ABSTRACT
There is growing interest in Indigenous reenactment as a subversive form of performative political action deployed to force social change. This is especially so within the nominally “post”-colonial settler states such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America, and South Africa, and various Latin America countries. Yet, until recently, Indigenous reenactment has been relatively ignored within the field of postcolonialism itself, thus obscuring a major aspect of the ongoing contestation and remaking of history at national and global political levels, where the stakes are high. There is certainly a long tradition, from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, of Europeans bringing colonized Indigenous peoples from the “new world” to Europe to be placed on public show in international fairs, zoos, and circuses in the name of curiosity, display, and spectacle. By the mid-to-late 19th century, in the name of ethnography and hardening racial taxonomies, the specular commerce of the European colonial gaze required Indigenous peoples in such exhibits to appear in the “ethnographic present,” frozen in time, thus reenacting an imagined, authentic “savage” past. Indeed, they were often made to reenact and “perform themselves” and their own cultural practices, where the quotidian was rendered as spectacle in a “staged authenticity” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1990, pp. 18, 47, 408) (authenticity). These colonized subjects were popularly known in Europe as “zoo humans” or referred to as participants in Völkerschauen (“ethnographic shows”), and in the industrialized cities of Europe and growing cities in the colonies, there was a hunger for the spectacle of such touring troupes of “primitive” peoples and displays of savagery in Wild West shows, circuses, zoos, and museums (Poignant, 2004, p. 116). Modernity sought out its own supposed mirror image, and desired Indigenous peoples to figure in the “backtelling of its own past” (Bennett, 1995, pp. 19, 188) (production of historical meaning). Correspondingly, there is a robust literature around the many ways that colonized Indigenous peoples were both contracted and coerced into various European historical reenactments during the 19th and 20th centuries. Enrolled to perform in battles, various national commemorations, and made to “play Aborigines” and too often with delimited agency, Indigenous actors were called on to perform a “savage” past as counterpoint to a teleological rendition of European modernity, conquest, and the birth of modern settler nationhood, thus heralding the future of the settler states ( Nugent, 2015 ). Likewise, white Americans have “played Indian” using ideas and misrepresentations of Native American peoples to shape their national identity over generations ( Deloria, 1999 ).116
