Guest Editor’s Introduction

This special issue of American Indian Quarterly examines indigenous cultural tourism in both theoretical and practical contexts. The articles critically address the practices of spectatorship and participation at work in world’s fairs, Wild West shows, photography, cinema, museums, cultural performances, commemorative events, and public sculpture. By addressing this diverse subject matter from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors in this issue add to current scholarly conversations about self- representation and identity, national and transnational negotiations, and personal and cultural memory.

To open the issue, Melissa Rinehart examines an act of resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition. When Native performers showed up to the exposition with short hair, organizers felt that they appeared “too civilized” and insisted that they wear wigs. When spectators openly discussed ugly stereotypes in front of Antonio Apache, the young Native American organizer of the Indian pageant, he threw out the wigs in frustration. The tourists, who thought the wigs were scalps, fled. Rinehart writes, “This resistance ultimately spoke to their resiliency as an unconquered people directly countering the progressive theme of the Exposition.” Next, I address trajectory of the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Real Wild West show. Native participants in the Real Wild West show performed on national and international circuits and subcontracted with organizations such as Germany’s Sarrasani Circus and southern California’s early film studios. Through an analysis of these sites, I suggest that the transition from live to filmed performances in the early twentieth century was a fluid process, leading to new viewing positions for both performers and spectators.

Moving into the present, Michelle Jacob draws on interviews with members of the Wapato Indian Club, a dance troupe based on the Yakama Reservation in Wapato, Washington, to “articulate the lessons about identity, representation, and resistance contained in the narratives about participation in [the club].” By revitalizing cultural traditions of dancing and intergenerational exchange, Jacob argues that “the Wapato Indian Club represents a community-based educational effort that seeks to heal the soul wounds of colonialism.” Jennifer Adese questions “the nature of Indigenous involvement” in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Opening Ceremony and the broader implications of such participation for conceptions of Canadian nationhood.

Jon Daehnke addresses the Confluence Project, a series of contemporary art installations along the Columbia River primarily designed by Maya Lin, created for the Bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Envisioned as a collaboration between civic groups, Pacific Northwest Native American tribes, and architects and landscape designers, the project emphasized environmentalism and the Corps of Discovery as “part of a larger shared heritage.” However, Daehnke argues: “Rather than transforming and reimagining the story of Lewis and Clark, I suggest that the messages of shared heritage and sustainability found in the Confluence Project serve to further assimilate the Native American story as one more component of the American master narrative, create a false equation of indigenous and settler experiences on the landscape, distance and erase the tragedies of colonialism, and perpetuate stereotypes of pristine nonanthropogenic landscapes.” Doctoral student Jeff Fortney’s essay further examines commemoration and remembrance, considering how a statue of a Civil War soldier on Main Street in Norman, Oklahoma, reflects an often-silenced historical narrative in former Indian Territory. In closing, Doreen Martinez calls for a theoretical and methodological (re)mapping of “previous expectations and imposed understandings of Indigenous cultures” to “more fully illuminate the landscape, terrain, and meaning of lives” in a global society.