Staging Indigeneity

Reviewed by: Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History by Katrina M. Phillips Bethany Hughes Katrina M. Phillips. Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History. 2021. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 246 pp. Paper, $29.95; Hardcover, $95.00; E-book, $24.99. Staging Indigeneity by Katrina M. Phillips tells a compelling story of how Native American history is quite literally staged, why its staging persists as a tourist attraction across the United States, and what the complex conditions for its production and performance were and are. The book provides an in-depth look at the creation and continued production of three distinct outdoor performances of Native American history, Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show in Oregon, Unto These Hills in North Carolina, and Tecumseh! in Ohio, in order to explicate how these shows reveal the economic and regional motivations of “Indian” tourism. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, script analysis, and performance attendance and analysis, Phillips offers scholars and students alike the opportunity to see how a performance is always more than just what happens on stage. Phillips draws clear and cogent connections between these shows begun decades apart and occurring across the country from one another by offering the analytical concept salvage tourism. Building on an already well-established understanding of salvage ethnography, Phillips demonstrates how a desire to save an authentic (and typically vanishing or vanished) “Indian” worked with regional desires for improved economic conditions and increased civic pride to transform Native American history into something else, what Phillips neatly calls “fauxstalgia” (23). Phillips’ work demonstrates both the depth of her knowledge on the narrow subject of these productions and the breadth of her expertise on how these productions fit into, shape, and are shaped by larger regional, [End Page 148] national, and international histories, contexts, and forces. Moving fluidly between, for example, the history of outdoor drama in the United States, federal Indian law, and twentieth-century tourism development she shows how what appears to be a simple outdoor production occurring in a region far-flung from major cities is actually a dynamic, complex, and high-stakes event. She takes seriously all aspects of her subject matter from the performances themselves, to their creation, navigation of challenges, advertisement, financing, audiences, and detractors. Her description of what happens on stage is particularly vibrant and urges the reader to envision not just the content of the productions but the experience of them as well. Ironically, the book is a history of explicitly historical productions that deny and sometimes outright defy history. Phillips repeatedly makes the case that these historical productions are more interested in drama, tourist dollars, and regional and national identity formation than in historical accuracy or rigor. It is this commitment to the sheen of history rather than its substance that most clearly reveals the relationship between tourism and the “fauxstalgia” these productions provide. Phillips’ writing is detailed, descriptive, and self-aware. Each production is covered in two chapters, generally one on its original production and one on its most recent iteration or contemporary challenges facing it. These secondary chapters extend Phillips’s analysis beyond merely the origin of these production to their trajectories, allowing her to convincingly argue for salvage tourism as a meaningful and flexible mode of analysis. She pays careful attention to the ways in which these productions did and did not collaborate with Indigenous nations showing that through these fraught interactions the silhouette of salvage tourism is starkly visible. In chapter 2 on Indigenous participation in Happy Canyon she shows how Indigenous agency functions within constrained spaces and narratives, complicating a simplistic analysis of Happy Canyon’s impact. Chapter 4 tells of how objections long voiced by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and changing social expectations led Unto These Hills to spend a decade trying to rethink, rewrite, and fix the problems inherent in its script. Ultimately, and importantly for Phillips’s argument, the plays’ producers returned to a slightly altered original script rather than face the decline in ticket revenue and support from its largely white audiences. Chapter [End Page 149] 6 focuses on how Tecumseh! overtly

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