Primitive encounters: Film and tourism in the North American West

Western Historical Quarterly

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 47-65

  Brégent Heald, Dominique ^a  

^a MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42449105822     PISSN: 00433810     EISSN: 19398603     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/whq/38.1.47     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. Sgt. Bruce describes a Native festival to Marie de Flor in Rose-Marie (W. S. Van Dyke, 1936).
2. FBI Agent Bill Retz discusses the San Pablo fiesta with Lucky Gagin in Ride the Pink Horse (Robert Montgomery, 1947).
3. A note on terminology: I use "Aboriginal" and "Native" when referring to the first peoples of North America and their descendents. Although some may find the term offensive, I use "Indian" to indicate imaginary portrayals of Native peoples and where historical context dictates its usage.
4. Unless specified otherwise, the tourist industry is an umbrella term encompassing various private, public, national, regional, and local sectors involved in tourism promotion. Since 1935, Canada has managed the tourism industry at the federal level via the Canadian Travel Bureau and later the Canadian Tourism Commission. There is no comparable national tourism office in the United States; each state is responsible for its own travel promotion.
5. Rose-Marie premiered on Broadway on 2 September 1924 and ran for 557 performances (music by Rudolph Friml and Herbert Stothart, libretto by Otto A. Harback and Oscar Hammerstein, II, produced by Arthur Hammerstein); Rose-Marie (Lucien Hubbard, 1928);
6. Rose Marie (Mervyn Leroy, 1954). Hereafter, Rose-Marie shall refer to the 1936 version.
7. See Pierre Berton, Hollywood's Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image (Toronto, ON, 1975).
8. Daily (Los Angeles, CA) Variety, 19 October 1935, 2.
9. Frank S. Nugent, "The New Version of 'Rose Marie,' at the Capitol," New York Times, 1 February 1936, 9
10. and The Commonweal 23 (31 January 1936): 386. Emphasis added.
11. Hunt Stromberg's Projection Room Notes for Rose-Marie, 4 December 1935, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (hereafter AMPAS).
12. See E.J. Hart, The Selling of Canada: The CPR and the Beginnings of Canadian Tourism (Banff, AB, 1983).
13. George Colpitts, "Wildlife Promotions, Western Canadian Boosterism, and the Conservation Movement, 1890-1914," American Review of Canadian Studies 28 (Spring and Summer 1998): 103-30.
14. See Patricia Jane Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914 (Toronto, ON, 1995).
15. Carl Berger, "The True North Strong and Free," in Nationalism in Canada, ed. Peter Russell (Toronto, ON, 1966), 3-26.
16. See Eva Mackey, "Death by Landscape: Race, Nature, and Gender in Canadian Nationalist Mythology," Canadian Woman Studies 20 (Summer 2000): 125-30
17. and Brian S. Osborne, "The Iconography of Nationhood in Canadian Art," in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen J. Daniels (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 162-79.
18. See Ian Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal, QC, 1997).
19. H.W. Wack, "The Wonders of American and African Travel," Arts & Decoration 33 (May 1930): 74-5. Emphasis added.
20. John MacCormac, "The Dominion Realizes its Travel Trade is One of Its Greatest Industries," New York Times, 16 June 1935, sec. 11, p. 3.
21. "Canada Beckons to Vacationists," Literary Digest, 121 (6 June 1936): 36.
22. Canada, Parliament, Senate. Debates, 17th Parl., 5th sess., 25 April 1934 (Ottawa, ON, 1934), 294.
23. Michael Berkowitz, "A 'New Deal' for Leisure: Making Mass Tourism during the Great Depression," in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), 185.
24. Canada, Parliament, Senate. Debates, 17th Parl., 5th sess., 25 April 1934 (Ottawa, ON, 1934), 303.
25. New York Times, 12 May 1935, sec. 4, p. 7. Emphasis added.
26. "Canada Eases Entry for Tourists," Literary Digest 119 (July 1935): 39.
27. Back page advertisement, Travel 75 (May 1940).
28. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, "Becoming West," in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York, 1992), 3-27.
29. Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, KS, 1998), 40.
30. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounters with American Deserts (Albuquerque, NM, 1985), 167.
31. See Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, DC, 2001).
32. See Keith L. Bryant, Jr., History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (New York, 1974).
33. See J. Valerie Fifer, American Progress: The Growth of the Transport, Tourist, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-Century West (Chester, CT, 1988)
34. and John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln, 1985).
35. Mildred Adams, "The Blooming of the American Desert," New York Times Magazine, 25 May 1930, sec. 5, p. 12.
36. Ride the Pink Horse clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.
37. Erik Camayd-Freixas, "Introduction: The Returning Gaze," in Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture, ed. Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González (Tucson, 2000), ix.
38. See Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900-1942 (Norman, OK, 1983)
39. and Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer's Era, 1916-1941 (Santa Fe, 1982).
40. "Tourists follow artists to nature's hideouts," Literary Digest 118 (15 December 1934): 24.
41. Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC, 1996), 183.
42. See Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver, BC, 1992).
43. Eva Mackey, "Becoming Indigenous: Land, Belonging, and the Appropriation of Aboriginality in Canadian Nationalist Narratives," Social Analysis 42 (July 1998): 150-78.
44. J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto, ON, 1989), 213.
45. See Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes & U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT, 1982).
46. Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989), 70.
47. Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 77-124.
48. New York Times, 29 May 1938, sec. 11, p. 4.
49. Stella Burke May, "Vacation across the Border," Parents' Magazine 11 (May 1936): 32.
50. Michael E. Zega, "Advertising the Southwest," Journal of the Southwest 43 (Autumn 2001): 281-315
51. and Shelby J. Tisdale, "Railroads, Tourism, and Native Americans in the Greater Southwest," Journal of the Southwest 38 (Winter 1996): 433-62.
52. Keith L. Bryant, Jr., "The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Development of the Taos and Santa Fe Art Colonies," Western Historical Quarterly 9 (October 1978): 437-53.
53. Pedro J. Lemos, "An Old World Trip in our Own United States," School Arts Magazine 30 (March 1931): 403-16.
54. F. Gonzalez Gamarra, "Ancient America Inspires the New Decorative Vogue," Arts & Decoration 20 (December 1923): 38
55. and "American Indian Modern," American Home 22 (July 1939): 25.
56. Rothman, Devil's Bargains, 81.
57. Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque, 1997), 80.
58. Santa Fe held the first fiesta celebrating the Spanish re-conquest in 1712 as a religious event. See Fray Angelico Chavez, "The First Santa Fe Fiesta Council, 1712," New Mexico Historical Review 28 (July 1953): 183-91.
59. Following congressional approval of statehood for New Mexico, Santa Fe revived the fiesta as a civic celebration in 1911 and again in 1912. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 181.
60. Dean Rehberger, "Visions of the New Mexican in Public Pageants and Dramas of Santa Fe and Taos, 1918-1940," Journal of the Southwest 37 (Autumn 1995): 450-69.
61. Paul A.F. Walter, "The Santa Fe Fiesta of September, 1924," Art and Archeology 28 (November-December 1924): 181.
62. The other painters were Jozef Bakos, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, and Willard Nash. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Modernist Painting in New Mexico, 1913-1935 (Albuquerque, 1984).
63. "Interview with Will Shuster conducted by Sylvia Loomis in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 30 July 1964 (for the Smithsonian Archives of Art),"http:// www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/shuste64. htm (accessed 4 May 2006). At Easter time, the Yaqui and other Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico burn an effigy of Judas to symbolize renewal.
64. Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies, 97.
65. In 1931, Cartier performed Dances of the Hopi and Legends of the Southwest Mescali Dance of the Hopi Indians, Legend of the Snow God, Blanket Dance of the Hopi Indians, and Comanche Dance of the War Drum. Barbara Naomi CohenStratyner, Biographical Dictionary of Dance (New York, 1982).
66. Theatre Arts Monthly 11 (August 1927): 635.
67. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 34.
68. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 123.
69. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 3rd ed. (New York, 1976; Berkeley, CA, 1999).
70. Hugh Leamy, "Toeing the Line," Collier's 86 (13 September 1930): 15. The Loews cinema chain was the exhibition arm of MGM Studios until 1954.
71. Hide-Out (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
72. and Naughty Marietta (W.S. Van Dyke, 1935).
73. Stuart Hall, "The Spectacle of the 'Other,'" in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1997), 223-79.
74. Rose-Marie Script, 13 August 1935, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.
75. Notes from Chester Hale for Rose-Marie, 5 November 1935, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.
76. Hunt Stromberg's Conference Notes on Rose-Marie, 8 August 1936, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.
77. Christopher Gittings, "Imaging Canada: The Singing Mountie and Other Commodifications of Nation," Canadian Journal of Communication 23, no. 4 (1998): 507-22, quote on page 507. From, http://info.wlu.ca/∼wwwpress/jrls/ cjc/BackIssues/23.4/gittings.html (accessed 17 August 2006).
78. Berton, Hollywood's Canada, 111.
79. On the Mounted Police in popular culture, see Michael Dawson, The Mountie From Dime Novel to Disney (Toronto, ON, 1998).
80. Keith Walden, Visions of Order: The Mounted Police in Symbol and Myth (Toronto, ON, 1982), 5.
81. See also, Michael Dawson, "That Nice Red Coat Goes to My Head Like Champagne': Gender, Antimodernism and the Mountie Image, 1880-1960," Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (Fall 1997): 119-39.
82. "Selling them the Blue Sky," Christian Science Monitor, 22 June 1938, 5.
83. Ken Tingley, "125 Years: The Prairie Legacy of the Mounted Police," Legacy: Alberta's Arts, Heritage, and Culture Magazine (November 1999-January 2000), 15.
84. The Nation 165 (8 November 1947): 511.