Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney, by Linda Scarangella McNenly

Abstract

Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney, by Linda Scarangella McNenly. Norman, Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. xviii, 254 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Linda Scarangella McNenly builds on the work of George Moses and Joy Kasson about Native North American performers in Wild West shows, adding theoretical perspectives from anthropology and broadening the scope to include Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) performers from the region that is now Quebec as well as contemporary Indian performers in Euro Disney's Wild West. She recognizes the commodification of Native peoples as part of a larger colonial discourse, but remains focused on Indian agency, asking how Native people made meaning out of this work. In archival records, oral interviews, photographs, and at contemporary tourist sites, the author finds Indian narratives of opportunity, success, skill, and cultural pride framing their performances. The author defines Wild West shows as zones, with a nod to Mary Louise Pratt's 1992 analysis of travel writing. Pratt describes zones of contact between cultures not only as sites of interaction, but as processes in which cultural production is shaped by improvisational negotiations between subaltern groups and the colonial powers they engage. McNenly also references practice put forth by anthropologist Sherry Ortner in a 2006 monograph on culture and power. Practice theory cautions against reducing cross-cultural encounters to questions of domination and resistance, since questions of agency are often more complex and contradictory. Practice theory recognizes the intentions of colonized peoples to define what is good and desirable on their own terms--and to pursue it--as significant forces within colonial encounters. Wild West shows, like harvest fairs and fourth of July celebrations, became venues where Indian participants asserted their own agendas, even as their participation was embedded in a complex web of unequal power relationships with show entrepreneurs, government agents, and the public, to name a (p. 14). McNenly traces the recruitment of Native performers by three major Wild West shows at the turn of the nineteenth century, Buffalo Bill, Pawnee Bill, and the Miller Brothers. Indian performers saw in showmanship opportunities to travel widely, in contrast to confinement on reservations; to earn a good living when reservations offered few job prospects; to maintain extended family groups like the Lakota tiospaves, in contrast to federal imposition of European family models on reservations; and to continue meaningful practices such as dancing and singing at the drum, which were prohibited on reservations. Native participation in Wild West shows became widespread, underscoring Indian agency in the phenomenon. In 1905, for example, 1,617 Native performers appeared in the records kept by Wild West shows. If Joy Kasson exposed Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as a nationalist narrative of expansion, McNenly, in turn, reveals how Native performers transformed their role as actors from exotic savage to worthy adversary. While Lakota warriors in Buffalo Bill's outfit no longer could raid enemy tribes, their collective memory of these honors could be invoked and perpetuated through warrior songs and dances within the show. …