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TDR: The Drama Review 44.2 (2000) 101-106



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Independence:
An Intercultural Experience in North America

Ray Privett

Plates


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Annually on July 4th, musicians, craftspeople, and city officials come together with an audience of several thousand at Fourth Fest in Duluth, Minnesota's Bayfront Festival Park. A festival fills the park all day long before the main attraction--a nighttime fireworks display out over Lake Superior. Bands from the region and beyond play. Crafters showcase their goods. Vendors sell food. In a tent, visitors learn about Duluth's "sister cities." Flags, photographs, and decorations from Petrozovadsk, Russia; Vaxjo, Sweden; Ohara, Japan; and Thunder Bay, Canada, hang about the tent. Merchants representing the various countries sell trinkets and T-shirts. On a stage, performers in "ethnic" costumes represent different countries. At the 1998 event, at least one of these performances was a subtle act of social criticism.

As Russian dancers leave the stage, the drone of bagpipes fills the tent. A man in a red kilt leads a group to the stage, which he mounts as the others take seats nearby. Spectators look around, surprised to learn Duluth has a sister city in Scotland. When he finishes his song, people applaud, and he begins again as a very blonde woman wearing a blue skirt--apparently a representative of Sweden--stands up and starts to dance. When the song ends, they sit down. A woman in buckskin and moccasins, apparently representing Native America, rises and begins to play a hand drum. A fiddler in green, apparently representing Ireland, joins her.

Their song finished, the woman in buckskin and moccasins picks up a microphone and explains that the group is from Old Fort William, a reconstructed trading post outside Thunder Bay, just a few hundred miles north along the Canadian Lake Superior shore. She points out the Scottish, Swedish, Ojibwe, and Irish representation. She also notes her drum's roots in Irish culture, then explains that the song she has played with the fiddler is French-Canadian. All these groups, she insists, have contributed to building the Canadian nation. She and the Swedish-Canadian sing another French-Canadian song, their quiet voices barely audible above the sounds of commerce. Remaining master of ceremonies, the Ojibwe woman invites two males from the audience onto the stage. A small boy who has volunteered himself is instructed [End Page 101] to stick his nose in the air. A large, older man who has been picked out is given a kerchief to wrap around his head. They play the lord and the lass as the woman sings a Scottish song about unrequited love. Everyone laughs, and the men sit down. Together again, the Canadians play an instrumental, with the Swedish-Canadian woman playing wooden spoons. A few whoops, which might be intended to recall Ireland or Native America, are let out. Inviting the crowd to join them, the Ojibwe woman leads the group out of the tent and into the park among the general audience. They join hands with those who have followed. Together all dance in a circle, at points breaking apart and interweaving.

The performance seems to be a celebration of cultural hybridity. The Ojibwe woman's historical linking of her drum with Ireland, instead of with Native America, suggests that pre-Canadian ethnicities have interblended enough that slippages are possible. These various ethnicities, represented by types of complexion, clothing, and music, join together in a "uniquely Canadian" performance, interblending with the French and the English who are represented through language and music. The interweaving dance of the cultural representatives, the audience, and ultimately the general festival crowd suggests an inevitable interweaving of ethnicity in performance and daily life, creating a hybridity that deserves to be celebrated. But on closer examination, things aren't so simple.

Lost among the birch trees along the Kaministiquia River outside Thunder Bay along Highway 61 north from Duluth, Old Fort William reanimates a key moment in North American history. In 1815, the Nor'west and Hudson Bay companies were vying for control of the North American fur trade which supplied...

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