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From the 1880s to the 1930s-a period often considered the height of genocidai onslaughts on the Native peoples of Turtle Island (North America)-a large network of Indigenous performers made vaudeville into a site of Indigenous continuance, resilience, and resurgence. As a settler scholar of popular culture, I aim to contribute to the recovery of this network by following archival traces and building relations of research exchange with contemporary Indigenous theater artists.1 Repeatedly, these artists emphasize Indigenous relationality and community in remembering and honoring their theatrical and familial predecessors on popular stages. These principles guide my efforts at historical reconstruction.
This essay considers one way in which Indigenous vaudevillians contributed to early cinematic space. Much illuminating scholarship has established the importance of Indigenous creativity to the making of early moving pictures and of vaudeville's role in shaping their exhibition and reception. Here I consider the space between: the role of Indigenous performers in bridging vaudeville and early moving pictures, in acclimatizing spectators to the shift from liveness to cinematic representation. As they performed virtuoso vaudeville acts during reel changes, accompanied showings of early Westerns, and ballyhooed for audiences, what kinds of community did vaudeville Indians make and how did they contribute to training spectators in two central entertainment technologies of Western modernity-vaudeville and motion pictures-at the moment when they came together?
The public projection of moving pictures began in Berlin Varieté in 1895 and New York vaudeville in 1896. Vaudeville houses were a prime exhibition outlet for early one-reelers, having already brought together mass audiences and established national distribution circuits. Variety playbills responded and accommodated audiences to the rhythms of urban modernity with their atomized bursts of novelty into which short films could be slotted, dovetailing vaudeville time and filmic time. Many early films recorded vaudeville acts, thereby transferring live rhythms and audience address to celluloid and creating what Tom Gunning famously dubbed "the cinema of attractions" to train audiences in new spectatorship practices.2 Even when early exhibitors shifted to predominantly filmic programs, following the introduction of nickelodeons in 1905 and picture palaces in the 1910s, liveness remained a significant force in mediating audience experience. Feature films continued to be accompanied by vaudeville acts and later floor shows; what Henry Jenkins calls "the vaudeville aesthetic" continued...