IN QUEST OF THE WHITE MANDAN

In Quest of the White Mandan

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That came following a forceful move from sophomore forward Devin Mikell, who brought down a rebound with one hand, went up and forced an and-one. Two more NBA 3-pointers by a red-hot Gunville and the Magi were leading with under two minutes to play. Gunville racked up 17 points on five made 3-pointers. With Minot still leading after a pair of made Mandan free throws, Klein blocked Albertson on a rim attack. However, Minot got the ball back with the shot clock turned off when Mandan committed an offensive push off foul.

Catch and cradle the basketball could have possibly clinched a Minot state tournament berth with some made free throws, instead Klein stole the inbounds pass. He drove straight to the rim and drew a foul. Klein made both free throws, giving the Magi But, to no avail, as a twisting shot in the lane from Albertson rolled off the iron. Mandan advances to its first state tournament since the season. The project involved forty-seven truckloads of rock which area business sponsors had delivered to the base of the hill.

The stones were collected from fields around the city. The local Boy and Girls Scouts maintained the sign for more than 30 years. In August , eight gallons of paint and hours of effort by the Mandan Jaycees members went into rehabbing the sign. Click to Enlarge In June , work was again completed on refurbishing and replacing stones and repainting the sign. Railroad ties were added to the display which denoted "Trail West" to promote the new Custer-based drama debuting at Fort Lincoln State Park in July The project was sponsored by the Mandan Jaycees with member Larry Sullivan serving as project chairman.

The marker is credited currently as being the largest sign in North Dakota. Trees were planted in the late s across the original location of the sign, i. Click to Enlarge for Route Map. The area was also used by Native Americans to mourn their dead. Whether its importance is of cultural significance, or evokes fond childhood memories sledding down its slippery snowing slopes, the place is a true historic landmark.

Norris 9 wonders in if the name was the "resurrection from the limb of forgotten memories of something previously unknown" or if "something actually happened[,] which staggers the imagination" 1. This conjectured mystical link to a native spirit receives another twist when Salting in the next paragraph adds that Mrs.

Maisonville in suggests Mrs. Gillespie, whose first husband was from Australia, takes the word Naramata from "aboriginal Australian dialect" meaning "place of water" 1. This naming and fixing of place serves as a model for the displacement of First Nations who are no longer part of the land or cultural fabric; they serve as "colour" and as psychic outsiders whether Sioux chief or Australian Aboriginals and thus enable the invader-settler to play native from a safe psychic distance.

She argues in much less fantastical gestures that Canadian invader-settlers tend to mythologize the land as a way of ameliorating "colonial violence" In this configuration, First Nations are the willing mimics of a superior culture that they can only imperfectly imitate.

Edward Said 12 argues Orientalist discourse relies "on this flexible positional strategy, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand 7. McKelvie clearly does not cede the "upper hand" as his narrative rests on three assumptions that buttress white privilege: The article begins, "[a]dopting modern customs and conforming to a way of life entirely different from that of their forefathers does not detract fundamentally from the romance and colour so closely associated with the Okanagan Indian" "Okanagan Indian" 2.

Bennett, "the first white child to be born in Fernie," and "Mrs.

Cawston," who is also "recognized as an authority on the customs and viewpoints of the Indian person" "Okanagan Indian" 2. While extolling how the First Nations women are "embracing modern handicrafts, dress making, crocheting, first aid, and home nursing" "Okanagan Indian" 2 , it would seem the white women are becoming slightly more "native" with their involvement in this endeavour as passionate agents of civilizing modernity. In the s, First Nations are a symbol to be manipulated by settler-invaders as a sign of a past pre-colonial moment that precludes considering the violence and persistence of colonialism.

Ashnola is set in the pre-European-contact period while The Lake is set in the early European-contact period. These operas, by representing First Nations as fossilized and often comedic types, pace McKelvie, Salting, and Winston Churchill, make possible the construction of a safe, unthreatened Canadian cultural nationalism where the invader-settlers as characters, performers, and audience can play red face. In these operas, representations of First Nations resisting the colonial process are nearly expunged or transformed into a monstrous outsider.

The four principle characters constitute an allegorical matrix of race and gender that delineates between the imperial white male realm of rational economic exploitation of terra nullius and the First Nations-female realm of superstition and nature: John Allison, as the stiff British farmer, embodies unquestioned colonialism, patriarchy, and rationality; his wife Susan, 18 a year old expectant mother, is inspired by native culture 19 not unlike his manservant, Johnny McDougal, a Metis guide and farmhand.

Allison" 3 , who functions as a repository of native lore. She is the embodiment of the invader-settler transformed into native. Her husband, John, provides a counterpoint to this Edenic colonial harmony: He is the "master" who must discipline an offstage First Nations worker, Cherumchoot, 23 who has gambled away his clothing and returned naked to the reserve Accompanying John Allison across the lake is the Metis Johnny McDougal, who takes along a pig and hen that he plans to throw overboard as peace offerings to Naaitka.

The stage notes direct him to stoop to catch the pig in what is called a "humorous by-play" and thus explicitly red faces his character as a buffoon The menacing figure here is the off-stage, anti-colonial Naaitka, who the audience is told "long ago [.

Both characters need the restraint of the rational colonial mind offered by the stern English gentleman, John Allison, who will discipline them with creaky civility. The grandmotherly Marie offers a tale of pre-European contact civilization that suggests the coming of the "White man" with "[g]old burned in his head! Why the vengeful Naaitka would not simply prey on European colonists is unexplained. In this opera, violent resistance to colonialism can only be coded as a supernatural being; it cannot reside in the bodies of male natives.

Susan repeatedly rhapsodizes about the land and not the people ; , even though she begins the opera by writing a list of debts she owes natives: One bag of sugar.

To Jacob One-leg, huckleberries [. One hat given woven with my own hands from the meadow grass" The sugar, most likely the product of the Caribbean colonial project used to sweeten this exchange and the other goods crafted from the land, suggest that although she attempts to live in harmony and economic reciprocity with First Nations, her vision is essentially one of soft colonialization.

Thrifty White Drug

Rather than relying on physical force to subdue First Nations and their land, Susan Allison, via trade, assumes First Nations are adequately compensated for "granting" land for invader-settlers to develop into an Eden-like British garden and farm system. The script, naturally, does not speak to how she and her husband acquired their farmland via pre-emption or interrogate the exalted narrative of agricultural progress that assumes settler-invaders improve the lot of First Nations by bring them the benefits of European modernity.

This triumph for her family is a triumph for white heterosexual settlement that is coded as an inevitable and pastoral white fertility. None of the native characters have offspring in this opera: Marie is literally the handmaiden to white fertility that will populate the Okanagan and erase Metis and First Nations leaving settler-invaders as the "new" natives to improve the land.

By the end of the play, John Allison is unconvinced of this "native" superstition but agrees to stay home with his wife to witness the birth. The opera concludes with all four voices simultaneously singing "Naaitka," with the stage direction in the score indicating that John Allison sings it "scornfully" In this text, gender and race are linked in a manner that makes race subservient to a liberal feminist and Canadian nationalist project.

MANDAN Historical Society

Thus Susan and John Allison function as the epitome of white civility, standing in place for the Canadian imaginary, and the racialized characters of Marie, McDougal, Cherumshoot, and even Naaitka are consigned to subsidiary roles. This view of First Nations as background is confirmed by a Canadian Music Journal article, where Pentland indicates how her violin sonata is informed by "folk" music that includes First Nation music:.

An account from the Vernon News in suggests blackface is a source of anxiety when taken out of its theatrical context: Blake Crothers, a member of "the AOTS 26 minstrel show," dressed in blackface has car trouble on a rural road. Unable to flag a motorist down, he knocks on a farmhouse door and inadvertently frightens a woman. This woman frantically calls for assistance, demonstrating that although the blackened white body is designed to entertain comically, it signifies menace for white audiences "This Minstrel" 2.

Working to Preserve & Promote Mandan's Heritage since 2004

A caption for a promotional photograph in the Penticton Herald neatly captures this conflation as it describes a First Nation ritual as "a dance of the furies" "One" 8. Thus the performance of the native can only occur within an ethnocentric framework that suggests this "new" primitive culture is analogous to European classical culture that has also had its rituals transformed into entertainment.

As a new rendition of classical culture within an anthropological mode, the authors ambivalently claim the opera to be a clear sign of Canadian cultural maturity; yet, it is a "fantasy opera" "Authors" 5; "All-Local" 6. For these women, creating and playing red face quite literally results in liberation from the domestic space. Their village is a cluster of log cabins nestled in the trees on the other side of the Similkameen River from the highway and cannot be seen unless one crosses the river. Ashnola eschews this potentially unsettling narrative of a fraught settlement to offer the idyllic pastoral Okanagan in a pre-contact period that is reflected in how the paratextual introduction shifts from this violent narrative of Chief Ashnola John to a description of how the opera perfectly mirrors the geography of the region.

The introduction concludes with the disclaimer, "[t]he story itself is entirely a figment of the imagination" that ensures this mimicry is only representing, with red paint, fanciful First Nations and not the ones that inhabit the cluster of cabins cut off from exalted European modernity in The second line the dancing squaws sing confirms a traditional view of women as domestic labourers: After a competition, the Chief agrees to marry his daughter to this outsider who is described as royalty.

Predictably complications ensue in act two, when the jealous local "brave," [ sic ] Rushing Wind, seeks magic from the Shaman to poison Shining Arrow. In act three, the Shaman attempts to discredit and poison Shining Arrow, but he is upstaged by a wise old woman, Old-Seeing Owl, who reads her version of a dream while Meadow Lark poisons the Shaman. The murder of the Shaman as the repository of native cultural belief is swept away by the climax that focuses on happy marriages for the young couples.

A note on the original playbill offers this "ethnographic" detail:. Shamanism is reduced to malevolent fakery rather than a spiritual belief that might also involve healing, an alternative world view, etc. In this case, red face uses ethnographic distance to appropriate, authenticate, and insist on the primitive values of the Other.

Thus this opera speaks more to post-World War II gender issues for white women 29 than to the specifics of First Nations cultures via an anthropological lens. A Legend , 4 , and the composer Constance Waterman. Costley and Estabrooks are proud of creating a libretto based on "original" material that suits the vocal range of their all-female chorus and speaks to local interest rather than simply relying on European scripts written for male voices. Inspiration is plentiful in Canada they point out.

It lies in the folklore of the country and in its colourful history waiting for writers and composers to take up their pens and write" Nicholson 8. Descriptions of pre-European contact native culture are the raw material that these women use to create a nationalist culture for consumption by opera fans seeking to see "Canadian" content on the stage. Or is the reception of this opera by these children something more profoundly brutal because it was not acted by people on a screen but by prominent local white settlers in drag?

I also sense that it is not my role to re-traumatize someone with a hopefully faded childhood memory, but it is my role to unpack how white privilege operated in the s and lingers in the Okanagan and elsewhere in Canada where notions of being Canadian exploits quaint notions of aboriginality as symbolic capital.

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