When All the Cowboys Are Indians: The Nature of Race in All-Indian Rodeo

Abstract

Constructions of nature as the antithesis of culture have influenced both the ascription of, and resistance to, specific racialized identities. While it is possible to develop alternatives to these imposed identities, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to escape the influence and limitations of dominant social constructs. To build this argument, I draw on the attempts of “Indians” in western Canada to assert their identity as cowboys. ¹ The article begins with a brief overview of Euro-Canadian conceptions of nature and culture and of how they were deployed to construct Indians as a separate and inferior race. As part of this process, rodeo was used to help entrench a cowboy/Indian dichotomy and to deny, thereby, the legitimacy of Indian cowboys. Against this backdrop, all-Indian rodeos are introduced as a response to these processes of exclusion. Close examination of these events demonstrates that they have facilitated the assertion of Indian cowboy identities by creating contexts in which all of the cowboys are Indians. At the same time, however, an examination of the ways in which Indians have constructed their identity as cowboys suggests a heavy reliance on hegemonic notions of nature, culture, and “race.” This identity is both a manifestation of the power of dominant concepts and an unsettling challenge to the goal of moving beyond binaries in the formation of fluid, flexible, and egalitarian identities.

Key Words:

• Canada
• culture/nature
• North American Indians
• race
• rodeo

Notes

1. I have used the term “Indian” throughout this article for the simple reason that this is how my respondents referred to themselves.

2. In this article, the words “race” and “nature” appears in quotation marks only where it is necessary to remind the reader that it is being treated as a problematic category.

3. Throughout this article, I use “culture/nature” (instead of the more common “nature/culture”) in order to maintain consistency with the cowboy/Indians derivative of this dichotomy.

4. As with most attitudinal shifts, it is difficult to pinpoint when Indians stopped being accepted as cowboys. According to Burgess (1993), there was no problem with their participation in the early Calgary Stampedes of 1912 and 1919, but by the end of World War 2, their legitimate place in these celebrations had shifted to the Indian Village in Stampede Park.

5. Granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670 by Charles II of England, Rupert's Land comprised the entire Hudson Bay drainage system. In modern geographical terms, this huge area included Northern Quebec and Ontario north of the Laurentian watershed, all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, and a portion of the Northwest Territories (Smith 1988).

6. The issue of gender is an important one and a subject worthy of separate study along the theoretical lines advanced here. Like Indians, women were early participants in rodeo (including the Calgary Stampede), but as the construction of the cowboy was refined to fulfill Euro-Canadians' renditions of their western history (especially between the 1920s and 1940s), women were excluded (and expunged) from rodeo. Here again, biological assumptions were invoked—in this case, the fear that intense athletic activities would “unsex” women and possibly leave them barren—to clear the rodeo arena as the sole preserve of cowboys, now defined as white men (LeCompte 1989,; 93).

7. The pass system was introduced in 1885 to prohibit Indians from leaving their reserves without permission of their agent (for more detail see Carter 1985; Barron 1988; Miller 1989). It was intended to protect Indians from the corrupting influences of whites, but also to impede the movement of Indian politicians and to discourage parents from visiting their children at off-reserve residential schools. The system had limited effectiveness, however, because it could not be legally enforced, and although passes continued to be used in parts of the West during World War I, they were widely abandoned as an instrument of control as early as 1893.

8. The association of Indians with drunkenness was also perpetrated by some high government officials. Titley (1986,; 173) recounts an incident from 1910, when Duncan Scott, then Superintendent of Education, issued a statement to the press that “reprimanded the organizers of fairs for interfering with the work of the department, and…claimed that during a recent fair in Lethbridge, fifty-five Indians had been arrested for drunkenness.” It soon transpired that this was a complete fabrication: the total number of liquor offences during the fair was only five.

9. It is important to note that a number of Indians have continued to participate in “white man's rodeos,” and that some of these men have been very successful competitors (e.g., Fred Gladstone and Pete Bruised Head). At the same time, both Cuthand's (1997) documentary film and my own investigations make it clear that the vast majority of Indian cowboys feel much more comfortable at all-Indian rodeos. This situation prevails despite the official intolerance of racism in Canadian society. This suggests that even if overtly negative experiences of “white man's rodeos” are in decline, all-Indian rodeos are preferred because of the positive environment and experiences that they offer to Indian cowboys.