The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe Rayna Green Folklore, Vol. 99, No. 1. (1988), pp. 30-55. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0015-587X%281988%2999%3A1%3C30%3ATTCWPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 Folklore is currently published by Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/fel.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Tue Jan 1 11:51:42 2008 Folklore vo1.99:i, 1988 30 The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe RAYNA GREEN The Seventh Katharine Briggs Lecture, 10 November 1987. 'It is very easy to make an Indian out of a white manLWeeatawash.' ONE of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American cultural expression, indeed one of the oldest forms of affinity with American culture at the national level, is a 'performance' I call 'playing Indian.' Since the invasion of North America by those 'red hairy men' in the fifteenth century, non-Indians have found the performance of 'playing Indian' a most compelling and obviously satisfying form of traditional expression. Almost from their very arrival in the Americas, Europeans found it usehl, perhaps essential, to 'play Indian' in America, to demand that tribal peoples 'play Indian,' and to export the performances back to Europe, where they thrive to date.' This performance, or set of performances, with many stages, performers, contexts, and variants, has its deepest roots in the establishment of a distinctive American culture. I would insist that it represents one of the ways in which we can demarcate the boundaries of an American identity distinct from that which affiliates with Europe. Curiously, perhaps, 'playing Indian'since it is so well represented historically in England and Germany, and to a lesser extent, in Russia, Poland, France and Italy-may be one of the ways in which Europeans affiliate with an America that causes them tremendous ambivalence. The performance has significant historical roots and embodiments, some aspects of which (eg: 'white' Indians and stereotypes) have been well-described by myself and other scholar^.^ But we shall explore these many aspects as part of a cohesive phenomenon which renews itself yearly, takes on new versions and modes of expression, while retaining a performance core of versions from the past. This expressive complex of behaviours reiterates itself freely across boundaries of race and class, gender and age group, regional and other affiliative groups, to find its various expressions in a range of media from traditional, orally transmitted texts (songs, stories, jokes, anecdotes) to formal, literary texts, to artifacts (clothing, toys, tools, drawings, paintings), to dramatic performances (games, gestures, dramas) and ritual enactments or reenactments. Some people wed to the roles of Indian play Indian for a lifetime; others for brief, transient staged performances performed only in childhood or erratically and situationally over a lifetime. For some, it is a hobby; for others a semi-religious passion; for others still, merely one of many reference points that root them in an American identity. The performance is, for the most part, one played by persons of Anglo-American or Anglo-European background, but persons of Hispanic, Mediterranean and AfricanIAfro-American background also play Indian in large numbers. Even Apaches, Sioux, and Cherokee 'Indians' play 'Indian.' Whether conventionally 'folk' or 'popular' in venue and form of transmission-even often conveyed through 'Classical forms'the performance exists THE TRIBE CALLED WANNABEE and thrives long after other forms (eg: blackface impersonation) of reiterating the cultural persona have long since been abandoned or fallen into disuse. For many reasons, we must look at this performance with critical interest. With the elaboration of those reasons to follow, let it suffice for the present to say that this performance involves the reenactment of a script so deeply imbedded in and apparently necessary to the American persona that to challenge its continuing reiteration creates a kind of cultural 'identity crisis.' Thus, we must examine this performance and all the aspects of its artistic shape in order to comprehend the extraordinary consequences, historical, cultural, psychological, and social, of its continued renewal and survival-upon Americans in general, on those Europeans who cherish it, and upon those Americans most deeply affected by the performance-the people called 'Indians.' For, I would insist now, the living performance of 'playing Indian' by non-Indian peoples depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. In that sense, the performance, purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love for Indians, is really the obverse of another well-known cultural phenomenon, 'Indian hating,' as most often expressed in another, deadly performance genre called 'gen~cide.'~ It is not coincidental that the earliest, most primary and essential form of playing Indian belongs to Anglo male, military behaviour, and extends itself through the four centuries of its survival into the neo- or proto-military behaviour of games, political and social organizations, and sport. But, inevitably and eventually, it draws women, even blacks, into the peculiar boundaries of its performance, offering them a unique opportunity-through playing Indian-of escaping the conventional and often highly restrictive boundaries of their fixed cultural identites based in gender or race. Playing Indian offers this escape, of course, for all who perform the roles, however brief or transient the performance may be, and thus, perhaps, we can understand part of its attraction. Its historical roots are impressive, though the early period just after first contacts-between 1500 and 1600-yields little to suggest that playing Indian had any significant presence on the cultural landscape. We should note, however, that the Americas, or America herself, was understood to have an Indian identity from the outset. The iconography of the early Americas, about which I and others have written previously, was distinctly tied to Indians through the symbol of the Indian Queen, later to become the Princess,who loses her Indian-ness as she transmogrifies into the Anglo- European and neo-classic Miss Libert~.~That process, of altering the cultural icon so that it conforms to the majority population's notions of itself, is certainly co-existent with nationalism and nationalization. Note, for example, the Nazi reinterpretation of their icons of origin via Wagnerian opera and Germanic folklore. Curiously and significantly, however, the Indian-ness of America remains premier in Europe, though it fades in the official iconography of the New World, and that primary identification reemerges in contemporary Europe through playing Indian as well as through other forms of fascination with Indians. During this early period, nevertheless, Indians were dying in large numbers-some 10 million at the outside between 1492 and 1700-primarily of disease introduced by ~uro~eans.~Colonial Europeans were struggling to establish a habitat as well as a commercial, political and cultural presence on the American landscape. The removal of Indians, as obstructions to that presence, whether through military and political action, or through vigorous and destructive encroachment on the resource niches of Indians, was central to such an establishment. Indians were everywhere the physical problem for European settlers, and yet they had been the solutions to problems as well. America RAYNA GREEN was still Indian country; yet Europeans had to be about the business of making it theirs. Both they and Indians were too busy fulfilling or resisting their destinies to permit the full impact of that destiny to spawn artistic expressions of it. In spite of the awful realities of the struggle for America, however, other realities-of cultural interaction and intercourse, affiliation and relationship, confluence and convergence-had begun to transform both Europeans and Indians into something other than what they were at first ~ontact.~ While in this early period we have no specific instances recorded of the phenomenon of playing Indian in its true sense, that is, the artistic adoption of a dramatic role as 'play,' however culturally 'deep' or shallow that role or artistry might be.' Rather, we can see clearly the outlines, the structure of