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.
About the presenterMelissa Otis
Melissa Otis recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is a social history of contact between Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples and Euroamericans in the Adirondacks, a mountainous, rural area of northeastern New York State and a former hunting territory of both Indigenous peoples. She is currently developing a manuscript for publication of her thesis.