“The wigwam on the hill” and other acts of performing “Indianness” during the long nineteenth century

Abstract

This paper examines the use of performance by Abenaki and Mohawk performers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their activities are illustrative of Indigenous peoples performing culture as a way to market themselves and their goods, and to make obvious to their colonizers their continued existence in the Northeast, a region that believed them to be vanished. Algonquian and Iroquoian performers temporarily disconnected from their own rich culture and represented one that was simplistic and stereotyped. They had to make choices that outwardly appeared contradictory to their cultures’ survival even as they continued to perpetuate it privately. Although contradictory, the depictions by these Native performers quietly and creatively left an imprint and a record of their persistence in the Northeast.