Introduction"Cultures are most fully expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and theatrical performances."--Victor Turner, By Means of Performance (1990)Some years ago, at the opening of the Pittsburgh American Indian Center, I met a man named Edward Hale, a Mandan/Hidatsa medicine man and promoter of Indian causes. Both aspects of Hale''s dual role were on display at the inaugural ceremony. Called on not only to provide the mostly Anglo audience with a living example of Indian people''s resurgence but to supervise and interpret the enactment of Native dances, songs, and rituals, Hale, dressed in what I took to be a traditional costume of feathers and fringed leather, beating a drum and chanting in a soft voice that seemed too small even for the tiny Quaker meeting-house in which the event took place, was at once the arbiter of Native mysteries and the vendor of a mystery as strong and strange as the medicine bundle he bore: the mystery of his people''s presence and persistence. I acknowledge now that I too was beguiled by the promise of Hale''s performance, that I was taken by the preposterous thought that I, at that time a graduate student in English beginning to study Native American sacred traditions in antebellum literature, could make contact with that yet more distant mystery by fitting a lone hour''s encounter with a lone contemporary healer into a hectic research and writing schedule. I imagined that I might talk with Hale at length--again, I meant an hour--about his practice, his people, his powers. I imagined that his medicine, ensconced within the pages of my dissertation, might live on through me. As it turned out, my hopes were vain.

Hale was distracted, the center of attention, rushing here and there, wearily answering questions and permitting his possessions and person to be admired and handled. Compounding this problem, he seemed, in the few moments I was able to capture his notice, to be convinced that I was looking to participate in one of his ceremonies, which I was not. "I''ll set you up," he said--meaning, I suppose, that he would arrange for me to undergo a procedure similar to that of the older woman who, after submitting to a few passes from his healing crystal, pronounced herself cured, though of what I don''t know. Hale could not seem to grasp that my interests were academic rather than therapeutic. He had come to heal, to break down barriers between peoples through the immediate or symbolic application of his medicine, while I--though I imagined my purpose to be somewhat the same--had chosen as my medium the pursuit of a doctorate in a secular, materialist, demystifying field, and neither of us was prepared or able to appreciate the other''s vocation. I left the meeting-house both discouraged and a bit annoyed. I imagine, as I recall myself dogging Hale, introducing the same tired questions time and again, that he must have felt pretty much the same. Though I did not get from Hale what I was--absurdly--seeking at the time, I have come to believe that my encounter with him was immensely productive for, as well as emblematic of, the project I begin with this reminiscence: the project of studying Indian sacred performance in its manifold, conflictual, intimate relationships with American literature and culture.

What was being enacted in the Quaker meeting-house, I now believe, was an encounter between Native Americans and Euro-Americans that has pervaded American culture and shaped American literature throughout our mutual history, an encounter with two complementary, inseparable acts. On the one hand, it is an encounter involving Euro-American misapprehension of, fascination with, and dispossession of Native American sacred performance: ceremony, healing ritual, dance, song. On the other, it is an encounter embracing Native American repossession of, and revitalization through, the very acts by which whites have sought their dispossession: acts including, most notably, the public performance of Indianness in scenes engineered and attended by whites. In this twinned performance space, neither Native Americans nor Euro-Americans can escape the other''s presence. Thus, though Hale may have seemed the only one on stage that day, we were all engaged in the performance, and not merely as spectators: not only did we in the audience crave a taste of Hale''s medicine, but the very context of his performance, the setting for the drama, was tuned to our desires. Conversely, though Hale may have seemed the only one who was not playing a role, the only one who was artlessly expressing Indian medicine rather than calculatingly peddling or consuming it, the fact that our presence, our expectations, had brought him there necessitated his adopting a persona that met us (at least) halfway. In this regard, the performance space we created was an intercultural one, a space in which Indian and white traditions of sacred and secular performance circulated, collided, confounded, and compounded one another. This encounter of Indian and non-Indian traditions of performance, I will argue, played a central role in producing American identities, American culture, and American literature during the period of my study-as, indeed, it does to this day.

In the following pages, I will trace the forms, sources, and uses of Indian performance in American literature and culture from 1824, the publication date of Cherokee convert Catharine Brown''s jointly authored Memoir , through the period of Indian Removal and the late-century era of the Wild West show, and then into the opening decades of the twentieth century, my terminal date correlating to the publication of John G. Neihardt''s Black Elk Speaks in 1932. In this project, I urge the reader to think of Indian performance as a complex, contested arena encompassing various interlocking acts and actors. On the one hand, Indian performance cannot be thought of without regard to the sacred performances enacted by Indian peoples, both before and during the era of intercultural contact: performances including ceremony, dance, song, visionary experience, and shamanistic ritual. The importance of such performances to Indian communities can scarcely be overstated. Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo) captures their significance as sources of spiritual as well as cultural power, as sites of tradition and innovation, and as markers of Indian identity: "At base the ceremonials restore the psychic unity of the people, reaffirm the terms of their existence in the universe, and validate their sense of reality, order, and propriety. The most central of these perform this function at levels that are far more intense than others, and these great ceremonies, more than any single phenomenon, distinguish one tribe from another." But during the contact period, such sacred performances were met by another form of Indian performance, one that was itself deeply significant in shaping the terms of encounter.

This was the performance of Indianness, by both Indians and whites: acts of Indian portrayal, invention, and identity-formation including conversion narratives, stage plays, bicultural autobiographies, traveling medicine carnivals, and Wild West shows. Generally speaking, I will refer to the varieties of Indian sacred performance as Indian medicine , a phrase reflecting widespread usage among Indian peoples: "medicine" (or its Native-language equivalents) refers not only to healing remedies but to sacred power or mystery, as well as to the invocation or performance thereof, by individuals ("medicine men") as well as by communities. Extending this usage, I will refer to Euro-American systems and practices of power or mystery--including Euro-American acquisition of Indian medicine--as white medicine . In bringing together two forms of Indian performance that have been studied at length but in relative isolation-the former principally by anthropologists and ethnohistorians, the latter principally by historians and literary critics--I will illustrate that sacred performance by Indians and the performance of Indianness, by Indians and whites alike, have coexisted throughout American history, contending with each other, fighting and folding into each other, disrupting and determining each other. These processes of interaction and cocreation I will name the medicine bundle , a phrase I adapt from its autochthonous sense--sacred objects bound together for ritual or ceremonial purposes--to designate the complex, conflictual, cross-cultural acts that lie at the heart of American life and literature. My decision to focus this exploration of Indian and white medicine on the period from 1824 to 1932 reflects my belief that it was during this roughly one hundred year span that the convergence of certain developments in American history, culture, and literature fundamentally transformed the practice and representation of Indian performance in all its forms. To begin with, it was during the nineteenth century that initiatives to undermine Indian sacred performance were formalized, legalized, and nationalized. Beginning in the colonial era, Europeans had attacked Indian shamanism and ceremonialism; recognizing, in Francis Jennings''s words, that the Indian powwow or medicine man was "one of the strongest unifying factors in any Indian community," this religious figure "became the object of the most intense hatred of Europeans striving to weaken and dominate his tribe.

" Thus in the 1648 list of "conclusions and orders" that puritan missionary John Eliot imposed on his Indian converts, the following rule appears second from the top: "there shall be no more Pawwowing amongst the Indians . And if any shall hereafter Pawwow [Pawwows are Witches or Sorcerers that cure by help of the devill.], both he that shall Powwow , & he that shall procure him to Powwow