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“I’m an Indian Too:” A Contemporary Indigenous Reclamation of Racist Musical Tropes By Kimimilasha James Advisor: Claire Fontijn, Music Wellesley College Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Music May 2021 © 2021 Kimimilasha James Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………i Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: Depictions of Native Americans in American Music 1888-1947………………….5 Historical Background – Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock………………………………………..........5 The Indian Love Song………………………………………………………………………………9 The Film Score…………………………………………………………………………………….14 Chapter Two: Wampanoag History and Wamsutta Frank James………………………………..21 Wampanoag Historical Background……………………………………………………………21 Chapter Three: Wamsutta Frank James and Wame Oka-Suoh…………………………………..30 Wamsutta Frank James…………………………………………………………………………..30 Description of the Score………………………………………………………………………...34 Wame Oka-Suoh as Cultural Reclamation and Cultural Expression……………………...39 Chapter Four: A 21st Century Native American Reclamation of Walt Disney’s “What Made the Red Man Red?” and Irving Berlin’s “I’m an Indian Too”……………………………………….54 Native American Representation in James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan………………….54 “What Made the Red Man Red?”………………………………………………………………58 “I’m an Indian Too”……………………………………………………………………………...63 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….68 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………72 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..79 Full Score of Wame Oka-Suoh…………………………………………………………………...84 i Acknowledgments I must begin by thanking my incredible thesis advisor, Claire Fontijn, without whom this document never would have progressed past page one. Her kindness, dedication and guidance have been invaluable, and as my major advisor, she has helped me grow not only as a writer, but also as a person. Since I first began research for this thesis two years ago, Professor Fontijn has offered me steady guidance and invaluable advice, and it truly has been a pleasure to work with her. I also wish to thank Professor K.E. Goldschmitt for their incredibly helpful and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of my thesis, as well as Professor Gurminder Bhogal and Professor Sharon Elkins for agreeing to be on my thesis committee. Lastly, I want to thank the Music Department, the members of the Wellesley College Native American Student Association (Jenn, Emily, Saffron and Emma), Sonja Tengblad, Dean Shih, Dean Alicea-Westort, William Hodgkinson, my tribal community, my brother Womsikuk, and my mom for their support throughout this particularly difficult year. ii Dedication Dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, who was unable to pursue his musical dreams because of the color of his skin, my great-aunt, June Frances MacDonald, who was the most important Wampanoag elder in my life, my father, Moonanum James, who passed away while I was writing this thesis, and all of my Wampanoag and Lakota ancestors who fought so that I could be where I am today. 1 Introduction From the very first moment they set foot on Turtle Island, white colonists have held a voyeuristic, fetishistic fascination with the Indigenous peoples of North America. This fascination has often been incongruous, with white colonists and Americans routinely “playing Indian,” while also participating in the slaughter and genocide of the very same people whose identities they co-opted.1 Over the past few centuries, the American population has shifted between reviling, persecuting, demeaning, murdering, and pitying the original inhabitants of North America. American popular music, starting in the late 19th century, has embodied all of these sentiments, while also adding new racial stereotypes of its own. In Chapter One, I examine the “Indian Love Song,” a musical phenomenon that sprang up in the late 19th century as a direct result of white America’s newfound fascination with the Indian reservation, as well as Americans’ deep obsession with capturing and capitalizing upon the dying cultural traditions of a race of people they simultaneously sought to exterminate. “Indian Love Songs” were the forebears of several musical genres. They contained a variety of tropes that would come to denote Native Americans in music: dactylic rhythms, chromaticism, “war whoop” grace notes, pentatonic harmonies (primarily fourths and fifths), and problematic lyrics. Also in Chapter One, I explore the relationship between the so-called “Oriental Riff” (which is used to denote East 1 A note about the language used in this thesis: I use the outdated (and offensive to some) term “Indian” extensively. I do this mainly in quotes or when referring to laws, reservations, and federal agencies. All federal agencies and the majority of laws that have anything to do with Native Americans still use the term (e.g., the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Termination Act, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 etc.), so I feel it is acceptable to use the term when speaking about Native Americans within a certain context. Additionally, the majority of Native Americans living on reservations prefer the term “Indian,” and among ourselves we use it. However, wherever possible I have used the term “Native American,” and my use of the term “Indian” should in no way be seen as a normalization or acceptance of the term. 2 Asian people and cultures in music), and its Native American counterpart. I also isolate the rhythmic pattern that would come to denote Native Americans in late 19th and early 20th century American popular music by examining a series of extant “Indian Love Songs,” including the foundational “Indian Love Song,” “Hiawatha (A Summer Idyl)” (1901) by Neil Moret, as well as “A Wigwam Courtship” (1903) by Sadie Koninsky, and Egbert van Alstyne’s “Navajo” (1903). Although the craze for the “Indian Love Song” eventually died out, its musical legacy continued in the Hollywood film score.2 Certain musical riffs from the “Indian Love Song” migrated to Hollywood largely due to Max Steiner, a prolific Hollywood composer who began his career as a music copyist in New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley was the compositional hub for the “Indian Love Song,” and this was therefore one of the main ways it was able to live on vicariously through Hollywood film scores. I briefly touch upon Steiner’s score for They Died with Their Boots On (1942), a Warner Brothers film about Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a prolific killer of Native Americans, before examining “Pass That Peace Pipe” from Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Good News (1947), which is notable for its lyrics and its use of rhythms to portray “savagery.” In 1973, a Native American theatre troupe flipped “Pass That Peace Pipe” on its head, and I briefly assess the ways in which they turned a song intended to taunt Native Americans into a mockery of the United States government. In Chapter Two, I provide a great deal of Wampanoag history in order to contextualize the work of Aquinnah Wampanoag composer Wamsutta Frank James, who grew up watching 2 In the introduction to her book about Native American representation in film music in Music of the Western: Notes from the Frontier (New York: Routledge, 2012), Kathryn Kalinak writes, “Although Native American music had been transcribed or recorded by ethnographers as early as the 1910s, Native American music does not find its way into the accompaniment for on-screen Indians in any significant way in the studio era. Instead, Indian music exploits powerful musical codes that reinforce cultural stereotypes about Otherness: Indians are positioned outside American-ness” (6). 3 films like Good News (1947) and listening to the music of Max Steiner. Wamsutta is my paternal grandfather, and I chose to include his final composition Wame Oka-Suoh (1996) in my thesis because it is an excellent example of a 20th-century Native American person reclaiming, playing with, and subverting tropes. Wame Oka-Suoh is an incredibly special piece, as it is likely the only piece of music written in the 20th century by a Wampanoag tribal member in the Wampanoag language. Its publication in this thesis will mark the first time it is available to the general public, and I hope that it will begin to get the recognition it deserves. I analyze the piece in its entirety in Chapter Three, and draw on Wamsutta’s lived experience, the effects of Pan- Indianism, and Wamsutta’s own writings on Wame Oka-Suoh to attempt to understand the work as cultural expression. Lastly, in Chapter Four, I look at two of the most egregious examples of musical racism against Native Americans in film: “What Made the Red Man Red?” from Walt Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), and “I’m an Indian Too” from Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s film adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1950). After considering the lyrics, staging, and context of each of these films, I then examine the contemporary musical Native American response, which comes in the form of “What Makes the Red Man Red?” by Lakota hip-hop artist Frank Waln, and “I’m an Indian Too” by Native American comedy troupe The 1491s. Through this, I show how contemporary Native Americans are reclaiming racist lyrics and tropes, while also creating brand new Native American cultural expression. I chose to write this thesis because I am Native American. I am an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah, one of the two federally recognized tribes in Massachusetts, and also Oglala Lakota, as my mother is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In doing research for an independent study 4 two years ago, I noticed that there was a lack of scholarship on contemporary Native American musical output, as well as a lack of scholarship on the music of the Northeastern tribes. Through this thesis, and through future work, I hope to add to the body of scholarship on Native American representation in music. 5 Chapter One: Depictions of Native Americans in American Music 1888-1947 Historical Background – Lone Wolf v.

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