An Operatic Skeleton on the Western Frontier: Zitkala-Sa, William F. Hanson, and the Sun Dance Opera (2001)

Braves Aid in Indian Opera at Utah Presentation ... A Full-Blooded Sioux Co-Author. (1) So runs part of Musical America headline reporting premiere of an opera on a Native subject, created in part by a Native woman. Built around a religious practice that was still banned by federal government, production featured participation of members of Ute Nation living on Uintah-Ouray Indian Reservation, a short way across rolling sagebrush plateau from performance venue. (2) The date was February 1913, and place was Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah. The Sun Dance Opera was enthusiastically received at its premiere, filling hall for three nights. Two separate productions at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, followed in May and December next year, second of them taken forty-odd miles to Salt Lake City for ten more performances. Three years after a 1935 revival at BYU, opera had two performances at Broadway Theatre (Cine Roma) in New York City, where it did not fare as well. (3) It is among earliest of operas on Native subjects that constituted an early twentieth-century subgenre within still broad-based, popular field of opera. (4) Native Americans had been subject of European curiosity, speculation, and exploitation since first contact. They provided one source for Rousseau's noble savage in eighteenth century; in nineteenth they became a major subject of and European art, literature, and theatrical entertainment. Two examples in area of popular entertainment are especially relevant here. In 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 United States and in Europe. Also, Indians were commonly portrayed in opening scenes of community-based pageants that were staged all across United States from 1907 on. Traditional dancing might be represented, but most often scene consisted of local indigenous people signing a treaty cheerfully surrendering their land and graciously retreating in favor of white arrivals. This scene provided an exotic opener for 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 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 general question of authenticity. (7) The Musical America article quoted at start of this paper states that the purpose of opera is to portray inner spiritual life of this wronged and misunderstood people. Along with literal closeness of Native culture represented in opera to audience and performance venue, here was an aesthetic approach that held possibility of setting this opera apart from 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 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 European style, was superimposed on ceremony, giving representation a characteristically nineteenth-century operatic shape. In this formulation, Ute hero elects to undertake five-day sun dance in order to win hand of his chief's daughter in 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. …