Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition

Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 128 KATRINA PHILLIPS Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney by Linda Scarangella McNenly University of Oklahoma Press, 2012 IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES, thousands of audiences across America and Europe thrilled to the horsemanship, marksmanship, and historical reenactments on display in Wild West shows that, according to numerous academics, are largely responsible for the romanticized, nostalgic view of the American West that “produced stereotypes and reproduced colonial relationships” (4–5). American Indian performers added an aura of authenticity and exoticism, whether they were performing traditional dances or reenacting famous battles and attacks on stagecoaches. The “winning of the West,” as shown through the theatrical lens of Wild West shows, showcased the prowess of white America and celebrated the promises of Manifest Destiny by relying on the “otherness” and exoticism of American Indians. Ironically, as anthropologist Linda Scarangella McNenly argues, Wild West shows—despite their use of Indians as static, one-dimensional pawns in the inevitable conquest of the American West—served as stages of power for Indigenous performers. Showmen like William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, encouraged Indians in these traveling shows to keep dancing and wearing their regalia, even as Indian agents and government officials sought sweeping bans on the practices of Indigenous cultures. McNenly contends that Wild West shows not only highlighted the struggles between government officials bent on assimilating American Indians and the Indians intent on sustaining their traditions but also allowed for Native resistance in public contexts and preserved, rather than destroyed, many elements of Indian culture. Similarly, even though Wild West shows purportedly presented authentic (read: stereotyped ) imagery, Native performers adapted and altered dances and regalia to more accurately reflect their own identity (e.g., 124). McNenly focuses on the experiences and perspectives of American Indian performers in historic and contemporary iterations of Wild West shows. While other scholarship has examined the negative effects of stereotyped Native performances, the control and coercion of Indigenous participants, and the commodification, appropriation, and exploitation of American Indians , McNenly uses the lens of agency to question how Indigenous performers navigated and continue to navigate attempts to pigeonhole them in the performative representations and storylines of Wild West shows. NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 129 McNenly analyzes American Indian performers in three major Wild West shows—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show, and Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show—from 1885 to 1930. While the Office of Indian Affairs sought to regulate Indian employment in Wild West shows, promoters used Indians to satiate audiences’ demand for authenticity . Rather than painting Indians as victims, she uses the historical record to argue that Native performers often took control of their careers or actively sought such employment. Next, she examines three Mohawk families from Kahnawake, Quebec, who capitalized on these constructions of Indianness in the early years of the twentieth century, including a family that produced its own Wild West show. Lastly, she moves to the twenty-first century to investigate why, and under what conditions and circumstances, contemporary Indian performers work at Buffalo Bill Days in Sheridan, Wyoming, and Dis­ neyland Paris’s recreation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Academics studying Indigenous populations must take care when attributing agency to actions wherein one merely hopes to find it, and it is often difficult to ascribe motivations to Native performers without falling into the trap of the “romance of resistance” (15). However, McNenly offers several hypotheses, acknowledging that American Indian performers in Wild West shows may have simply been seeking economic survival rather than purposefully circumventing government attempts to repress Native cultures. She notes that there is a fine line between exploitation and agency—while the lowering of performers’ wages in the 1900s could be seen as a sign of exploitation, for instance, at the same time it corroborates the notion that a large number of Indians pursued work as performers rather than subsisting on reservations. Similarly, Native resistance to government interference may have been evasive rather than oppositional. However, the most captivating chapters, particularly those that analyze the motivations of contemporary performers, make the most valuable...

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Reviewed by: Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside Kenneth Kidd (bio) Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future. By Martin Woodside. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Martin Woodside opens his excellent study Frontiers of Boyhood by reflecting on this famous exhortation by Horace Greeley in 1865. Indeed, many young men and even boys did go West, some literally and still more in their minds and hearts. As Woodside emphasizes, the "frontier" of the American West was understood in the late nineteenth century as the place where boys could become the right sort of men: rugged, self-reliant, demonstrably masculine. And, just as important, the presence and activities of boys on the frontier would ostensibly help the nation grow up. Reflecting also on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Woodside emphasizes how boyhood and the frontier thus "develop through exposure to one another" (11). Including seventeen illustrations, Frontiers of Boyhood adds richly to a body of existing scholarship on American literary boyhood across and slightly beyond the nineteenth century: see, for instance, Marcia Jacobson's Being A Boy Again, Ken Parille's Boys at Home, Lorinda B. Cohoon's Serialized Citizenships, David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy, and my own Making American Boys. Woodside is the first to focus on the frontier's particular importance for boyhood and vice versa. The book contributes not only to children's literature studies and American literary studies but also to studies of the American West, which have neglected the importance of youth on and to the frontier. Woodside's volume appears with the University of Oklahoma Press as part of its William F. Cody series on the history and culture of the American West. The book's placement in the series makes superb sense, as the organizing figure of Frontiers of Boyhood is William F. Cody himself, aka "Buffalo Bill," buffalo hunter, Indian scout, and consummate showman—architect of the world-famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West stage show, launched in 1883. Three of the book's five chapters take up Buffalo Bill and his show and their ongoing legacy. Woodside details how Buffalo Bill's persona and show [End Page 286] were fashioned for a child-friendly audience and thus had to navigate concerns about the show's sensationalism. The focus on Cody as a broker of American youth culture is one of the book's key strengths. Another is Woodside's persuasive account of the dime novel as a form of children's and adolescent literature. Woodside also engagingly explores the role of actual children in frontier mythology. That's not surprising, as Woodside earned his PhD in childhood studies from the (dare I say it?) pioneering program at Rutgers University-Camden. Woodside's introduction nicely sets the stage for the entertaining show that follows. Woodside draws on important work about American adolescence and gender norms by Joseph Kett, Kent Baxter, Sarah Chinn, and Gail Bederman. He makes the case that frontier narratives position the West as a space for white male development through a rhetoric of both "peril and promise" and by delineating "proper" from "improper" boyhood (14). The book proper begins in familiar territory, with a discussion in chapter 1 of the Bad Boy book as practiced by Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland and as approximated by Cody in his autobiography The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1879). Turns out, the bad boy book went West too. The chapter offers strong treatment of both Twain and Garland—and trust me, it's hard to say anything new about Twain. But Woodside does it in his engaging commentary on Huck and Tom Sawyer among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories. However, as Woodside stresses, "it is Cody, not Twain, who successfully integrates the dime novel hero with a literary model of successful American boyhood" (42). Building on this insight, chapter 2 reframes the dime novel as a frontier form that walks the same tightrope that Buffalo Bill did with his show. Dime novel authors had to titillate without seeming to endorse violence or glamorize running away, all the more so...

Public relations and advertising textbooks either ignore or treat the old fashioned press agent with contempt. Yet the origin of modern day sports and entertainment promotion dates back to a group of press agents who made important contributions to the marketing communication tactics we take for granted. From 1884 to 1917, the promotion of Buffalo Bill' Wild West incorporated advertising, public relations, and integrated marketing communication strategies and tactics. Many of these tactics are still in use today. A case will be made to view Buffalo Bill as a „brand” By doing so, the promotion of the Wild West takes on a new meaning. Buffalo Bill' press agent, John M. Burke, for more than 30 years increased the „brand equity” of the Buffalo Bill product through effective and strategically sound advertising and public relations campaigns. For example, building upon the long circus tradition in American folk culture, Burke staged parade events headed by Buffalo Bill to generate major press coverage when the Wild West arrived in local communities. Although Burke might not have had the formal education and access to the latest in communication technology to promote the Wild West, he certainly had the brains and skills

William E (Buffalo Bill) Cody gave Americans a real version of the West that depicted Indians as raw savages, cowboys as chivalrous knights, and both as products of nature. Courageous pioneers versus savage Indians seemed as natural an opposition as sun and moon. The Wild West (the term was omitted from the title to indicate that this was no fantasy), announced Cody's publicists, not the result of rehearsal, it is not acting, it is nature itself (Reddin, p. 61). Perhaps that is indictment enough against Cody and his Wild West show. Both Cody and his show sponsored, celebrated, and commemorated a racialized form of imperialism. Yet, as Joy Kasson (professor of American studies and English at the University of North Carolina) and Paul Reddin (professor of history at Mesa State College Colorado) show two new books on wild west shows, Buffalo Bill leaves us a quandary. It is impossible to celebrate Buffalo Bill wholeheartedly; yet it is impossible to condemn him outright. He did, after all, give Americans and Europeans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries first-rate modern spectacles. Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows involved constant action, horsemanship, sharp shooting, and glitter enough for the Grand Ole Opry, putting the Wild West show a league with P.T. Barnum's circuses. More important, who would condemn a man who apologizes to a friend for being slow to respond to a letter because he had been in a hell of a toot (i.e., drunk), and who shouts to his wife the middle of a third-rate stage melodrama, Hello Mama! Oh, but I'm a bad actor (Reddin, p. 57)? Buffalo Bill was an ingenuous soul, at least the early stages of his entertainment career, and he defies simple judgment. The resurrection of Buffalo Bill, if he needs resurrecting, is far from complete, yet the more human he seems, the more likable he becomes. L.G.

At the turn of the 20th century many Native Americans took part in white man's enterprises: first Wild West shows, then silent movies. Wild West shows toured not only the United States but the Old World as well, including the south-eastern edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among the Native Americans who performed in Europe particularly visible were the Lakota (western Sioux) who performed, among others, in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The most famous of these Lakotas was Sitting Bull who had led his people's military resistance against encroaching white Americans a decade beforehand. Sitting Bull joined the Buffalo Bill's show for 1885 season. In 1890, the Sioux and other tribes lived a great religious awakening that was named Ghost Dance, hoping that by performing the Ghost Dance ritual they would make their lives better and get rid of the white men who took their lands, put them in reservations, broke treaty promises and brought hunger and diseases. On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was killed by Indian Police in front of his cabin at the Standing Rock reservation. Two weeks later, on December 29, 1890, at least two hundred, but perhaps as many as three hundred, Lakotas were killed in the tragic battle (that soon turned into a massacre) at Wounded Knee or died in its aftermath. A few months later, almost one hundred Lakotas, including those who survived Wounded Knee massacre, joined the Buffalo Bill show during its second European tour. In 1902 they participated in the third European tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, now called Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. I will discuss the show as well as the Native American performers and their reception while the show travelled among Polish cities during the summer of 1906, almost at the end of that tour. Delving into Polish press of that period, I will attempt to demonstrate how the Polish press made various, sometimes quite unexpected uses of the show.

Book Review| October 23 2020 Review: Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, by Michelle Delaney Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West by Michelle Delaney. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xii + 235 pp.; appendices, notes, bibliography, index, illustrations; clothbound, $45.00; eBook, $30.00. Laura J. Arata Laura J. Arata Oklahoma State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2020) 42 (4): 201–203. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.4.201 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Laura J. Arata; Review: Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, by Michelle Delaney. The Public Historian 23 October 2020; 42 (4): 201–203. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.4.201 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

"Show Indians"/Showing Indians: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and American Anthropology Rosemarie K. Bank (bio) Scholarship about William F. Cody and Buffalo Bill's Wild West has, undeniably, become an industry. As a man, a myth, a celebrity, a showman, a fraud, a frontiersman, a legend, a husband, a philanderer, a marksman, a phenomenon, a defender of Indians, an exploiter of Indians, a successful businessman, a failed businessman, a producer, and in many other aspects of life, theatre, and cultural history, more has been written about William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody than, perhaps, any other American of his day not elected to public office. Revisionist histories of the 1970s and 80s did much to end the celebratory view of frontier subjects, including Cody, but carried with them a strong antitheatrical prejudice, a prejudice which is, ironically, on view in theatre works like Arthur Kopit's Indians (1969) and in Robert Altman's 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson."1 A subsequent generation of historians in the 1990s and this century have taken up the sobering critiques of revisionist histories, but with a tempered view of the duplicity of performance, representation, and celebrity. Performance troubles oppressor/oppressed binaries, and the present article locates, in a preliminary way, antitheatrical prejudices that have colored views of Cody and his show from the late nineteenth century to our own day by beginning an exploration of the connection between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and American anthropologists. Examining B.I.A. philosophy and procedures with respect to Amerindians and those in Buffalo Bill's Wild West around the time of the Wounded Knee/Columbian Exposition events (c.1890–93) reveals the constraints of modernism in the former and the liberty of traditionalism in the latter. Both were influenced by the views of anthropologists in the nineteenth century and their connections to performance. The triumph of Buffalo Bill's cultural version of Amerindians set a course that has cast "show Indians" (Amerindian performers, in B.I.A. lingo) in dialogue with "showing Indians" (the content of the performances they executed in Buffalo Bill's [End Page 149] and other wild west shows). This tension is under historiographical reconstruction in this paper.2 William F. Cody began to employ Indians in a wild west show format in 1883, when he took his depiction of the frontier to an arena setting. Cody was not the first to hire single Amerindians or troupes of Indians to perform in a show setting or to use a circus format. Indeed, there is an example of Indians performing an outdoor show under Indian management in the 1840s (to the consternation of Phineas T. Barnum, whose employ they had left). Neither was Cody the first showman (or performer) who had to obtain some form of official permission to exhibit Indians or to travel with them to perform.3 Cody, whose earliest Indian performers were Pawnees from the Indian Territory, began "sign-up" days in the early 1880s, in the area around then at the Pine Ridge Agency, where Lakota aspirants in the hundreds would don regalia and audition for the season's tour.4 The rules governing recruiting and hiring Indians during the 1880s appear to have derived from the problems encountered by Cody in employing the headliner Sitting Bull for Tatanka Iyotake's one-season tour, from June to October 1885. The terms of Sitting Bull's employment, according to L. G. Moses, "established a course for all subsequent shows" and marked "the shift of Show Indian employment to the northern plains" and to the Lakota people, who "became the most prized Show Indians."5 At the end of his study of wild west shows, Moses observes, "The only way to explain . . . [its] . . . inconsistency of policy would be to admit that the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] possessed no real authority" to regulate wild west shows or the hiring of Indians to perform in them, which, as one official belatedly confessed in a 1921 memo, would have been "‘inadvisable at least officially and in writing'" to admit.6 Undaunted, officials in the 1880s, from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to...

Reviewed by: Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong Ryan Hall (bio) Keywords Indigenous peoples, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Native American history Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021. By David H. DeJong. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 510. Cloth, $70.00.) Until relatively recently, government administrators exercised an extraordinary degree of power over Indigenous people. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials could dictate almost every aspect of Indigenous people's lives, including where they lived, how and what they bought and sold, what they owned, what they wore and ate, the languages they spoke, how they received and managed money, how they organized their governments, and even how and whether they raised children. Indigenous people resisted, but these policies had undeniably important, and often disastrous, consequences for generations. Yet historians still have an incomplete understanding of the BIA and its inner workings, and in recent decades there have been disappointingly few studies of the Bureau (and of its pre-1824 antecedents in the War Department). Bureaucracy is, after all, an unattractive and intimidating area of study. By design, bureaucracies perpetuate [End Page 352] themselves by producing enormous piles of bloodless and abstruse documentation, the sheer volume of which make them frustratingly difficult for historians to use or comprehend. Paternalism to Partnership seeks to bring some clarity to the study of Indian affairs bureaucracy by focusing on specific individuals. Using separate chapters for each, it offers historical sketches of the sixty-three men and two women who held the highest administrative position in the federal government's Indian affairs system from 1796 through 2021. It typically provides a two- to four-page biographical sketch for each administrator, along with several pages of primary-source excerpts that demonstrate his or her "personal philosophy" (xv). By structuring its analysis in this way, the book contends that individual administrators played essential roles in determining the course of Indian affairs, and by extension, the history of Indigenous people in America. These chapters illuminate the major questions and controversies that preoccupied generations of administrators: for instance, whether the BIA should be under civilian or military control; to what extent the government should manage Indigenous trade; whether treaties should be the primary mechanism for dealing with tribal nations; whether Indian agents should be political appointees or career civil servants; to what extent the BIA should force or advocate for cultural assimilation; and how the BIA should manage Indian lands and money. The chapters also show substantial change over time. While administrators in the nineteenth century generally came to the job with little experience in Indian affairs and were committed to policies of forced assimilation and land dispossession, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries top administrators mostly came from Native communities themselves, and advocated policies of economic development and limited tribal sovereignty. In DeJong's telling, the paternalist BIA of the nineteenth century gave way, bit by bit, to the BIA of today, which is ostensibly focused on serving tribes in a spirit of consultation and partnership. This book gleans these observations from a modest source base. The biographical sketches draw heavily from Robert Kvasnicka and Herman Viola's volume The Commissioners of Indian Affairs (Lincoln, NE, 1979) and a relatively small number of other primary and secondary sources. The primary-source excerpts, which make up about half of the book's total length, come mostly from the annual reports that administrators made to their superiors. These excerpts would not be difficult for historians to find on their own—the commissioners' annual reports are all online and [End Page 353] familiar to any historian of the subject—and the author never introduces or contextualizes them, their intended audience, nor the specific moment when they were written. Still, compiled together they provide snapshots of each administrator's views at a particular point in time. This approach shows what individual commissioners believed and sought to achieve during their tenure, but it also limits the book's perspective on how Indian affairs operated. For example, one of the shortest chapters (just a page and half) discusses William Clark, the famed Corps of Discovery co-captain...

Almost Invisible:The Brotherhood of North American Indians (1911) and the League of North American Indians (1935) Steven Crum (bio) Native American people established intertribal or pan-Indian organizations throughout the twentieth century. Existing scholarship has made us familiar with several, including the Society of American Indians (1911), the American Indian Federation (1934), the National Congress of American Indians (1944), the National Indian Youth Council (1961), and the American Indian Movement (1968).1 On the other hand, there are others we know very little about. Two such organizations are the Brotherhood of North American Indians (1911) and the League of North American Indians (1935), also called the League of Nations, Pan-American Indians. The League has received only passing scholarly references, including mentions in the earliest and latest writings of Native American scholar Vine Deloria Jr. In a 2003 essay, Deloria writes, "The League of Nations—Pan-American Indians was in its final phase [in the late 1960s], although I tried my best, in the afterword in Custer [Died For Your Sins (1969)], to boost its status."2 There are multiple reasons we know so little about the Brotherhood and the League. One is that a percentage of the public, both Indian and non-Indian, had a negative view of both organizations since they were led by so-called controversial figures. This image or representation has discouraged later generations from making historical inquiries about these and other organizations. When scholars do write about them, their descriptions are largely negative and based on official Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) documentation.3 This article examines [End Page 43] why the two organizations ended up almost invisible in twentieth-century Native American history. The Brotherhood of North American Indians Richard C. Adams, a member of the Delaware Tribe in Oklahoma, founded the Brotherhood of North American Indians on December 5, 1911, in Washington, D.C. Adams drafted a written constitution that included the following objectives: to "promote a feeling of friendship, brotherhood, and good citizenship" among the Indian tribes; to "perpetuate the ancient traditions" of the tribes; and "to collect . . . records, papers, and documents" of Indian tribes. Indian tribes could organize local Brotherhood chapters and send representatives to larger conventions to be held in Washington, D.C. Participants at the conventions would elect twenty national chiefs and also council officers, including a Great Sachem, a Chief Historian, and a Great Chaplain. Any person of Indian blood could become a member of the Brotherhood. Non-Indians married to Indians could also become members, but their status would be strictly "honorary" (they couldn't vote). The president and vice president of the United States, the commissioner of Indian affairs of the BIA, and other public officials could also become honorary members.4 Besides the written constitution, Adams produced other written statements that outlined additional objectives for the organization. The Brotherhood wanted the federal government to fulfill its treaty obligations by allowing tribes to press claims in the U.S. Court of Claims against the white Americans. It wanted the BIA to release Indian trust money (up to 25 percent per individual) so Indian allottees who received land allotments under the Dawes Act of 1887 could improve their land. The Brotherhood favored Indian "preference," or that the BIA needed to hire qualified Indians for BIA jobs. It wanted Indian children to attend public schools, implying that the BIA schools were inferior. It wanted Indians to possess the right to vote, or that Indians needed to become U.S. citizens. And the Brotherhood wanted Indian delegates in Congress, with one delegate representing every 60,000 Indians.5 Of course, Adams favored Indian presence in Congress because of the Delaware Treaty of 1778 (the first American treaty with an Indian tribe), which noted that the Delawares would have representation in Congress.6 The Brotherhood also publicized itself in different ways. It selected Senator Robert L. Owen of Oklahoma to give the keynote address at the founding organizational meeting held in December 1911. Owen told the Indian audience that Indians had been weakened over the years because of their tribal diversity, and that the Brotherhood would bring them together politically.7 The organization also had two [End Page 44...

Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, The Significance of the Frontier in American History; the other took place in William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, The Wild West. Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians - and bloody battles - at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as 'Custer's Last Stand'. Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices - those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American. Generously illustrated, engagingly written, and peopled with such unforgettable characters as Sitting Bull, Captain Jack Crawford, and Annie Oakley, The Frontier in American Culture reminds us that despite the divisions and denials the western movement sparked, the image of the frontier unites us in surprising ways.

Annie Oakley and the Disruption of Victorian Expectations Lisa Bernd (bio) This ongoing project to consider the legacy of Annie Oakley's performances began when I came upon a framed poster of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in the lobby of the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma. I was surprised when the images made me recall my own childhood in suburbia. Despite the fact that I grew up on Long Island during the 1970s, I had played cowboys and Indians, always insisting on impersonating Annie Oakley. This play scenario was perhaps the closest I came to being treated as an equal among the neighborhood boys. Letting me play with their cap pistols and ride my invisible horse next to theirs, they allowed me to be the hero—after I had finished cleaning up the cabin, of course.1 Ironically, by framing my play within gender expectations that included domestic chores, I was able to experience what performance theorist Peta Tait labels "moments of freedom" from those expectations—moments where I was able to run with the boys and capture (or even be) the "bad guy."2 As a female sharpshooter, Annie Oakley traveled the world precisely because she could do a "man's work" while appearing to adhere to the conventions of Victorian femininity. By framing her own "moments of freedom" in gendered gesture and behavior, Oakley was fundamental to the construction of a modern "American" identity for women. Modeling authority and self-sufficiency, as well as a spiffy pair of pantaloons, Annie Oakley influenced American women while fostering the national enterprise of cultural unification. Theorizing that "the Wild West" was an effort toward the creation of a national identity, I consider the way Annie Oakley's presence cultivated an American identity for women by embodying freedoms typically denied to women in the Victorian era. [End Page 39] Although Oakley refused to align herself politically with the feminist movement, her dress, actions, and associations resulted from the freedom she experienced as a performer, especially as a woman doing "man's" work. That her audience came to accept and idolize her speaks volumes about her ability to disrupt audience expectations to accommodate social change. If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, nations are "imagined communities," then it was particularly important, at the end of the nineteenth century, for the United States to establish itself firmly in the imaginations of its own inhabitants as well as Europeans. Buffalo Bill's theatrical representation of frontier life offered an alternative to the prevalent European ethno-linguistic model of nationalism.3 The late nineteenth century proved a highly volatile period of European nationalism as groups constantly tried to partition territory according to historical ethnic demographics. Without ethnicity or history in common, cultural diversity and regional divisions were seen as the U.S.'s biggest threat to a cohesive nation. Clearly, however, the violent and oppressive dynamic of colonialism implicit in the "taming" of the frontier demonstrates that, for the United States, nationalism was not a matter of political self-determination but, ironically and inescapably, one of cultural recognition in a world where homogeneous ethnicity was "the decisive or even the only criteria of potential nationhood."4 No wonder, then, that international cultural expositions of all kinds flourished during this period. In the United States, a site of multicultural and multiethnic inevitability, those expositions often took the form of "Wild West" shows that deliberately capitalized on the exotic composition of its diversity. Buffalo Bill Cody ran the largest and most popular Wild West show. His show included a cast and crew of over 600 as well as 400 horses. At one point, the show played 131 locations in 190 days. Incongruously, despite his own participation in the destruction of Native American culture, Buffalo Bill's show supported the idea that cultural diversity contributed to the strength of the nation. Roger Hall, in Performing the American Frontier: 1870-1906, argues that by framing the appearance/participation of Native Americans within a context of education and "cultural" enrichment and highlighting the contributions of diverse peoples in the "Rough Riders of the World" act, Buffalo Bill defended the United States's multicultural existence while other struggling nations clearly...

Reviewed by: Catlin's Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature Susan Savage Lee John Hausdoerffer . Catlin's Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2009. 178p. George Catlin devoted his entire life to the preservation of American Indian material objects and to the protection of the American landscape. Often his efforts at preservation rebelled against popular nineteenth-century notions that declared the American Indian and the environment as sure casualties in the name of the nation's progress. In Catlin's Lament, John Hausdoerffer investigates George Catlin's personal viewpoints concerning westward expansion, American Indian removal, and the eradication of the natural landscape. Hausdoerffer explains that his monograph analyzes "the tenuous relationship between conscious ethical intentions and the unexamined cultural ideologies of George Catlin" (19). Hausdoerffer chose Catlin because of the artist's objection to nineteenth-century environmental and racial ideologies regarding the treatment of the American landscape as well as the American Indians, respectively. At the same time, Catlin's work (paintings, writings, a "wild west" show) involves stereotypical tropes of the American Indian, illustrating his partial "consent" of nineteenth-century ideology. Hausdoerffer's monograph attempts to flesh out the reasons for Catlin's contradictory ideas. Hausdoerffer structures his book into five "snapshots" of Catlin's unexamined assumptions: his decision to devote his artistic and literary talents to American Indian environments and cultures; his journey west to document "vanishing" lifestyles; a critique of Catlin's presentation of the western frontier; Catlin's exhibitions of his work in European cities, such as his "wild west" show; and the effects of his death as well as his desire to found a national park (posthumously created as Yellowstone) on the American public. Hausdoerffer explains that Catlin viewed the commodification of nature as problematic simply because of the destruction such capitalistic ventures wrecked on the environment as well as the American Indians who inhabited these landscapes. While Catlin's objection illustrates his amazing foresight concerning the environment, at the same time, Catlin does not recognize the possibility of American Indian survival, thus demonstrating his reliance upon the Vanishing Indian trope, a commonality in nineteenth-century thinking. Despite the precariousness of Catlin's position regarding the American Indians, Hausdoerffer does not attempt to glorify or vilify any of Catlin's ideological [End Page 226] assumptions. Rather, he examines them in order to understand the complexities of the nineteenth century as a whole. Hausdoerffer explains that, "Rather than a moral judgment of Catlin, this analysis indicts the logic of domination that engulfed a formative era in U.S. history—to the point that it reduced even its most visionary critics to participants in consensus" (159). In other words, because Catlin's work embodied both consent and objection to American notions of race and modernization, his achievements illustrate that even the most freethinking, liberal-minded person cannot completely separate his/her belief system from the dominant society, in this case, the American nineteenth century. Hausdoerffer gracefully demonstrates his main argument concerning Catlin's intertwining notions of consent and objection through convincing examples taken from the artist's writings about Indian removal and his paintings of famous figures such as Dewitt Clinton and Black Hawk. The most apt example of Catlin's objection to nineteenth-century thinking emerges through his depiction of the West. Rather than portray the American West as an inviting pastoral region completely devoid of native inhabitants, Catlin reveals the conflicted landscape by juxtaposing open fields with industry and civilization. Although Catlin deplored the abuse of nature because of a budding American fixation on modernization, his opinions concerning American Indians repeatedly follow a less egalitarian route. When Catlin wanted to add Mandan religious artifacts to his collection despite the tribe's rejection of the idea, for example, he collected the artifacts anyway. Similarly, in his "wild west" show, Catlin displayed American Indians as a spectacle for the amusement of Americans and Europeans alike. For Hausdoerffer, the root of this contradiction lies within the pressures applied by the white dominant culture on all members of nineteenth-century American society, whether these members realized it or not. Catlin's Lament thus illuminates how difficult it...

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a milestone in the development of American popular culture, a late Nineteenth century phenomenon that enshrined the frontier as an enduring symbol of national progress and prosperity. Existing scholarship ably assesses the show’s contributions to emergent mass culture and its ideological framing of frontier mythology. However, current scholarship largely ignores the importance of childhood and child performers to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. This paper examines how Buffalo Bill and his partners drew on ideations of childhood in crafting their show and analyzes the complex ways child performers responded to the Wild West’s dominant narratives.

In Reproduction on the Reservation, Brianna Theobald orients the history of reproductive justice around Native American women and the history of Native sovereignty around reproduction. In her analysis of the twentieth-century policies that shaped Native women's reproductive health, Theobald emphasizes Native women's stories. This is a conscious—and political—choice, reflecting Theobald's rejection of common narratives where sterilization abuse appears as the defining feature in the history of Native women's lives. Instead, Theobald illustrates a longer and more nuanced history of reproduction, pregnancy, and birthing practices throughout the twentieth century. This history is inextricably intertwined with the history of Native kinship, women's power within their communities, and cultural knowledge.Theobald balances her study between “depth” and “breadth,” alternating chapters between specific analyses of her case study of the Crow Reservation in southern Montana and a wider, national story of policy and activism. Her sources include oral histories of Crow and Northern Cheyenne women, bureaucratic records, government studies, ethnographic reports, memoirs, and the records of activist organizations. An expert at reading colonial sources against the grain, she finds Native women's resistance and negotiation in the words of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents.Theobald identifies links between two distinct time periods: the early twentieth century and the 1960s to 1970s. Both periods were characterized by the “eliminatory logic” of the state and by Native women's activism. As Theobald notes, Native women navigated both periods with “fortitude and creativity,” negotiating, adapting, and refusing the federal government's prescriptions on childbirth and reproductive health (p. 12).Theobald's first chapter primarily focuses on Crow birthing and child-rearing practices, as she explains the system of “flexible childrearing,” where children, who had many parents and grandparents, were raised communally. In her second chapter, Theobald argues that the Progressive-era “Save the Babies” campaign was a “cornerstone of early twentieth-century federal Indian policy,” (pp. 44–45) illuminating the connection between the maternalist mission of field matrons, reformers, and other state agents and the medicalization of childbirth on reservations. In her analysis of the relationships between Native women and BIA personnel in the first decades of the twentieth century, she argues that BIA efforts to “persuade” Native women to conform to Americanized childbirth practices reveal how effectively Native women negotiated with BIA staff in matters of reproductive health.Reproduction on the Reservation has implications for our understanding of how Native people experienced the eugenics campaigns of the early twentieth century. In short, Theobald effectively demonstrates that the widespread coercive sterilization of Native women in the 1960s and 1970s was not an anomaly. In her third chapter, Theobald explores the conflict and interpersonal dynamics among BIA leadership on the Crow Reservation in the 1930s (including the superintendent, Robert Yellowtail, the first Native superintendent of his own reservation), non-Native and Native staff at the agency hospital, tribal council members, and Native women. In the 1930s, Crow women were “far from silent regarding health and politics,” and pushed reproductive health concerns into reservation politics (p. 85).Theobald's treatment of Native women's experiences of relocation in chapter 4 illuminates the dynamics of bureaucracy where assimilative policies and reproduction meet, including how Native women navigated health insurance and urban public hospitals. On relocation, Native women maintained and adapted their ties with reservations, practiced flexible childrearing in new environments, and, through Indian centers, established the infrastructure that the BIA sorely lacked. Theobald's definition of termination as a “host of policies and practices—not limited to the dissolution of a tribe's political status—that affected virtually every aspect of reservation life,” pushes scholarly discussions of termination outside of the political realm and into the everyday experiences of women and their families (p. 124). Specifically, in chapter 5, Theobald considers the role of terminationist policymakers’ decisions to close reservation hospitals—ostensibly as a way of saving money, but really as a way to ensure assimilation—in her analysis of Crow political opposition to termination.Theobald's focus on the activism among Native nurses, including Susie Yellowtail (Crow) provides needed context to the scholarly conversations around sterilization-related activism in the 1970s (p. 157). Her final chapter elucidates the contributions of Native women's organizations like Women of All Red Nations (WARN), the pan-Native women's organization founded in 1978, in the fight for decolonization, which required, “restoration of women's strength and the reclamation of their reproductive control” (p. 165).The definition of Native women's political activism should include reproductive health. For example, Native women have employed midwifery as a response to sterilization abuse and have advocated for access to health care using the language of treaty rights. Reproduction on the Reservation is a rich contribution to the historical fields of twentieth-century Native American activism, women's history, the history of reproductive justice, and Indian policy. Theobald reminds readers that reproductive health was and is a matter of tribal sovereignty.