"Braves Aid in Indian Opera at Utah Presentation ... A Full-Blooded Sioux Co-Author." (1) So runs part of the Musical America headline reporting the premiere of an opera on a Native American subject, created in part by a Native American woman. Built around a religious practice that was still banned by the federal government, the production featured the participation of members of the Ute Nation living on the Uintah-Ouray Indian Reservation, a short way across the rolling sagebrush plateau from the performance venue. (2) The date was February 1913, and the place was Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah. The Sun Dance Opera was enthusiastically received at its premiere, filling the hall for three nights. Two separate productions at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, followed in May and December the next year, the second of them taken the forty-odd miles to Salt Lake City for ten more performances. Three years after a 1935 revival at BYU, the opera had two performances at the Broadway Theatre (Cine Roma) in New York City, where it did not fare as well. (3) It is among the earliest of the operas on Native American subjects that constituted an early twentieth-century subgenre within the still broad-based, popular field of opera. (4)

Native Americans had been the subject of European curiosity, speculation, and exploitation since first contact. They provided one source for Rousseau's "noble savage" in the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth they became a major subject of American and European art, literature, and theatrical entertainment. Two examples in the area of popular entertainment are especially relevant here. In the decades immediately preceding The Sun Dance Opera, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows, in which Native Americans (most often Sioux) demonstrated certain "traditional" skills and participated in sham battles, played to enormous audiences across the United States and in Europe. Also, Indians were commonly portrayed in the opening scenes of the community-based pageants that were staged all across the United States from 1907 on. Traditional dancing might be represented, but most often the scene consisted of the local indigenous people signing a treaty cheerfully surrendering their land and graciously retreating in favor of the white arrivals. This scene provided an exotic opener for the many pageants that went on to address subsequent white history and nation-building as their primary subject. (5) In addition, an interest in Indian music as a source for characteristically "American" concert music had been triggered by Anton Dvorak's 1893-95 residence in the United States. (6) The publication of Alice C. Fletcher's A Study of Omaha Indian Music in 1893, combined with Dvorak's visit, led to a discussion of how this ethnic material might be applied to concert music, raising by implication the general question of authenticity. (7)

The Musical America article quoted at the start of this paper states that "the purpose of the opera is to portray the inner spiritual life of this wronged and misunderstood people." Along with the literal closeness of the Native American culture represented in the opera...