An operatic skeleton on the western frontier: Zitkala-Sa, William F. Hanson, and The Sun Dance Opera.
"Braves Aid in Indian Opera at Utah Presentation ... A Full-Blooded Sioux Co-Author." (1) So runs part of the Musical America headline reporting the premiere of an opera on a Native American subject, created in part by a Native American woman. Built around a religious practice that was still banned by the federal government, the production featured the participation of members of the Ute Nation living on the Uintah-Ouray Indian Reservation, a short way across the rolling sagebrush plateau from the performance venue. (2) The date was February 1913, and the place was Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah. The Sun Dance Opera was enthusiastically received at its premiere, filling the hall for three nights. Two separate productions at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, followed in May and December the next year, the second of them taken the forty-odd miles to Salt Lake City for ten more performances. Three years after a 1935 revival at BYU, the opera had two performances at the Broadway Theatre (Cine Roma) in New York City, where it did not fare as well. (3) It is among the earliest of the operas on Native American subjects that constituted an early twentieth-century subgenre within the still broad-based, popular field of opera. (4)Native Americans had been the subject of European curiosity, speculation, and exploitation since first contact. They provided one source for Rousseau's "noble savage" in the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth they became a major subject of American and European art, literature, and theatrical entertainment. Two examples in the area of popular entertainment are especially relevant here. In the decades immediately preceding The Sun Dance Opera, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows, in which Native Americans (most often Sioux) demonstrated certain "traditional" skills and participated in sham battles, played to enormous audiences across the United States and in Europe. Also, Indians were commonly portrayed in the opening scenes of the community-based pageants that were staged all across the United States from 1907 on. Traditional dancing might be represented, but most often the scene consisted of the local indigenous people signing a treaty cheerfully surrendering their land and graciously retreating in favor of the white arrivals. This scene provided an exotic opener for the many pageants that went on to address subsequent white history and nation-building as their primary subject. (5) In addition, an interest in Indian music as a source for characteristically "American" concert music had been triggered by Anton Dvorak's 1893-95 residence in the United States. (6) The publication of Alice C. Fletcher's A Study of Omaha Indian Music in 1893, combined with Dvorak's visit, led to a discussion of how this ethnic material might be applied to concert music, raising by implication the general question of authenticity. (7)
The Musical America article quoted at the start of this paper states that "the purpose of the opera is to portray the inner spiritual life of this wronged and misunderstood people." Along with the literal closeness of the Native American culture represented in the opera to the audience and the performance venue, here was an aesthetic approach that held the possibility of setting this opera apart from the less consciously "authentic" exoticism of other so-called Indianist operas. In The Sun Dance Opera as it was produced in 1913 and 1914, secular fragments of the sun dance and other native customs were enacted by Native Americans for a largely white theatrical audience. A romantic triangle, whose roles were sung by white singers trained in the European style, was superimposed on the ceremony, giving the representation a characteristically nineteenth-century operatic shape. In this formulation, the Ute hero elects to undertake the five-day sun dance in order to win the hand of his chief's daughter in the face of competition from a Shoshone visitor.
Clearly, a ceremony imbued with religious meaning from one culture cannot be enacted for a group of people not part of that culture, especially in an abbreviated form and in a nonreligious venue, without some loss of authenticity. The romantic triangle takes the enactment further from such an abstract ideal. Yet among American operas on Native American subjects composed at about this time, this opera rates very high for its level of authenticity. A few illustrations from plots of some other pre-1920 "Indianist" operas make its unique aesthetic aspirations clearer. Arthur Nevin's Poia (piano-vocal score and first production, Berlin, 1909 and 1910 respectively) is closest to The Sun Dance Opera in its plot, though still markedly different. Claiming a precontact setting, its plot nevertheless includes elements that are more suggestive of heroic biblical stories and Wagnerian-style myths than of native Blackfoot lore. Poia, who bears the disfiguring mark of the Sun God and is therefore ineligible to win the princess Natoya, is liberated from his handicap in a sleep scene suggestive of Die Walkure as a reward for rescuing Morning Star, son of the Sun God, from his attackers. The Sun God strikes the villain Sumatsi dead in time to prevent Sumatsi from murdering Poia as Poia returns to claim his bride, but not in time to prevent Natoya from becoming a substitute target for the evil Sumatsi's blow. Poia takes the dying Natoya with him as they join the Sun God. This mythic conflation aimed, in Edward Ellsworth Hipsher's words, "to create ... an art work which would interpret the Indian in his life and manner of thought, and at the same time to mold the work to the requirements of the operatic stage." (8) In fact, Poia is a generically mythical story that happens to take place in a Native American setting.
The creators of The Sun Dance Opera, Zitkala-Sa and William F. Hanson, might conceivably have known about Poia. They might also have known about Victor Herbert's well-publicized Natoma (piano-vocal score, New York, 1911; first production, Philadelphia, 1911), Frederick Shepherd Converse's The Sacrifice (piano-vocal score, New York, 1910; first production, Boston, 1911), and Mary Carr Moore's Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire (piano-vocal score, New York; first production, Seattle, both 1912). All of these deal with white-native interaction and depend in some way on the stereotyping of native characters in the long-standing American theatrical tradition. The first two are set in pre-Gold Rush California and involve the usual romantic triangles. Natoma is an Indian woman who, adoring her Spanish mistress Barbara, murders Barbara's unwanted suitor (a stereotypically sinister half-breed) and as her punishment commits herself voluntarily to a fictionally sympathetic Roman Catholic convent rather than seeking exile with her tribe far from the comforts of Christianity. She (played by the famous Mary Garden) sings of the wrongs of her people but nevertheless embraces the models offered by her tribe's conquerors. In The Sacrifice, often included among the "Indianist" operas, only one role, that of Conchita's servant, is specifically designated as "Indian." Here, American and Mexican officers compete for the hand of Conchita, a Mexican woman. The white American officer is the "sacrifice," in this case to the notion of ethnically determined romantic love. Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire is concerned primarily with "missionary passion," represented by the historical figure of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, a missionary in Oregon Territory before it became part of the United States. Moore here takes a unique feminist position in deliberately eschewing a romantic triangle to give more weight to Narcissa's role as a direct participant in the mission. Relative to its treatment of Indian people, its librettist wrote, "An effort has been made to give the Indian sympathetic treatment.... No plea of `the destiny of the white race' can ever wipe out the infamy." (9) Its approach to Indian people is arguably more humane and even authentic than is to be found in the other operas mentioned in this paragraph. The subject matter of Narcissa aspires to another kind of authenticity, however, aimed at revealing the experience of a white missionary woman. Thus its direct investment in the white colonialist position sets it apart from The Sun Dance Opera. The contrast between the statement in Moore's score of Narcissa and Hanson's statement (from the program for the 1935 production of The Sun Dance Opera) reflects both the possibilities and limitations of The Sun Dance Opera:
We have tried to use the Opera as a medium to interpret the inner and human side of the Red man. He has been influenced in his forms, rituals and social customs by a heredity and environment so vastly different than ours, that we often mistake and call the Aborigine a being without heartthrobs, loves, social standards, or devotion. (10)
A major reason Hanson gave for his work on this opera (and the one following) was to preserve a rapidly vanishing culture. He was scarcely alone in his view that Native Americans were a "vanishing race" at that time, for their population had declined disastrously in the nineteenth century. A romanticized image of an irretrievably "vanishing race" was at the same time a popular notion in the white imagination. As the Handbook of North American Indians's editor remarks, "so desperate was their [the Great Basin Indian people's] condition that White observers in the latter part of the nineteenth century predicted their imminent extinction, and some even welcomed the possibility as a solution to `the Indian problem.'" (11)
Beyond this consideration of subject and authenticity, the dynamic of a genuine collaboration between a white male and a Native American woman, each a child of the frontier in very different ways, on an operatic project--especially one about native culture--is intriguing on its face. Research on this essay began with the goal of sorting out Zitkala-Sa's contribution to The Sun Dance Opera. The musical sources, which have serious gaps, are inadequate by themselves for this task; the details of the collaboration remain a mystery. However, by looking through the musical evidence and beyond it to the individuals involved, their contrasting motivations, and the context in which they worked, it is possible to develop a revealing sense of the uneasy cross-cultural interactions about race and gender that were at work in this unlikely collaboration.
It is difficult to know what was actually performed in 1913 and impossible to track changes in the subsequent productions, especially the early ones, in much detail. Two versions of The Sun Dance Opera score survive, one predating the first production and the other prepared in the 1930s for the later ones and possibly edited further after that. Hanson deposited a piano-vocal score with the Copyright Office in December 1912, two months before the initial production. The evidence of this early copy is inconsistent in several respects with the published reports of that production, just as the reports of the collaboration between Zitkala-Sa and Hanson are inconsistent. The early version of the score, which was unknown to the only previous writer on the opera, is especially important to this exploration because, as the biographical material in the finding aid for the Hanson papers notes, Hanson revised his score after each production to reflect changes made for that production. (12) That there were changes is strongly suggested by the report in the Deseret News (Salt Lake City) of the 1913 performances, that the opera was "just yet in its early stages of crystallization." (13) None of the intermediate versions, or even any notes suggesting where changes were made, have been located, limiting this discussion of the music to a comparison of two versions separated by as much as a quarter of a century, neither one necessarily an accurate representation of any single performance.
The second version of the score exists in two forms, a piano-vocal score and a full orchestral score. (14) This piano-vocal score says, on the first page of act I:
The Sun Dance Opera (revised ed.) William F. Hanson. (From the original opera By Wm. F. Hanson colaboration [sic] Zitkala-Sa)
The orchestral score, less elaborately, says only:
The Sun Dance Opera--Romantic Indian Opera William F. Hanson M.S. (15)
The second version is substantially different from the early deposit copy. It is more than twice as long. Several numbers have been withdrawn and others added; many of those remaining have been rewritten. A major singing character has been added, substantially altering the plot. Many of the numbers in the second version of the piano-vocal score appear to be reproduced using a diazo (ozalid) process that could not have been available to Hanson before the early 1930s. Some of these were duplicated much later, suggesting that in 1950 or later Hanson was still tinkering with the score, possibly hoping for another production. (16) The question arises whether the changes are sufficient to justify removing Zitkala-Sa's name from the title page of the second version, thereby among other things making the initial question of this paper moot.
In addition to the evidence of the scores, we have Hanson's book, Sun Dance Land, an account first of the history of the Ute people and then of the opera, published long after the last production but clearly worked on for many years. It includes a narrative of the late version of the opera's story, elaborated well beyond the spoken dialogue inserted in the score or in other descriptive texts. (17) There are also brief accounts of the various productions with cast listings and a sketchy account of his collaboration with Zitkala-Sa. (18)
Even the timing of their collaboration is uncertain, with claims ranging from contemporary commentators' "months" to Susan Dominguez's eleven years or more. (19) Biographical data reduce the possibility of interaction to the period ca. 1909-16. Hanson was born and raised near Vernal, Utah, the site of the first production, and claimed to have observed his first sun dance in 1899, at the age of twelve. After completing a two-year course of study at BYU in 1907 and performing his mission service (commonly two years) for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he returned to Vernal to teach at the Uintah Academy, from which he had earlier graduated. He taught there from ca. 1909 until he left to study music in Chicago in 1924, and then took up a position on the faculty at BYU in Provo.
Zitkala-Sa, whose English name was Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation (South Dakota) to a Lakota mother and a white father. She was often described as a "full-blooded Sioux" and sometimes as the granddaughter of Sitting Bull; both claims were literally inaccurate but emblematic of her lifelong advocacy of Indian culture and native rights. Raised as Lakota by her mother, she received a "white" education, which alternated with periods of illness at home, successively at White's Indian Manual Labor Institute (Indiana), Earlham College, and the New England Conservatory. For a time she taught at the Carlisle Indian School (Pennsylvania); in 1900 she traveled to Paris as violin soloist with an orchestra from Carlisle. She quit Carlisle over its policy of forced assimilation. Her position is made clear by her publication of Old Indian Legends in 1901, "Why I Am a Pagan" in the Atlantic Monthly the following year, and other essays. (20) She married Raymond T. Bonnin, an other Sioux, in 1902, and lived with him on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah from 1902 until they moved to Washington DC in 1916, when she began her later career as an articulate and forceful advocate for Indian rights. Thus, unless their collaboration began before Hanson finished high school, it must have taken place between 1909 and 1916.
Except for his laconic "she skeletoned the opera," Hanson has little to say about how they actually worked:
With already a knowledge of Government attitudes and practices, and with experiences among many American tribes, the Bonnins came to Fort Duchesne [the federal agency office on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation] steeped in Indian history. During their long assignment in Uintah, they learned much about the Ute nation and its mountain lore. Their help in gathering materials was invaluable to the writer in composing The Sun Dance Opera and other works. (21)
The earliest and fullest outside description of their collaboration comes from N. L. Nelson, another faculty member at BYU:
It was she who furnished the missing links that made a story of the Sun Dance, she who revised his poems, phrase by phrase, so that they should truly reflect her people; she who criticized his music, wherever it departed from true Indian melody; she who furnished all the ideas for the magnificent costumes--the largest and perhaps the most splendid collection ever brought together; she who trained the dancers and singers so as to be true to the highest and best ideals of her people. (22)
Zitkala-Sa's role in the early productions was always fully acknowledged in the surviving newspaper stories before the 1935 revival. Yet several pieces of evidence tend to contradict Nelson's story about their collaboration. Hanson copyrighted his score under his own name. He neglected to assign "an undivided half interest" in the opera to his Native American collaborator until a month after the first production. (That assignment, notarized in Uintah County, Utah, is not recorded in the Copyright Office.) Entirely absent is any word whatever about The Sun Dance Opera or her contribution to it in Zitkala-Sa's published work or her papers.
A further uncertainty is raised by the inequalities in the training and experience of the two collaborators. Hanson is usually listed as the "composer" and Zitkala-Sa as "collaborator." All of the music is written in one hand, undoubtedly his. Yet, as a comparison of their biographies, summarized in table I, shows, much of Hanson's training in composition and any experience on his part of large-scale opera took place long after their collaboration had ended. Zitkala-Sa was the partner with wider experience not only of native culture but also of the Western, European American music tradition.
The musical evidence in the early score underlines the paradoxical nature of the collaboration. The first version of the opera includes little in the way of "native" melody. Its music simply does not support Nelson's assertion of a "sympathetic portrayal" of native culture. It is the second, later version, prepared well after the collaboration had ended, in which a variety of melodies and chants claimed as "native" appear, often introduced in rewritten solo numbers. The story provides the opportunity to recreate a portion of a native ceremony within the bounds of a stage presentation. As explained earlier, it superimposes a romantic triangle as a unifying thread. Ohiya, a Sioux brave, determines to win approval for his marriage to the Ute chief's daughter, Winona, by completing the five-day ordeal of the sun dance. His rival and the chief musician for the sun dance is Sweet Singer, a Shoshone. The women of the tribe ("Gossips," led by Blue Necklace) and the clown Hebo side with Ohiya, who carves a courting flute (customary for Sioux and Ute men) and serenades Winona. Sweet Singer also woos Winona, but in a sentimental Western style with a "Throbbing Heart Song," thankfully cut from the late version, and offers gifts to her father in exchange for her hand. Winona rejects him. As the exhausted Ohiya completes his trial, Sweet Singer conveniently dies and is carried away by the Witches of the Night. His likeness appears forthwith on a nearby cliff. The chief awards his daughter to Ohiya.
In the later version of the opera, a more eloquent Sweet Singer is portrayed as having led Shoshone Maid--a new character--astray using stolen medicine (the "love-leaves"), which dooms her to follow him even though he has rejected her. In this version she becomes one of the Witches of the Night and helps them carry away her betrayer near the end of the opera. Many musical changes accompany this rewrite, virtually all of them for the better. For the productions in 1935 and 1938, native participants were no longer used. More of the ceremony is written out, and native melodies are more extensively used.
The early version of the opera consists of a brief overture and twenty-three short numbers divided into three acts; the second act is further divided into three scenes. The later version begins with the same overture, revised and extended to include a prologue. (In both cases the overture trumpets the seriousness of the proceedings to come with a four-note opening motive reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.) The three acts have become five. Table 2 is a scene-by-scene comparison of the two versions. In both versions, the areas of group Indian participation are set apart, most likely for practical reasons, from the choruses and the actions of individual characters. They are concentrated in act 2, scene 1 (act 2 of the late version); at the end of act 2, scene 3 (act 4); and in act 3 (act 5). In the first production, the pit orchestra was limited to six musicians. A larger orchestra was available at BYU in 1914, but the fuller score is unlocated. Much of the present full orchestral score was probably prepared for the 1935 or even the 1938 production.
Hanson prepared nine examples of Indian melodies labeled "Part 2, Appendix B, Themes used in The Sun Dance Opera," clearly intended for his book but omitted from the published version (ex. I). (23) "Ink-pa-ta," the third of his examples, a Lakota love song, was specifically said to have been secured by Zitkala-Sa; it may not be coincidental that whenever this theme appears it is always presented in exactly the same way, in a simple chordal style. Hanson also used an Edison cylinder machine for collecting songs for this opera and probably for the succeeding one, Tam-Man Nacup from 1923. The ethnologist Frances Densmore visited the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in 1914 and again in 1916; her 1922 Northern Ute Music is based on those trips. (24) One of Densmore's informants, Quinance, was the leader of the half-dozen Ute men who participated in The Sun Dance Opera performances in 1913 and 1914, and in Hunson's later lyceum tours. John Archoop was a second individual who acted as an informant to both Hanson and Densmore. Curiously, there is no overlap between the melodies published in Densmore's book and those used in the opera. The tunes used by Hanson often assume the descending form that Densmore suggests is characteristic of Ute song, however.
Of Hanson's nine Indian themes in example I, three--(e), (f), and (h)--do not appear at all in the early version of the score. In general, the native themes that appear in the first version of the score are more skillfully incorporated into the newly composed music when they reappear in the second. Example 2A and 2B show early and late versions of Ohiya's Serenade, which forms act 2, scene 2, in the first version and, in expanded form, much of act 3 in the later version. Theme (b) from example 1 is used in both; theme (c), which was sung separately from this number in the early version, is incorporated several times in the second version.
Examples 3A and 3B illustrate the generally increased level of sophistication demonstrated in the later score, example 3 shows the beginnings of two versions of the final chorus of act 1, in which all are summoned from their private concerns to participate in the sun dance. Both the 1912 chorus, "We Must Away," and its later substitution, "Away, Away, Away," fill the same function, providing a conclusion to the act and a preparation for act 2, scene 1 (act 2 in the later version), the ceremony in which the Indians raise the sun dance enclosure. In the first case, Hanson provided a generic waltz with no particular relevance to the subject. In the second, his motivic selection is reminiscent of example 1g; the general affect is one of greater seriousness, in keeping with the solemnity of the ceremony to follow.
Several conclusions are clear from this cursory look at the music. Hanson brought little technical skill or musical imagination to the first version of the opera. The mix of boy-meets-girl plot and fragments of religious ceremony was awkwardly achieved in the early version and not much more smoothly in the later one. The use of Indian themes is more extensive as well as more skillful in the second version, in which Zitkala-Sa did not participate. Based on the brevity of the early score and its pervasive weakness, The Sun Dance Opera's initial success must have depended heavily indeed on Zitkala-Sa, whom we may guess brought in the Indian participants, determined what they would do, prepared them to do it in the unfamiliar stage surroundings before a largely white audience, trained the chorus, and oversaw the costuming of the entire company. By the later version, in which the group of Utes did not appear, Hanson had acquired more skill and composed improved versions of several of the weakest numbers. (The two choruses "Tall Trees" and "Great Spirit Hear, Prayer" are notably better than their predecessors, for example.) Especially in combination with her contribution of the story's "skeleton"--reproducing part of the sun dance and certain other customs with the participation of native peoples, Zitkala-Sa was indeed a full collaborator and maybe even more in the early productions of the opera. Her aesthetic approach remained fundamental even as Hanson expanded on the plot and slowly developed the compositional skill to realize her ideas (and his own) more fully.
A look at the historical situation of both white and native participants in The Sun Dance Opera and its mainly white audience is helpful here as a preface to discussing the opera's reception. The relatively few Utes who managed to survive nineteenth-century contact with whites were confined by 1913 to two reservations in Colorado and to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah. Many had been pushed onto the latter reservation by white settlement in the decades after the Mormons emigrated from Illinois in 1847. (25) Diligent in the cultivation of the lands on which they settled and anxious to dispel the cloud left by their early practice of polygamy, Mormons placed a high value on sexual morality.
In 1913 members of the Ute tribe who lived on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, including those who took part in the performances of the opera, were not U.S. citizens; thus they were not always allowed the right to assemble peacefully or practice their religion without interference. Often illiterate, they were dependent on the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs through the local agency (at Fort Duchesne) for most of their food and clothing. (26) Much of their treaty land had been sold, some very likely to members of the early audiences. Given this subject position, it is unlikely that they would willingly have participated in The Sun Dance Opera without Zitkala-Sa's involvement.
Published criticism of the first production of The Sun Dance Opera is limited to a report by N.L. Nelson published both in the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and, in shortened form, in Musical America. Nelson's commentary dwells on the impression the opera made on its audience and on the sympathy with which the native peoples are represented:
Indian Opera on an Indian Reservation There occurred in Vernal recently an event of more than passing importance to the people of Utah. This was "The Sun Dance," an opera and an original production.... Although isolated to the extent of being nearly 100 miles from a railroad, Vernal, in the matter of musical taste, is by no means behind other cities of equal size in the state. Concerts and operas by home talent have for many years past, been the occasion of creating a fine musical atmosphere.... nothing like the furore recently evoked by "The Sun Dance," has ever stirred eastern Utah before. The first night the Orpheus hall was packed, evidently through motives of curiosity, and curiosity plainly veering in the direction of skepticism, ... But the curtain had not been up 15 minutes till all critical anticipations melted into enthusiasm. The next day the telephone lines became busy, with the result that for the two evenings following, the audience was made up by a considerable number of people from the reservation towns, some of whom traveled over 40 miles to hear this fine home production. The writer was among the latter group and did not regret the price of the long, cold ride paid in exchange for sights and sounds, and new ideals respecting the Indian, which still go on repeating themselves in his memory. For this opera does not follow conventional lines, depicting the Indian in the dime novel fashion so familiar to the world in drama and moving picture shows. On the contrary, it is a sympathetic portrayal of the real Indian--a conscientious attempt to depict the manners and customs, the dress, the religious ideals, the superstitions, the songs, the games, the ceremonials--in short, the inner life of a people hitherto but little understood.
Nelson then moves to Zitkala-Sa's role in creating the opera. Although Nelson idealizes her contribution, it is hard to imagine what about the early score would impress a reviewer as being even remotely "Indian." The sung texts contain little that suggests the polished prose of Old Indian Legends.
But how to weave all these spectacular but extremely fragmentary bits of Indian life into connected perspective; how to catch and translate into twentieth century music, the weird strains of native song, and withal infuse the whole with the all but elusive spirit actuating the Indian--this became the most perplexing problem to him. At this point fortune favored him--he met Zitkala Sa. From the first she seems to have recognized in him a kindred spirit; for the two have worked together for months in the utmost harmony as collaborators of the new opera.
Nelson domesticates and westernizes Zitkala-Sa as a properly feminine lady as a way to justify what he says about her contribution:
For Zitkala Sa--otherwise Mrs. R. T. Bonnin, who now lives in a modern home at Fort Duchesne, and whose husband is an employee of the United States government--is one of those rare spirits whom God sends, now and then, among lowly peoples to lift them to higher planes. As an Indian maiden--for she is a full blooded Sioux--she was educated in the best of Indian schools, where she specialized in music, finishing her studies of the piano and violin in the Boston Conservatory of Music. Gentle, refined, modest to a fault, and of a strongly intuitional cast of mind, this woman has assimilated the best in American civilization, without losing any of her deep appreciation of the spiritual ideals of her own people.
Even though the opera omitted the more sacred sections of the sun dance ritual, it was billed as revealing the religious practices of Indian people. Nelson, writing for a Mormon paper and for a Mormon community, is condescending but interested in this aspect of the opera and in what Zitkala-Sa had to say about it:
"I have been trained," said she, "in the concepts of the Christian religion, but I do not find them more beautiful, more noble, or more true than the religious ideals of the Indian. Indeed if one allows for a change in names, the two sets of concepts are much the same. I should not like to see my people lose their ideals, or have them supplanted by others less fitted to influence their lives for good." That our brothers and sisters of the desert have such a spiritual background to their lives, was a complete revelation to the writer, and makes him feel the need of meeting them on the plane of a nearer social and spiritual equality. Mrs. Borin [sic] confessed that she regarded it as her mission to bring about a more sympathetic understanding between her people and their white neighbors; for both people have things to learn in this direction. Zitkala Sa--pronounced Sha, the "a" as in father--is the author of a neat little book of well-written Indian legends. "And I have material," said she, "for ten more such books which I hope to rescue from oblivion, if I can ever get the time to write them." It is plain that one would have traveled far to find a personality more interesting than that of this gifted Lamanite. (27)
Nelson turns finally to the performance, which he assesses generously:
As to the spectacular effects and climaxes, there was more color and variety of movement, more vivid stage effects than it has been the writer's lot to witness in an opera before. The music was particularly thrilling. Without being a connoisseur of the divine art, and therefore incapable of passing judgment from an art standpoint, the writer was conscious throughout, from the first notes of the overture to the closing chorus, of a quality that every little while set up a quivering in his spine. A most unique and rather pleasant sensation! Prof. Hansen [sic] confessed that in order to produce the Indian's spirit of music, he often had to depart from the accepted rules of musical composition. The theme of this opera is certainly a noble one; its execution, while just yet in its early stages of crystallization, is nevertheless, remarkably well begun. No doubt, however, changes will be made for a long time to come. But even with the present cast and development, the writer and his fellow-visitors from Roosevelt predicted a 10-night run, should the opera be taken to Salt Lake City. Indeed, it seems difficult to conceive better or more appropriate acting than was done with some of the leading parts; and the absolute newness and uniqueness of the whole production must sustain popular interest in any city of America. For this opera appeals to a sentiment deeply imbedded in the consciousness of the western world--especially in North America; viz., the feeling that the Indian has been deeply wronged because not understood. (28)
For Nelson, and very likely for the early audience, this production enhanced his "understanding" and assuaged his "deeply imbedded" Western guilt. That, perhaps, was his measure of the opera's and the performance's "authenticity" for that early audience. A review from the first production at Brigham Young University, in May 1914, also stresses the "authenticity" of the proceedings: "The scenic effects are the best ever shown on a local stage, and the nearness to Indian life was little less than marvelous." (29) A 1926 sketch about Hanson in Sunset Magazine (California) continues this idea, reporting that Hanson's two operas "have been composed with a view of using only customs which are still uninfluenced by the white people." (30)
The reception of the later version of the opera in its 1938 New York production was quite different, though the notion of authenticity was not abandoned. The New York performances were engineered by John Hand, the Ohiya of the December 1914 production at BYU; the sponsoring group was his New York Light Opera Guild, an amateur chorus that focused its efforts on one or two light opera productions a year during the 1930s. (31) Several reviews put the opera's musical and formal achievement in a modernist perspective far less forgiving than that of its Utah critics. The advance publicity referred to the opera's religious content an "orgy," contrasting the sun dance as performed in the opera with the "emasculated and tawdry version ... performed annually for white spectators." (32) Stereotypes about what native music should sound like, as well as a conviction about the "authenticity" of the performance, persist, though they are expressed differently:
The composer ... has provided a tuneful score, which, in the measures in which it sets forth a Western Indian atmosphere, does so effectively, as in the vocal prologue and the dances. But this is an occasional rather than a pervasive feature of the work, which was more often marked by pleasing but somewhat conventional melodies of a more or less standard light opera type which suggested the atmosphere of urban stages on both sides of the Atlantic rather than of Amerindian folklore. (33) Unfortunately, his is a patchwork score, mingling the ethnological with the popular. Old-fashioned comic opera has been taken as a model. (34) The Indian songs--especially those for chorus--and the dances were attractive and sometimes rousing, but there was enough straight operetta in the score to give the impression that Mr. Hanson had two works there, and the two didn't appear to belong in the same show. (35)
What had pleased Utah critics in 1913 and 1914 was less successful in New York City a quarter century later. Despite Hanson's extensive revision of the score, New York critics had no trouble pointing out the opera's structural weakness, the disjunction between the "ethnological" and the "popular." Both sets of commentaries have a common element in their concern with the "authenticity" of the "Western Indian atmosphere," reflecting in each case the interest in primitivism that is characteristic of both nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, art, and political history. (36) Their difference, beyond the local conventions that required encouragement of local talent in remote Utah and (at least the appearance of) dispassionate evaluation in New York City, has to do with more with their relative distance in time and geographic location from the usual site of the native ceremonies, less with the cultural voyeurism that is an element of primitivism for each. The claim of "authenticity" in both cases is a code word, intended to separate relatively elite genres such as opera from the cruder, cigar-store Indian stereotypes of popular culture. In neither set of critical responses was Zitkala-Sa's probable intention addressed.
The choice of the sun dance as the opera's subject raises some points that may relate to ZitkalaSa's role. The sun dance was a postcontact ceremony, first performed by the Uintah Utes as late as 1889 or 1890, borrowed by them from the neighboring Shoshones. "Men danced for three or four days and nights to the accompaniment of drumming and singing. The dancers often underwent various tortures such as ritual fasting, thirsting, and mutilations, in a quest for power, good health, success in wars and on hunts, and the general welfare of the group." (37) Adopted in defiance of a federal order outlawing it, the sun dance was a midsummer ceremony whose warlike aspects had become purely symbolic, limited to "capturing" the "tall trees" that framed the dance enclosure. A much older, specifically Ute celebration was the bear dance, an early spring festival lasting as long as ten days, involving women as well as men, gambling and games as well as dancing. (38)
Although the evidence is confusing, it is likely that Hanson was initially interested in bringing the bear dance to his white audience rather than the sun dance. The finding aid to the Hanson papers includes this paragraph:
Mr. Hanson's second opera tells the story of the Springtime Social Festival of the Utes, called "Tam-Man Nacup." It is the Bear Dance Opera. Hanson included original chants from the Ute Medicine Men. Out of respect for the sacred nature of the ritual music, the composer carefully arranged the words and melodies to express the spiritual and emotional content of its source. Hanson was particularly indebted to Zitkala Sa and her husband, R. T. Bonnin, not only for obtaining the sacred music but for retaining the authenticity of its intent. This opera was presented in four performances at BYU in 1928 and 1929. (39)
A 1925 clipping from Hanson's scrapbook discusses Hanson's work, both The Sun Dance Opera and a later opera, Tam-Man Nacup, at that point copyrighted but not yet produced. Its author likens Hanson's efforts to preserve Ute music to the work of the better-known Charles Wakefield Cadman and Thurlow Lieurance, composers who used native materials to sentimentalize their subject, relative to eastern and midwestern Indians. (40) Though full of factual error, the article suggests Hanson's motivation and also implies Zitkala-Sa's participation:
Through Mrs. Bonnin much of the Indian legend and tribal ceremonials was given to him--much that he could not get before, for Indians are secretive and suspicious.... The Sun Dance, after all, he discovered, is really not original with the Utes, although they use the ceremonial.... He was determined to give to the world a genuine Ute composition. (41)
A photo with the article includes Hanson "in Indian regalia" and Zitkala-Sa, said to be "assisting him in his work" even though it must have been taken before she left the area in 1916, nine years before this story appeared. One infers that Hanson began his collecting of Ute music before his collaboration on The Sun Dance Opera, as he suggests in his later book, Sun Dance Land. Zitkala-Sa probably helped him collect material for both but encouraged him to develop The Sun Dance Opera first. Hanson describes going with the Bonnins to their summer cabin following a 1910 sun dance all three had attended:
During the day they explained the rituals, the religious urges of the natives, the mysticisms and the sacraments, which the whitemen usually called Paganism. They told me about the background and the implications of each act. They related many stories and legends pertinent to the Sun Dance Climax.... Our eager hostess suggested: "We must use this evening and tomorrow to work on material for the opera score, The Sun Dance. Wa-chi-pi--Wi-wan-yag Wa-chi-pi! You must transcribe some of the love-chants to use with the other materials you have already recorded." (42)
To get a sense of why Zitkala-Sa insisted on the sun dance as the subject for the 1913 opera, one must go to Nelson's interview, part of his review of the opera. Nelson quotes her as saying, "I have been trained in the concepts of the Christian religion, but I do not find them more beautiful, more noble, or more true than the religious ideals of the Indian.... I should not like to see my people lose their ideals, or have them supplanted by others less fitted to influence their lives for good." From the time when, at age seven, her braids were cut off, her moccasins confiscated, and the use of her mother tongue forbidden at White's Indian Manual Labor Institute, Zitkala-Sa had resisted the policy of assimilation that was still being aggressively applied to native peoples at the time of The Sun Dance Opera. Though only recently adopted by the Ute, the sun dance, with its high religious aspirations, was much better suited than the bear dance to impart the intrinsic value of native culture first to her white, primarily Mormon audience and later to a wider American audience. The dramatization of ceremony with clear spiritual values held the promise of countering the pervasive social Darwinism of the time with its presumption of the essential inferiority, even subhuman categorization of nonwhite peoples. Further, the high moral tone of the sun dance-based plot served to buttress Zitkala-Sa's campaign against the peyote culture, which had recently spread to the Ute people. Hanson may not have been fully aware of that motivation, but he was willing to accept the more pan-Indian approach of the sun dance from his collaborator. In choosing the sun dance, then, Zitkala-Sa's and Hanson's goals coincided even though they were also at cross purposes.
Zitkala-Sa's share in creating The Sun Dance Opera was emphasized as an element of the opera's simultaneous "authenticity" and exoticism. Her participation in the project also served to legitimize Hanson's representations of native culture. In this construction her racial identity was important, but not, apparently, her gender. Yet a look at some of the gender issues involved is revealing. We begin from the basic premise of an essential difference between female and male Indians on the part of Hanson and the white audience. This premise is as fundamental to the story as is the premise of essential difference between Indians and whites, as is evident from the use of language. The Indians who participated, including Zitkala-Sa, were always "full-blooded." Hanson worked on the opera; Zitkala-Sa "assisted." Even for Hanson, Indians are always "maidens" and "squaws," "braves" and "boys," never "women" and "men." (43) Zitkala-Sa herself was termed a "maiden," presumably since "woman" was seen as inappropriate. The stereotyped language and the apparent absence of sensitivity about her position on Hanson's part must have weighed on Zitkala-Sa, who wrote elsewhere of the destructive effect of facing a poster with her likeness and the word "squaw" while participating in an intercollegiate competition as a member of the Earlham College debate team. (44)
Representation of native practice relative to gender roles appears to be adjusted in the opera, at least in part, to the sensibilities of the audience. The Smithsonian's encyclopedic Handbook of North American Indians tells us that marriage was "`a tenuous and temporary bond in all Ute groups.' Choosing a spouse was usually an individual decision although parents had some influence in the selection for first marriages." (45) The Handbook also implies an unusual element of equality between the sexes, one that did not fit with Hanson's or the early audience's view: "Like other Great Basin tribes and unlike almost all the rest of western North America, the Ute had an equal proportion of men and women shamans." (46) One might infer from this that a sun dance ceremony would probably not have been undertaken for so personal a reason as is done in the opera's plot. Moreover, the notion that the bride's father must "give" the bride to her suitor was not, according to the later Handbook, essential to Ute culture.
The incorporation of the triangle into the opera may have been a matter of contention between Hanson and Zitkala-Sa. She is acknowledged as the supplier of "Ink-pa-ta," a love song not previously known to white collectors; it occurs several times, always without elaboration. The carving of a love flute by Ohiya, the successful suitor, likewise reproduces a native custom. On the other hand, Shoshone Maid and the fatal love leaves, with their intimation of undying Wagnerian ardor, were added only after Zitkala-Sa was no longer a part of the production. One can speculate that Hanson insisted on a primary triangle partly to meet his own and his audience's stereotyped theatrical expectations, partly to create the impression that Ute marriage practices were similar to those of his Mormon audience. Zitkala-Sa might have accepted the triangle as a necessary means to achieving her goal of demonstrating a level of native morality the audience could readily grasp, but nevertheless insisted on including the authentic courtship elements.
More relevant from an artistic standpoint is the virtual absence of character delineation in the opera. Winona's only character trait, for example, is her faithfulness to her lover, Ohiya. Hanson's responsibility for the general blandness of the characters is clear from the later version of the opera, for he did nothing to refine the portrayal of Winona or Ohiya in his rewrite. Beyond that, his added female character, Shoshone Maid, is even more hapless than Winona. She exists only to pursue Sweet Singer; given his rejection, her fate can only be to join the supernatural Witches of the Night. Thus the triangle, whatever its genesis, amounts to nothing more than a pro forma adoption of a Western cultural practice, of interest merely because it demonstrates Ute courtship practices and implies that Ute marriage practices were similar to those of the audience. "Authenticity" here was clearly in the eye of the mainly white, Mormon Utah audience, not in the substance of the opera. As the New York critics pointedly noted later on, the attempt to fuse the hackneyed triangle onto the sun dance was not successful.
Thus the opera may be said to have foundered artistically on the issue of authenticity in the representation of gender despite its creators' aspiration to faithfully represent native culture. The solemnity of the sun dance experience might have been enhanced by skipping the triangle (taking Mary Carr Moore's Narcissa as a model in that respect) and perhaps substituting the pervasive dilemma faced by all Native Americans over how to address the overwhelming pressures of the white culture while retaining any semblance of personal or group integrity. That is a struggle in which Zitkala-Sa and the other native participants in the production were involved whether they wanted to be or not, but not one that Hanson or the white audience could easily have accepted as an operatic subject. That such a topic would be relevant and authentic now, in the early twenty-first century, is a measure of how the concept of authenticity has changed, for it would surely would have seemed dangerously realistic but not sufficiently exotic ("authentic") for its early audiences in Utah.
The contrast between the two individual collaborators who created The Sun Dance Opera is extreme--a white male Mormon pioneer's son and the daughter of a traditional Sioux mother and an absent white father. Each of them also harbored an internal split as well, Hanson devoting his career-long creative efforts to reconstructing and rationalizing the ways of natives displaced by his family and his religious community to that same white community, Zitkala-Sa never able to reconcile her loyalty to her mother and her mother's culture with her "white" education. The balance of this essay attempts to shed more light on this operatic collaboration by examining more of first Hanson's and then Zitkala-Sa's later careers.
Hanson's second opera, Tam-Man Nacup from 1923 and produced in 1927 at BYU, follows the model of The Sun Dance Opera, superimposing another triangle on sections of native ceremony. Thus it constitutes an extension of Zitkala-Sa's influence, although it does not carry the high moral tone that for Zitkala-Sa characterized The Sun Dance Opera and that I posit as her primary reason for insisting on the sun dance as the basis for their opera. (47) His last opera, The Bleeding Heart produced at BYU in 1938), wanders much farther from the values imparted by Zitkala-Sa. A setting of a story by Eugene L. Roberts about human sacrifice practiced by a Ute band on nearby Mt. Timpanogos, The Bleeding Heart is a fanciful "Indianist" work with no pretense of cultural "authenticity" to commend it. (48) Hanson also composed a number of songs, including some settings of cowboy tunes in which the portrayal of native people follows stereotyped, much less sympathetic models.
Confusion on Hanson's part between native cultural production and Indian-derived Western music (including his own) is shown in one case that involved his teaching:
Indian Pianist to Make Debut at Provo School An Indian co-ed, who is a skillful pianist, will play in tribal costume at Brigham Young University on Wednesday evening, Feb. 12. She is a student of Prof. William F. Hanson of the BYU music faculty. He will present her among other advanced students in a recital in College Hall at 8:15. Miss Phyllis Daniels, of Roosevelt, is the Indian student. She will interpret "From an Indian Lodge" by MacDowell and "The Coming of the Bear From Hibernation" from Prof. Hanson's opera. She will appear in colorful Ute garb. (49)
One wonders how the student in question reconciled the notion of dressing in her traditional costume to perform "Indianist" music by Edward MacDowell and Hanson. In a grating contrast with the everyday situation of the residents of the Uintah-Ouray Indian Reservation, Hanson played with his student's own construction of her cultural Indianness. This position was not unique to Hanson; it may have been a common characteristic of the self-serving social Darwinism that underlay the policy of forced assimilation. Another "Indianist" composer, Charles Sanford Skilton, explaining "Native American Music" in the 1938 edition of the International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, held a similar view. Skilton's article "concludes with the expressed belief that Indian music could only be sustained through incorporation by art-music composers in their own works. Skilton's article began with studies of `aboriginal' music and dovetailed into composers' use of that music, as if the latter were a logical outgrowth (and even continuation) of the former." (50) This teaching incident lends poignancy to the discussions about the cultural construction of the notion of "Indian" explored extensively in recent times in relation to political history, literature, and other aspects of culture by Philip J. Deloria, Helen Carr, and others. (51) Hanson's book Sun Dance Land carries forward this dizzying confusion of theatrical representation with historical narrative. Its organization, moving without acknowledgment from historical narration to opera plot, confirms Hanson's own confusion about the nature of his operas and lyceum presentations. He saw himself as a teller of tribal history and customs for a vanishing race. One may say of him that his interest in the music of Native Americans was genuine but also obtuse, naive, and ultimately, fatally limiting.
Zitkala-Sa's later direction led away from the complexities of theatrical make-believe. Truly bicultural, she did not play at being an Indian, nor did she play with her double identity. Seldom far from her ongoing struggle about how to be true to herself in both white and native cultures, she agonized over the anomalies of her life. Snatches of her situation relevant to her role in creating this opera survive in her letters to Carlos Montezuma, an Apache physician who practiced in Chicago. (52) Zitkala-Sa and Montezuma were engaged for a time, in 1901-2. Her hard-earned independence and especially her ambivalence about whether to live in the white or native culture figured powerfully in the relationship. (53) The engagement ended when Zitkala-Sa married Raymond T. Bonnin and went with him to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. In her years in Utah, she taught in the Indian school, organized a community center, and engaged in numerous other activities intended to improve the lot of the Indian people. In addition, she organized a reading club and a band that drew participation from whites in the area. In 1913, a few months after the premiere of The Sun Dance Opera, she sought out a meeting with Montezuma when she passed through Chicago on what was apparently her first trip East since 1902. The next day she expressed her overwhelming cultural ambivalence and some longstanding regrets about the direction she had chosen:
Tuesday May 10, 1913 My dear Dr. Montezuma, ... I was not worthy because I did not recognize true worth at that time. Permit me to say that I am one of your admirers.... I humbly beg your forgiveness for my gross stupidity of former years.... P.S. I seem to be in a spiritual unrest. I hate this eternal tug of war between being wild or becoming civilized. The transition is an endless evolution that keeps me in a continual Purgatory. My duty as mother and wife, of course, keeps me in the West, but now I can hardly stand the inner spiritual clamor to study, to write, to do more with my music. Yet duty first! Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years but my sleep was disturbed in half that time. I wonder if I may sleep again. Gertrude Bonnin (54)
After a month, she wrote again:
Burlington Station. June 23rd, 1913 My dear Dr. Montezuma, ... I am bound for Spalding Institute for Small Boys, a Benedictine Sisters School, Nauvoo, Ill.... I am taking my boy to school. I know it is necessary to educate him but this knowledge does not make it any easier to leave him.... [While in Ohio] I studied piano music at Otterbein University. I practiced 6 hours a day.... I am returning to Utah because Mr. Bonnin insists upon it. I shall continue my study at home and try to go every summer to some place to study under a real first class teacher of music. (55)
Working on the opera generated an intellectual reawakening for Zitkala-Sa, a reason why she resumed music study. That she chose to study piano rather than return to the violin may suggest further that she initially thought to contribute more substantially to other music projects beyond The Sun Dance Opera, perhaps on her own. One might even speculate from these letters that jealousy arose in her marriage over the prominence she achieved through her role in The Sun Dance Opera, that Hanson's ultimately offensive attitudes showed little signs of change, that the belated copyright assignment was a price exacted for further collaboration, that later on she wanted nothing more to do with Hanson or The Sun Dance Opera. What seems certain is that, quite apart from the different skills the two collaborators brought to the project, the differences in their cultural situations and the resulting differences in aesthetic approach are the most interesting thing about the opera and the collaboration.
Hanson later changed his representation about Zitkala-Sa's participation in the opera. All the early publicity and stories acknowledge her contribution, which added to the exotic novelty of the opera. Yet he had originally copyrighted the opera under his own name, assigning half to her only after the success of the first production and the clear need for further cooperation in order to revise it for further performances. For the New York production the descriptions of her role were reduced. The later piano-vocal score notes "Revised by WEB"; many of its numbers are individually labeled "copyright WFH" even though deposit copies of these don't appear in the current catalog of the Library of Congress. One New York critic had even reported "The Sun Dance" as "an earlier work," by implication separate from the one on which she had collaborated. (56) Much later, Hanson thought better of all this. In a shaky hand, he added "Zitkala Sa & W. F. Hanson" after the opera's title. In one of the late drafts of his book, every page with the header "The Sun Dance Opera--Hanson" bears Zitkala-Sa's name, added to his own in the same shaky hand. Without her insistence on the sun dance as the opera's basis, without her insistence that the opera communicate the cultural worth of the people it portrayed in terms its audience could grasp, without her collaboration in locating and marshaling its materials and carrying them through to production, without her technical musical skills, and without the "skeleton" she provided, the opera might not have taken shape at all. To his credit, Hanson eventually came to recognize that.
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin--Zitkala-Sa--never returned to public music making. In fact, there is no record beyond what is cited here of her further involvement with the opera or with Hanson's later projects. It is clear that she found other ways to use her multiple gifts, largely in collaboration with Raymond T. Bonnin. In 1916 the Bonnins left the reservation in Utah for Washington DC, where he volunteered for the U.S. Army and she became a political activist, mostly through the organization she founded, the National Council of American Indians. Among the lobbying successes she could claim was an Act of Congress in 1924 granting citizenship to all Native Americans, including those who had demonstrated a compelling, if necessarily not entirely authentic, version of Native American values in that unlikely, fatally flawed artifact, The Sun Dance Opera.
TABLE 1.
Music Chronology for Zitkala-Sa, William F. Hanson,
and The Sun Dance Opera
Zitkala Sa Hanson
born 1876, Yankton IR 1887, Vernal UT
pre-Sun Dance
Opera music
training and
experience Indian schools; Vernal;
Earlham College, Brigham Young
3 yrs New England University, 2 yrs
Conservatory
travel to Paris
with Carlisle
performers
to Vernal or
vicinity: 1902 c. 1909 (return after
mission)
m. Raymond T. schoolteacher
Bonnin
post-Vernal
music
training and
experience
Otterbein Univ;
piano study, 1913
to Washington DC,
1916 no further
music activity
known
to Chicago, 1924
to BYU faculty, 1924
M.S. in music, BYO, 1937
Tam-man Nacup (opera)
copyright deposit, 1923
produced BYU, 1927, 1928
Hanson's Wigwam (lyceum
lectures), 1925ff
Bleeding Heart (opera),
produced BYU, 1938
Sun Dance Land (monograph),
published 1967
died January 1938 died 1969
The Sun Dance Opera
Copyright deposit
under "Wm. F. Hanson" 12 December 1912
First production
Orpheus Hall, Vernal UT 20 February 1913
Copyright assignment;
half-interest to Zitkala Sa 13 March 1913
First BYU revival May 1914
Second BYU revival and
Salt Lake City performances December 1914
Third BYU revival 1935
New York production,
Broadway Theatre 27 April 1938
TABLE 2.
The Sun Dance Opera: Comparison of 1912 Version and Later Version
1912 1935 and later
Overture/Overture and Prologue
Fanfare opening; otherwise Same opening and ending;
a medley of tunes used new middle section
later, ending with the includes a native Medicine
"Sun Dance" theme. Chant and Sweet
Singer, "I Gave Her the
Love-Leaves."
Act I
Winona and Ohiya together; Winona and Ohiya numbers
duet between Ohiya remain. Ohiya-mother
and mother; Sweet Singer duet and Sweet Singer's
aria; Hebo, Blue aria cut in favor of new
Necklace, and Gossips aria for his mother.
poke fun at him; Crier Hebo's scene expanded,
and chorus summon all to chorus added. New
the start of the sun concluding chorus.
dance.
Act 2, scene I/Act 2
Circle Dance; War Dance Expanded from 4 to 20 pp.
("Each tell [sic] of This scene (act) is now
brave deeds. Capture Sun largely written out for
Dance poles. All in performers playing Indians.
action while they Chorus, "Tall Trees," sined
dance."); Wa-ci-pe (Sun Provo, Utah," added;
Dance) chorus. The sun Wa-ci-pe chorus cut.
dance enclosure is
erected. Scene is mainly
native participation and
ceremonial, not written
out.
Act 2, scene 2/Act 3
Ohiya's serenade to Expanded from 3 to 27 pp.
Winona; Witches of the The serenade is expanded;
Night (chorus). Winona gets an aria; the
chorus is extended.
Act 2, scene 3/Act 4
Sweet Singer confronts The point of greatest
Winona ("A Throbbing divergence. The Heart Song
Heart Song"), who turns is cut; instead, the
him down (duet with wronged Shoshone Maid
Hebo); chorus ("Great appears and confronts Sweet
Spirit Hear Our Singer with two arias and a
Prayers"); Sun Set March duet. A new chorus ("Great
(Braves); the sun dance Spirit Hear, Prayer")
proper begins and is substituted for the
extends through the other one; the sun dance
pause. begins as before.
Act 3/Act 5
Opens with sun dance in Two sun dances repeated ad
progress; an oration libitum; short aria for
(omitted); a chorus; Winona; sections of the
more sun dance and a overture are repeated;
final chorus ("He Won concluding chorus is
Winona for a Bride"). slightly expanded.
(1.) Musical America, 26 April 1913. Clipping in scrapbook, box 4/7, Hanson papers. Most of the sources on Zitkala-Sa and Hanson used for this paper are in two collections housed in the Department of Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo UT. Collection 299, the William F. Hanson papers (hereafter cited as Hanson papers), includes most of the music, clippings, some correspondence, a scrapbook, and Hanson's master's thesis. (Deposit copies of The Sun Dance Opera and Hanson's two later operas are in the Music Division, Library of Congress.) Collection 1704, the Raymond T. Bonnin papers (hereafter cited as Bonnin papers), includes some correspondence and other materials of Zitkala-Sa, whose English name was Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. Most of these papers relate to her years of activism for Indian rights. In addition, it includes photocopies of her letters to Carlos Montezuma, whose originals are at the Hayden Library, University of Arizona.
(2.) The ban, imposed by government officials after the sun dance was revived by Shoshone Indians in 1889 and 1890, resulted from fears of trouble when Indians congregated in large numbers for any reason. Such fears were exacerbated by the Ghost Dance events of the early 1890s, and by the tragedy--massacre or battle according to different accounts--at Wounded Knee.
(3.) The Salt Lake City performances were underwritten by the local Elks Club. The New York performances were sponsored by the New York Light Opera Guild, whose director, John Hand, had sung the role of Ohiya in one of the 1914 productions at BYU.
(4.) Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), establishes the popularity of small touring opera companies in the antebellum period. Despite the argument of Lawrence W. Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), chapter 2, "The Sacralization of Culture," that by the late nineteenth century opera had become the exclusive property of the rich, small-scale opera performances remained very popular.
(5.) Eugene H. Jones, Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753-1916 (Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), summarizes the theatrical aspect of this tradition. L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), is a good account of the Wild West shows. For an account of the pageantry movement, with which Arthur Farwell was heavily involved but which is generally ignored in American music history, see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
(6.) For a general account of Dvorak's visit and its consequences, topics of continuing interest, see Michael Beckerman, ed., Dvorak and His World (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Beth E. Levy, in "`In the Glory of the Sunset': Arthur Farwell, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Indianism in American Music," Repercussions 5 (1996):128-83, addresses specific uses of Native American themes in the music of Arthur Farwell and Charles Wakefield Cadman (including Cadman's Shanewis, produced by the Metropolitan Opera in 1918 and revived in 1919). Michael V. Pisani, "`I'm an Indian Too': Creating Native American Identities in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Music" in Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 218-57, casts a wider net over uses of music ideas having Native American sources in concert music.
Pisani challenges the subgenre of "Indianist" opera in his Ph.D. dissertation, "Exotic Sounds in the Native Land: Portrayals of North American Indians in Western Music," University of Rochester, 1996, on the grounds that it was in practice merely another form of late nineteenth-century exoticism. His argument is developed from the long and pervasive influence of Longfellow's Hiawatha on this history. I favor retaining "Indianist" as a descriptor in order to fully confront the cultural anomalies, still not fully resolved, on which these operas depend.
It is worth noting that this entire discussion took place as a counterpoint to the emergence of commercial popular culture, especially ragtime and (somewhat later) jazz.
(7.) Alice C. Fletcher, aided by Francis La Flesche, A Study of Omaha Indian Music, with a Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music by John Comfort Fillmore (New York: Kraus, 1967), reprint of Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum 1, no. 5 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1893).
For more on these stereotypes in theater and elsewhere, see S. Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder co: Westview Press, 1996); Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936 (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
(8.) Edward Ellsworth Hipsher, American Opera and Its Composers, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Presser, 1927; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 342.
(9.) Sarah Pratt Carr, "Foreword," in Mary Carr Moore, Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire. Piano-vocal score (New York: Witmark, 1912). For more on this opera, see Catherine Parsons Smith and Cynthia S. Richardson, Mary Carr Moore: American Composer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), especially chapter 9. See also Smith, "Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire: Constructions of Gender in an American Opera" and "Enlightening--and Enwhitening--the World: Mary Carr Moore's Opera Narcissa, or The Cost of Empire," unpublished papers.
(10.) William F. Hanson, in the program for the 1935 production at BYU, Hanson papers.
(11.) Warren L. D'Azevedo, "Introduction," in William C. Sturtevant, general ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. II, Great Basin, ed. Warren L. D'Azevedo (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1986), 2. I have relied on this volume for information on the Native Americans of northeastern Utah. The most valuable chapters to this project are Joseph G. Jorgensen, "Ghost Dance, Bear Dance, and Sun Dance," 660-72; Thomas Vennum Jr., "Music," 682-704; and Donald G. Callaway, Joel C. Janetski, and Omer C. Stewart, "Ute," 336-67. See also Judith Vander, Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
(12.) Susan Dominguez, "Zitkala Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), 1876-1938: (Re)discovering The Sun Dance," American Research Center Journal 5 (1995): 83-96. Apparently unaware of the 1912 deposit copy, Dominguez discusses only the late revised score.
(13.) N[els] L[ars] N[elson], "Indian Opera on an Indian Reservation," Deseret News (Salt Lake City), 29 March 1913, section 2, clipping in box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers. Nelson, 1862-1946, taught English at BYU. His publications as found in the BYU library include The Mormon Point of View (1904) and Plea for a State Kindergarten System (1909).
(14.) Part of the William F. Hanson papers in the Department of Special Collections at BYU, the originals of these two late scores could not be located for this reader. They were examined in microfilm form only. Susan Dominguez (see n. II) was unaware of the deposit copy and accepted the late copy as directly reflecting the collaboration.
(15.) The latter title page was prepared after Hanson was awarded the master's degree by BYU in 1937.
(16.) The diazo (blueprint) process, first invented in mid-nineteenth-century France and available in the United States from 1876, was not applied to music reproduction until some time in the 1930s. It was completely displaced by computer music printing only in the 1990s. Characteristically the music was written in India ink on the reverse of translucent printed music papers. The music copies in the Hanson papers that are the product of this process are almost always crudely trimmed with scissors at the bottom of the page, meaning that the name of the shop where the copying was done has been removed. There are two exceptions. One, "Accurate Photocopy & Blueprint, 6207 Sunset, Hollywood," is listed at that address in Los Angeles phone books starting in 1950. The other, "Cameo Music Reproductions," is listed at two different Vine St. addresses starting in 1947.
(17.) William Frederick Hanson, Sun Dance Land (Provo UT: J. Grant Stevenson, 1967). Numerous typescript drafts are in the Hanson papers. The book includes a history of Ute-white interaction, a detailed narrative of the opera, and an account of the Bonnins and of the opera's various productions. Appendixes list the programs and casts of the various productions, some other unrelated "stories of Indian culture," and a bibliography. Appendix B, two pages of Indian chants used in the opera, was omitted and is reproduced here as example I.
(18.) The Hanson papers contain numerous drafts of this book manuscript and many press clippings relating to the later productions. Postscript 4 to the manuscript of Sun Dance Land reads: "All orchestra and piano-vocal scores of Sun Dance Land, and the mss. will also be on file at the library" (Hanson papers, box 3, folder 7); "mss." may indicate all versions of Hanson's book rather than the various versions of the music scores.
(19.) Dominguez, "Zitkala Sa," 85.
(20.) Zitkala-Sa, Old Indian Legends (Boston: Ginn, 1901; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). "Why I Am a Pagan," Atlantic Monthly 90 (December 1902): 307-10, is one of a number of essays that appeared before her marriage in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly Magazine, Everybody's Magazine, the American Indian Magazine, and the Earlhamite. A complete list appears in the finding aid to the Bonnin papers at BYU.
(21.) Hanson, Sun-Dance Land, p. 91 of typed version of chapter 7, "The Sun Dance Opera Takes Form"; omitted from published version.
(22.) N[elson], "Indian Opera on an Indian Reservation."
(23.) Box 3, folder 2, Hanson papers. The book contains several appendixes, but no appendix B.
(24.) Frances Densmore (1867-1957), Northern Ute Music (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Government Printing Office, 1922; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).
(25). Callaway, Janetski, and Stewart, "Ute," 355-56. In the 1860s Utes were displaced by Mormons west of the Wasatch Mountains and near Utah Lake. "In the 1870s, through Mormon and government suasion, Utah Utes became increasingly restricted to the Uintah Reservation (established in 1861 by Lincoln). Thus by the mid-1870s these Utes had been restricted to about 9 percent of their aboriginal range"(356). In 1880 over six hundred Utes were relocated from Colorado to the Uintah Reservation (established 1861). More than three hundred Uncompahgre Utes were forced to the Ouray Reservation, established in 1882 by executive order, adjacent to the southern boundary of the Uintah reservation.
(26). Hanson was well aware of the difficult position of the Indians who participated in the opera. In 1925 and 1926 (and possibly in other years), he recruited several Ute men, most of whom had taken part in The Sun Dance Opera, for a series of lyceum performances in various Utah communities. He called this enterprise Hanson's Wigwam, or sometimes Hanson's Wickiup. As he later wrote in his master's thesis, "The lectures included Indian history, lore, costumes and stories with demonstrations by the Indians themselves in dance, pantomime and song." The control over reservation Utes exercised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, whether direct or indirect, played a role in Hanson's planning for these presentations. Two letters from Quinance, Hanson's principal recruiter of Ute participants for his lyceums, survive in Hanson's papers. Written out by another person, they reveal some unexpected practical difficulties and call attention to conditions faced by the Ute participants, the result of conditions described above. Here are excerpts: "Dear Friend, I have your letter and we Indians would rather come and dance now sometime. Maybe we have to work in the Spring and can't go all Summer. We could go now any time. Will you let me know when you want us to come ... Your friend, Quinance." And again: "Dear Friend, I found out here white man want $50 to take five of us out--$60 for 6 to ride. Five of us ready to go anytime. We want to go soon so can be here to work in the spring. Pretty soon have Bear dance too. Last night they sing at my house. I talked to the boys last night and they said they want to go. Maybe you can get a car to take us. $50 too much money. This car can't take all our things--it's too small. You let us know right away. If you can send a car send it now, a big one. I tell the boys to stay right here so they will be ready any time."
(27). "Lamanite" is a Mormon characterization for North American Indians, who were thought to be degenerate descendants of peoples dispersed at the Tower of Babel who emigrated from Jerusalem to the New World about 600 B.C.E.; see Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 59-60.
(28.) N[elson], "Indian Opera on an Indian Reservation."
(29.) Unidentified clipping from Provo paper, Friday, 22 May 1914, box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers.
(30.) Harrison R. Merrill, "Interesting Westerners," Sunset, November 1926, clipping, scrapbook, box 4 folder 7, Hanson papers.
(31.) A record of the company's productions, box 5, folder 2, Hanson papers:
April 1932, Boccaccio, Suppe, Carnegie Hall 24 June 1932., Aida (participant), Polo Grounds 30 January 1933, Victor Herbert Festival, Carnegie Hall 7 June 1933, Martha, Town Hall 23 October 1933, Light Opera Festival, Pythian Temple 15 December 1933, Reginald de Koven Festival, Carnegie Hall 14 and 15 May 1935, Gypsy Baron, Hecksher 31 March and 1 April 1936, The Fencing Master, de Koven, Jolson Theatre 9 December 1936, Operatic Gems, Pythian Hall 4 and 5 May 1937, Herbert, Mlle. Modiste, Jolson Theatre 16 December 1937, Operatic Concert Festival, Pythian Theatre 28 and 29 April 1938, The Sun Dance, Broadway Theatre (Cine Roma)
The New York Light Opera Guild may have been a church-based group.
(32.) New York Cue, 23 April 1938, scrapbook, box 4 folder 7, Hanson papers: "If you should happen to hear Indian war cries in the vicinity of Broadway and 53rd Street some evening next week, don't be alarmed. It won't be anything more sinister than the American Light Opera Guild working up to a climax in The Sun Dance (Wa-Ci-Pi).... This tribal rite of the Sioux and the Utes used to last for five days without food or drink, and was an endurance test as well as a religious orgy. Nowadays, it is banned by law in its original form, and only an emasculated and tawdry version is performed annually for the benefit of white spectators."
(33.) F.D.P., New York Herald Tribune, 28 April 1938, clipping, box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers.
(34.) O. T. [Oscar Thompson?], Musical America, 10 May 1938, clipping, box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers.
(35.) Robert A. Simon, New Yorker, 7 May 1938, clipping, box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers.
(36.) See, for example, Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907 (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), and Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). Connelly explores how primitivism was set up as a category in opposition to modernism; the opposition as "other" is what all the various "primitives" from different times and places in her period have in common.
(37.) Although it had probably originated with Plains Algonquins as early as 1700, the sun dance had died out among Plains Indians before it was revived on Shoshone reservations in the 1880s; see Jorgensen, "Ghost Dance, Bear Dance, and Sun Dance," 666.
(38.) Later the sun dance was fully integrated into Ute cultural practice: "The Sun Dance and the Bear Dance were of utmost importance in the health and continuance of Ute society, one a formal attestation of faith and promise of hope, the other, a time for festivity and opportunity to establish and renew social ties" (Callaway, Janetski, and Stewart, "Ute," 35, photo caption).
(39.) Finding aid, collection 299, Hanson papers, Susan G. Thompson, compiler, rev. 1994. Scores to two later operas are in the Hanson papers. A deposit copy of the score to Tam-Man Nacup dated 1923 is in the Library of Congress; The Bleeding Heart is dated 1937. Both were produced at BYU. Hanson's master's thesis, dated 1937, is entitled "The Lure of Tam-Man Nacup, springtime festival of the Utes."
(40.) Charles Wakefield Cadman, 1881--1946, is best known for his song "From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water" (1909) and his opera Shanewis, or The Robin Woman, produced at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918 and revived in 1919, on a Native American subject. Thurlow Lieurance, 1878-1963, composed "By the Waters of Minnetonka," a song that appeared in 1917 and had wide popularity. Cadman used the term "idealization" to indicate that his use of native melody represented an adaptation that had little or no relation to its original cultural context.
(41.) Harrison R. Merrill, "Preserving the Music and Legends of the Utes for Future Generations: A Utahn Has Made It His Life's Work to Give the World the Enchanting Weird Strains of the Tribal Ceremonies of a Vanishing Race: Here Is the Story and a Plea for Support," Deseret News, 7 March 1925, section 4, scrapbook, box 4 folder 7, Hanson papers.
(42.) Hanson, Sun Dance Land, 74-75. Although Hanson describes his lyceum performances of 1925 and 19z6 in this book, he does not mention his bear dance opera, Tam-Man Nacup.
(43.) The roughest use of stereotypes, revealing of the brutality that lay beneath their supposed humor, is revealed in an unidentified clipping found in Hanson's scrapbook (box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers): "Intimate Views of Prof. William F. Hanson Says AMPA-O-LUTA [Hanson's Indian name]--`Now, where I came from, men are men and Indians are Indians and you can't tell much difference between the two. Why, when I was a kid and rode the range I shot jack-rabbits, ground-hogs, and Indians when they didn't behave. I didn't kill for meat to eat but merely hunted for the pleasure derived from the game. Well, I spent a lot of time with the Indians there and got to be pretty good friends with the old Indians and their squaws. The Indians give me a background of their legends, myths, ceremonials, music, and customs. I spent about fifteen years watching the way they acted and behaved and then I decided to write an opera.'" This writer goes on to say that Hanson's two operas "have been composed with a view of using only customs which are still uninfluenced by the white people."
(44.) Dexter Fisher, "Foreword," in Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories (1921; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), xii.
(45.) Callaway, Janetski, and Stewart, "Ute," 352. Quotation from Anne M. Cooke Smith, "Ethnography of the Northern Ute," Museum of New Mexico Papers in Anthropology 17 (1974): 128-37.
(46.) Callaway, Janetski, and Stewart, "Ute," 354. This contrasts with Mormon religious practice.
(47.) Tam-Man Nacup became the subject of Hanson's master's thesis at BYU, awarded in 1937.
(48.) Eugene L. ("Timpanogos") Roberts, "The Story of Utahna and Red Eagle: An Original Indian Legend of Timpanogos," Minnequa Historical Society Magazine, spring 1940, 6-9.
(49.) Unidentified clipping, scrapbook, box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers. The date 23 February fell on a Wednesday in 1930, 1941, and 1947.
(50.) Quoted in Michael V. Pisani, "The Indian Music Debate and `American' Music in the Progressive Era," College Music Symposium 37 (1997): 74 paraphrasing Charles Sanford Skilton, "American Indian Music" in Oscar Thompson, ed., International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, 1938.
(51.) Deloria, Playing Indian; Carr, Inventing the American Primitive. Carr focuses on the representation of Native Americans in various writings, including those of Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore, major collectors of Native American music. Deloria complicates the interplay of whites and Native Americans in various meanings of "Indian." See also Bird, Dressing in Feathers.
(52.) Zitkala-Sa was outlived by her husband, Raymond T. Bonnin. After his death their papers went to Ernest L. Wilkinson, an attorney who represented Indians in various land claim litigation and later became president of BYU. Before the papers came to BYU in 1978 (long after Bonnin's death), many personal letters and documents were removed from the collection and destroyed. Photocopies of her letters to Montezuma, which are at the Hayden Library, Arizona State University, are now in the Bonnin collection.
(53.) At one point she wrote to him: "I have no desire to make definite plans for my future life. I am too independent. I would not like to have to obey another--never! ... Seriously, is there no reason that would make you think it by far a grander thing to live among the Indians, to give a little cheer to the fast-dying old people than to be a missionary among the whites? Consider this well, for upon your reply my mind is likely to be changed.... Tonight I got a few Indian things from my poor old mother. I am proud to have the things but they made me want to weep to see that my mother really loves me and thinks of me at times. I wish I could talk to you instead of writing. I do not know how to write a letter. Goodby, Zitkala."
Letter, Zitkala-Sa to Carlos Montezuma, ca. April 1901, photocopy in box 2, folder 2, Collection 1704, Bonnin papers, Brigham Young University. Originals in the University of Arizona Library Special Collections, Carlos Montezuma Papers.
(54.) Letter, Gertrude Bonnin to Carlos Montezuma, 10 May 1913, photocopy in box 2, folder 2, Collection 1704, Bonnin papers, Brigham Young University. Originals in the University of Arizona Library Special Collections, Carlos Montezuma Papers.
(55.) Letter, Gertrude Bonnin to Carlos Montezuma, 23 June 1913, photocopy in box 2, folder 2, Collection 1704, Bonnin papers, Brigham Young University. Originals in the University of Arizona Library Special Collections, Carlos Montezuma Papers.
(56.) O. T. [Oscar Thompson?], review, Musical America, 10 May 1938, clipping, box 4, folder 7, Hanson papers
Catherine Parsons Smith is Emerita Professor of Music at the University of Nevada Reno and a former member of the Reno Philharmonic. She is the author of book-length studies on Mary Carr Moore (1985) and William Grant Still (2000) and several feminist essays, of which the best known is " `A Distinguishing Virility': On Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music," in Cook and Tsou's Cecilia Reclaimed: Perspectives on Gender and Music (1994).
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| Author: | Smith, Catherine Parsons |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Women & Music |
| Geographic Code: | 1U8UT |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2001 |
| Words: | 14080 |
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