Copyright by Katherine Liesl Young Evans 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Katherine Liesl Young Evans certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Staged Encounters: Native American Performance between 1880 and 1920 Committee: James H. Cox, Supervisor John M. González Lisa L. Moore Gretchen Murphy Deborah Paredez Staged Encounters: Native American Performance between 1880 and 1920 by Katherine Liesl Young Evans, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2010 Acknowledgements For someone so concerned with embodiment and movement, I have spent an awful lot of the last seven years planted in a chair reading books. Those books, piled on my desk, floor, and bedside table, have variously angered, inspired, and enlightened me as I worked my way through this project, but I am grateful for their company and conversation. Luckily, I had a number of generous professors who kept funneling these books my way and enthusiastically discussed them with me, not least of which were the members of my dissertation committee. James Cox, my director, offered unflagging enthusiasm and guidance and asked just the right questions to push me into new areas of inquiry. Lisa Moore, Gretchen Murphy, John González, and Deborah Paredez lit the way towards this project through engaging seminars, lengthy reading lists, challenging comments on drafts, and crucial support in the final stages. Other members of the English department faculty made a substantial impact on my development as a teacher and scholar. Joanna Brooks and Jim Lee made the stakes of exploring ethnic American texts excitingly clear in seminars my first year in grad school, and graciously demanded I attend to the lives behind the literatures. My teaching is exponentially better because of the influences of Phillip Barrish and Brian Bremen; both my past and future students join me in thanking them heartily. I would also like to thank the administrative staff of the graduate program in the English Department: Graduate Program Advisor Wayne Lesser and Coordinators Patricia Schaub and Amy Stewart ably guided me through the administration and funding mazes iv of the University, making teaching and research not only possible, but financially sustaining. For two years I worked for the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and the lessons I learned there about the public vitality of the humanities and the need for knowledge-sharing across all boundaries have contributed largely to this project. Thank you to Professor Evan Carton, Sylvia Gale, Jill Anderson, and Jeremy Dean for consistently modeling a community-engaged intellectualism. While conducting my research, I received help from a number of wonderful librarians at various archives and special collections, including the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University; the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University; New York Public Library‘s Humanities Research and Performing Arts divisions; the Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth College; the Moving Image Section of the Library of Congress; and the University of Texas‘ Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Thanks to the wonders of online databases and interlibrary loan, I was able to quickly locate important primary and secondary texts. I am grateful for the patience and help of the staff at the University of Texas Libraries as I navigated these technologies, including Lindsey Schell, subject specialist in English and Women‘s Studies; Beth Kerr, subject specialist in Theater and Dance; and Interlibrary Loan Services. This project received important financial support from the American Association of University Women; thanks to the AAUW‘s American Dissertation Fellowship, I was able to dedicate this past year completely to research and writing. A grant from the v Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society and a Bruton Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies also facilitated my research. This dissertation would not have been completed without the ongoing feedback and support of other graduate students. Innovative scholars, generous colleagues, and wickedly funny friends, Kirby Brown, Amanda Moulder, Bryan Russell, and Amy Ware dedicated many hours to reading and commenting on these pages. The Native American Reading Group and the American Literature(s) Group both kept me connected to a vital intellectual community and made the last seven years a profoundly enjoyable and stimulating time. Finally, it is to my family I owe my deepest gratitude. My parents, Meg and Jon Young, and my big sister, Alyson Magliozzi, were the first storytellers and performers of my life. They set in motion my love of the theater, but more importantly, they cultivated my curiosity and confidence. By some stroke of luck, I have had Mike Evans in my corner throughout this entire process. He never let me doubt my strength as a scholar and teacher, but even more importantly, helped me to see beyond the borders of the academy. I can find no better reason to drag my nose from a book than to spend time with him. vi Staged Encounters: Native American Performance between 1880 and 1920 Publication No._____________ Katherine Liesl Young Evans, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: James H. Cox This dissertation explores the unique political and cultural possibilities that public performance held for Native American activists and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Not only did these performance texts, generated in multiple genres, offer a counternarrative to the mainstream discourse of Native assimilation, they also provided Native writer-performers with a vehicle for embodying tribally-specific epistemologies, cosmologies, and diplomatic histories. These Native dramatists transformed the stage into a site of political possibility left unrealized on the printed page, a site where they could revise images of their peoples from shadows and stereotypes to sovereign nations. Included in this study are analyses of the speaking tours of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins/Thocmetony (Northern Paiute), the performance poetry of Emily Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (Mohawk), The Sun Dance Opera co-written by Gertrude vii Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota), and dramatic interpretations of The Song of Hiawatha by the Garden River First Nation (Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe). Drawing primarily on contemporary scholarship in Native American literary studies, including American Indian literary nationalism and internationalism, the burgeoning work in Native American performance studies, and methodologies from theater history, the following chapters contextualize both printed and performance versions of these texts with tribally-specific political, economic, and cultural histories, as well as performance reviews and broader federal Indian policy of the time. viii Table of Contents List of Figures .........................................................................................................x Introduction ............................................................................................................1 Scenes of Standardization Chapter One .........................................................................................................51 ―The Wandering Princess‖: Sarah Winnemucca‘s Speaking Tours as Northern Paiute National Resistance Chapter Two .......................................................................................................108 ―Dawn is Not the Opposite of Dusk‖: The Mohawk Performance Poetry of Pauline Johnson Chapter Three ....................................................................................................170 The People‘s Pageant: Anishinaabe Dramatic Interpretations of Hiawatha Chapter Four ......................................................................................................235 Stages of Red: Intertribal Indigenous Theater in Zitkala-Ša‘s The Sun Dance Opera Conclusion ..........................................................................................................275 Bodies in Relation Bibliography .......................................................................................................282 Vita ....................................................................................................................309 ix List of Figures Figure 0.1: Carlisle Indian Industrial School Students ..........................................8 Figure 0.2: Edward S. Curtis ...............................................................................23 Figure 1.1: Sarah Winnemucca‘s Travels in the Great Basin .............................86 Figure 1.2: Sarah Winnemucca ...........................................................................96 Figure 2.1: E. Pauline Johnson‘s Business Card ...............................................109 Figure 2.2: George H.M. Johnson and Smoke Johnson ....................................129 Figure 2.3: Two-Row Wampum........................................................................132 Figure 2.4 ―A Cry from an Indian Wife‖ .........................................................138 Figure 2.5 Pauline Johnson ..............................................................................160 Figure 3.1: Tekumegezhi ―Thomas‖ Shawano