2. Playing for Keeps
A Brief Colonial History of
Carnival and Powwow
COMPARATIVE COLONIALISMS
This chapter compares Carnival and powwow, framing them as responses to colonialism. I trace the history of Carnival in Trinidad from slavery days through emancipation in 1838 and the subsequent colonial administration of a profoundly mixed-race society. I follow pan-Indian culture through the 1880s, when the Dawes Act allocated Indian lands during the final phase of military conflict over the western frontier, and into the twentieth century, with its history of federal attempts to assimilate or eradicate native peoples and culture. The chapter continues a short way into the twentieth century, concluding with a description of Carnival and powwow in their contemporary im/migrant incarnations in Brooklyn and Minneapolis.
Throughout their long histories in this hemisphere, Carnival and powwow have responded to three central themes in Caribbean and Indian social experience: migration, colonial administration, and, in the twentieth century, the astounding reach and celerity of mass culture. These three things are, of course, linked: the forced migration of Africans in the Middle Passage resulted in their invention and remembering of a culture that was subject to vicious repression first by slaveholders, later by the postemancipation hierarchies of Caribbean colonies. American Indians were forced west by pressure from Euroamerican expansion. Removal of eastern nations to Oklahoma, for example, resulted in the formation
Both Helen Safa and Errol Hill suggest that the inability of Africans to return to their actual geographic homelands has a lot to do with the richness of Afro-Creole culture in the New World. Rooted in the concept of culture, rather than any specific place, slaves and their descendants forged a uniquely “indigenous culture,” as Hill phrases it.[2] While the respect given by these Caribbeanists to the power of diasporic memory is appropriate in light of the tremendous syncretic capacity of Afro-Atlantic cultures to remember and reinvent history, the example of Native American experience in the United States provides an illuminating parallel, connecting feats of cultural memory with geographic removal.
Rather than being barred from returning home, American Indians have had the experience of being interned and administered on their own land. They have been removed from or legally deprived of specific places that their nations held sacred; relocated to “Indian territories” on reservations or in Oklahoma; and then administered through the culturally genocidal practices of Indian boarding schools and the prohibition of Indian religions. As both Gloria Anzaldúa and John Martínez Weston point out, native and mestizo peoples often inhabit lands that are historically theirs but have been reshaped by colonial power.[3] Ties to the land are important as practice, much as ties to Africa or to a syncretic Afro-Creole culture are the products of historical struggle. “It is the land,” asserts Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, “real and imagined, lived in heritage and current political process, and expressed in discourse, which constitutes the connection between nature and culture for Indians.”[4] As evidenced by contemporary struggles at Black Mountain, the Paha Sapa (Black Hills), and Mole Lake, to name only a few, simple geographic proximity does not necessarily facilitate access to cultural practices of the land.[5] Patterns of im/migration and administration partially determine the relationship of diasporic peoples to their homes. I will discuss these two strands of Indian and Caribbean history together, and then move on to consider the role of mass culture in what Robert Orsi calls “the inner history” of im/migration.[6]
HEMISPHERIC MOVES
For both Indian and Caribbean people, moves to New York City and Minneapolis after World War II were only the most recent phase of ongoing migrations. People have moved throughout the history of this hemisphere, responding initially to the pressures of colonization and slavery that moved Indians west and brought Africans to the New World, and, in the twentieth century, to the hemispheric politics of labor and resources. Im/migration involves cycles of regional and hemispheric economic development; political restrictions such as immigration policy and official relocation programs; and local negotiations about municipal empowerment. The international economy has always pulled local versions of identity into a broader dialogue: race and class, ethnicity and nation are powerful narratives told both within and beyond the borders of the nation at different historical junctures.
From colonial conflicts over land up to the present-day pattern of leaving the reservations to find employment, migration has been a central feature of the experience of Indian people. The historical exigencies of such geographic mobility have brought about, in turn, cultural invention and change. The relocation of many nations to “Indian territory” in Oklahoma after 1830 brought different Indian cultures into close proximity. Such proximity, as James Howard and others have argued, led to the development of a pan-Indian culture in Oklahoma.[7] This pan-Indian culture centrally featured the powwow, which had long been a site where Indian nations have met to socialize.[8] As both William Powers and Carol Rachlin point out, the development of a pan-Indian culture in Oklahoma did not extinguish specific tribal cultures; nor does it signal the inevitability of assimilation. “There is no renascence of Indian culture in central and western Oklahoma,” Rachlin argues, “because Indian culture there never died in order to be reborn.”[9]
Relocation to Oklahoma brought diverse Indian peoples together. Before the Dawes Act (1887), the federal government used Oklahoma as a place to exile defeated Indian nations from the Midwest, South, and Southwest. Many of the newly arrived exiles, then, carried along with them the recent memory of pan-Indian political alliances, such as the one in the Ohio River Valley between Shawnee, Potowatomie, Miami, and Delaware nations in the early part of the nineteenth century, or other struggles, such as the Apache-Comanche resistance in Arizona and New Mexico.[10] At a powwow in Hinckley, Minnesota, during the summer of
It is important here to distinguish between assimilation, which denotes the gradual melting of different cultural groups into Americans, and acculturation, which signals the ongoing process of cultural adaptation and change. Many scholars have written about the ways Indians used Christian and federal institutions (churches, schools) to further their survival in an increasingly Euroamerican context and simultaneously to preserve native cultures.[11] Indians often drew on Euroamericans' efforts to assimilate them for their own ends; federal boarding schools in the twentieth century, as both K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Brenda Childs have documented, served Indian parents in hard times when they could not provide for their children's well-being, as well as becoming sites of resistance, where children from diverse tribes educated one another in their religious beliefs and languages, intermarried, and forged new political alliances.[12] Pan-Indian practices, such as the Ghost Dance of the 1880s and 1890s, allowed for the circulation of traditional Indian forms of dance, song, and culture around the fragmented geography of this time period. The Ghost Dance Movement used the trains and mail service to circulate people and ideas; many of its leaders, educated in missions or in off-reservation schools, used English as a movement lingua franca.[13] Both boarding schools and other pan-Indian forms, such as the Ghost Dance and the Native American Church, the Society of American Indians, and even the notorious Wild West shows aided in the circulation of cultural forms between Oklahoma and the Plains, and from these two centers of colonial pan-Indianism throughout Indian nations in the United States and Canada.[14] Michael Rynkiewich traces the spread of the Grass Dance from Oklahoma tribes such as the Pawnee to the Dakota by the end of the nineteenth century, and east to Minnesota and Wisconsin Ojibwa in the early twentieth century.[15] Pan-Indian diffusion combines with local tradition and invention in complex forms such as the Grass Dance, which is danced to local forms of drumming by dancers who wear costumes bearing both local and intertribal markings.
With the end of the period of removal and the implementation of the reservation system, Indian people were relegated to small pieces of land. Because the Dawes Act allotted land to individuals rather than along traditional lines, the reservation system after 1887 resulted in loss of land to entrepreneurs who offered quick cash for ancestral holdings; to swindlers who swapped paper titles for farm and forest land; and to outright theft by federal agents and Euroamerican settlers. In addition, the reservation system often broke up existing family and band alliances. Lakota individuals from a band near Pine Ridge, for example, might find themselves enrolled on the Rosebud or Standing Rock reservation. This tendency of the reservation system to break up existing social ties was exacerbated by the blood quantum standard, which mandated that individuals had to prove one-quarter lineage from a specific reservation to be officially recognized as Indian. The reservation system disrupted indigenous political organizations: the systems Indian people had devised to deal with cultural contact and trade. Aware of the potentially devastating effects of allotment on Indian life, both traditional leaders and a newer generation of reservation “progressives” struggled to maintain native lands and identities.[16] And, as Harold Hickerson argues, this colonial displacement brought about an emphasis on cultural organizations, such as drum societies and local councils, in Indian social life.[17]
Federal Indian policy attempted to break up native relationships: to the land; to social organizations of band and nation; and to religious and cultural practices. Because of their association with Indian military resistance, many religious and cultural forms were driven underground. Noel Dyck contrasts the efforts of Indian people to maintain their lands and culture to the impetus of U.S. and Canadian policy in implementing reservation systems in the late nineteenth century, explaining that federal policy assaulted all forms of Indian community in the interests of promoting the individualism necessary for capitalist development.[18]
At the same time that federal policy assaulted existing practices, it stressed the assimilation of Indian people during the postallotment period.[19] Colonel Richard H. Pratt had founded a boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879 with the motto “Kill the Indian and civilize the man.”[20] Indian boarding schools attempted to silence and shame Indian students, and to prevent them from speaking their languages or practicing their cultures and religions, going so far as to force Indian boys to dress as girls until they spoke English.[21] The standard curriculum at federal boarding schools, half days in the classroom and the rest
By forcing geographical and cultural relocation, the boarding schools attempted cultural genocide in the name of assimilation and progress. At the same time, the boarding schools created a group of English-speaking intellectuals. Many of these bicultural individuals were involved in political pan-Indian reform efforts, such as the Indian Reform Association, founded in 1882.[24] Like the relocation to Oklahoma, the boarding schools forced Indians from diverse regions and cultures together. In addition to the class of reformers who emerged from the boarding school experience, the many Indian students went back home with common experiences and with a cultural pan-Indianism forged out of the immediate exigencies of institutional life. Lomawaima writes: “Tribal and pan-Indian identity were reinforced, not diluted, in Indian schools.”[25] Along with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the boarding schools, most of them located in the Midwest, helped to disseminate and popularize Plains Indian traditions as pan-Indian style.[26]
Indian people responded to forced relocation and cultural prohibitions with syncretic invention and historical alacrity. Similarly, the history of Carnival illuminates the ongoing struggle of Caribbean people as they created a home in exile from their diverse nations of origin. The history of Carnival begins in Trinidad and then travels, along with various migrations, throughout the Caribbean and later to Britain, Canada, and the United States.
Characterized by an eighteenth-century observer as “the sinkhole of the Eastern Caribbean,” colonial Trinidad was a refuge for diverse populations of escaped slaves, renegade revolutionaries, and Catholics who did not fit into the British colonial order of other West Indian colonies. The island was settled by French, Spanish, and British colonists; by French republicans fleeing Napoleon's ascendancy; by generations of Creole and African slaves as well as free Blacks, some of whom had served in the British forces in Virginia; by Africans escaped from slave ships or freed from service in the
Carnival has traditionally been a site where the complex class and ethnic relationships among this diverse population have been articulated through inversion, parody, and imagination.[28] Where American Indians were “removed” out of the way of the developing United States, Afro-Creole slaves and their European owners were forced into an uneasy cohabitation on plantations as well as in cities. Because of its liberal colonization policies and the comparatively late introduction of sugar, Trinidad did not have the same rate of absentee plantation landlords as other colonies, such as Cuba and Santo Domingo. In addition, the presence of a sizable population of free people of color complicated the race question, both before and after emancipation. The colonial administration of culture provided symbolic resolution to questions of race and power, much as it did in the case of the federal Indian policy. Because the Afro-Creole and African populations were a much larger proportion of their populations in the Caribbean than Indians were in North America, the African influence permeated Caribbean culture; its effects on Carnival after emancipation were difficult to ignore. Supposedly disappearing but noble Indians came to symbolize a virtuous republican past in North America, but it was harder ideologically to sweep colonial cultures free of the African. Throughout Trinidadian history, Carnival and other public processions, such as the Madrasi Hindu festival of “fire pass” and the Muslim festival of Muhurram, have been focal points for this struggle between cultural invention, appropriation, and suppression.[29]
Initially imported to the island by the French, the Carnival preceding Lent during slavery days featured the cross-dressing and class inversion of European Catholic festival days. Slaves were not permitted to masquerade, though it is likely that they performed for their masters. Certainly Caribbean masquerading traditions—“playing mas',” as it is called today—retain as many African influences as they do European ones, although, because of the ongoing repression of the African in Trinidadian history, it is harder to document them.[30] British authorities, in command in Trinidad after 1797, banned drumming altogether in their colonies, starting in Jamaica in 1792. Drums sounded threatening and unfamiliar to European ears, and were associated by Africans and their descendants with Shango, the Yoruba god of war and fire.[31]
Free Blacks and the Creole working and middle classes celebrated Carnival in the period between 1797, the beginning of British rule, and 1838, when the four years of indenture after emancipation in 1834 expired. Fearing the disorder caused by drinking and dancing in the street, the British passed a law in 1808 requiring police permission for Blacks to hold parties after 8 P.M.[32] The Creole middle class in Port of Spain obtained police permission to hold balls, although they still faced a curfew at 9:30 P.M. and were expected to carry lanterns.[33] The French Catholic upper classes preferred house parties and costume balls. In the ongoing cross-racial exchange of the Americas, which Eric Lott has so aptly dubbed “love and theft,” the upper classes favored costumes portraying field and house slaves, while Black celebrants, according to contemporary descriptions, often dressed in mock-European finery as kings and queens and English mummers.[34]
Although they had been prohibited from participating in Carnival before emancipation, slaves had maintained and invented their Afro-Creole culture in the small gaps in colonial administration. In canboulay(from cannes brÛlées, French for burning sugar cane), for example, slaves would march to the fields to extinguish sugar cane fires, carrying torches and singing songs. Along with command performances for the slave owners, canboulay was a rare opportunity for slaves to perform without sanction. After emancipation, canboulay transcended its function as a slave fire squad, becoming an important site for Afro-Creole invention. Groups of revelers would march with their lit torches through the street in the early hours of Carnival morning; this pre-Carnival festival, called j'ouvert, or break of day, has been a site of suppressed Afro-Creole practices throughout Trinidadian and, as we shall see, Brooklyn history. As freed slaves moved away from the countryside and into urban centers, Carnival became more African during the 1860s and 1870s, driving respectable European and Creole classes away from a street festival that had become a festival for the “urban black underworld.”[35]
In 1881, as Ghost Dancers prepared themselves to fight for a land newly replenished with buffalo and rid of whites, Black working-class canboulay revelers clashed with police in Port of Spain in what have come to be know as the Canboulay Riots. Predominantly Afro-Creole revelers clashed with police in Princess Town in 1884 and in Cedras in 1885, and a struggle between Islamic Asian Indians celebrating Muhurram (Hosay) with the colonial authorities in 1884 resulted in twelve deaths and approximately one hundred injuries.[36] British colonial authorities responded to these incidents by abolishing canboulay and fixing the time for the start
Throughout Trinidadian history, Carnival has been the focal point for encounters between the colonial administration and the impetus of grassroots imagination. In the 1870s, as colonial authorities began clamping down on the new Afro-Creole practice of masquerading at Carnival, they banned the Madrasi Hindu “fire pass” festival; in the 1880s, such restrictions resulted in both the Canboulay Riots and the Muharram Massacre.[38] At the same time that these festivals were sites for working-class Black and East Indian performances of social unrest, sometimes resulting in physical clashes with the police, these conflicts marked and reinforced fears of working-class culture among both white Creoles and the colored middle class.[39] The latter groups responded by participating in Carnival in limited ways, holding private parties and sometimes taking advantage of the masquerading tradition to attend Carnival unnoticed, avoiding the social sanction that could come from such participation.[40] Civic efforts to police Carnival, to make it safer and more respectable, resulted in an ongoing struggle between working-class Blacks with their Afro-Creole cultural forms and the colored middle class, which favored a more European, regulated Carnival, with contained performances of more Africanized forms.
Carnival forms such as calypso and steel drums originated in the increasingly urbanized Black working class,[41] while the European origins of costuming mingled with African retention and New World invention in both the themes and designs of the costumes. In 1846 an observer of Carnival masquerades reported seeing pirates, Turks, Scottish Highlanders, Wild Indians, the Angel Gabriel, and Death portrayed at Carnival. He observed a group of Black Trinidadians “as nearly naked as might be, bedaubed with a black varnish. One of this gang had a long chain and padlock attached to his leg, which chain the others pulled. What this typified, I was unable to learn; but, as the chained one was occasionally thrown down on the ground and treated with a mock bastinadoing, it probably represented slavery.”[42] By the 1860s, the Black urban working class had taken over Carnival in the streets.[43]
The social organization of Carnival reflects the historical development of urban Black working-class spaces in tenement yards: mas' bands (groups of people wearing thematic costumes); pan yards (places where the steel drums are made and played); and even “tribes” of “Wild Indians” who wore costumes that separated them into groups of black, red,
Many members of early steel bands during the 1930s and 1940s were also supporters of labor struggles in the predominantly Black oilfields.[46] The emergence of road and yard forms such as the steel band into mainstream Trinidadian Carnival and its appropriation from the “grass roots” by the “national” marks a cultural negotiation over class, race, and national identity.
At the same time that Carnival has been marked by conflict over racial meanings between Europeans, the Creole middle classes, and the Black working class, it has also helped to consolidate a national identity based in an African heritage. The development of calypso and the steel band in the 1930s and 1940s in Trinidad as grass-roots forms critical of class and colonial domination pushed the African aspects of Caribbean culture into the political foreground of Trinidadian life. Donald Hill writes:
If fancy mas' was a harbinger of colored Creole power for the middle class, the steel band was a forerunner of a re-afrocreolization of the entire Creole complex, a development that eventually led to political independence. Carnival was once again being pushed by the grass roots, as in the 1880s. These groups tended to retain Afro-Creole culture to a greater degree than the middle and upper classes. The fusion of the new steel-band Carnival to the structure of the middle-class fancy mas' Carnival that had been evolving for fifty years resulted in a modern, truly Creole-Trinidadian popular culture, a re-afrocreolized culture.[47]
The steel band movement has been significant for the development of Trinidadian nationalism, at home as well as in New York. Often appropriated from the grass roots to speak of an entire nation, Carnival forms have been intricately linked with the development of a national identity. Black working-class neighborhoods such as Laventille, then, become simultaneously places of national origin and invention and “bad neighborhoods” of denizens that need more discipline.[48] Since decolonization,
Because Trinidad has always been a profoundly multicultural society, with a high rate of in- and out-migrations, Carnival did not remain a strictly Trinidadian cultural form. Both Dawn Marshall and Elsa Chaney delineate four stages of Caribbean im/migration: interterritorial movement after emancipation as former slaves left the plantations, primarily for English-speaking islands; movement toward the Hispanic Caribbean and, in smaller numbers, to the United States in search of work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a slower rate of migration during World War I and the Great Depression; and the massive emigration to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States after World War II. Four million Caribbean people left the region, primarily for the United States and Canada, between 1950 and 1980.[50] Cultural forms, such as the calypsos and costumes of Carnival, must have circulated through the Caribbean and reached the United States well before the arrival of the largest wave of Caribbean immigration, after 1965. And as Carnival cultures spread, they change to suit their locales, becoming variously a means of ethnic expression, a link to home, and a source of racial or pan-African solidarity and pride.[51] If “All o' we is one” was a popular slogan in Brooklyn as well as Port of Spain in the 1990s, the questions “Who is we?”; “Who is all?”; and “Under what circumstances does ‘we’ come together as ‘one’?” are profoundly political im/migrant questions.
THE LONG PAST AND THE CHANGING SAME
Indian and Caribbean people came to the U.S. urban landscape with cultural traditions that had long been articulated in the contexts of migration and repression. The revivals that have taken place in Minneapolis and New York during the post–World War II period are part of these traditions, which are always in dialogue with places known and affectively experienced as “home,” even for those who have never visited the
“Tradition,” in this context, is always contradictory, invented at the same moment that it lays its claims on the past. Tradition can be politically mobilized by the hierarchical authority of national, racial, or patriarchal formations, as it has been at various times. Mined with the multiple contradictions of a multicultural and migratory history, traditions also contain space for negotiation and reinvention.
New powwow forms invented in the post–Dawes Act period brought together Euroamerican style with native concerns. The Jingle Dress Dance, for example, was based on the dream of an Ojibwa elder about how to heal his sick daughter in Mille Lacs, Minnesota, in 1919.[52] The dress, an elegant cotton dress with a tiered skirt, was adorned with jingling metal cones made from Copenhagen chewing tobacco cans. When the women dancers move with a dignified step around the powwow circle, the cones make a jingling noise; the wearer creates a movement that both looks and sounds beautiful. The Jingle Dress Dance spread throughout Ojibwa country on reservation powwows during the 1920s; it also made a comeback during the 1950s.[53] Perhaps the dance's metaphorical message, about using the implements of mass culture to heal a sickness of Indian people, held great appeal in these periods of cultural deprivation and enforced assimilation.[54]
Ellie Favel, a guidance counselor and teacher at Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis, explained contemporary jingle dress stories among Indian people in the northern United States and Canada: “Well, the jingle dress story, the one that the elders gave me the right to tell, is from the Lake of the Woods area. And there's three that I heard: one from that lake, Red Lake, that area. And there's even one I heard from Sisseton, South Dakota. And they're all a little bit different, but they're all, you know, special, because they're visions and dreams, and the vision was a gift from the Creator.”[55]
Individual tellers are given permission to relate specific stories about the jingle dress, as well as about other powwow forms, such as the Grass Dance. Those who tell these stories publicly always announce the origins and partiality of the story, leaving room for the multiple layers of historicity these forms carry.[56]
As much as tradition is entwined with the historical exigencies of invention, the preservation of Carnival folk arts has been increasingly involved with the development of the mass culture industry in the twentieth century. Just as Caribbean and Indian people negotiated the repressive effects of colonial administration and migration, they also deal with the increasing power of mass culture as it not only commodifies and exoticizes their cultural practices but also allows for the huge increase in the reach and speed of specific forms.
Recent scholarship has documented the dependence of emergent mass culture at the turn of the twentieth century on working-class popular forms. Early films drew on the popularity of immigrant theater and vaudeville, much as the minstrel shows, with their love, hate, and theft of Black culture, provided the grounds for a white audience for Afrodiasporic cultural forms. As early as 1910, Victor Recording Companies was recording Trinidadian calypsos for a New York audience that was made up of both West Indian immigrants and white socialites.[57] In Los Angeles during the same time period, Chicanos, Jews, and Italians found work in the emergent film industry; movies depicting frontier conflicts needed extras to play Indians, but avoided hiring Indian people, because of their supposed volatility.[58]
The early mass culture industry drew on narratives of migration and transformation as they were encoded in Afro-Atlantic performative forms. Tin Pan Alley songwriters, for example, drew on the “coon songs” of Black and white performers, including the most famous African-American musical comedy star, a Bahamian immigrant named Bert Williams, to write the tunes that came to embody American urban glamour and power.
Music, in particular, would continue to cross over between Afro-Caribbean performers and Euroamerican mass audiences. The song that became popular as “Rum and Coca-Cola,” for example, originated as a Martiniquan folk song, and became popular in Trinidad during the 1890s. In the 1940s, Lord Invader put new lyrics to the tune and popularized it throughout the Caribbean. Decca Records, a U.S. company that had been recording West Indian calypsos and folk songs during the 1930s, released an Andrews Sisters cover of “Rum and Coca-Cola” during World War II. This popular song helped sustain Decca through the war and a protracted musicians' strike, and revived the popularity of calypso music in North America.[59]
The title proclaims the mixing of Yankee ingenuity—Coca Cola, possibly the most widely marketable product of U.S. capital—with a well-known
The song, as well as the pattern of postcolonial economic development, feminizes labor.[61] In addition, it narrates the close connection between economic and cultural circulation in the Western Hemisphere.
The rise of a mass culture industry facilitated the spread of both pan-Indian powwows and Caribbean Carnival at the same time that it influenced changes in these forms. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which toured the country with Indian dancers, drummers, and such famous warriors as Sitting Bull, spread Plains Indian cultural forms throughout the Indian United States, resulting in the diffusion of such practices as the Grass Dance and of the Lakota war bonnet to other cultural regions. Sitting Bull, as well as Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, Jack Red Cloud, the son of the famous Lakota chief, and Métis veterans of the Riel Re bellion of 1886 all toured in the show.[62] Because the popularity of the Wild West Show coincided with the final military conflicts over the in termountain West, Plains Indian forms came to symbolize resistance to other Indian people.[63] In addition, the Wild West Show introduced ele ments of non-Indian origin into powwow practices: the Master of Cer emonies figure, the Grand Entry Procession, the contest powwow, and the Indian Princess competition, all central elements in contemporary powwow culture.[64] Some of the major powwows in the country date back to the turn of the twentieth century. William Powers writes of the influence of the Wild West Show on Indian performances:
The famous Wild West shows of the latter part of the nineteenth century, which partly gave rise to the notion of War Dance, also created for the next century the idea of the Indian musical performer as showman. Along with this newfound role came attributes of the theatrical performer—a calendar of events, performance outside the usual setting—the rodeo arena, coliseum, auditorium, theatrical stage.[65]
Another “tribe” of Indians influenced by the Wild West Show, the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, combined Afro-Atlantic Carnival performances with their interpretation of both their own mixed bloodlines and of the touring anticolonial Plains heroes.[66] “Playing Indian” is an old Caribbean Carnival tradition, dating back to the appearance of
Wild Indians were among the most popular Carnival bands throughout Trinidadian history. Their descendants, the often spectacular “Fancy Indians,” remain popular today among master costume designers as well as among those who want to slap something together quickly to wear on Carnival morning. People who “play Indian” at Carnival explain their costumes variously. They talk about the tradition of Carnival Indians, about the Carib Indians in the Caribbean, about the multicultural history of Trinidad, and, in the United States, sometimes about the struggles of Native Americans against colonization. One costume designer I met in Brooklyn during the summer of 1993 showed me his Carnival king, a tenfoot-tall Indian figure. Two years after the Mohawk resistance at Oka made headlines throughout the country, the Carnival king of the Association of Belizean Americans was called “Mohawk Spirit Dancer.”
Narratives of frontier conflict have long been a staple of American popular culture. In addition to Fancy and Wild Indians, two other popular Carnival figures emerge from frontier conflicts. The Trinidadian tradition of the Midnight Robber, derived from the icon of the masked cowboy, “holds up” onlookers and must be paid off in contributions of change. Although this costume has diverse incarnations, Daniel Crowley's folkloric research led him to speculate that the probable source of imagery for the Midnight Robber figure was the pulp or “Texas” magazines, an early form of the Western genre, with its romanticized cowboys and noble Indians, popular in the 1890s.[70] Another extremely popular figure at Carnival, the
Mass culture must be seen as a part of the colonial enterprise. Tourism has been almost as ongoing a source of interest in Caribbean and Indian cultures as hunger for land, resources, and labor. Rarely situating Indian and Caribbean people in their actual historical circumstances, films exoticize and objectify them. Frontier narratives rewrote the history of the West at the same time that the nascent music industry bleached the Afro-Atlantic origins of much popular song. Mass media images of contemporary immigrants and urban Indians are almost inevitably negative: one more piece of a seemingly formidable colonial arsenal that breaks apart colonized nations and national minorities, and with them cultures and memories. It becomes difficult to separate mass media images of waves of poor brown and Black people mobbing the shores and cities of the United States from the equally surreal policy initiatives designed to “deal with them.”
At the same time, mass culture imagery can be appropriated as part of a temporary shelter against the colonial effort as a whole. Midnight Robbers symbolically mug people at Carnival, demanding a share of the loot, while drunk and dirty Yankee Sailors cavort, offering entertainment and a reminder that imperial force is made up of men who depend on Port of Spain for their pleasure. The Master of Ceremonies at powwows is likely derived from the imperialist spectacle provided by Buffalo Bill Cody, but today he is also likely to talk about red power and rallies for treaty rights. These symbolic figures, by themselves, do nothing to oppose the ongoing depredations of imperial capital; but they imaginatively reconfigure a mass-mediated universe.
Carnival in New York and powwow in Minneapolis encode a history of resistance to colonial administration. But I want to conclude this chapter on the colonial past of these festivals by skipping forward in time to look at the ways these festivals carry on the traditions of invention and resistance in these urban contexts. Grass Dancers and Midnight Robbers, jingle dresses and steel bands: all arrive in an urban landscape that offers Indian and Caribbean people only partial access to power and citizenship. These festival denizens, bearing their complex and potent historical
Just as the Midnight Robber and the Yankee Sailor costumes reflect the circulation of popular imagery throughout the United States, Canada, Britain, and the Caribbean, the meanings of Carnival in metropolitan contexts shift. Alma Guillermoprieto notes the rediscovery of Zumbi, the leader of the maroon community Palmares, in the late 1970s by Brazilian Carnival designers. Emphasis on Zumbi in Carnival floats paralleled contemporary Afro-Brazilian interest in Black history and cultural pride.[72] Similarly, Abner Cohen, in his detailed study of Notting Hill Carnival in London, talks about how Rastafarian themes emerged as the festival became both more dominantly West Indian and more explicitly political during the 1970s. Cohen explains these changes by emphasizing the role of Carnival in immigrant identity formation. “London carnival was continuously transformed, within certain cultural and social conventions, into an expression of, and an instrument for, the development of a new homogeneous West Indian culture that transcended affiliations to islands of origin, to confront the economic and political realities of contemporary Britain.”[73]
In Brooklyn, contemporary Carnival practices deploy different structures of meaning than the same practices would elsewhere. As Philip Kasinitz points out, eating a roti on Eastern Parkway on Labor Day in Brooklyn takes on an ethnic significance it lacks in Trinidad.[74] At the same time, the meanings of costumes and music are always in dialogue with the Caribbean as well as with other metropolitan festivals, inventing local practices both traditional and specific to New York. The name of the mas' camp and front office for the West Indian–American Day Carnival Association in 1992, “The Culture of Black Creation,” has a different meaning in Brooklyn than it would have had in Port of Spain or London. Brooklyn Carnival emphasizes West Indian Black ethnic identity against the background of a predominantly African-American city. The name “The Culture of Black Creation” carries both ethnic and Afrocentric pride. Gesturing to second-generation Caribbean-Americans and to African-Americans with a broadly inclusive pan-Africanism, the name simultaneously points out to Caribbean immigrants that their culture is as Black, and can be as proud, as the African-American culture that surrounds them. It also points to the geographical segregation in New York of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean im/migrants. One year and several blocks from the 1991 Crown Heights conflict, the name of the mas' camp also announced its origins and alliances to those passing by the building.
The tendency of Trinidadian Carnival bands to memorialize actual and imagined pasts was amplified in the 1950s, when the designer Harold Saldenha began to draw on contemporary Hollywood imagery to create themes rooted in past empires—Romans, Greeks, and Asians.[75] Carnival designers have always done extensive research into the themes and sartorial specifications of their bands; through Hollywood productions, images of cultures elided in British canonical histories became available.[76] More recently, Carnival themes have turned to imagining great non-European empires of the past, particularly in Brooklyn.
In Brooklyn as in Trinidad, Indian, Asian, and African empires are especially popular. The celebration of empire on Eastern Parkway carries resonance of im/migrant national pride. Carnival in Brooklyn, after all, falls on or directly after Trinidad's Independence Day; many of the sound systems move down the parkway on floats that proclaim Panamanian, Belizean, or Grenadian pride and solidarity. At the same time, in the context of contemporary Afrocentricity in Brooklyn, the celebration of non-Western empires also relates directly to a politicized geography of Blackness that draws heavily on the ideas of Egyptian and ancient African splendor. “I wouldn't even break it down in terms of Caribbean,” one pan player argued. “I think what you see happening, especially in our community, is African.”[77]
As Kasinitz argues, the strength of Carnival has always been in its multivocality, its refusal to speak in what sounds like a unified, political voice. While it frustrates politicians who attempt to support Carnival as representing a monolithic community, such multivocality allows for the existence of multiple layers of history. Such layers of history, in turn, constitute the grounds for the formation of a new urban identity; both Kasinitz and Frank Manning argue that Carnival is the space where West Indian immigrants mark an identity that is at once Black and distinct from the African-American community; ethnic but generically West Indian, rather than identified with any specific Caribbean nation.[78] In the cultural space of Carnival, then, immigrants and their children negotiate various claims of assimilation, racial identification, and dual loyalty.
At Brooklyn Carnival in 1992, the popular Hawks mas' band celebrated the Columbian Quincentennial by playing Empires of the Americas, with vast sections devoted to the Aztec, Inca, and Mixtex empires. The Culture of Black Creation mas' camp was dressed in the theme of Sophisticated Africa. A Trinidadian immigrant and an artist who makes the copper masks used by the large Carnival bands explained the importance of designing such costumes, connecting the Sophisticated Africa
Like Brooklyn Carnival, Trinidad Carnival in 1992 also featured bands that portrayed pre-Columbian splendor, illustrating Shadow's calypso hit of that year, “Columbus Lied.” Such parallels indicate the constant circulation of contemporary Caribbean culture, from sending nation to metropole and back again. The popular historiography of Carnival involves the transatlantic transmission of intellectual currents, of dreams and imaginings of exile and homecoming. At the same time, the great popularity of such bands as Sophisticated Africa in contemporary Brooklyn and the rows of stalls along Eastern Parkway that sell Caribbean food along with contemporary Afrocentric commodities such as kente clothe and cowrie shells indicate the growth of a Caribbean-American Carnival culture that negotiates boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality to stake out a Caribbean identity in Brooklyn.
Like West Indians in Brooklyn, Indians in Minneapolis navigate the multiple hierarchies of contemporary urban life. As I have argued, pan-Indian culture in the United States developed in response to the exigencies of serial relocations, as well as the boarding school experience, the cultural imperialism perpetrated by Wild West shows and the Western genre of popular novels and films they influenced. In some cases, as Gail Guthrie Valaskakis writes in her political memoir about growing up in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, the preservation of tradition mingled with pan-Indian performance in the context of tourism. The powwow at the Lac du Flambeau reservation, according to Valaskakis, became more tourist-oriented during the 1950s, as automobiles proliferated with postwar affluence, and with them the development of the white middle-class family vacation.[80] At the same time, according to Jim Clermont of the Lakota Porcupine Singers, the diffusion of automobile travel also helped proliferate powwow singing styles, as more Indians visited reservations during their annual powwows.
The knitting of traditional practices into the fabric of Indian life in Minneapolis required adaptation into an urban, intertribal context. Along with the memories woven into the fabric of daily life, Indian people in the 1950s and 1960s inherited a history of direct repression of
In attempting to reinvent this spirit of reverie, Twin Cities Indian organizations confronted a long history of repression. Bill Means described the early days of the American Indian Movement during the 1960s, when AIM organizers decided to include drumming and singing in their demonstrations. He recalled: “See, when AIM first started, we used to have to go get the singers out of bars and—because a lot of our Indian people didn't even want to sing, because in some ways they were kind of ashamed, unless if they had a few beers. And then they said, ‘Oh, wow, let me be an Indian.’” In creating a politicized cultural revival in Minneapolis, Indians drew on their diverse cultures, bringing them together into an urban pan-Indian form.
According to both Clermont and Powers, the move from the reservation to the cities changed the ways people sang and danced. Migrants brought their songs to the cities and shared them; by 1962 the Upper Midwest Indian Center boasted a singing group with members from the Crow, Chippewa, Sioux, Arapaho, Gros Ventre, and Canadian tribes. Powers argues that relocation changed singing styles because people who were not known for their singing in reservation communities often got involved in it in the cities, changing and reinterpreting traditional songs.[85]
With the mobility brought partially by relocation, singing groups traveled to various reservations. Groups such as the Porcupine Singers, traditionally based in Standing Rock and Pine Ridge, traveled around, teaching and performing. When the Porcupine Singers began to travel around the northern United States and Canada in the 1960s, Clermont recalled, they spread the Lakota singing style to diverse urban and reservation communities, “mainly in Canada. A lot of their powwows sat idle
Today a popular drum group at both urban and reservation powwows is the Boyz. Jim Clermont's son, Hokie, started the group, along with Opie Day, who is a Nett Lake Ojibwa. Like the Porcupine Singers, the Boyz travel to reservations and urban powwows. Also like the Porcupine Singers, they influence other drum groups through the recordings that people make at powwows by standing around the drum group with small, portable tape recorders held high in the air. Unlike the Porcupine Singers, though, the Boyz are urban Indians: they sport the fade haircuts popular with their African-American contemporaries and listen to rap music at the same rate that they play tapes of drum groups at powwows. Their name, with its echoes of popular films like Boyz in the Hood, indicates the multiple influences of contemporary urban Indian culture.
The Boyz's participation in powwows marks their commitment to Indian culture, but as Valaskakis points out, this is not a simple maintenance of an uninterrupted tradition. Rather, urban Indians continue to transform a tradition that has survived largely because of the creativity and ongoing commitments of Indian people. Because Indians residing in urban areas often return to reservation communities for extended visits, to live, or for short periods during the summer “powwow trail,” when Indians from all over the nation travel to weekend powwows held in rural communities, the urban Indian revival is in constant dialogue with reservation life as well.[87] Some years ago the Red Lake Nation changed its guidelines for the Red Lake Nation Princess competition. Previously, young women who wanted to represent the nation had to reside on the Red Lake Reservation; because many young women enrolled in the reservation live in the Twin Cities or in Bemidji, the competition was opened to women living in urban areas. Such changes indicate the ongoing “intertwining,” as Valaskakis calls it, of contemporary Indian reality with local interpretations of tradition.
Means explained, “The powwow has become that link to our homeland and to the past for the urban area. On the reservation, where you live in that setting … of course they have a lot of powwows, and I think that for the urban Indian the powwow is really a chance to come together and to recreate that. In the past and to their home.”[88]
As Carnival and powwow change to reflect and create new narratives of identity, these forms are also in dialogue with the urban environment.
Chapter 3 discusses the foundational fictions of immigration and termination that brought Caribbean and Indian people to the cities during the 1950s and 1960s. This national romance operates at a local level through discourses of ethnic empowerment and machine politics: new immigrants to the cities work their way into municipal power by constituting themselves as the latest ethnic group to be absorbed into local opportunity structures. Of course, the conversion of foreign immigrants to white ethnics is race-based; these accommodations are less available to nonwhite immigrants.[89] The transnational cultures of such groups as urban Indians and Caribbean immigrants respond to racialized hierarchies. By maintaining and reinventing ties to home, these im/migrants use the ethnic model against itself, participating in nation-building “back home” and using their identities as a basis for local empowerment. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc write: “Transmigrants simultaneously participate in nation-building in their home country and in processes of nation-building in the U.S. that are ordinarily subsumed under the rubric ‘ethnicity.’”[90] The question, then, is the role that emergent pan–West Indian and pan-Indian identities play in the struggle for municipal power, for citizenship, or a role in the national romance. Racial and ethnic identity in Minneapolis and Brooklyn bear heavily on the positions of these communities in the urban order.