Lecture 3 – Buffalo Bill 2 Flashcards
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
– Contemporary documentation: photographs, films
– Postcards and cabinet cards
– Representation of Native Americans
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Postcards and cabinet cards
– postcards, first introduced at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, were not only abbreviated forms of communication but were frequently collected in albums
– interest in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (at least in provincial Britain) ranged across age and gender difference
cabinet cards, like postcards, had practical use as cartes de visite but were also collectors’ objects
– they, like postcards, give an indication of the way in which stereotypical representations were linked to the performative aspect of the shows
– they also show how representations of Native Americans became collectable and reveal the pattern which informed such representations
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Sitting Bull
– Sitting Bull, the Sioux Chief at the Custer Massacre
– after being forced to make peace and confined to the Standing Rock Agency (reservation), Sitting Bull was made the attraction of Alvaren Allen’s Sitting Bull Conncetion in 1884, which toured parts of Canada and the Northern US
– on the show, Sitting Bull met the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who was to become a star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which she joined in 1885
– Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in the same year, getting special permission to leave the reservation
– When Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, this was perceived as a further domestication of the fearsome Native American
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans basics
– representation of the Native American other in wild west shows was paradigmatic of the wider perception of the “Indians” and was simultaneously productive in creating, embedding, and confirming new stereotypes and ‘myths’
– many of these stereotypes and myths were adopted and adapted by other forms of cultural production and in many ways continue to inform constructions of the American West
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans
– in the face of Manifest Destiny and of the constantly shifting frontier, by the final decades of the nineteenth century the Indian nations were perceived to vanish
– it is hardly a coincidence that the spectacular Wild West shows emerged at the very same time (see Moses 1996), even though Reddin, as we have seen, traces the romantic notion of the “vanishing Americans” back to the first Wild West shows under the management of George Catlin in the 1830s and links it to the same sentiment informing Cooper’s novels, in particular his The Last of the Mohicans of 1826 (1999)
– in these early representations of the native other was already embedded the ambivalence of its perception in that the romantic imaginary of the noble savage was counterbalanced by that of the savage
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans, 19th century
– in 19th c, a more dynamic, evolutionary concept of human history was developed
– belief in and reliance on technical progress made indigenous peoples appear inferior as well as subject to extinction
– the “primitive” no longer carried an implicit moral reproach to the decadence of European culture
– rather, in what has been called the mission civilisatrice, which the allegedly superior civilized nations arrogated to themselves, the supposed inferiority of native peoples and their traditions was increasingly instrumentalized as justification for expansionist and oppressive (colonial) policies
– it is nevertheless important to note that the Wild West shows were not unambiguously limited to the image of either the “savage” or the “noble savage” but presented both imaginaries within the dynamics of the narrative of the vanishing natives and the progress of civilization
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans, Linda Scarangella McNenly
– as explored by Linda Scarangella McNenly, it were not only the performances of the Wild West shows themselves that provided sites of representation: “The visual and print media, including newspaper reports, advertisements, photographs, postcards, show programs, and posters, also produced and perpetuated images of a noble savage or ‘savage Indian’.” (2014)
–as a part of this dynamic, the later Wild West shows reflect also the final subjugation of the natives within the narrative of Manifest Destiny
– as McNenly observes, “[a] modification in discourse from the ‘savage and vanishing Indian’ to the ‘civilized and tamed Indian’ was hence necessary to maintain the story of a successful conquest.” (2014)
– and yet – controversial as the shows were even at the time, with the opposition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and mainly Christian humanitarian groups (see Moses 1996) – the performances “did allow, at least for a few moments, the Native performers’ bodies to become visible in a culture devoted to marginalising them.” (Magelssen and Nees 2011)
– Moses suggests that even though the Wild West shows “never offered an alternative to forced assimilation,” they nevertheless emerged “as a method to ease the transition of a proud and capable people to the cultural demands of the majority.” (1996)
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans, Linda Scarangella McNenly II
–the shows moreover offered not only economic opportunities to the native Americans, restricted as they may have been, but provided also a means of keeping their traditions alive, of evoking and even celebrating their cultures:
– “‘Playing’ Indian could also be viewed as defiance.” (Moses 1996)
– Magelssen and Nees argue that: “despite its often-racist portrayals, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became a counter-site to a mythical American West (a heterotopia in Foucault’s terminology), in which Sitting Bull and other Native performers used their ‘spectacular’ status to tactically operate within a changing political field of ethnic stereotypes and oppression.” (2011)
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans, Linda Scarangella McNenly III
– in other words, the native performers in the Wild West shows assumed “communicative agency” (Buddle 2004), importantly also outside their stage acts (McNenly 2014)
– Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1885 and was contracted to ride once around the arena during performances
– he quickly became a popular attraction, but stayed with the show only for four months
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans, Linda Scarangella McNenly IV
– Sitting Bull earned very well for his performances and retained full autonomy over the production and sale of souvenir autographs and portrait photographs (McNenly 2014 and Magelssen and Nees 2011)
– though controversial, it has frequently been assumed that Sitting Bull cursed his audiences in Lakota during performances even as they cheered him (see Utley 1993)
– other ‘native performers’ in ethnographic shows have been known to resort to similar means of resistance, it was a way of taking agency for those who were denied agency
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— Representation of Native Americans, Linda Scarangella McNenly V
– Sitting Bull had only limited authority over the internal and external mechanisms of producing and disseminating his image, including the iconographic tradition within which his portraits were created and beheld and the contextual reconfigurations to which they may have been subjected
– yet, as suggested by McNenly, the Lakota chief may not have been concerned so much “about constructing a particular image that resonated with the general public, so long as that image was of himself, an image he knew could be sold to the public.” (2014)
–another channel for the communicative agency assumed by native performers of the Wild West shows was the press; in the proliferation of newspaper reports on the shows and subject to editorial intervention, they were occasionally given a voice, be it in interviews or in feature articles (see McNenly 2014)
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— New projects
– in the second decade of the twentieth century, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became less and less economically viable
–in 1913, Cody had to declare bankruptcy and, in 1914, sold his enterprise to the Sells-Floto Circus for which he continued to work as impresario for another two years before he finally retired from the Wild West show
The Cultural Productivity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
— After Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
– as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West failed, Cody began to look for new projects
–George Catlin had tried without success, in the 1830s, to win government support for his project of the Gallery unique
–Cody was more successful; he proposed, and was supported in, a project of filming re-enactments of the battles of the recent Indian Wars
