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

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...

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