Haoles, Gussiks, and Gringos

Jay Caldwell

10 April 2009

[Kudos for Indians in Unexpected Places. I love the subject. I am envious of Deloria’s writing style—a kind of combination of reporting, research, memoir, and analysis. I am fully on board with his thesis that in order to understand the genesis and impact of stereotypes you have to understand the history/genesis of those representations and the agenda of those presenting them. ]

During this past week one of my favorite academic journals arrived in my post box: The Journal of Sport History and serendipitously this Summer, 2008, issue (yes, that is the most current and our library carries it: GV561.J6 @3C) is a themed forum on “Indigenous Sport.” Great stuff, and it dovetails perfectly with Deloria’s chapter, “Athletics.” One selection in this JSH, by Courtney W. Mason, titled “The Construction of Banff as a ‘Natural’ Environment: Sporting Festivals, Tourism, and Representations of Aboriginal Peoples,” is also relevant to Deloria’s chapter “Representation.” In this paper Mason details how the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian government, and several local entrepreneurs envisioned, then developed the eastern slope of the Rockies as a tourist Mecca, originally for the elite European and eastern U.S. traveler, then, once a “carriage road” was blazed in 1914, for the middle class. Banff’s most promising selling point was its “naturalness,” a term which connoted not just untrammeled pristine beauty (meaning the absence of visible evidence of “productive sites of labor and subsistence land use practices” [223]: no mining, timbering, or farming), but also the presence of (pacified) Indians, or Aboriginal peoples, as the Canadians say. But not just any Indians would do, they would have to exhibit “pre-colonial” Indian-ness. This paper describes, in detail, exactly how this all came to pass.

From here Mason undertakes to demonstrate the “problematics” of this tourist-“nature”-Indian interface. She offers several insightful observations about the forces in play:

· “cultural festivals organized by dominant agents or institutions that control some aspects of cultural representations may share a performance discourse that often stands in contrast or opposition to the ways communities may stage themselves” (after Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 230-1).

· “…when tourist productions are consumed almost entirely by one dominant cultural group and that same group also controls some of the means of production, representations of Indigenous peoples can often reinforce racist stereotypes as they are in some ways designed to simulate consumers’ expectations of Indigenous groups and meet market demands to satisfy the tourism industry” (after Edward Bruner, 231)

· “access to space and the spaces themselves are the most powerful aspects of controlling representation of any tourism production” (after Edward Bruner, 231)

· “Homogenous labels support offensive and even racist stereotypes regarding Aboriginal peoples by glossing over the diversity of North American Indigenous languages and cultural groups.” (after Beatrice Medicine, 231)

These texts got me thinking about a variety of “tourist” experiences I have had and how the institutionally-imposed and -reinforced representations have long seemed to me hollow, but hollow based on some insider knowledge to which I was privy.

Consider the Hawaiian “spirit of aloha.” There is no need for me to delve too deeply into the picture we have of smiling, brown-skinned, maidens hula dancing and of airport leis and kisses on the cheek by these same smiling, brown-skinned, maidens. The problem I have with this is that my wife and I lived on Oahu for a year (1970-1971) while I did a pediatric internship at Kauikeolani Children’s Hospital and she taught in high school. I got to see these same once-smiling, brown-skinned, maidens at 2:00 am in the hospital emergency room where under the pressures of fatigue, darkness, perhaps some alcohol and/or weed, poverty, and fear there was no longer even a semblance of “aloha spirit” in evidence. There was anger, spite, humorlessness, shabbiness, disorderliness, and even physical rebellion directed at the hospital staff and/or at an amorphous “them,” which I took to refer to the haoles (Caucasians). Although the term “Hawaiian” is officially reserved for locals who can trace their ancestry back to people who were resident (indigenous) when the missionaries arrived in 1820, outsiders call everyone in Hawaii who seems to have some sort of Polynesian appearance (i.e. smiling, brown-skinned maidens) a Hawaiian. There is, today, a fairly vigorous pro-“Hawaiian” movement that has resulted in widespread advancement of indigenous rights, especially the rights of land use and ownership. Even Hawaii now is officially Hawai’i. Despite all this, the tourism industry still has its agenda and foremost is that it is a paradise for outsiders to visit. The unstated message is: we’ll fulfill pretty much any fantasy you desire (golf, “nature,” culture, beaches, weather), but you have to agree to three things: stay in assigned areas and don’t go wandering off, spend your money freely, then leave.

After our year in Lanikai we moved to Kotzebue, Alaska, deep in the heart of Eskimoland, or so we envisioned, where I was to be a doctor and my wife a school teacher (how about that for stereotypical white liberal paternalism). Every summer we noticed standard schoolbuses full of tourists being driven up and down our only street, barely a mile long , dropped off at the museum near the airport, then whisked away on the daily Wein jet (that had brought them in, several hours earlier[1]). I noticed that the drivers were usually young, college-aged, gussiks (Caucasians), so one day during the last of our thirty-months in Kotzebue we booked a tour. The driver didn’t know us and we didn’t know her. My God, what she told people: historical misstatements, cultural faux pas, some general outright silliness, and jokes that were not funny, and subtly cruel. We were finally dumped off at the museum, which had grown and modernized in our time there, to watch a troupe of Eskimo entertainers (carefully constructed of at least one very old, but spry elder, an old nana or two, several adorable children aging all the way down to pre-schoolers, a precocious young adolescent or two, several virile and athletic young men, and, of course several knockdown gorgeous smiling brown-skinned maidens) dance, joke, clown, and demonstrate some aspects of their heritage that would seem most pleasing to the mostly white audience, making sure—through costumery and chatter—that “Eskimoness” was kept at the forefront: for instance, the dance. All so phony, yet all so real, and all so very lucrative for these really impoverished people. Kotzebue was a kind of low-budget, off-Broadway Banff.

I suspect that much has already been written about the problematics of the Santa Fe Railway’s development of Indian entertainment along its route west: the “Indian Detours” promotion, the annual Indian Market in Santa Fe itself, and the arts & crafts industry at/in the Albuquerque train station, but Mason’s points certainly apply to these. But this brings me, finally, to the question of mariachi bands.

I was born and raised and now again live in Tucson where mariachis have always seemed part of the entertainment complex. While Indian dances and “ceremonies” rarely work their way into the fabric of the Tucson cultural scene (as they do in Hawaii and Kotzebue)—you have to go out to the rez to experience them—the Mexican(-American/Hispanic) tradition of mariachi music seems to be omnipresent. Not being an expert on the lore of the mariachi, I only assume it is some kind of “authentic” representation of Mexican musical heritage. That may not be true. Its authenticity be a shibboleth. It may bear only a faint resemblance to its origins and meaning. In fact, it may have been so co-opted by Anglos that it has become a joke. There are, I have learned, international mariachi festivals in which bands win prizes for being the best in one or another sub-category of the mariachi genre (all girl, all kids, and I suspect even all Irish, all left-handed, and so on).

Recently we attended a company Christmas dinner for a business created by my late stepfather: Concrete Designs. I even worked there for a couple of college summers. My stepfather sold Concrete Designs to Oldcastle, an Irish firm, when he retired and Oldcastle had just brought in some new, youthful, management types. Either because it was a good idea (about 75% of the employees of CD are Hispanic) or because it seemed to be a good idea (after all, Oldcastle may have theorized, this was Tucson in the holiday season), a very loud mariachi troupe was hired. Through the evening they circulated throughout the banquet room at the local Indian casino, essentially squelching all conversation.

In March my wife and I went to a dinner sponsored by the Tucson Presidio Trust (tucsonpresdiotrust.org), a non-profit group whose mission it is to “guide and aid in the interpretation of the history of the Old Pueblo at the Tucson Origins Heritage Park
with special emphasis on the Spanish Colonial period” and to restore the “original” 1776 Tucson presidio, by which is really meant the original colonial habitation of Tucson. In any case, the food was themed Mexican, even to the “Mexican hot chocolate” that was served as a dessert beverage over at the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson Garrison itself where people walked around in 18^th century military uniforms (http://tucsonpresidiotrust.org/soldados.htm and http://tucsonpresidiotrust.org/costume.htm) and occasionally shot off muskets. After dinner, inexplicably, a group of Mayan dancers performed with their incense and drums, then followed, a youthful mariachi band, just recently named the outstanding youth band (or something along those lines). That essentially squelched all further conversation.

I would like to believe that mariachi music is as an integral a part of “Mexican” culture as is, well, as is, ah . . . baseball integral in “American” culture. I am being purposefully ironic here. Baseball is not quintessentially American. Ham and eggs are not quintessentially American. There is nothing we could call essentially and necessarily American because “America” simply does not exist as a unity. Likewise, “Mexican” as a totalizing term is meaningless. “Mexican” and “American” are as much homogenizing labels as is “Indian,” and are therefore, in some sense, racist. So what about mariachis? I have a sense that mariachi, as a concept and as a performance, has been so anglicized that it has become the borderzone equivalent of the Hawaiian hula dance.

Aloha, piuraa, and adios.

---

[1] Later, when tourism really began to blossom, Wein would put on two jets a day in the summer, offering the intrepid tourist time enough to drive out of town or get in a motorboat and zoom around Kotzebue Sound for a few minutes.