David Bellin, Laura L. Mielke, and: Ceremony, Spirituality, and Ritual in Native American Performance: A Creative Notebook by Hanay Geiogamah Teresa Stankiewicz Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832. Edited by Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. pp. 333. $35.00 paper. Ceremony, Spirituality, and Ritual in Native American Performance: A Creative Notebook. By Hanay Geiogamah. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2011. pp. 144. $16.00 paper. Given the disappointing lack of books published each year on Native American drama, these two new works are prime considerations not only for literary review but also for use in cultural and performance studies. Both of these works speak to the “Indianness” of Native American performance and, perhaps more importantly, are written from a distinctly Native American perspective. Editor Laura L. Mielke’s explication of the terms “Indianness” and “performance” in her introduction to Native Acts, is relevant to both works: “When we refer to Indianness in this volume, we mean the acknowledged attribute of direct association with American Indian peoples and cultures; who identifies American Indian attributes determines the substance of Indianness at specific moments” (5). Mielke defines performance in three ways: to present to an audience, to carry out a command or particular action, and to participate in a formal public function or ritual (2). Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832 includes ten insightful essays on the performance of being “Indian” that explore said performance from the perspective of the indigenous peoples. Mielke’s introduction is a superlative beginning that not only defines terms and explains the selection of essays but also [End Page 159] raises some pertinent questions about the performance of Indianness for the indigenous peoples of North America. She begins with an example of her own, the legend of Pocahontas, dissecting the various interpretations of the story and calling for an examination of the intent behind those who reported what has now become an American legend that perpetuates a romantic myth of indigenous peoples in North America. The chronologically organized essays first explore the essentialist attitudes of the Europeans who colonized America and the impact of those attitudes on the native people, concluding with the performance of Indianness in the early formation of the United States. As Mielke asserts, “In early North America, Europeans’ conceptions of Indianness were inextricable from the moral, religious, teleological, political, and economic justifications for their [European] presence” (5). The significance of this collection of essays lies in the deliberate intent to recognize the proprietorship of Native Americans, characterized by Mielke as “a critical intervention in the scholarship treating the performance of Indianness” that restores “Indian peoples to the intercultural matrix from which such performances arose” (10). The first four essays, by scholars Matt Cohen, Nan Goodman, John H. Pol-lack, and Olivia Bloechl, expose essentialist interpretations that pervade historical representations of Indians. All four scholars argue that specific essential-ist assumptions led to misrepresentations of the Native American peoples and the subsequent public attitudes that defined native and Euroamerican relationships during the colonial era. Each author also provides a brief historical background of the text or events that are being examined. In “Lying Inventions: Native Dissimulation in Early Colonial New England,” Cohen analyzes Native American acts of strategic simulation and dissimulation as challenges to perceptions of stable national identities. Goodman’s essay, “The Deer Island Indians and Common Law Performance,” examines the European attitudes that deprived Indians of legal status in common law. Bloechl’s essay, “Wendat Song and Carnival Noise in the Jesuit Relations,” reveals the Jesuits’ assessment of Wendat healing ceremonies as superstitious, a grave charge at the time. Pollack’s essay, “Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France,” focuses on the misinterpretation of native ritual of the Innu, Algonquin, and Maliseet as a negotiated treaty, documented by François Gravé Du Pont and Samuel de Champlain in Des Sauvages, ou, Voyage de Samuel Champlain in 1603. The French understood the oration of Anadabijou as a chief or king commanding his people to accept French settlement and military aid. Pollack explains, however, that allied tribes were not interested...