Download or read book Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians 1883 1933 written by L. G. Moses and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the lives and experiences of Show Indians from their own point of view.

Download or read book Native Performers in Wild West Shows written by Linda Scarangella McNenly and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now that the West is no longer so wild, it’s easy to dismiss Buffalo Bill Cody’s world-famous Wild West shows as promoters of stereotypes and clichés. But looking at this unique American genre from the Native American point of view provides thought-provoking new perspectives. Focusing on the experiences of Native performers and performances, Linda Scarangella McNenly begins her examination of these spectacles with Buffalo Bill’s 1880s pageants. She then traces the continuing performance of these acts, still a feature of regional celebrations in both Canada and the United States—and even at Euro Disney. Drawing on interviews with contemporary performers and descendants of twentieth-century performers, McNenly elicits insider perspectives to suggest new interpretations of their performances and experiences; she also uses these insights to analyze archival materials, especially photographs. Some Native performers saw Wild West shows not necessarily as demeaning, but rather as opportunities—for travel, for employment, for recognition, and for the preservation and expression of important cultural traditions. Other Native families were able to guide their own careers and even create their own Wild West shows. Today, Native performers at Buffalo Bill Days in Sheridan, Wyoming, wear their own regalia and choreograph their own performances. Through dancing and music, they express their own vision of a contemporary Native identity based on powwow cultures. Proud of their skills and successes, Native performers at Euro Disney are establishing promising careers. The effects of colonialism are undeniable, yet McNenly’s study reveals how these Native peoples have adapted and re-created Wild West shows to express their own identities and to advance their own goals.

Download or read book Wild West Shows written by Paul Reddin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wild West: a term that conjures up pictures of wagon trains, unspoiled prairies, Indians, rough 'n' ready cowboys, roundups, and buffalo herds. Where did this collection of images come from? Paul Reddin exposes the mythology of the American frontier as a carefully crafted product of the Wild West show. Focusing on such pivotal figures as George Catlin, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Tom Mix, Reddin traces the rise and fall of a popular entertainment shaped out of the "raw material of America." Buffalo Bill and other entertainers capitalized on public fascination with the danger, heroism, and courage associated with the frontier by continually modifying their presentation of the West to suit their audiences. Thus the Wild West show, contrary to its own claims of accuracy and authenticity, was highly selective in its representations of the West as well as widely influential in shaping the public image of life on the Great Plains. A uniquely American entertainment--colorful, energetic, unabashed, and, as Reddin demonstrates, self-made--the Wild West show exerted an appeal that was all but irresistible to a public hovering uncertainly between industrial progress and nostalgia for a romanticized past.

Download or read book Scots in the North American West 1790 1917 written by Ferenc Morton Szasz and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Scots trappers dominated the fur trade, often proving more loyal to clan than to trading company or nation. Relying on centuries of experience raising livestock for British markets, Scottish investors and managers became highly visible in the post-Civil War western cattle industry with thriving outfits such as the Swan Land and Cattle Company in Wyoming. They introduced new breeds to western ranching, such as the Aberdeen Angus, that remain popular today. Similarly, Scots herders dominated the western sheep industry, running herds of over 100,000 animals. Andrew Little's sheep ranch in Idaho was so famous that a letter addressed simply "Andy Little, USA" found its intended recipient.

Download or read book Buffalo Bill s Wild West written by Joy S. Kasson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buffalo Bill's Wild West presents a fascinating analysis of the first famous American to erase the boundary between real history and entertainment Canada, and Europe. Crowds cheered as cowboys and Indians--and Annie Oakley!--galloped past on spirited horses, sharpshooters exploded glass balls tossed high in the air, and cavalry troops arrived just in time to save a stagecoach from Indian attack. Vivid posters on billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure. Joy S. Kasson's important new book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity" yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of the American tradition. But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked "memories" of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study--richly illustrated--in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture, shows us just how we came to imagine our memories.

Download or read book Imagining Tombstone written by Kara L. McCormack and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When prospector "Ed" Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all he'd find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the West—a strike he wryly called Tombstone. Briefly a boomtown, in less than a decade Tombstone was fading into what, for the next half-century, looked more like a ghost town. How is it, Kara McCormack asks, that the resurrection of a few of the town's long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstone—and turned it into what the Arizona Office of Tourism today calls "equal parts Deadwood and Disney"? A meditation on the marketing of "authenticity," Imagining Tombstone considers this "most authentic western town in America" as the intersection of history and mythmaking, entertainment and education, the wish to preserve, the will to succeed, and the need to survive. McCormack revisits the facts behind the feud that culminated in the Earp brothers' and Doc Holliday's long walk to their showdown with the Clantons and McLaurys—a walk reenacted by so many actors that it became a ritual of Hollywood westerns and a staple of present-day Tombstone's tourist offerings. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts, stories told by Hollywood, performances on the town's streets, the fervor of Earp historians and western history buffs, and global notions of the West, Imagining Tombstone shows how the town's tenacity depends on far more than a "usable past." If Tombstone is "The Town Too Tough to Die," it is also, as this edifying and entertaining book makes clear, the place where authentic history and its counterpart in popular culture reveal their lasting and lucrative hold on the public imagination.

Download or read book Citizen Indians written by Lucy Maddox and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1890s, white Americans were avid consumers of American Indian cultures. At heavily scripted Wild West shows, Chautauquas, civic pageants, expositions, and fairs, American Indians were most often cast as victims, noble remnants of a vanishing race, or docile candidates for complete assimilation. However, as Lucy Maddox demonstrates in Citizen Indians, some prominent Indian intellectuals of the era--including Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Eastman, and Arthur C. Parker--were able to adapt and reshape the forms of public performance as one means of entering the national conversation and as a core strategy in the pan-tribal reform efforts that paralleled other Progressive-era reform movements.Maddox examines the work of American Indian intellectuals and reformers in the context of the Society of American Indians, which brought together educated, professional Indians in a period when the "Indian question" loomed large. These thinkers belonged to the first generation of middle-class American Indians more concerned with racial categories and civil rights than with the status of individual tribes. They confronted acute crises: the imposition of land allotments, the abrogation of the treaty process, the removal of Indian children to boarding schools, and the continuing denial of birthright citizenship to Indians that maintained their status as wards of the state. By adapting forms of public discourse and performance already familiar to white audiences, Maddox argues, American Indian reformers could more effectively pursue self-representation and political autonomy.

Download or read book Hollywood s Native Americans written by Angela Aleiss and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the contributions and careers of Native Americans who have carved impressive careers in Hollywood, from the silent film era of the early 1900s to the present, becoming advocates for their heritage. This book explores how the heritage and behind-the-scenes activities of Native American actors and filmmakers helped shape their own movie images. Native artists have impacted movies for more than a century, but until recently their presence had passed largely unrecognized. From the silent era to contemporary movies, this book features leading Native American actors whose voices have reached a broad audience and are part of the larger conversation about the exploitation of underrepresented people in Hollywood. Each chapter highlights Native actors in lead or supporting roles as well as filmmakers whose movies were financed and distributed by Hollywood studios. The text further explores how a "pan-Indian heritage" that applies to all tribes in terms of spirituality, historical trauma, and a version of ceremony and storytelling have shaped these performers' movie identities. It will appeal to a wide range of readers, including fans of Westerns, history buffs of American popular cinema, and students and scholars of Native American studies. A note from the author: Since the publication of this book, the CBC news magazine "The Fifth Estate" released an investigative documentary on October 27, 2023, alleging that Buffy Sainte-Marie had been fraudulently posing as a Native Canadian throughout her career.

Download or read book A Dancing People written by Clyde Ellis and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2003-10-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everywhere they are dancing. From Oklahoma City's huge Red Earth celebration to fund-raising events at local high schools, powwows are a vital element of contemporary Indian life on the Southern Plains. Some see it as tradition, handed down through the generations. Others say it's been sullied by white participation and robbed of its spiritual significance. But, during the past half century, the powwow has become one of the most popular and visible expressions of the dynamic cultural forces at work in Indian country today. Clyde Ellis has written the first comprehensive history of Southern Plains powwow culture-an interdisciplinary, highly collaborative ethnography based on more than two decades of participation in powwows. In seeking to determine what "powwow people" mean by so designating themselves, he addresses how the powwow and its role in contemporary Indian identity have changed over time-along with its songs and dances-and how Indians for nearly a century have used dance to define themselves within their communities. A Dancing People shows that, whether understood as an intertribal or tribally specific event, dancing often satisfies needs and obligations that are not met in other ways-and that many Southern Plains Indians organize their lives around dancing and the continuity of culture that it represents. As one Kiowa elder explained, "When I go to [these dances], I'm right where those old people were. Singing those songs, dancing where they danced. And my children and grandchildren, they've learned these ways, too, because it's good, it's powerful." Ellis tells us not only why and how Southern Plains powwow culture originated, but also something about what it means. He explores powwow's cultural and historical roots, tracing suppression by government advocates of assimilation, Indian resistance movements, internal tribal disputes, and the emergence of powerful song and dance traditions. He also includes a series of conversations and interviews with powwow people in which they comment on why they go to dances and what the dances mean to them as Indian people. An insightful study of performance, ritual, and culture, A Dancing People also makes an important statement about the search for identity among Native Americans today.

Download or read book Lakota Performers in Europe written by Steve Friesen and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2017-06-08 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From April to November 1935 in Belgium, fifteen Lakotas enacted their culture on a world stage. Wearing beaded moccasins and eagle-feather headdresses, they set up tepees, danced, and demonstrated marksmanship and horse taming for the twenty million visitors to the Brussels International Exposition, a grand event similar to a world’s fair. The performers then turned homeward, leaving behind 157 pieces of Lakota culture that they had used in the exposition, ranging from costumery to weaponry. In Lakota Performers in Europe, author Steve Friesen tells the story of these artifacts, forgotten until recently, and of the Lakota performers who used them. The 1935 exposition marked a culmination of more than a century of European travel by American Indian performers, and of Europeans’ fascination with Native culture, fanned in part by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West from the late 1800s through 1913. Although European newspaper reports often stereotyped Native performers as “savages,” American Indians were drawn to participate by the opportunity to practice traditional aspects of their culture, earn better wages, and see the world. When the organizers of the 1935 exposition wanted to include an American Indian village, Sam Lone Bear, Thomas and Sallie Stabber, Joe Little Moon, and other Lakotas were eager to participate. By doing this, they were able to preserve their culture and influence European attitudes toward it. Friesen narrates these Lakotas' experiences abroad. In the process, he also tells the tale of collector François Chladiuk, who acquired the Lakotas’ artifacts in 2004. More than 300 color and black-and-white photographs document the collection of items used by the performers during the exposition. Friesen portrays a time when American Indians—who would not long after return to Europe as allies and liberators in military garb—appeared on the international stage as ambassadors of the American West. Lakota Performers in Europe offers a complex view of a vibrant culture practiced and preserved against tremendous odds.

Download or read book Painting Culture Painting Nature written by Gunlög Fur and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1920s, a group of young Kiowa artists, pursuing their education at the University of Oklahoma, encountered Swedish-born art professor Oscar Brousse Jacobson (1882–1966). With Jacobson’s instruction and friendship, the Kiowa Six, as they are now known, ignited a spectacular movement in American Indian art. Jacobson, who was himself an accomplished painter, shared a lifelong bond with group member Stephen Mopope (1898–1974), a prolific Kiowa painter, dancer, and musician. Painting Culture, Painting Nature explores the joint creativity of these two visionary figures and reveals how indigenous and immigrant communities of the early twentieth century traversed cultural, social, and racial divides. Painting Culture, Painting Nature is a story of concurrences. For a specific period, immigrants such as Jacobson and disenfranchised indigenous people such as Mopope transformed Oklahoma into the center of exciting new developments in Indian art, which quickly spread to other parts of the United States and to Europe. Jacobson and Mopope came from radically different worlds, and were on unequal footing in terms of power and equality, but they both experienced, according to author Gunlög Fur, forms of diaspora or displacement. Seeking to root themselves anew in Oklahoma, the dispossessed artists fashioned new mediums of compelling and original art. Although their goals were compatible, Jacobson’s and Mopope’s subjects and styles diverged. Jacobson painted landscapes of the West, following a tradition of painting nature uninfluenced by human activity. Mopope, in contrast, strove to capture the cultural traditions of his people. The two artists shared a common nostalgia, however, for a past life that they could only re-create through their art. Whereas other books have emphasized the promotion of Indian art by Euro-Americans, this book is the first to focus on the agency of the Kiowa artists within the context of their collaboration with Jacobson. The volume is further enhanced by full-color reproductions of the artists’ works and rare historical photographs.

Download or read book The Newspaper Warrior written by Sarah Winnemucca and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute) has long been recognized as an important nineteenth-century American Indian activist and writer. Yet her acclaimed performances and speaking tours across the United States, along with the copious newspaper articles that grew out of those tours, have been largely ignored and forgotten. The Newspaper Warrior collects hundreds of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, advertisements, book reviews, and editorial comments by and about Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. This anthology gathers together her literary production for newspapers and magazines from her 1864 performances in San Francisco to her untimely death in 1891, focusing on the years 1879 to 1887, when Winnemucca Hopkins gave hundreds of lectures in the eastern and western United States; published her book, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883); and established a bilingual school for Native American children.

Download or read book Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance written by Iris Smith Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays dissects American plays, movies and other performance types that examine America and its history and culture. From Amerindian stage performances to AIDS and post-9/11 America, it displays the various and important ways theatre and performance studies have examined and conversed with American culture and history.

Download or read book History of American Indians written by Robert R. McCoy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at the entirety of Native American history, focusing particularly on native peoples within the geographic boundaries of the United States. The history of American Indians is an integral part of American history overall—a part that is often overlooked. History of American Indians: Exploring Diverse Roots provides a broad chronological overview of Native American history that challenges readers to grapple with the elemental themes of adaptation, continuity, and persistence. The book enables a deeper understanding of the origins and early history of American Indians and presents new scholarship based on the latest research. Readers will learn a wealth of American Indian history as well as appreciate the key role American Indians played in certain significant stages of American history as a whole. The direct connections between the events in the past and many current hot-button topics—such as race, climate change, water use, and other issues—are clearly identified. The book's straightforward, chronological presentation makes it a helpful and easy-to-read scholarly work appropriate for advanced high school and undergraduate college students.

Download or read book Portraits of Women in the American West written by Dee Garceau-Hagen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men are usually the heroes of Western stories, but women also played a crucial role in developing the American frontier, and their stories have rarely been told. This anthology of biographical essays on women promises new insight into gender in the 19C American West. The women featured include Asian Americans, African-Americans and Native American women, as well as their white counterparts. The original essays offer observations about gender and sexual violence, the subordinate status of women of color, their perseverance and influence in changing that status, a look at the gendered religious legacy that shaped Western Catholicism, and women in the urban and rural, industrial and agricultural West.

Download or read book Injuns written by Edward Buscombe and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-10-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the “white” perspective. Many studies have analyzed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. Distinguished film scholar Edward Buscombe offers here an incisive study that examines cinematic depictions of Native Americans from a global perspective. Buscombe opens with a historical survey of American Westerns and their controversial portrayals of Native Americans: the wild redmen of nineteenth-century Wild West shows, the more sympathetic depictions of Native Americans in early Westerns, and the shift in the American film industry in the 1920s to hostile characterizations of Indians. Questioning the implicit assumptions of prevailing critiques, Buscombe looks abroad to reveal a distinctly different portrait of Native Americans. He focuses on the lesser known Westerns made in Germany—such as East Germany’s Indianerfilme, in which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against Yankee imperialists—as well as the films based on the novels of nineteenth-century German writer Karl May. These alternative portrayals of Native Americans offer a vastly different view of their cultural position in American society. Buscombe offers nothing less than a wholly original and readable account of the cultural images of Native Americans through history andaround the globe, revealing new and complex issues in our understanding of how oppressed peoples have been represented in mass culture.

Download or read book Demanding the Cherokee Nation written by Andrew Denson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demanding the Cherokee Nation examines nineteenth-century Cherokee political rhetoric to address an enigma in American Indian history: the contradiction between the sovereignty of Indian nations and the political weakness of Indian communities. Making use of a rich collection of petitions, appeals, newspaper editorials, and other public records, Andrew Denson describes the ways in which Cherokees represented their people and their nation to non-Indians after their forced removal to Indian Territory in the 1830s. He argues that Cherokee writings on nationhood document a decades-long effort by tribal leaders to find a new model for American Indian relations in which Indian nations could coexist with a modernizing United States. Most non-Natives in the nineteenth century assumed that American development and progress necessitated the end of tribal autonomy, that at best the Indian nation was a transitional state for Native people on the way to assimilation. As Denson shows, however, Cherokee leaders found a variety of ways in which the Indian nation, as they defined it, belonged in the modern world. Tribal leaders responded to developments in the United States and adapted their defense of Indian autonomyøto the great changes transforming American life in the middle and late nineteenth century. In particular, Cherokees in several ways found new justification for Indian nationhood in American industrialization.