Introduction

3This essay reunites the traveling works on paper narratively as well as visually, in a digital gallery hosted by an Auburn University wordpress page. It further reconnects them to a variety of agents who collaborated in their production, circulation, and reception. In lieu of a unitary account of authorship, I treat the posters as multivocal elements of a broader assemblage of people and objects that connected the Indigenous Americas to France between the wars. Originating in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, assemblage is “a mode of ordering heterogeneous entities so that they work together for a certain time,” without sharing a common identity or intention (Müller 28; Deleuze and Guattari). My use is methodological as well as descriptive, indicating the reassembly of a scattered transnational archive to illuminate how disparate yet conjoined subjects and objects affected the conditions of possibility for Indigenous artists in the 1930s.

4As the bold, black letters of his name suggest, Coze sought to territorialize the commission, drawing the Studio School into his circle of French boy scouts and hobbyists alongside Native American performers in Paris. His activities built upon the well-known efforts of Dorothy Dunn, the fine arts instructor at the Studio School from 1932–1937, to define the new painting movement as wholly autochthonous, yet he shifted the work into a decidedly theatrical register. Approaching the commission as a fraught collaboration between Coze and the students allows me to both appraise and delimit the roles of colonial agents in dialogue with Native artists who are underrepresented in historical documents. Treating the posters themselves as privileged components of a transatlantic assemblage serves to further illuminate how they affected their material and social environments upon crossing the ocean. I show that the Studio School students answered Coze’s invitation to participate in the performance culture of Paris on their own terms, by engendering a dynamic interplay of text and images. The colorful figures played a kind of visual game with French audiences, as auratic paint pushed against, merged with, and occasionally leapt past machine-printed words to engage with the three-dimensional spaces of streets, museums, and stages.

7While the commission operated within colonial-capitalist frameworks, I maintain that a subtler politics did unfold on Coze’s stage. The French text—and by extension, context—opened new possibilities for exuberant movement that the students were already exploring in graphic form. Hailing primarily from the Southwest and Great Plains, Studio School attendees were born into communities variously displaced by nineteenth-century Indian removal policies, confined by white settlement, and controlled by federal assimilation policies. Amid colonial rupture, strict definitions of authenticity framed the emergence of a modern Native American painting movement. Elite white supporters in the United States sought a uniquely American tradition with deep roots in the past, a perspective supported by Dunn and federal agents of the “Indian New Deal” of the 1930s. Given this fraught legacy, a number of Native Studies scholars have privileged performance, particularly Wild West shows and other forms of ethnographic entertainment that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as “the most favourable site” (Phillips 27) for Native Americans to exercise agency and mobility in dire political times (Denzin; Flint; Graham and Penny). Art historian Ruth B. Phillips, for one, writes,

8In the early twentieth century, when visual fine arts were confined to static plastic and graphic forms, the added dimensions of performance – temporal, spatial, and vocal—offered better tools for Native intervention. The directness and immediacy of live performance confronted audiences with the fact of the Native performers’ contemporaneity and bodily co-presence. (27)

The “Indian Rome”: Coze’s Studio School Visit

10The makers of posters were among the first Native students to study at the Studio School, a painting program which opened at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932. <figure 2> According to a newsletter released in December of 1934, one month after Coze’s visit, some 456 students were enrolled at the Indian School, ranging in age from adolescence to their early twenties, representing 41 tribes from around the United States (Tegayo 2). Dunn additionally reported that more than 150 students took classes in the Studio School during the academic year 1934–1935 (277). Their work built on the achievements of an established generation of Pueblo painters such as Fred Kabotie, Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), and Tonita Pena (Quah Ah) in New Mexico (Bernstein and Rushing; Brody 1971; 1997; McGeough; Penney and Roberts), and Kiowa painters such as Stephen Mopope and Spencer Asah in Oklahoma in the 1910s and 1920s (Wyckoff). Dunn worked to institutionalize the earlier, ad hoc developments by formalizing instruction, securing federal sponsorship, and growing an international market. While the Santa Fe Indian School offered training in a range of mediums such as pottery and textiles, the Studio School was unique in promoting painting as a modern fine art sourced entirely from Indigenous traditions.

11Dunn’s description of the last-minute request for posters harnessed the anti-capitalist rhetoric that framed Native modernisms in the wake of the Great Depression. She wrote,

The students were asked to make broader, sketchier drawings for this purpose; however, many of the paintings were as nice as those sent on for the exhibit, and all were superior works, entirely beyond ordinary poster quality. During the two days of intensive and joyous activity, most of the students on campus came at some time to the Studio to see what was going on, and some even volunteered to try to help. This one experience, perhaps more than any of the many inspiring activities in the Studio, proved absolutely that modern paintings, springing from Indian tribal sources, could be done wholeheartedly, spontaneously, and without thought of monetary reward. The students had cheerfully made paintings before to give one another, to the school and to take home, yet never had there been such an immediately voluminous outpouring of artistic effort as for this unseen and practically unknown cause. It seemed to be an unpremeditated gesture of international goodwill. (281)

12Dunn’s emphasis on the students’ jovial naivety obscures the knowing manner in which they engaged with foreign text and by extension, new audiences. Construing their efforts as “without thought of monetary reward” stoked antimodernist desire for Native Americans to model traditional communal values that were threatened by industrial capitalism. She distinguished the students’ work as finely-made gifts, in contrast to the crass commercial function of “ordinary” posters.

13Dunn also spoke to the concerns of government reformers during the “Indian New Deal” of the 1930s. The opening of the Studio School heralded the temporary reversal of federal policies of assimilation that had dominated the national landscape for some five decades. Devastating losses of land, language, political authority, and ceremonial knowledge defined the reservation era, although not without substantial resistance from Native people. Some relief came when John Collier, Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1933–1945, ushered in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Although it was undermined ten years later, the new policy partially restored self-governance to Native nations and prohibited further allotment of their land (Deloria, Jr. 52-55). It also provided funding for economic development, including artistic and cultural ventures designed to support Indigenous self-reliance while bolstering New Deal nationalism.

15Coze’s appearance in this history prompts my reassessment of the Studio School through the lens of transatlantic performance culture. Answering Collier’s invitation to visit New Mexico for the first time, the founder of the French boy scouts met the students in November of 1934. He promptly deemed their school “the Indian Rome where Indian art has been born anew!” (Tegayo 1). Coze published accounts of the meeting in two French magazines and in his book, L’Oiseau-Tonnerre: Paysages et magie peaux-rouges (385-391). In “L’Art sauvera-t-il les Peaux-Rouges?” (Will Art Save the Redskins?) in ABC Magazine d’art in 1935, the Studio School is posited as an agent of salvation. Coze issued a devastating critique of the historical politics of assimilation in the United States and lavished praise upon Collier, the “apostle of this renaissance.” He supported Dunn’s argument that the paintings spontaneously sprung from tribal traditions. Yet the text is full of lavish flourishes that border on the fantastical:

Reestablishing confidence gives birth to wonders. I spent several days at the government Santa Fe Indian School. In the immense studio, Sioux, Navahos, Pueblos, Apaches, Kiowas fraternize in their search for art. At their desks, young boys and girls tap into wells of unknown dreams to find curious figures who bound into being under their brush, without sketching, or at least rarely, without hesitation, without models, as if by looking deep within they can draw on their memory for the familiar gestures, the rhythm of sacred dances, and all the evocative images of a past which suddenly explode, as do the oil wells on the land stolen from the Indians.
Redskin Art Today! (“L’Art” 177)

16Coze wrote with the flare of a circus master, transforming the students’ brushes into magicians’ wands that conjure “wonders” and “dreams” filled with “curious figures” that “bound” and eventually “explode” in a grand finale. His theatrical arc shifted Native modernisms away from the strict definitions of authenticity key to revivifying American nationalism and towards, I argue, a brand of knowing fantasy. Encouraging his readers to picture tempera paint exploding like an oil well, Coze drew attention to an exploitative system of capitalism that dispossessed Indigenous communities. Yet the effect was to heighten melodrama, not encourage political reflection. Immediately after, he translated the excitement into the exhibition title, “Art peau-rouge d’aujourd’hui !” His punctuation turned the pithy phrase into an advertising slogan.

20Houser’s galloping rider likewise navigated the commercial landscape of the twentieth-century. His well-known biography helps to contextualize the artistic choices that he shared with many unnamed Studio School colleagues. <figure 9> The artist was born on a farm in Oklahoma in 1914, following the release of his parents and other resistant Chiricahua Apaches from a twenty-seven-year prison term at the hands of the United States government (Rushing, 2004 32-34). He recalled, “We had a kerosene lamp out there on the farm and I would sketch horses, people, dogs, motorcycles, race cars, airplanes, and things like that. I didn’t have much of a traditional Indian background” (Rushing, 2004 13). Houser’s absorption of family narratives, as well as inspiration from books and magazines, led him to imagine vivid scenarios he never witnessed in person. The artist related,

[Dunn] would say, “Do something from the ceremonial dances of your tribe.” Well, I couldn’t do that so easily, because I came from the farm. That meant I had to create more, use more imagination. I thought of what my dad used to tell me. I was really familiar with some of the oldtimers who went through war with Geronimo […] Then I recreated the scenes in my art, imagining them as if they were happening right then while I was drawing or painting. (Perleman 112)

21While older relatives offered oral stories, popular culture provided visual props. The headdress worn by Houser’s rider was an honor intended for high-ranking men from select Plains nations who earned each feather. But thanks to Wild West shows and print culture, the war bonnet came to stand for Native people everywhere. In two additional unsigned posters, feather-crowned, portrait-like “Indian heads” of the sort discouraged by Dunn appear as central design elements (see A18 and A31).

22Framed by Coze’s theatrical sensibility, the poster commission put pressure on a paradox that existed at the Studio School from the beginning. Dunn’s expectation that the students arrive with “a fund of knowledge about tribal custom and ceremony” was, for many, a fantastical standard (305). The school was born out of decades of colonial displacement, assimilation, and struggles for tribal sovereignty; the path to the past was circuitous. Accordingly, the students regularly turned to popular culture cues, “oldtimers’” stories, the work of admired peers, and their own imaginations to generate the proof of origins that she sought. The posters furthermore attest that the artists occasionally ignored Dunn’s dictate in order to roam freely in subject and style. Coze, a consummate bricoleur, granted creative license to their wanderings and directed the outcomes toward new bodies and spaces abroad.

From Studio to Street: The Ludic Art of Posters

23Freed of the specific demands of bolstering American identity, the French poster commission introduced a number of distinctive challenges. In Poetics of the Poster, David Scott argued that the internationally popular form of the poster was aligned with modernist investigations into the hybrid potential of text and image. While the poster format was hardly new, neighborly relations between pictures and words gave way to new entanglements in the first decades of the twentieth century. Scott explained that by exchanging characteristics or locations, “word and image follow a double logic, one that is both syntactical and pictorial, textual and visual” (13). This new “rhetoric of the poster” had everything to do with its advertising function. To seduce a passerby to first look, then identify, remember, purchase and/or visit, image-text collaborations had to deliver messages with an economy of means that matched the accelerated pace of urban life and stole attention from the clutter of competition. <figure 10> Scott discussed this seduction as a game that draws a viewer into a play of image-text associations, testing her cultural savvy through punning, metaphor, metonymy, or contrast. It is by offering this “ludic pleasure that the poster draws from the observer a certain commitment to the message” (14).

24The egalitarian relationship between word and image was complicated by the two-step production of the Studio School posters; first, the printed French text, then the hand-painted picture. The layout of the text also predetermined its separation from the image to come. Lines of letters framed a conspicuous swath of unarticulated space in the center of the page, as a pointed directive to decorate, here. In this way, the text declared a certain authority over the image, not unlike that which Dunn attempted to exercise over Native students and Coze marshalled in his hobbyist circle abroad. Temporal and spatial disunity was compounded by a material differential: while repetitious printed text signaled what Walter Benjamin famously called the “era of mechanical reproduction,” linking it to the advent of photography, cinema, and the commodity form, tempera paint clung to the aura of the singular mark (221). Combined with recognizably Indigenous imagery, painting risked confirming arguments by Dunn, Collier and others for an authentic, anti-commercial art with ties to the past. Finally, there was a foreign language challenge. As it is unlikely that many of the Studio students were fluent in French, the savvy so integral to the success of advertising images was tested by a gap in translation. Were the students able to play the seduction game while distanced from French text that had already claimed its priority on the page? Could such seemingly disparate forms be reconciled on the same plane?

25The feathered lance held aloft by Houser’s bareback rider hints at some students’ will to work across temporal, spatial, material, and linguistic gaps. The thickness of the object is designated by two parallel brown lines punctuated by feather forms, which meet to form the tip of a lance. From even a short viewing distance the lines cohere into a single, bold, straight dash. Still visible at the front end is a soft pencil marking likely laid with the help of a straight-edged device. While the lance underscores Coze’s name just above, it also echoes the black line that bisects the page at the top of the poster. No longer does text corral the image; now, painted and printed lines work together to frame the text. Borrowing from the logic of the surrounding graphics, the rider at once occupies his space on the page and conceptually moves upward, into the printed field. But of course, the lance cannot leave the rider behind, or he would go to hunt empty-handed. Instead, it marks a frontier where foreign text and painted rider converge. It is the pictorial equivalent of what Mary Louise Pratt has famously termed a contact zone, a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (34). If, as others have established, colonial authority was exercised over Studio School pupils, the painted products of the classroom are key to understanding how the students met, confirmed, contested, or teased the authority of those frameworks. In Houser’s figure, the lance sutures word and image to claim equal priority for the latter. In this way, belated paint met print on its own terms.

26The regular appearance of such borderline elements in the extant posters indicates the students’ pictorial savvy when faced with unfamiliar signs. While a detailed study of all sixty-one objects is beyond the scope of this essay, my chosen examples underscore common strategies that the students employed to wrestle with the constraints of the central image space. Many artists composed elements that mimicked the printed letters and lured them out of line. In an unattributed painting, the edge of a yellow tipi flap aligns with and nearly touches the vertical length of the L in Paul Coze’s name, effectively extending the geometry of the text downward and into the triangular color field. <figure 11> A spray of black sticks protrudes from the opening on top, forming a sharp V that entices L and C to dip from their rigid location into the representational elements below.

28Other students overwhelmed the text with compelling compositions that took up more than their allotted space. In a particularly striking example mentioned previously, the artist centered a representational profile with headdress inside of a circular “window” of bare cream paper, framed by bright abstract triangles in a symmetrical, interlocking motif. <figure 13> The jagged edges of the shape spread horizontally past the edges of the text, stretching toward the borders of the page. The vivid geometric mass fills the poster with jewel-like colors, rendering bold text suddenly diminutive. But the juxtaposition of the delicately rendered “Indian head” calls for a shift in viewers’ attention, back to the cream surface of the paper and towards the intimate, detailed world of a miniature portrait. These cleverly managed shifts in subject, style, and scale are wholly engrossing, crowding out the comparatively banal act of reading words.

30Faced with the possibility that the identity of Coze and “his” exhibition will eclipse that of the unnamed painters, this and other diverse maneuvers seem aimed less at overtly undermining authority than playing with the terms of its enunciation. Indeed, there is reason to doubt the signifying sway of the text over non-francophone painters who encountered the words first and foremost as graphic elements. Students could assuage the strangeness of the printed language by drawing its elements into their own games of visual punning. As images merged with text or pushed past it, the artists developed a visual language that enabled what Scott called a “reciprocal exchange” between disparate graphic and cultural elements. The paint teased the text’s pretense to point elsewhere, to stand in for the “real” power of man or institution, while claiming space for additional meanings and unexpected relationships to unfold.

32Cropped from their shared pictorial space by the abrupt edge of the page, horse, rider, and buffalo opened up to their real-time conditions of display by inviting any number of activities to transpire in the space between. While Scott’s analysis restricted image-text relations to the page, the posters comingled with other objects and bodies in crowded urban spaces. René Salanon has stated that “the street, in its vast open-air museum, offers to all the publics the endless vistas of pictures hung along its walls and fences” (n.p.). As André Breton, Walter Benjamin, and other period writers explored, the industrial cityscape jumbled past and present, high and low, near and far (Benjamin, 2002; Breton). With an eye for marvelous juxtapositions, Breton prescribed near daily walks for members of his Surrealist circle in the 1920s and 1930s. In the words of art historian Louise Tythacott, they wandered hoping “for unexpected, novel associations, for the discovery of objects torn from one set of circumstances and thrown into another” (37). In the jumble of windows and arcades, all that was “old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse” in hierarchies of bourgeois taste were given new life through “chance encounters” with discerning viewers (Breton 52). Avant-garde writers and artists saw the assemblage of the streets as a form of everyday resistance to the capitalist imperatives of modern nation-states. They hoped to unleash a fantastical imagination in resistance to rationalized industrialization, by locating vignettes for an alternative framework of lateral, non-instrumental relations. Houser seems to have anticipated this varied landscape, and his horseman rode to meet it.

From Street to Stage: Native Performances

35These tendencies were already on view in Coze’s exhibition, Peaux-Rouges d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, which opened at the MET in May 1931. The predecessor to Art peau-rouge d’aujourd’hui, the comparatively extensive displays surveyed material culture and Coze’s own watercolors from his trips to western Canada. Parisians could walk among Native-garbed mannequins peopling tableaus of canoes, tipis and horses. A comparison of two installation photographs serves to underscore the theatrical nature of this purportedly “ethnographic” exhibition. <figures 19 & 20> The first reveals a figure in headdress and hide clothing who raised a horse whip, establishing his role as a prophetic leader in a circle of five other blanketed and befeathered men. Ostensibly dioramic—the buffalo skull sitting on a ledge in the foreground makes the point—the close-up framing, narrative pose, and chiaroscuro lighting nonetheless transformed static figures into lively performers. A second photograph zooms out to show us the stage on which the action unfolded. <figure 20> The scene was housed in an alcove in the temporary exhibition walls, surrounded by comparatively staid framed images, hanging textiles, and glass cabinets filled with objects. A low step in front of the display breaks the spatial division separating theater from exhibition, inviting visitors to elevate themselves into the drama or conversely, imagine that the mannequin-actors might step down to walk among them.

36An accompanying film that shared the exhibition’s title purported to document Coze’s Musée d’ethnographie-sponsored expedition to western Canada, “shot entirely on site and seeking above all to be ‘true.’” The program for the opening night of May 30, 1932 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris nonetheless indicates that Coze employed Native men in Canada to stage scenes of wars, buffalo hunts and sweat lodges (“Peaux rouges”). In a private letter to his producer, the French director Jacques de Baroncelli, Coze revealed his willingness to fill in the gaps in the Canadian footage, promising that “in a few days in the studio with some Scouts and all the costumes and props that I possess, we can fake it” (Letter to Jacques de Baroncelli). He eschewed documentary truth claims altogether when writing and directing another Baroncelli project in 1934, a romantic drama featuring a Yakima performer, Charlie Oskomon, opposite Dao, an actress of Asian descent. While no known footage survives, a photographic still reveals Oskomon waving what appears to be a raven rattle from the Northwest Coast over the prostrate, bare-breasted body of Dao in the role of an “Indian princess.” <figure 21> The exhibition and films were equally host to Coze’s ample fictions. They set the stage for the entry of painted dancers and riders that peopled the companion exhibition, Art peau-rouge d’aujourd’hui, in 1935.

37Coze was always ready to join the act. Numerous photographs show the Frenchman dressed in iconic regalia he collected among Plains communities, including a regal eagle-feather headdress, a bone ribbed breastplate, and elaborately beaded hide pants and moccasins. To complete the identity of a Plains chief, he froze with a pipe raised to his lips or bow stretched ready to shoot an arrow. While dramatic studio lighting and heavy sepia toning could not mask his fair skin, Coze adopted an intense gaze that mirrored the stoic Indian poses conventional in period photographs. Philip Deloria, in a classic study of the long history of “playing Indian,” linked adoption of stereotypical Native garb and other identity markers by Anglo impersonators to the strengthening of American national identity. Modern yearnings for authenticity and natural purity assuaged the rapid social, technological and political change that the country experienced in the twentieth century (1999 103). Speaking of the founder of scouting in America, Deloria wrote that “mimetic Indian play conferred a particular kind of authentic reality on Ernest Thompson Seton in his headdress and breechcloth,” helping him to channel hard-to-access authenticity to the next generation of American youths (1999 121). Through communications with Seton, Coze modeled the French boy scouts after the Americans, channeling the primitivist ideals of hardy, outdoor survival to his young charges in Paris (Dubois 29). Yet Coze indulged a level of theatricality that shifted his Indian masquerades away from the strict definitions of authenticity key to revivifying American nationalism and toward, I argue, a brand of knowing fantasy.

38His effusive personality notwithstanding, Coze was an agent of the broader culture of interwar Paris. In a famous speech at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in 1932, French writer Paul Valéry described a fundamentally contradictory landscape: “Never has humanity joined so much power and so much disarray, so much anxiety and so many playthings, so much knowledge and so much uncertainty” (140). Two years later, while the “playthings” prospered in the cabarets, cinemas, and circus, the streets of Paris became the staging ground for a veritable civil war. Riots broke out across the city in response to Republican government scandals and depression-era suffering. Although the violence peaked in 1934, suspicion, greed, and radical politics continued to split the country (Large 23-58). Notably, the culture wars of everyday Paris included widespread anxieties about rates of immigration from French colonial territories in Africa and the Caribbean. Critics and artists such as André Levinson and Paul Morand saw the explosive popularity of jazz as evidence of a dangerous rise of black subaltern power and the decline of “the European spirit” (Blake 86; 89). Often blurring the distinction between African American entertainers and African immigrants, French audiences interpreted Josephine Baker’s gyrating, banana-ringed body at the famous La Revue nègre as an expression of the liberating or threatening barbarism of Africa (Berliner 1-3; Blake 85-6; 91-2; Burt 77).

39Less frequent images of American Indians did not seem to provoke the same suspicions. The French relinquished the last of their colonial holdings in North America with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and largely turned their attentions to Africa and Southeast Asia. Amnesia ensued, permitting a cultural attitude of innocence towards Native Americans that anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has broadly termed “imperialist nostalgia” (Rosaldo 107-8). U.S. Indian removal and the establishment of reservations helped to produce a French discourse of pacified Natives, even as the stereotyped figure of the warrior was mobilized to new ends abroad. As Dominique Kalifa has explored, the name “Apache” carried connotations of resistance to normative civilization into the twentieth century in France. It was alternatively appropriated to denigrate criminal threats to the Republic and laud a home-grown brand of political radicalism (37). Notably, those attempting to wean the public off its dangerous jazz obsession promoted a waltz known as the “Apache” in the city’s cabarets beginning in 1910 (Malnig 10). Borrowing from turn-of-the-century street gangs of the same name, the dance staged a violent encounter between domestic lovers or a prostitute and her pimp. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Apache was proudly lauded as a dance of Paris’s “native savages” who were busy exploring the city’s own wilderness, suggesting that the term became deeply entangled with constructions of interwar French nationalism (Blake 105). The conditions were ripe for Coze to imagine Paris as a liberating frontier for Native Americans suffering policies of confinement and assimilation in the United States—a vision that Native artists both claimed and bent to their own ends.

40In particular, Indigenous performers seeking fame and reinvention abroad were willing to flatter the Frenchman’s Indian antics. The celebrated Mohawk dancer Esther White Deer sent a telegram from New York in December 1934 that bore the message, “Wishing you a bon voyage depending on you to make me the star of paris let me hear from you soon heap much regards to oskomon” [sic] (Correspondence with Paul Coze). White Deer likely met Coze during her French tour in 1929 (Phillips 156), as well as Charlie Oskomon, a self-identified Yakima performer who came to Paris with a travelling circus that same year. When word of Art peau-rouge d’aujourd’hui reached New York in 1935, “Princess Atalie, America’s Foremost Cherokee Prima Donna” (Atalie Unkalunt), an artist and founder of the Society of the First Sons and Daughters of America, crafted a letter to Coze full of insistent longing:

I have noticed by several papers that you planned the American Indian Exhibition of Art that now graces your Museum and city with posters of our native art, created by our boys and girls, mainly of the Southwest.

I can never begin to tell you how sorry I am because you did not have some of my art objects for such an exhibition […]

Perhaps some future date will bring me to Paris as a concert singer and artist of my people. Now, it is to be regretted that I am not there, not only to sing the songs of my ancestors, but to assist you with interpretations of our art at the exhibition.

When you return to America, please call and see me at my wigwam in New York.

Aboriginally yours,

Princess Atalie (Unkalunt, Letter to Paul Coze)

41While the Princess was angling for an invitation, the New York-trained Penobscot dancer Molly Spotted Elk (1903–1977) made her own way to Paris by dancing with the US Indian Band at the International Colonial Exposition in May of 1931. Dreams of the city preceded her. She wrote in her diary in New York in 1929, “If only one could dance solely for art! Maybe someday I will have that chance, if not in America, then in Europe” (McBride 128). A signed photograph in the Frenchman’s personal collection, sent prior to her departure to Paris, bears the lavish compliment, “To Paul Cose, under whose fair skin there beats the heart of an Indian. –Molly Spotted Elk, 1930 [sic].” <figure 22>

42Coze found his most willing accomplice in Oskomon. The performer stayed on in Paris to become a prominent singer and dancer in Cercle d'études Wakanda, donning Coze’s Indian collection and making public appearances with the boy scouts (Coze 1929). His career was managed and paid for by Madame Clement, a French composer enamored of “things Indian,” and he lived comfortably in an apartment that Spotted Elk described as “big enough for a soirée” (McBride 165). But it was Coze, not Oskomon, who authored his biography:

• 18 “Green Corn” was Coze’s translation of “Oskomon.”

It is natural enough, for an introduction, to begin like a Fairy tale […] Once upon a time, there was in Paris a painter who […] met an Indian the very day when this one was thinking of leaving Paris where he had just arrived. This Indian was Oskomon who, then in a circus, sang some American popular songs on horseback […]

I remember the very first evening he came to my studio, I was just back from America and I asked him to sing the Indian songs which filled with musing thoughts the hours I had spent sitting near the camp fires.

Oskomon was abashed. He confessed he did not know anything about such songs. He had been too much used to hearing himself scoffed at for being an Indian in America, and it had been the same thing in Europe. Perhaps he did feel inwardly how shallow a jazz he was playing with himself, because white people had obliged him to do so. I did not make any speech to him. He found out quite by himself the awakening of his being.

One thing only perhaps helped with the beginning of what became his real life. That very evening, I took a tam-tam I had taken back with me, I gave it to him and I asked him to try and remember. […] He took the tam-tam and never gave it back to me. But a few days after, when I saw him in a small room in which he lived in a hotel on rue Pigalle, I heard, from behind the door, that my tam-tam had found life again and that Oskomon’s heart was already beating its old rhythm.

Oskomon began working. The sound of the tam-tam scared away the remembrance of his American education and gave birth again to the old Indian songs which had lulled his childhood. I advised him he should be only an Indian and never try to do what white people did. He soon showed he first was an interpreter, then a creator, and lastly an artist in his successes and even in his faults.

Paris seemed to favor him with its vivifying air, its curiosities, its intelligent sympathies, its artistic forces which make it the birthplace of art and the crucible of thought […]

The “Green Corn” soon attacked the Parisian Public in the manner of a genuine Indian War chief (Oskomon and Coze 8-10).18

43Coze’s sentimental “fairy tale” introduced a bilingual book of twenty-two poems published by Wakanda in 1936, illustrated by Coze, and supposedly authored by Oskomon. The poems bore titles such as “A Warrior,” “Sacred Pipe,” “The Life of a Navaho Blanket,” and, perhaps most curiously of all, “Hopi Prayer at Sea.” While it is unclear if Oskomon ever visited Diné or Hopi communities, it is certain that Coze knew well the differences between cultural groups in the land-locked Southwest and the coastal Northwest, where the Yakima reside. He must have assumed that his Parisian public wouldn’t know these subtleties, or, perhaps more to the point, that they did not care. Oskomon was invited to the stage not to provide an education in authentic Indian identity, but rather to inspire the hopes and imaginations of a public inundated by “so much anxiety and so many playthings.” Importantly, Coze’s tale features contemporary Paris, not Yakima lands, as a central protagonist in Oskomon’s nativist “return.” In the midst of political crisis in France, the city’s “vivifying air and intelligent sympathies” peeled aside his corrupt American education, inspiring his heart to begin “beating its old rhythm.” <figure 23> Coze molded Oskomon’s biography into a potent analogy for the durability of French society in the wake of economic turmoil and the spread of fascism. While culturally authentic Indians may have been a linchpin of American national identity in the same period, Coze recognized that the French were content to glean aphoristic meaning from their dealings with all things Native American.

44A rare gramophone recording of Oskomon singing “Chants Populaires Indiens” at the Université de Paris Institut de Phonétique in 1931 can give us a sense of what Parisians might have heard during an evening of performance. In “Ti-Pi-Lonesome (Chant d’amour),” Oskomon manages a baritone vibrato as he covers the Western musical scale punctuated by an occasional drumbeat. <audio 1> The English words “Oh my tipi lonesome” are mixed with nonsense syllables similar to jazz vocalists singing scat. Like the “Indian operas” popular in the United States in the early twentieth century, the song features what Deloria called “the sound of Indian.” While much Indigenous music presented challenges to transcription because it did not conform to a Western musical scale, composers and musicians translated songs into a melancholic minor key for the stage. In this manner, they familiarized foreign sounds to meet the expectations of a non-Native audience accustomed to hearing opera and jazz (2004 183-223). “Chant de guerre,” in contrast, forgoes melodic accommodation. <audio 2> Fast-paced drumming and rough-edged utterances of “heya” without a guiding key are punctuated by high-pitched staccato yells. Two voices are evident on this track; the second, which chimes in solely to holler with abandon, is surely that of Coze. It seems that if “Green Corn” attacked the Parisian public “in the manner of a genuine war chief,” the Frenchman was right at his side.

45

46“Ti-Pi-Lonesome (Love Song),” Popular Indian Chants (Chants populaires Indiens), Chief Oskomon with Paul Coze, Université de Paris, Institut de Phonétique, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, AP2078, n. X 9093, 03 Face A. 

47

48“War Chant,” Popular Indian Chants (Chants populaires Indiens), Chief Oskomon with Paul Coze, Université de Paris, Institut de Phonétique, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, AP2078, n. X 9094, 04 Face B.

49The duet by Coze and Oskomon is a performative counterpart to the posters. In the latter, the Frenchman’s ubiquitous name similarly merged with the students’ handiwork to play their parts in concert. The pre-printed posters functioned like a theatrical stage, on which the figures of hunters, warriors, and dancers moved and intermingled. Across Parisian streets, museums, magazines, circuses, and nightclubs, sights and sounds of “Indian” were heterogeneous and in motion. For Coze’s Native associates, this proliferation of signs doubled as an invitation to participate in an expanded, elected set of relationships amid the physical and ideological confines of the reservation era.

Spotted Elk, Surrealism, and Anticolonialism

51The Colonial Exposition of 1931 was a fraught ticket to freedom for Spotted Elk. The sprawling six-month spectacle worked to convince over seven million visitors from around the world of the benign successes of France’s imperial efforts, especially in Africa and Southeast Asia, while hiding the realities of growing political unrest in the colonies. Other participating nations, including the United States, similarly exercised their power over colonized subjects by staging veritable human “zoos,” comprised of architectural renderings of Indigenous huts and villages. Ethnographic displays were augmented by programs of music and dance (McBride 153).

52Instead of applauding Spotted Elk and the rest of the Indian Band, members of the Surrealist circle headed by Breton launched a vehement critique of the events. Members circulated two manifestos calling for a boycott of the Exposition and the “immediate evacuation of the colonies,” joined forces with the Communist Ligue anti-impérialiste to stage a counter-exhibition, La vérité sur les colonies (The Truth about the Colonies), and distributed tracts in working-class, immigrant districts where anticolonial activity persisted underground (Morton 100; Stansell 117). The violence of World War I radicalized an international avant-garde, leading some to invert colonial hierarchies that posited Europeans as culturally superior to those they colonized (117-18). The Surrealists’ approach blended opposition to bourgeois, capitalist French culture, desire to access alternative cultural and spiritual systems, and political support for those they deemed oppressed. Their agenda by definition excluded Spotted Elk, Oskomon, Houser, and other Native artists, who sampled from the very expressions of transatlantic modernity deemed suspect by avant-garde manifestos.

53As Bunny McBride has emphasized, the Indian Band was called upon to demonstrate “the cultural progress of the Indians” (153) in keeping with paternalistic U.S. narratives embraced by Dunn at the Studio School. The sixteen male members played the Star Spangled Banner and popular jazz tunes wearing Plains headdresses and “full war paint” in front of a full-scale replica of Mt. Vernon (158). U.S. newspapers lauded the “picturesque” accompaniment of Princess Spotted Elk, “a university girl [who] interpreted in her dances […] centuries of joys and sorrows of the Red Man” (156). She was “a pretty girl playing the tom tom” and “a dancer of great talent” (158). At once patronizing and admiring, the accounts suggest the contradictory array of stereotypes and opportunities offered Spotted Elk as she navigated distinct nationalisms on the brink of a new life abroad. In a lengthy account published in the Portland Sunday Telegram in 1931, she pointedly ignored the vestiges of U.S. colonialism that framed her participation, preferring to underscore the Exposition as “a tribute to the power of the French.” She wrote ecstatically of her encounters with “the wonders of the world,” which she found “dazzling, crude, bizarre, fantastic, grotesque, stately, modern and primitive” (“Beautiful Maine Princess”). The list of adjectives mirrored Coze’s ready embrace of hyperbole and contradiction, while foreshadowing the hybrid performances and posters that would populate Parisian streets, museums, and stages in subsequent years.

56Indigenous artists’ embrace of such opportunities placed them at odds with the aesthetic and political program of the Surrealists, who were active in many of the same contexts during this period. While Native Americans did not figure into the Surrealist’s immediate critique of French colonialism, their art was incorporated into an avant-garde valorization of marvelous objects that more often included works from Oceania, Africa and Mesoamerica. Although North American material culture was relatively difficult to acquire, Breton’s circle read the reports of the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology, cheaply available in French bookstores after WWI. In the early 1930s art dealer Charles Ratton exhibited rare Yup’ik and Northwest Coast masks that he acquired cheaply from the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Katsina tithu—small wooden carvings of spiritual beings given to Hopi children and, by the 1880s, made for sale to outsiders (Pearlstone)—could be found among the jumbled collections of the Trocadéro, augmented by collecting trips made by Breton, Aragon and Éluard to London. Prior to Coze’s first trip to the Southwest, these figures appeared alongside Mesoamerican sculptures and contemporary paintings in Yves Tanguy et objets d’Amérique at the Galerie Surréaliste in 1927; by 1936, Native American carvings were fully integrated in the Exposition surréaliste d’objets (Cowling 66). <figure 26> In a Preface to the 1927 catalogue, Breton described the visual qualities of “dolls of New Mexico,” writing, “In the crenellate headdress you find clouds on the mountain, in the center of this small checkerboard a little ear of corn; a rainbow around the mouth; in the vertical striations of the dress, the rain falling in the valley” (Maurer 547-8). In the expressive conjoining of wood, paint and feathers, Breton located a kinship with, and inspiration for, a Surrealist aesthetic that, in James Clifford’s words, “values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions” (540). The Surrealists admired the hybridity of old, exotic objects—so long as they appeared unsullied by Europe.

57Like Coze, Spotted Elk, and Oskomon, the Surrealists—both members of Breton’s circle and dissidents like Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris—participated in programs in and around the MET. Bataille wrote for the catalogue of the museum’s first exhibition of Mesoamerican art in 1928, worked with Riviere to publish the interdisciplinary journal Documents, and attended lectures by Mauss at the Institut d’ethnologie alongside Spotted Elk. Among his multifaceted activities, Leiris accompanied the famous Dakar-Djibouti expedition (1931–1933) that culminated in an important exhibition at the Trocadéro for which Spotted Elk consulted (Clifford 544). At some point, the Surrealists must have seen Spotted Elk on stage or in Rivet’s office, heard Oskomon’s operatics in the halls of the Institut d’ethnologie, read Coze’s theatrical word play in the mainstream l’Illustration, or stumbled upon a poster during a flight of flânerie. Although the ethnographic institutions acted as meeting halls for a diverse set of interests, Coze’s circle and that of the Surrealists seemed to pass through different doors. Avant-garde artists and writers did not collaborate with Coze, nor embrace the work of the contemporary Native painters and performers he promoted.

58I attribute their apparent disconnection to fundamentally incompatible visions of where Indigenous arts belonged within a broader story of colonial modernity. While the Surrealists’ own aesthetic practices invited impure cultural mixing consonant with the streets and stages, their fetishization of colonized peoples’ cultural difference led back to the trap of dualism they set out to avoid. Louise Tythacott joins other critics in arguing that they merely inverted, rather than destroyed, their own cultural conventions: “The devalued is revalued, but always in terms of existing European hierarchies of taste, place and position” (41). In their abhorrence of elite French culture, Breton’s circle in particular constructed Native America as its antithesis, a spiritual refuge free of capitalist doctrine. The Surrealists thereby extricated their aesthetic sensibilities and political commitments from the density of colonial histories, which had long reshaped the cultures in question and occasioned the arrival of Native subjects and objects on their doorstep. This relegation of Indigenous arts to a space outside of industrial modernity echoed the impossible ideal of authenticity enforced by Dunn’s curriculum and associated constructions of American national identity in the same era. Contemporary posters and performances—evidence of Native artists’ associations with popular entertainment and the upper echelons of French society—were tainted by the very bourgeois culture that the Surrealists sought to escape.

59Their loyalties rooted in patron circles and popular performance venues, neither Coze, Oskomon, nor Spotted Elk took a vocal stand against French colonialism. <figure 27> Indeed, Coze’s admiration for Paris’s “vivifying air and intelligent sympathies,” Oskomon’s dependence upon wealthy patrons, and Spotted Elk’s affirmation of France as a refuge from U.S. racism indulged French nationalism in a manner opposed by the politically trenchant avant-garde. Still, when Spotted Elk performed the Charleston alongside a “corn dance,” and Oskomon and Coze indulged a duet of war whoops, they reassembled incongruous signifiers in a manner akin to a Surrealist collage (Adamowicz). Likewise, when the makers of posters sutured imagery of tipis, headdresses, hunters, and dancers to the French text and the flux of urban Paris, they engendered a provocative form of play normally associated with the radical agenda of the Parisian artistic elite.

60As this study of posters and performances with Coze’s name attached has revealed, there was more room in interwar Paris for Native artists as contemporaries, present and actively shaping the cityscape, than Surrealist manifestos suggest. This was perhaps most true when such evocations fell outside of France’s immediate colonial purview, and did not directly challenge the country’s increasingly fragile grasp on international power. Despite Coze’s outspoken critiques of federal Indian policy and history, the Studio School painters saw few overt professional or political returns from the poster commission. While performers such as Spotted Elk and Oskomon competed for refuge and reinvention in France, the painters were pressed to navigate an altogether different political climate shaped by U.S. colonialism, including legacies of Indian removal, assimilation, and New Deal reform. Nonetheless the students’ will to stretch a variety of enclosures—from Dunn’s paternalistic curriculum, to Coze’s outsized name, to the strictures of avant-garde primitivism—is made palpable in the poster commission of 1935. By teasing the borders of text and paper with paint, they claimed the entangled spaces of a city that most would never see. By reconnecting the painters and performers in Coze’s far flung circle, we can trace “a sense of the Native presence in early twentieth-century art history” (Phillips 29) across a dichotomy of static images and mobile bodies. Indigenous artists traded forceful anticolonial critique for a capacious creative arena, operating within, yet pushing the edges of, a modernity that had yet to make room for both.

Coda

62Like other Studio School peers, the unidentified artist did not limit the design to the space between lines of text. Instead, she attached a tricolor cloud motif to the “horizon” of the printed black line at the top of the poster, echoing the stylized depictions of landforms and weather found on Pueblo pottery. The curve of a white semi-circle at the center of the motif pushes like a pillow against the bottom of the “Hi” in “Histoire,” while the longest of the black vertical lines signifying rain fall straight into the “u” of “peau-rouge.” Now the printed letters also seem to drip, as if the ink was whetted and turned back into liquid. Painted during the Easter holiday following a period of intensive assimilation, including federal bans on Indigenous dancing, the symbolic gesture of sending rainfall to France could hardly be construed as “unpremeditated” (Dunn 281). Engendering an interplay of painted figures and printed words, the artist enlarged the performance culture of Paris—indeed, the whole scope of transatlantic modernity—to accommodate the worldly address of Hopi spirituality and aesthetics.