Canadian Indian Cowboys in Australia: Representation, Rodeo, and the RCMP at the Royal Easter Show (review)

On 15 February 1939, eight First Nations men from four Alberta reserves began an exceptional journey. At the invitation of the Australian Royal Agricultural Society (ras) – Joe Crowfoot, Joe Bear Robe, Frank Many Fingers, Joe Young Pine, Edward One Spot, Jim Starlight, Jimmy Left Hand, and Douglas Kootenay – travelled to Australia to participate in the Royal Easter Fair. Lynda Mannik’s Canadian Indian Cowboys in Australia recounts the story of this trip from the perspectives of the cowboys themselves, ras officials, the Canadian government, Samuel J. Leach, the RCMP constable who oversaw their travel, and the Australian public. In so doing, Mannik intends to show ‘how the intercultural transactions of a small group of people destablilized stereotypical beliefs created through larger popular cultural venues and colonial projects’ (9). Mannik’s book claims a place with the now rich literature on cultural events and performance as sites for producing and contesting identities, ideas about community, and national narratives.

The book begins with an examination of ras and Canadian government views. The Australian initiators sought out ‘Indian cowboys’ in order to use them as representatives of ‘primitivism,’ against which to demonstrate Australia’s modernity. ras officials consistently treated the First Nations cowboys as objects for display and performance, as bodies but not individuals. The Canadian government approved of the participation of the First Nations cowboys for its own reasons. Reversing years of government policy that circumscribed public performance, Department of Indian Affairs officials approved the ras’s request on the condition that an Indian village be set up at which sales of handicrafts might take place, thus opening an international market for goods that government officials hoped would sustain Aboriginal people and thus reduce relief costs.

For their part, Crowfoot and the others agreed to travel to Australia because the trip offered them a chance to compete internationally in a sport they loved, to travel, to escape the confines of the reserve system and the position of wardship in which the Canadian state wished to keep them. These were no ordinary cowboys. All but one held or would hold important political positions within their communities. Some, like Many Fingers, were comparatively well off and others, like Eddie One Spot, had a career in film. Mannik interviewed family members of those who made the trip and heard stories about how well the cowboys were treated, how they became celebrities and were mobbed by Australian crowds. Significantly, throughout the trip they presented themselves as citizens rather than wards, as modern, contributing members of society, proud of their cultures and of their communities. In this way, they were able to defy the paternalism of Canadian government policy. Mannik nicely situates the participants in social and political contexts but eschews the recent historiography of memory, leaving the family reminiscences without interpretation.

The Canadian government insisted that the men be chaperoned and appointed Constable Stanley Leach to this task. Mannik’s treatment of Leach’s perspective is the most disappointing. In the other chapters, situating the perspective discussed in various contexts is enlivening, but in this chapter Mannik struggles to fit Leach’s narratives into primitivist and touristic discourses of the day. Though intent, it seems, on proving the unrealized transformative potential of Leach’s experiences with the eight cowboys, Mannik instead seems to indicate that Leach’s experience was over determined by these discourses.

The final chapter examines the reaction of the Australian public through a reading of the press surrounding the visit. Mannik discovers that the press developed a new dichotomy – ‘primitive’/ordinary – into which to fit their descriptions of the First Nations cowboys. More subversive than the primitive/noble savage stereotype of North American writing, the Australian press repeatedly reported on the surprising sameness of the First Nations cowboys, how alike they were to ordinary Australians. Mannik makes her point that contact, arranged even through a heavily managed and staged event such as...