Warriors and Carousels by Sheila Rocha

     “Tradition is personal…a part of our private lives, in the form of rituals and customs that our families and chosen communities maintain and perform” (Becker).  And it is in this personal, private and sacred aspect of our lives that the continued threat of mis-representation is acknowledged in this contemporary as that which steals the history and maligns the narrative of a people.

                Deloria  explores the impact of the Wild West shows that were artificially constructed by Buffalo Bill as he casted what was left of Native Plains survivors in the roles of the ominous, sub-human and dangerous Indian.  He even replayed his own image of self-history bedecked in costume, reenacting the representation of self as warrior-murderer in the light of righteous subduing of the west.         

                What I found interesting if not troublesome were the multitude of reasons why warriors, medicine people and war chiefs were coerced into the role of clown, actor and false player of their own immediate history: escape, economics, imprisonment.  The swirl of two separate spaces in which two antithetical human worlds interpenetrated contorted the reality of the human being—the Lakota—into transformations that moved them beyond even their own imagination.  There is the story of a surreal moment in which Black Elk, Sitting Bull and several other men were making their way through Central Park in New York City.  They spied a carousel brightly painted with music playing.  Curiosity intertwined with the draw toward paint and polish and image of horses dancing to an unknown melody drew the men in for a ride.  The image is described as something dreamlike as the remaining survivors of a still active genocide—men of visions—whirled in bouncing circles on the backs of festooned wooden ponies.  The epitome of representation took on a new meaning in that moment.  Perhaps the warriors became empowered by assuming the right to interpenetrate the imaginary of the western world.  Throwing it out of sync, if but for a few moments, “provided Indian people the chance to recraft new visions of themselves” (Deloria).  They performed their own image of the self outside of the act of didactic theater into one that allowed them to view themselves in situ—the act of seeing themselves.  In that moment, tradition was transposed in the image of self-representation.  In the act of interpenetration, new understandings were birthed.  Yet, today, the long term and persistent effects of false representations created by wild west performances/Hollywood/and the western proscenium stage continues to negate the vastness of the Lakota self.