“Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s to 1930s by Christine Bold (review)

Reviewed by: "Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s to 1930s by Christine Bold Amy Gore (bio) "Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s to 1930s Christine Bold Yale University Press, 2022 BOLD TAKES RECOVERY WORK in a new direction by taking up the subject of vaudeville, one of the most popular forms of mass entertainment during the turn of the century. Vaudeville brought to the stage a fast-paced variety of brief performances by a host of singers, actors, dancers, comedians, trained animals, and other spectacles. At an affordable price, an individual or a family could enter a vaudeville theater and be entertained for hours by an ongoing array of these short performances, an experience not unlike modern social media entertainment such as YouTube and TikTok. While many correlate Indigenous performances at the turn of the century with Wild West shows, vaudeville remains a distinct stream of entertainment with its mashup of Native and non-Native acts, stand-alone spectacles not tied to a common theme, and a somewhat greater degree of creative control for Native performers than the Wild West shows. Vaudeville had an immense impact on the entertainment industry, one that receives far too little attention for the ways in which it impacted modern American culture. Bold's research highlights the key role Indian performances and Indigenous Peoples played in vaudeville, and in doing so, Indigenous contributions to modernity and popular culture. Bold structures "Vaudeville Indians" largely around a handful of performers. After an introduction that provides the foundational history of vaudeville and an overview of the more than three hundred Indigenous people who participated, Bold details her approach over the past twenty-five years to such a complex and under-researched topic. She identifies her research exchange with Indigenous actors and communities, and she writes transparently and humbly about her dedication to the principles of Indigenous research methodologies and nonextractive scholarship. After laying the groundwork for vaudeville history and her research methodologies, Bold organizes the rest of her book around selected performers. Chapter 2 follows the career of Go-won-go Mohawk, a transatlantic Seneca playwright and performer. The third chapter largely focuses on Esther Deer/Princess White Deer, one of several multigenerational Mohawk family members who circled the globe as vaudeville entertainers. Then, in an unexpected [End Page 162] but appropriate turn, the last two chapters explore vaudeville performers whose Indigenous identities are either unclear or appropriated. The fourth chapter delves into the story of Princess Chinquilla, who self-identified as Southern Cheyenne but faced challenges in her claim to Indigeneity, and the fifth chapter traces the career of German redface trick cyclist Chester Dieck, who played Indian on stage for more than six decades. Bold justifies her inclusion of these non-Native or indeterminate identities by explaining, "Indian vaudeville was built from the entanglement of Indigeneity and Indianness, and a pattern recurs through this history whereby the energetic ingenuity of the first repeatedly saves vaudeville from the tired stereotypes of the second" (270). While she centers these four biographies, she mentions many more Indigenous performers encountered during her research, as their stories intertwine with other performers and Indigenous community members. Bold weaves sensitively and adeptly between Native, non-Native, and indeterminate identities of vaudeville performers, and each chapter is exceptionally dense with information. Bold intersperses four shorter "Vaudeville Numbers" between each chapter, and in the spirit of vaudeville, I anticipated that each of these would give me a more visual sense of a specific performance. Instead, each one primarily traces a specific performer rather than a single act, which redirected my expectations and made the interludes less distinctive from the chapters. As Bold readily acknowledges, "The ephemeral nature of the form and the huge number of acts made for sparse reviews," and therefore reconstructing the acts is understandably challenging (129). While Bold is sometimes able to find details that allow her to re-create the spectacle and emotions of an act, at other times those details are simply missing. This leaves Bold in the difficult position of "telling" rather than "showing" in her accounts of vaudeville history, sometimes leaving the reader missing an immediate sense of the subject at hand. However, the moments in which Bold...