Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney by Linda Scarangella McNenly (review)

In 2010 Linda Scarangella McNenly published “Indigeneity in Tourism: Transnational Spaces, Pan-Indian Identity, and Cosmopolitanism” in Maximilian Forte’s important edited book Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century. Her title seems to have been a bow to Forte’s specific concerns in that the essay appears in revised form here as “An Encore Presentation: Euro Disney’s Spectacular Wild West Show.” Dropping the terms indigeneity, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism from the original title is emblematic of Scarangella McNenly’s weakly theorized book as a whole. Since Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show—as well as some of the other nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wild West shows she considers From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney—spent a good deal of time in Europe, the concept terms “transnational” and “cosmopolitan” she used earlier would have been helpful here. But they appear nowhere in the book, while the complexities of “indigeneity” give way to what the author calls “Nativeness,” something that is or isn’t consistent with “Pan-Indian” identities.

“Transcultural,” from Forte’s title, appears at many points in the book in the form of “transculturation,” mostly as this concept was developed by Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992). Transculturation, McNenly writes with reference to Pratt, is “a process whereby marginal groups selectively incorporate dominant culture to varying degrees for their own use” (11). Thus Wild West performers, as she notes throughout, engage in the performances “for their own reasons” (192). But surely it’s been known for a long time that a great many Native peoples’ participation in colonial projects has very much been “for their own reasons.”

The process of transculturation occurs in what McNenly, using another concept she takes from Pratt, calls a “contact zone.” Pratt’s “contact zone” was essentially a restatement of Native studies’ revision of the concept of the “frontier,” in which the “frontier” was not the point to which “civilization” had advanced, but rather the space in which cultures, differing to be sure in material power, met and interacted. In addition to “transculturation” and the “contact zone,” a loose and shifting notion of what McNenly calls “agency” provides the book’s theoretical underpinning, such as it is. Indian agency is important because McNenly wishes to put the emphasis on Native performers in the contact zone of Wild West shows.

Agency, for McNenly, is activity in which the colonized don’t merely “mimic” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994) or submit to the colonizer, but assert themselves in the interest—again—of goals of their own. She regards Native “Dance as Expressive Agency” (85–90) and belatedly introduces the term “performative agency” (181)—despite the fact that what she had earlier described as “expressive agency” was in fact largely manifested in performance. (In this regard her fieldwork at the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve presents archival materials and interviews that are well worth consideration.) Over the course of the book, “agency” degenerates from performance details (alteration of songs, changes in costume and regalia) that might subvert the dominant society’s narratives of domination—“winning the West” and the “progress of Civilization” for the United States, at least—to such things as helping Native performers to “build confidence” (155; also 159 where agency is a “confidence booster”). By this time, agency is just about anything Native performers do—even when, as McNenly notes, Euro Disney has become “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, with Mickey and Friends” (165). Nonetheless, she assures us by way of conclusion—as who today would doubt?—that “Native peoples adapt, survive, and thrive” (196).