Conference Agenda

In this paper, I show how two of California's most famous outdoor stages promoted distinctly different forms of Native American "fakelore" in the early twentieth century. Focusing on Mary Austin's The Arrow Maker (performed in 1914 at Carmel's Forest Theatre) and on two of the so-called "Grove Plays" of the elite San Francisco Bohemian Club, I explore how contrasting dynamics of race and class inflected the widespread practice of "playing Indian," as outlined by indigenous historian Philip Deloria.

Founded in 1872, the Bohemian Club (despite its name) catered to the wealthiest segments of society, producing private amateur dramas designed to allow white men a safe space to perform strikingly non-traditional versions of masculinity: nature lovers, sentimental singers, and a bevy of cross-dressed roles. Influenced by these redwood "Grove Plays," the arts colony at seaside Carmel set up its own Forest Theatre in 1910, with novelist and poet Mary Austin at the helm. Archival research confirms considerable social and ideological overlap between the two venues. Yet the Bohemian Club's Man in the Forest (1902) and Nec-Natama (1914) emphasize messianic masculine heroism in stark contrast to The Arrow Maker, which centers on a fictional Medicine Woman whom Austin invested with anthropological pretensions based on her time living "among the Indians." While Austin insisted on music "of the Indians themselves," even borrowing a drum from the archaeological collection of philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Heart, the Bohemians preferred scores drenched in Wagnerian leitmotives and glee-club-style choral singing.

Both Carmel's Forest Theatre and Bohemian Grove fostered redface performance in settler colonial spaces; their appropriation of Native Americana is, sadly, unsurprising. While this paper broadens our consideration of racial masquerade beyond the typical boundaries of black-and-white, it also alerts us to some of the seriously grey areas in the political valences of these eccentric redface dramas. As musicology works its way through an overdue period of racial reckoning and an ever-more catastrophic ecological crisis, attending to these unsettling productions reveals the tangle of musical intersections between redface spectacle, "progressive" feminism, queer masculinity, and incipient conservationist impulses that took peculiar root in racialized stories of redwood redemption.

In 1893, Antonín Dvořák famously urged his American collegues to "turn to the folk songs of America" as the basis for a truly American compositional traditional. Dvořák's entreaty focused on the so-called "Negro melodies" as the "real foundation of any serious and original school of composition," but later comments also mention an interest in "Indian chants." While Dvořák was new to the American scene, he had in fact stumbled into a long-standing tradition, central to America's differentiation from Europe, of imagining and evoking Native America. From literature and staged drama to parlor tunes and instrumental fantasies, tropes of the wise and/or wild Indian were prevalent and durable within the young country's struggle to invent a cohesive national identity. Drawing on music analysis, archival research, and the work of Philip Deloria, Tara Browner, Bethany Hughes, Caitlin Marshall, Michael Pisani, Eric Lott, and others, this paper argues for the fruitfulness of sonic redface as an interpretive framework for critiquing the Indianists and those they influenced. Just as blackface minstrelsy allowed White performers and audiences to express their simultaneous fear and desire of blackness, the stereotypes fostered and reinforced by redface—heightened by the sentimentality of the music—allowed American composers, songwriters, performers, and listeners to embody their envy of Native culture, to perform a kind of absolution for Native removal and genocide, and to seek an "authentic" American sound via primitivist constructions of the naive, melancholic, nature-bound Indian.

The opera, Winona, by Alberto Bimboni and Perry Williams, and particularly its 1928 performance in Minneapolis, melds two imaginary images--the “vanishing ideal Indian” and a pristine wilderness of the Northwoods of Minnesota. The highly publicized narrative surrounding the opera invited its organizers, performers, and audience members (almost all of whom were non-Natives) to experience and identify with this Romanticized past. The presentation analyzes Winona and its Minneapolis performance through the lens of salvage tourism, a framework recently devised by historian, Katrina Phillips (Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History, 2021), in which she combines the well-established history of salvage ethnography with the commodification of Indianness to build regional tourism. In the 1920s, the numerous performances of Indianness in Minneapolis led Charles Eastman (a well-known Dakota physician from Minnesota) to refer to the city as the “Paris of Indian life.”

In the tradition of salvage ethnography, the history of Winona is steeped in claims of authenticity and preservation of Native American history. The librettist, Williams, who lived in Minneapolis and was the catalyst for the opera, dedicated the work “to the preservation of our cultural heritage from the North American Indian” and wove together, replete with footnotes, what were claimed to be Dakota and Ojibwe legends and customs from Minnesota. The composer, Bimboni, studied the work of the quintessential salvage ethnographer (and native Minnesotan), Frances Densmore, during the twelve-year compositional process, and according to Densmore, saturated himself in “some of the best, oldtime Indian singers in Minnesota.” The publicity highlighted the participation of “real Indians” (six Ojibwe dancers and a well-known Mapuche singer) to offer credibility, while the opera contributed to the erasure of contemporary Native Americans living in Minnesota. Consistent with patterns of salvage tourism, Williams, who served as the Secretary of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, worked to replace the declining lumber industry with tourism to fuel the state’s economy. As he sought to embed the image of the idealized Indian in the state’s identity, he boasted that the state had furnished the resources for Winona, “Minnesota’s own grand opera.”