In 2010, the Public Theatre of New York produced a punk-rock sketch-comedy musical called Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Critics praised its irreverent bravado and “sexy pants” take on the seventh president of the United States (Levine 2010). In one musical number, white actors, dressed in stereotypical deerskin dresses, sang and danced to the (explicitly racist) vaudeville tune “Ten Little Indians” (see, e.g., Jennings [2012]). Politico’s D. M. Levine (2010) describes Jackson as a musical
full of death and destruction and bow-and-arrow fights. There’s murder of natives and soldiers and betrayal and insults. But it’s all gag. This bleak, tragic history is filtered through a steam punk lens of red neon lights and modern iconography … all designed to foster an atmosphere of absurdity that makes it okay for people to delight in this bleak stuff.
Playing fast and loose with history, the musical distorted Jackson’s life, in effect obscuring (even justifying) his policy of ethnic cleansing, executed through the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Jackson was the Public’s second-largest grossing production at the time and moved quickly to Broadway; over the next several years, touring and regional productions took place in cities across the United States (Brantley 2009).1 Native artists associated with the Public were shocked and offended by the production’s cavalier representation of indigenous lives and history, including the fictionalized and historically inaccurate portrayal of the murder of Jackson’s family by Native Americans. Ironically, the Public had a Native Advisory Committee, but Jackson’s creative team had not consulted them (Yazzie 2014). How is it that the story of the Jacksonian era can be mined, fictionalized, and exploited without the inclusion of the viewpoints of real people whose bodies continue to be impacted by that history? As touring and regional productions of the work continued to receive rave reviews, outrage and protests mounted among Native communities and allies across the United States (Levine 2010).
Defenders of the production protested that the work was satire, dismissing critics and detractors as too sensitive. Meanwhile, in a New York Times piece, Ben Brantley (2009) observed that Jackson reflects an “abiding strain in the American character.” Whether Brantley was hinting at the production’s potential appeal to white nationalists or, rather, to the unfortunate persistence of “bad-boy” heroes in U.S. culture is hard to decipher. Brantley also points out that Jackson is like a person who can “say what he really wants to [say] only by pretending that he doesn’t mean it.” As the American story of origin, the frontier narrative on which the musical capitalized has become so ingrained that even New York artists have expressed surprise upon learning that indigenous North Americans have not “vanished” and that they and others are offended by “vignettes in which historic acts of violence are rendered as deadpan slapstick.” Such disregard for the unintended consequences of artistic work suggests ignorance or naiveté on the part of Jackson’s creative team or an intentional disregard for those who continue to experience the effects of history in the present day. The disconnect between the musical’s smashing success according to critics and the protests against the production’s content and aesthetic points to a cognitive dissonance that is not new in American popular culture or theater. Brantley’s sense that the musical “feels anything but distant” stems from the way it redeploys the familiar vocabulary of the American frontier story as it folds the past into the present while promoting ongoing ideologies of white supremacy, heroism, and environmental domination.
Theater has long played an important role in telling stories that propagate the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine of discovery on which that ideology has stood, and its implicit claim of white entitlement to land, which precipitated and sanctioned historic patterns of environmental destruction on this continent that continues to accelerate today. When the racial stereotypes that populated the nineteenth-century American stage still inspire laughter in 2015, then those stories, images, and tropes deserve closer scrutiny. Likewise, the role of theater in perpetuating narratives designed to exclude the lives and experiences of some while preserving entitlement and privilege for others must be examined precisely because the consequences of those stories are ongoing. If we – and here I mean white Anglo artists like I am – are troubled by epidemic sexual assault on college campuses or excessive use of force in our nation’s streets, then we must examine our part in perpetuating the old stories at the root of those present effects. The frontier narrative, even deployed in fun or fantasy, continues to condone the genocidal and ecocide project of U.S. expansion from first contact into the twenty-first century.
While the whole of U.S. history is implicated in this trajectory, this chapter deals with a key moment at the end of the nineteenth century, when the U.S. Census Bureau “closed” the frontier as the Anglo-identified nation sought to reposition as an international economic power. In 1893, Chicago’s Columbia Exposition celebrated a triumph of Anglo-Saxonism, with the United States positioned as the apex of its civilizing mission. Like a kind of Manifest Destiny theme park, the fairground’s “White City” bragged pseudo-classical architecture and outdoor carnivalesque fun that included Ferris’s great wheel that spun into the sky, taking spectators up-up-up over Lake Michigan to look down on the splendor of the city. Exposition spaces provided patrons with opportunities to view indigenous peoples and flora and fauna from throughout the colonized world, all on display as a testament to civilization’s evolutionary path: a narrative writ large in flesh and bone. The public could also witness the latest industrial accomplishments and ponder the marvels of modern mechanical invention, just as they could attend lectures by noted scientific and historical experts.
It was here that the up-and-coming historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” or “Frontier Thesis,” in which he described a national relationship with the land and shaped a collective imaginary about U.S. identity. The Turner thesis asserted who belonged and who did not and claimed a central place for the United States in the world as an emerging industrial capitalist nation (Turner 1956, 2–4). In 1890, the U.S. census had recently declared that the “frontier was closed,” a conclusion based on average population densities in the western states. For an audience assimilating this loss, Turner’s contention that the frontier lived on in the American mind had a strong attraction. The familiar personae of the “bad-boy hero” – who is buoyant, optimistic, irreverent, roughhewn, of the people, lawless by necessity, brutal, expedient, sexy, and, in short, the quintessential American male, who sang and danced at the center of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson – is a visage straight out of Turner’s thesis. Americans, Turner theorized, had been “compelled to adapt” to forces of wilderness, an encounter with the environment that propels the pioneer in reverse along a social evolutionary path to a “savage state,” where he “shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion” (2; see also Smith [1950], 150–160).
Turner (1956) asserted that the pioneer’s savagery is understood as the building blocks of a uniquely American identity. As he explained it in 1893, the quintessential American was gregarious, optimistic, lawless when necessity required, with an aptitude for and expectation of violence. American character, Turner theorized, arose out of the settlers/pioneers’ embodied encounter with the environment, in which he included indigenous resistance, fierce terrain, inclement weather, and wild animals (the elements theatricalized in the works discussed later). Turner posited that the critical role of the frontier in this process of transformation was predicated on its vast expanse of “free land” (1). There, Turner theorized, American pioneers honed their new identity as distinct from their European origins by regressing and then regenerating through an encounter with the wilderness. Turner asserted that “[l]ong before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away” (6). Rhetorically erasing thousands of diverse communities and cultures, he emptied the continent and conflated its indigenous human inhabitants with the wilderness (see, e.g., White [1994]). While the white pioneer can advance again from “the primitive economic and political condition of the frontier into the complexity of city life,” Turner maintained that indigenous peoples are fixed in the “primitive” state, conflated with the land itself, merely one of the savage forces with which the pioneer must contend. “The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel and thoughts. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization,” Turner argued (4). The American character could be distinguished from its European ancestry as a new species of man. Historians since then have pondered how a thesis of so little originality captured the Zeitgeist of how Americans understood themselves for, as Theodore Roosevelt mused (and as the discussion that follows shows), Turner had simply gathered together a lot of ideas floating around. Generations of Native and non-Native historians have actively rejected this framework for American history, demonstrating how it gave rhetorical support to imperialism and mapped its corrosive effect on popular imagination (see, e.g., Hofstadter [1944]; White [1993, 1994]; Limerick [1994]; Cronon [1996]; and Deloria [2004]).
The story Turner (1956) told was not new. These ideas had long been reflected in popular culture, propagated by stage plays and Wild West shows. The story’s elements – the pioneer setting out in a covered wagon, fighting the wilderness against all odds, clearing forest to build a small cabin, and violent encounters with indigenous warriors – were already familiar tropes in news reports, dime novels, melodramas, and visual art of the nineteenth century. In more recent decades, frontier iconography, and the implicit values it carries, has continued to saturate nearly every sector of mainstream U.S. culture (Limerick 1994). We have only to look at the figures of speech that saturate rhetoric used in some sectors of U.S. society to discuss sexual assault, or to defend white supremacists or corporate privilege, to see that everyday speech is haunted by the ubiquitous stories and images of leather stockings, log cabins, pioneers and covered wagons, cowboys and Indians, stagecoach holdups, gunfights, and endangered or compromised women, all encircled in a frightening yet sublime wilderness. Reinscribed and maintained through symbolic language, the frontier story is indicative of deeply ingrained ways of thinking and being – what environmental historian Patricia Nelson Limerick calls the “fly paper” of the [Anglo] American mind (94).2 Everyday euphemisms invoke frontieresque masculinity as casually as weather, as invisibly as wallpaper: a professional who pushes the edges of the status quo is a “pioneer,” “cowboy,” or “maverick”; a businessperson “wrangles a deal”; in life’s challenges, one can “play the cards you’re dealt,” “stake your claim,” “stick to your guns,” “play it fast and loose,” or “get outta Dodge” and “head for the hills” when “the chips are down.” These ubiquitous and seemingly harmless tropes contain implicit performances of gender, racial, and cultural privilege. They also imply an extractive relationship with the land and its ecological communities.
In what follows, I argue that the complex story-knot known collectively as the frontier has mythologized U.S. environmental imperialism as a “natural” evolutionary progression of Anglo-Saxon civilization, one that in turn shapes social norms, propagates structures of power and privilege, and informs the institutions and policies that affect shared ecological systems. Environmental sociologist J. M. Bacon (2019) argues that settler colonialism constitutes the foundational and precipitating origins of ecological destruction on a mass scale on this continent. Colonial ecological violence manifested first and foremost as intentional human-led annihilation of human cultures, communities, and nations, and then in the destruction of ecosystems and bioregions and, ultimately, global earth systems such as climate. As a theater-maker, as well as a citizen, I am particularly interested in how theater helped to propagate the ideas – as stories – that resulted in the long-term effects of settler colonialism on the ecologies of the continent. This chapter argues that theater has been complicit in sanctioning the frontier as an ecological ethos from which the destruction of people and lands ensues.
Thomas King writes, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2005, 8). We live by and within stories. “Stories are wondrous things,” King continues, and “they are dangerous” (9). Stories have marked the land and lives. As an artist of settler descent, I hope to encourage both increased cognizance of and responsibility for the power of the stories theater tells and has told. Engaging in a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the stories that have shaped mainstream U.S. culture thus becomes an integral part of the work entailed in apprehending environmental and environmental justice problems and solutions. Overall, this chapter aims to foster a frontier literacy with an eye toward promoting ‘ownership’ of these narratives, in such a way that artists (and others) might mindfully critique them with an awareness of their socio-ecological implications, as well as the power and privilege they inscribe and protect. By exposing the working elements of the frontier narrative, I hope that artists and readers of settler descent – myself included – might become more sensitive and discerning of the reach of this story, particularly in recognizing how its consistently reap-plied and recirculated tropes continue to sanction injury of land and peoples.
Setting the stage
Westward expansion was aided and executed by showmen as well as soldiers and settlers. In the nineteenth century, theatres were not only places of entertainment but also centers of community in which people met and mingled and spheres of influence intersected. Information about the “Far West” came to easterners, in part, through the supposedly true-to-life stories and personages that appeared on the melodrama stage. Theater played a vital role in popularizing ideas through stories and images about the west and in translating an ideology about western lands into stories that explained those territories to the east coast public. As American empire-building pushed farther west, frontier plays that claimed true-to-life escapades helped to justify and popularize ideologies of expansionism and imperialism. As ideology took on flesh through the visceral experience of live performance, theater became a weapon fired at the bodies, cultures, communities, and ecosystems of the land west of the Mississippi (White 1994, 10).
This chapter examines the connection between the social violence and the environmental violence in two emblematic productions – Augustin Daly’s Horizon (1978; see also Hall [2001], 38–43), which opened at New York’s Olympic Theatre in 1871, and William F. Cody’s The Wild West/Drama of Civilization, produced in 1886 and directed by Steele MacKaye at Madison Square Garden.3 Togeth...
