‘From Wigwam to White Lights’: Popular Culture, Politics, and the Performance of Native North American Identity in the Era of Assimilationism

Abstract

The major collection of historical objects owned by the Kanien’kehaka Onkwawén:na Raotitiohkwa, the Mohawk cultural centre at Kahnawake, Quebec outside of Montreal, is an assemblage of clothing and memorabilia that testifies to the strategic nature of Aboriginal reenactments of Native North American identity during one of the darkest periods in indigenous colonial history.² The collection is the legacy of Esther Deer, an acclaimed Hodenosaunee (Iroquois)³ professional entertainer who performed in Europe, Africa, and North America under the name of Princess White Deer between the late 1890s and the mid-1930s. It includes publicity photographs, scrapbooks of press clippings, theatrical programs, official documents, correspondence, and souvenirs of Deer’s international travels. The stage costumes in the collection include finely beaded hide garments typical of ‘authentic’ nineteenth-century Plains Indian clothing, fantastically coloured feather bonnets (which Deer wore, as her publicity photos show, with the tiny spangled halter tops and briefs also in the collection), and fashionable dresses in the flapper style of the 1920s.

For everyone involved in reenactments, it is a transformative experience, for it allows us to momentarily step into a real or imagined past through a political or cultural lens, never the historiographic route. Thus, the double entendre of reenactment: when elders are prone to say, ‘It’s hard to be an Indian’, we now know it plays both ways for Natives and non-Natives.

—Gerald McMaster, 2007¹