Dominique Brégent-Heald

Primitive Encounters: Film and Tourism in the North American West

This article analyzes the relationship between Hollywood and the tourist industry in constructing analogous representations of the Canadian Northwest and the U. S. Southwest by comparing Rose-Marie (1936) and Ride the Pink Horse (1947). In representing these western landscapes, film and tourist discourses exhibited a tension between utopic and dystopic images. Moreover, essentialized Indian imagery coded these sites as spaces of authenticity and regeneration for Euro-Canadians/Anglo-Americans.

They [the Montagnais] do this every year. It's like a Mardi Gras for them.

Sgt. Bruce

Lots of excitement: floats, dancing in the streets; the Indians put on a special show.

FBI Agent Bill Retz¹

INITIALLY, THE FILMS Rose-Marie and Ride the Pink Horse appear to function at cinematic cross-purposes. Released in January 1936, Rose-Marie is a musical romance set in the Canadian northwoods in which a diva, Marie de Flor (Jeanette MacDonald), treks north to help her fugitive brother. In the process, she falls in love with Sgt. Bruce (Nelson Eddy), the dashing Mounted Police officer assigned to track down her sibling. Ride the Pink Horse takes place in the fictitious border town of San Pablo, New Mexico. This 1947 film noir centers on Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery), a disillusioned WWII veteran. He travels to San Pablo to blackmail Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), the war profiteer who murdered his comrade. Although Rose-Marie was released during the Great Depression and Ride the Pink Horse debuted following WWII, the films nevertheless share a striking similarity—both feature spectacular Indian festivals.² In Rose-Marie, Sgt. Bruce brings Marie to a celebration to locate her Métis guide, while Ride the Pink Horse's fiesta serves as an exotic backdrop to its tale of revenge. Neither festival scene is central to the diegesis. Yet the camera lingers, imbuing the festivities with dramatic significance and hinting at their symbolic import. Why do these festival scenes appear in such different films? What cultural work do they perform? What do the films reveal about the representations of the North American West and of Aboriginal peoples during the Classical Hollywood period?

I use Rose-Marie and Ride the Pink Horse as a springboard to address larger discourses surrounding western landscapes and the Native "Other." This essay explores the connections between the expanding North American tourist industry to Classical Hollywood's representations of the Canadian Northwest and the American Southwest. I argue that mass tourism and Hollywood fused to create the popular topography of these regions. The mainstream film and tourist industries drew upon similar epistemologies—that of a romantic and primitivist conceptualization of the North American West and its indigenous populace. This comparative perspective complicates notions of national and regional exceptionalism, which have tended to characterize the historiography of the Southwest and Northwest respectively. The discursive practices of the tourist and film industries attempted to position the Canadian Northwest and New Mexico as distinct, yet ultimately collapsed both regions, thus creating an imagined construction of a singular West.

While the films project significant iconographic differences in terms of climate and geography, the films nonetheless share key cultural tropes. First, I draw parallels between tourist campaigns in the Canadian Northwest and the U. S. Southwest, particularly New Mexico, from the late-nineteenth century to the 1940s. To attract visitors, the tourist industry characterized both the Canadian Northwest and New Mexico as representative of, yet distinct from, each nation.³ Hollywood also sustained this process. Second, I show how Indian celebrations were popularized as commodified tourist experiences in the Northwest and the Southwest. These festivals function as sites of Euro-Canadian and Anglo-American identity construction, both on screen and off. Finally, I demonstrate that in Rose-Marie and Ride the Pink Horse interactions with the primitive Other forever altered the non-Native protagonists, thus upholding the tourist discourses surrounding the regenerative powers of the North American West.

In the popular imagination, the Canadian Northwest typically figures as a sublime wilderness—a land of ancient mountains and primeval forests. As such, the country beyond the 49th parallel has played a synecdochical role in defining nation-ness. Since the early silent period, American films have coded a romantic vision of the Northwest as the landscape, a stand-in for Canada itself. This is evident in the 1936 release of Rose-Marie, the most successful and critically acclaimed version of this popular story. While the original musical production, silent film, and 1954 remake were set in the Canadian Northwest, the 1936 version takes place in northern Quebec.⁴ Yet the opening credits unfold against a painted backdrop of a Rockies-type landscape. The presence of totem poles in the foreground of the frame, which are not a cultural artifact of Native peoples of the Northeast, further indicates how the diverse topography of Canada condenses into an invented visualization of the northwestern territories.

Ironically, Hollywood filmmakers rarely shot Canadian-themed films on location, and instead used the California Sierra Nevada mountain range.⁵ Convention, economics, and practicality forestalled on-location shooting in the Canadian Rockies. Rose-Marie was no exception; W. S. Van Dyke shot the outdoor scenes at Lake Tahoe.⁶ The practice of using the Sierras in Canadian-themed films inadvertently enforced the idea of a mythical, borderless West while paradoxically touting the unique attraction of the Canadian Northwest landscape. Contemporary reviewers praised Rose-Marie's "scenic beauty" and the "skill of preparation and production as that which sets the ideally suited Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy so humanely and so beautifully in the Canadian north woods with all its natural scenic splendor."⁷

Rose-Marie opens at an opera house in Montreal where Marie is singing. After her performance, a "half-breed" named Boniface visits Marie at her luxury penthouse. He informs her that her brother John is in trouble with the law after allegedly murdering a Mountie. Marie accompanies Boniface to the northwoods where John is hiding. Once at the trading post, Marie meets Sgt. Bruce at the local tavern. Hoping to hide her identity, she tells him that her name is Rose-Marie. Sgt. Bruce, however, immediately recognizes that she is Marie de Flor, the famous opera singer. She explains her motives for giving a false name and explains why she had traveled north: "I came up here to get away from people. I wanted to be alone, where I wouldn't be recognized." Marie's story of pretending to be a tourist is plausible because Classical Hollywood films often associate anonymity and solitude with the Canadian North. Frequently, protagonists fled north to forget the past, to escape such demons as gambling and alcohol, or to retreat from "civilization." Mainstream American films characterized the Canadian Northwest as an accessible yet secluded destination seemingly lacking the evils of corruption and excessive materialism associated with suffocating city life.

Yet while the wilderness appears as a sanctuary for jaded city folk, the cinematic Canadian Northwest simultaneously teems with fugitives, such as Marie's brother, and thieving "half-breeds." Soon after her arrival at the trading post, Boniface steals her purse and disappears. Sgt. Bruce, however, restores law and order, as well as a romantic vision of the northwestern frontier. While these dystopic elements potentially detract from the region as a tourist attraction, the element of danger adds a level of excitement. The great Canadian outdoors temporarily appears as a permissive zone, a place lacking the codes of social responsibility, governed instead by what producer Hunt Stromberg calls "the rugged law of rugged man."⁸

Stromberg and the American film industry did not fabricate this vision of the Canadian Northwest out of thin air. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) promoted the idea of the Northwest as a representative symbol of the nation. Completed in 1885, the CPR carried a tremendous debt and used tourism as one way to become financially solvent. As general manager and later president of the CPR, Sir William Cornelius Van Horne capitalized on the beauty of the landscape by offering first-class accommodations along the rail route.⁹ Through postcards and pamphlets, booster clubs further extolled the natural wonders of western Canada as a way to attract travelers and settlers.¹⁰

The Romantic Movement provided the cultural foundation for the CPR's campaign. Skeptical of Enlightenment notions of progress and technology, romantic travelers strove to be free spirits who reveled in the figurative connotations of the natural world. In the mid-eighteenth century, eco-travel in Canada first became popular in the St. Lawrence region, the Muskokas, and Niagara Falls, where travelers expected to experience the primordial landscape and catch glimpses of dwindling savage inhabitants.¹¹ The CPR later raised the conception of mediated wilderness tourism to an art form. The CPR dynamically promoted the imaginative allure of the Rocky Mountains and, as I will argue further on, northwestern Native settlements as the aesthetic equivalent of the Canadian wilderness.

Romanticism was linked to a burgeoning nationalist movement. Throughout the late-nineteenth century, imperialists argued that Canada's cold climate, northern setting, and Anglo-Saxon racial stock produced a distinctive character.¹² Moreover, Canadian artists and writers employed the northern landscape as a conceptual way to express a unique Canadian sensibility.¹³ These nationalist narratives juxtaposed Canada's pristine wilderness with the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing United States. Canadian national culture was founded upon the civilizing, Anglo-imperialist impulse. Conversely, Canada's aggrandizement of the natural world was an implicit critique of modernity, technology, industrialism, and individualism associated with the United States.¹⁴ Such a distinction became a vital component in asserting national difference and thus national identity.

Declarations of national difference were also intended to publicize the Canadian Northwest as an attractive tourist destination set apart from the American West. Yet the success of cross-border tourism thrived on the notion that Canada was distinct, but not too unlike, the United States. A travel piece appearing in Arts & Decoration highlights this approach:

On the north of us thrives a beautiful and romantic country, young, energetic, confident, and very hospitable of the stranger in its midst. It has all the scenic wonders of all the world...Its history is the story of rugged endeavor and adventure, of exploratory success, failure, hardship and achievement. The romance of the pioneer is its saga. The rapid progress of its material development is an American epic. Its people are a hardy, generous, courageous and daring race with the tenacity of the Briton and the enterprise and humor of the American.¹⁵

The tourism industry in Canada capitalized upon the interplay between civilization and wilderness by offering travelers domesticated nature. While the nation marketed itself as the antithesis of industrial and modern society, it also promoted comfort and a sense of familiarity that was attractive to American tourists. John MacCormac, the Ottawa-born Canadian correspondent for the New York Times from 1933 to 1939, reported that Canada was a "vast wilderness," where "there are still rivers and lakes where no angler has cast a lure, silent forests where the moose abounds and the bear and wolf have not learned to fear the crack of a rifle." Still, American tourists could expect "reasonable accommodation and facilities for occasional golf, swimming and other recreation."¹⁶ The availability of resort-quality accommodations thus tamed back-to-nature holidays. Although the wilderness setting was positioned as a direct experience, visitors roughed it in style.

While evidence establishing a connection between Rose-Marie's audiences and a subsequent desire to visit the Northwest remains elusive, the favorable connection between this box-office success and its pseudo-Canadian setting potentially motivated cross-border travel. In spite of the Great Depression, tourism to Canada from the United States remained relatively brisk at the time of Rose-Marie's release. The Literary Digest reported that fifteen million Americans vacationed in Canada in 1935–1936: "a greater hegira than crosses any other international boundary."¹⁷ Widespread ownership of automobiles profoundly affected notions of time and distance, allowing for quick sojourns across the border. Indeed, throughout the 1920s tourism had been one of Canada's most profitable industries. In 1929, tourism revenue was six times as great as the net value of fisheries production and equaled the net value of production in the Canadian forest, mining, and construction industries.¹⁸ Following the stock market crash, however, revenue from tourism in Canada drastically dropped.¹⁹ Despite economic hardship, vacation expenditures of U. S. tourists as a percentage of national income consistently increased in the 1930s.²⁰ The Canadian government was eager to cash in on the vigorous tourism market.

In April 1934, the Hon. W. H. Dennis from Halifax brought to the attention of the Senate the importance of the tourist trade to the Canadian economy and urged the federal government to cooperate with provincial authorities to enhance its development. Senators then debated the best way to portray Canada as a distinctive tourist destination, because — as the Hon. C. P. Beaubien states — "strangers come to a strange land to see strange things," and Canada had to entice Americans to cross the line to see uncommon things that they could not see at home.²¹ Dennis argued that "the natural attractions of the country constitute one great asset which can be sold lavishly and still be retained undiminished and unimpaired."²²

On 26 April 1934 a Special Committee on Tourist Traffic was appointed, chaired by Dennis, to consider ways to encourage the expansion of the tourism industry. The committee concluded that the immense importance of the tourist trade meant that its promotion could no longer be left to the provinces, municipalities, or private agencies but rather must be conducted on a national level. To coordinate the tourism campaign, the Canadian Travel Bureau (CTB) was set up under the Ministry of Resources and Development in 1935. Under the leadership of D. Leo Dolan, a former journalist from New Brunswick who had been active in the provincial tourist industry, the CTB advocated tourism by placing ads in American mass circulation magazines and metropolitan newspapers. The advertising campaign struck a careful balance between the desire for authenticity and foreignness with the demand for affordability, accessibility, and modern conveniences. For example, one CTB advertisement invited Americans to "vacation under a friendly foreign flag in the Land of the Maple Leaf. There are open doors with friendly welcoming officials in attendance all along the three-thousand miles of international boundary. Exhilarating days of sunshine, cool nights, and a hospitable people will help to make your stay a pleasant one."²³

The motif of a neighborly border figures prominently in the CTB advertisements of the period. This reflects the federal government's decision to ease the entry of Americans into the country to increase tourism. Under a new regulation, U. S. tourists could stay in Canada for a period of 48 hours (up from 24 hours) without a permit. Moreover, U. S. citizens did not need to present their passports when crossing the international border, but had to prove citizenship upon their return to the United States. The Canadian Government also removed the "irritating customs regulations" involving duty-free items.²⁴ An open letter from Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, appearing in a special Canadian issue of Travel, stressed the freedom of movement for U. S. citizens in Canada: "To visit Canada you only have to cross the most peaceful International Boundary in all the world. You do not require a passport. You may move about as freely as you do in your own country. You may leave with the same informality and ease."²⁵

Rose-Marie calls attention to this tourist discourse that capitalized upon the utopic/dystopic, remote/accessible, and modern/primitive elements of the Canadian Northwest. However, by deconstructing Ride the Pink Horse's vision of the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, I surmise that these tensions are not unique to Canada, but are characteristic of representations of western landscapes in general. Canada and New Mexico each courted tourists by touting the widespread availability of modernized tourist infrastructures while simultaneously publicizing the regions as convenient escapes from modern society. The North American West thus figures as a cyclical process that evolves from a remote frontier to a mass tourist frontier, which, in turn, commodifies the image of a remote frontier.²⁶

While the Northwest played a synecdochical role for Canada, in the tourism discourse the American West also symbolized the origins of the nation while simultaneously signifying a sense of newness and possibility.²⁷ The United States acquired this vast tract of land when Mexico surrendered its northern states in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase of 1855. Initially, much of this territory was seen as a Great Desert, "a betrayal of the promise of abundance fulfilled elsewhere in North America."²⁸ Representing nature in its most extreme and harsh state, the southwestern badlands are denuded. Unlike the sylvan Northwest, this was a land defined by absence; devoid of greenery, water, or signs of "civilization"; the desert offered only hardship.²⁹ By the end of the Civil War, however, the region attained a quasi-mythical status as a place of adventure, opportunity, and individualism.

In 1890, the U. S. Census Bureau declared that the contiguous frontier line no longer existed. Three years later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner used the "closing of the frontier" as an opportunity to reflect upon the influence it had exercised on the distinctive development of U. S. history. In a paper presented to the American Historical Association Meeting in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Turner not only stressed the self-reliance of the pioneer spirit, but cast the frontier as the most important factor in the formation of the unique American character—the dividing line between civilization and savagery.

Turner's frontier thesis initiated a widespread cultural, intellectual, and political wave of nostalgia for a romanticized vision of the West. Subsequently, domestic tourism to the trans-Mississippi West flourished. While Canada's tourist industry promoted a familiar yet foreign tourist experience, geared to entice American travelers to cross the 49th parallel, western boosters in the U. S. pressed for national tourism, in keeping with intensified discourses of patriotism and loyalty. The West was characterized as the American landscape—the embodiment of the nation's identity and its detachment from both Europe and the metropolises of the Northeast. For instance, "See America First" was a campaign advocating domestic tourism to the American West that linked the region with notions of national citizenship and republicanism.³⁰ At the same time, boosters appealed to regional distinctiveness to attract tourists from the East to cross into a mythical western frontier zone.

In particular, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (ATSF), in conjunction with the Fred Harvey Company, capitalized on the notion of the West as a distinct cultural region, yet one that was quintessentially American.³¹ These advertising efforts paralleled the CPR's publicity campaign in the Canadian Northwest. The transcontinental railroad offered travelers the opportunity to witness the western topography from the comfort of luxury railway cars and the convenience of hotel rooms and restaurants along the Santa Fe rail route.³² Though tempered by the availability of modern conveniences, the desire for authenticity motivated travelers during the late-nineteenth century. Similar to the draw of the Northwest, the Romantic Movement, specifically an anti-modern disillusionment with industrial capitalism, inspired travel to the American West. The preference for all things natural was a reaction against a seemingly artificial society overrun by materialism and the machine. By the 1920s, even the barren desert had become an increasingly popular tourist destination for those seeking respite from industrial and modern society.³³

Although a fictional town, according to Universal Studio's press materials the setting of Ride the Pink Horse was an amalgam of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos, New Mexico.³⁴Ride the Pink Horse begins with an establishing shot of the Southwest. As the opening credits roll, long panoramic shots of the desert cement the importance of geographic location to the narrative. However, the cruelty and violence in Ride the Pink Horse appears antithetical to its initial tranquil natural tableau. The film contains shadow-filled settings, a displaced G. I., and a deceitful femme fatale, as well as themes of alienation, uncertainty, and confusion, which are characteristic of film noir's cinematic conventions. Therefore, while the Canadian wilderness in Rose-Marie is a haven for thieves, killers, and fugitives brought to justice by the intrepid Mounties, so too does the Southwest in Ride the Pink Horse function as a site of murder and revenge, as well as law and order. The violent elements that define the films' narratives indicate that these bloodstained regions require policing by Mounties and FBI agents—official representatives of the nation-state. Both Rose-Marie and Ride the Pink Horse share utopic/dystopic components, while the narratives unfold in fictional, invented topographies.

In the case of Ride the Pink Horse, the elements of danger reveal the underlying struggle of a region trying to resolve its connection to its Spanish colonial past. The film echoes the "Black Legend," perpetuated by the English since the sixteenth century to encourage intervention in Spanish America. The legend depicted both Spain and its New World colonies as barbaric, but also hinted that its Hispano-American territories contained material riches. Anglo-America thus concurrently idealized Spanish America's "Arcadian serenity, beauty, and innocence" alongside "the grotesque, the monstrous, and the brutal."³⁵

Indeed, it was the vision of New Mexico as an Arcadia that attracted a number of disenchanted artists and intellectuals from the eastern United States. Beginning around 1900, they formed year-round colonies in Taos and Santa Fe. Many of these transplanted artists and writers suffered from such respiratory ailments as tuberculosis and came to the dry climate of the Southwest to recuperate. But mostly they were drawn to the quaintness and isolation of village life, where they could recover from the so-called philistine tastes of machine-age culture, echoing the Romantic Movement. By the 1920s, these artistic communities entered a Golden Age of creativity lasting until the 1940s.³⁶

Incongruously, most artists who had left the East to escape commercialism depended upon the tourist traffic to promote their work. Tourists had followed these artistic trailblazers into Santa Fe to see the luminaries as much as to bask in the sun-kissed landscape.³⁷ As early as 1912, when statehood was granted to New Mexico, the city of Santa Fe changed its image from a railway hub to a colorful tourist destination as a way to improve its sagging economy. The New Mexico and Santa Fe tourism industry promoted tri-culturalism: modern Anglo-American, Hispano, and Native cultures living together harmoniously. For example, the Museum of New Mexico and its School of American Archaeology cultivated pre-industrial local traditions and the picturesque Spanish colonial experience to forge a distinctive civic identity that, in turn, attracted tourists. In the process, tri-culturalism glossed over the realities of inter-ethnic/racial tensions and unequal relationships of power.

Hence, the lure of New Mexico manifested itself in both the land and in the notable presence of Native communities. In the United States, particularly in the West, Native peoples have played a central role in defining an imagined national/regional identity. Due to the perceived intimate connection between Aboriginal peoples and nature, Anglo-Americans coded Native peoples as products of the environment and as expressions of the "essential" American.³⁸ The "imaginary Indian" has been equally integral to the process of non-Native identity formation and vital to Canada's national identity. Euro-Canadians appropriated images of the Indian Other, particularly associations with pre-industrial society, as meaningful symbols of their own culture.³⁹ In nationalist mythology, Indians signify "harmony between humans and nature, and the untouched and virgin natural land that [has come] to represent Canada's beginnings."⁴⁰

The erroneous belief that Native peoples were disappearing resulted in a Euro-Canadian movement to preserve this dying race in the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁴¹ Likewise, just as the closing of the frontier was partially responsible for romanticizing the West, the concomitant myth of the vanishing American sparked an ethnographic and commercial desire to capture and preserve Indian culture before it was too late.⁴² Renato Rosaldo calls this process "imperialist nostalgia," wherein the colonizer destroys the cultures of the Other and then yearns for what they have vanquished.⁴³

The myth of the vanishing American/Canadian served the interests of the tourism industry. Blurring the line between anthropology and entertainment, Native peoples performed for tourists at the World's Fairs of the Victorian period and as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows. Well into the 1930s and 1940s, Indians were marketed as "living relics" who performed for paying non-Native spectators.⁴⁴ For example, one New Mexico Tourist Bureau advertisement depicted the region as a "land of color and romance," urging travelers to "join the modern adventurers who follow pioneer footsteps to this colorful land where history comes to life and romance lingers." The advertisement declares: "Your ordinary vacation becomes an extraordinary adventure as you travel through the land of Enchantment. You'll watch weird ceremonial dances in age-old Indian pueblos."⁴⁵

In the Canadian Northwest, tourists could also observe fading Indians in their natural habitat. Indian imagery played a crucial role in the CPR's publicity schemes. In association with local business interests, the CPR sponsored the annual Indian Days festival at Banff, Alberta. Popular tradition holds that the festivities began in the late 1890s as a way to entertain a group of stranded tourists. Until its demise in the late 1970s, Indian Days was a regular event held for one week every July. The festival featured members of the nearby Stoney Indian reserve, which children's author Stella Burke May describes as "one of the most picturesque Indian tribes on the continent," performing traditional dances and competing in rodeo events.⁴⁶ Subsequently, it is not surprising that Hollywood employed Indian iconography to index a particular motion picture as "Canadian-themed."

The ATSF in conjunction with the Fred Harvey Company similarly endorsed travel to the Southwest by using Indian imagery to invoke a primitivist vision of the region.⁴⁷ The railway arranged trips for ethnographic artists to paint Hopi, Pueblo, and Navajo subjects in order to record this "dying race." The ATSF then used the paintings for decoration or reproduced the images for promotional purposes.⁴⁸ With the prevalence of automobile travel in the 1920s, the Fred Harvey Company and the ATSF later initiated Indian Detours, which were guided Harveycar Motor Cruises into the Indian centers of New Mexico, such as Taos and Santa Fe.⁴⁹

While in Santa Fe, excursionists stayed at the La Fonda Hotel. Completed in 1922, La Fonda was part of the Harvey hotel chain from 1926 until 1968. The syncretic adobe hotel reinforced the myth of tri-culturalism. Though furnished with modern conveniences, the decor was accented by regional color, such as functional Pueblo artifacts displayed as art. The blending of pre-industrial and art deco elements, termed American Indian Modern, was in decorative vogue during the period of the hotel's establishment.⁵⁰ Therefore, although New Mexico appeared excitingly unusual, its difference was marked as benign.⁵¹ Similar to the Canadian tourist industry's promotion of domesticated nature, Santa Fe's projected uniqueness was non-threatening because it simultaneously appeared as an antediluvian, scenic village and as a sophisticated, modern Anglo-American city.⁵²

Ride the Pink Horse prominently features the recreated interiors of the La Fonda. In the film, the hotel functions as a fashionable haven for Anglo-American tourists in town for the fiesta. The San Pablo Fiesta was based upon the annual Santa Fe Fiesta. Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, director and founder of the Museum of New Mexico, established the contemporary Santa Fe Fiesta in 1919 to commemorate General De Vargas's bloodless re-occupation of the town and the conversion of Pueblo peoples to Catholicism.⁵³ The fiesta was consistent with the myth of tri-culturalism. First, the event romanticized the region's Spanish colonial past via the "Entrada," a re-enactment of the Spanish governor's triumphant entry to take back Santa Fe, as well as the inclusion of Hispano folk dramas and historical pageants.⁵⁴ Second, the fiesta organizers strove to preserve the "primitive purity" of Indian ceremonies, dances, and traditional crafts.⁵⁵ The Anglo-American curators of the Museum of New Mexico, in concert with local businesses, had already been appropriating the exotic details of Pueblo cultures to promote tourism.⁵⁶ These pagan entertainments contrasted with sacred Hispano-Catholic rituals, such as the mass and sermons. Finally, the fiesta typically included an exhibit featuring the work of modernist painters living in New Mexico, which indicated the city's cosmopolitan-ness.

However, several members of Santa Fe's bohemian community disliked the commodification of the festivities. In 1924, they organized El Pasatiempo, a carnival held at the same time as the fiesta. The three-day event included street dances, community singing, and the Hysterical Parade, which satirized historic figures and parodied tourists.⁵⁷ This counter-fiesta was a free event for the Santa Fe community and contrasted the stilted historical pageants, tourist-friendly performances, and admission charges of the legitimate Fiesta. However, Pasatiempo gradually became a popular event for tourists and has essentially merged with the Santa Fe Fiesta.

Since 1926, the highlight of Pasatiempo has been the burning of Zozobra. Roughly translated from the Spanish to mean "the gloomy one," Zozobra is a giant, animated marionette paraded through the streets before immolation. The puppet moans, groans, and waves his arms (his eyes, mouth, and arms manipulated by hidden puppeteers) in futile fury until he succumbs to the giant bonfire. The burning of the effigy symbolizes the purging of bad luck and the commencement of good times.

While Zozobra might appear pre-modern, the Philadelphia-born Will Shuster created the effigy and oversaw its design and construction for forty years. Shuster had come to the Santa Fe art colony in 1920 to recover from tuberculosis and soon befriended John Sloan, the well-known Ashcan school artist who summered in Santa Fe. A year later, Shuster became a founding member of Los Cinco Pintores, a group of East Coast artists attracted to New Mexico's scenery and "primitive" cultural traditions.⁵⁸ In addition to painting abstract landscapes and Indian subjects, Shuster was an active member of Santa Fe's civic community and integral to the founding of Pasatiempo.

Shuster claimed that the inspiration for Zozobra came while witnessing a Judas burning in a Native village outside Tucson, Arizona.⁵⁹ The creator of Zozobra thus embraced aspects of a syncretic ritual, that is, the Yaqui's mixing of indigenous and Catholic customs. Moreover, the Fire Spirit dance that precedes the burning of the effigy figured as a stylized interpretation of Native traditions. Jacques Cartier, a prominent concert dancer who toured with the Albertina Rasch Ballet and later taught in Santa Fe, created the dance and performed it for more than thirty-five years. After apparently living in India, South Africa, Japan, and among the Hopi, Cartier appropriated these various ethnic dance styles, which he blended into his choreography. While residing in Santa Fe, Cartier observed various Native dancers and incorporated their rhythms and movements into his repertoire.⁶⁰ According to a profile in Theatre Arts Monthly, his cross-cultural experiences exposed him to a diversity of "racial traits" and enabled him "to present them in his dancing with a sure and heightened sense of style."⁶¹

In Ride the Pink Horse, director Robert Montgomery used footage of the burning of Zozobra from a Pasatiempo. Replete with grotesque floats depicting ancient gods and rituals, the San Pablo Fiesta appears on-screen as an exotic Indian festival. Referring to the fiesta, Bill Retz (the FBI agent investigating Hugo, the war profiteer) claims: "Lots of excitement: floats, dancing in the streets. The Indians put on a special show." Here, the film signals the central role of "Indian-ness" to mass tourism and in forging Santa Fe's tri-culturalist civic identity. The Pasatiempo sequence brims with a spirit of spontaneity, inclusivity, and community. Mexicanos, Native peoples, and Anglo-American tourists interact in the carnival square, a seemingly egalitarian and democratic environment. Even the hard-boiled Gagin, who did not come to San Pablo for the fiesta, is swept up in the carousing. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, "this carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world...and to enter a completely new order of things."⁶² Carnival participants resist the dominant order, its "impenetrable hierarchical barriers," and ultimately redefine their subject position.⁶³

Therefore, the Pasatiempo/Zozobra sequence in Ride the Pink Horse reflects and reinforces the tourist industry's primitivist conception of Native peoples. In what Dean MacCannell terms "staged authenticity," the audience is led to believe that it was privy to a genuine experience, but the auratic qualities of the landscape and of the Native performers were largely contrived.⁶⁴ The cinematic fiesta functions as a commodified tourist experience intended to prop up the distinctive qualities of the greater Southwest and New Mexico in particular. Here the "scopophilic gaze" (pleasure of looking) of the cinematic audience magnifies the tourist gaze. Film is thus doubly escapist and self-reflexive. Just as cinematic tourists break with the established routines and practices of everyday life, movie spectators simultaneously departed their mundane world via darkened movie houses. The exaggerated qualities of the cinematic experience, in turn, potentially fuel a desire for the experiences witnessed on screen. The mainstream film industry, alongside an interconnected web of public and private tourist agencies, thus played a symbiotic role in shaping romantic and primitivist conceptions (tempered by modernity) of New Mexico.

Hollywood, as did the tourist industry, employed staged Indian spectacles to shape a primitivist vision of the Canadian Northwest to indicate its exceptional appeal. The highlight of every version of Rose-Marie is the Totem Tom Tom Dance. The dance director for the 1936 version of the film was Chester Hale. A classically-trained choreographer and former member of the Diaghilev Ballet Russe, Hale worked on Broadway founding the Chester Hale Dancers, a group of precision chorines who performed prologs at New York City's Capitol Theater, the cornerstone of the Loews' theater chain.⁶⁵ Hale divided his time between New York and Hollywood, where he worked with W. S. Van Dyke on Hide-Out, Naughty Marietta, and Rose-Marie.⁶⁶

In Rose-Marie, Sgt. Bruce brings Marie to this local Indian festival to find Boniface, the Métis guide who had stolen her money and deserted her. As she observes the Indians arranging themselves for the Totem Tom Tom dance, Marie exclaims, "Oh but there are hundreds of them! I never dreamed things like this were still going on!" To which Sgt. Bruce replies, "They do this every year. It's like a Mardi Gras for them." Again, the "vanishing Indians" are "putting on a show." The couple then makes their way to a higher spot and observes the festivities from a safe distance, taking part in the hegemonic tourist gaze. According to Stuart Hall, such "spectacles of the 'Other'" sustain the existing asymmetrical power dynamics between the colonizer and colonized.⁶⁷ Throughout the number, the camera frequently cuts away to close panning shots of Sgt. Bruce and Marie. Marie, the performer now becomes the spectator. As if in a trance, Marie watches as the "primitive dance [stirs] her out of her aloof sophistication...until reaching its finale, a high point of abandoned grotesquerie."⁶⁸

According to Hale's detailed notes, the dance number includes approximately one hundred dancers. Prior to filming, MGM's department of research consulted pictures of and reference books and magazines on Native peoples, in addition to spending a "weekend in the desert and mountains to get inspiration and atmosphere in the Indians' own environment."⁶⁹ Yet instead of utilizing Native peoples appropriate to the film's setting in northern Quebec, most of the Aboriginal performers came from the San Diego Fair, where Hale had recently visited.⁷⁰ Hale, however, admits that he did not aim for the number to be a realistic portrayal of an Aboriginal festival, but rather "a series of suggestions of the spirit and the activities of this Indian celebration."⁷¹ Since Hale attempted to project, in his term, the "spirit" of essentialized Indian-ness in the film, it is not surprising that the performance is inauthentic. In Rose-Marie, the participants in the festival are referred to as the Montagnais, the name given to the Innu people of Quebec and Labrador by French fur traders. Yet while the Innu are hunter-gatherers, who engage in very little agriculture due to poor soil and a short growing season, Sgt. Bruce informs Marie that the festival is in "appreciation for a good crop." Moreover, despite the fact that Rose-Marie takes place in northern Quebec, the aesthetics of the sequence are a mélange of ersatz Plains Indian style—breechcloths, beads, and feathered headdresses. To top it off, the dance number occurs against a backdrop of Haida-type totem poles.

Therefore, in Ride the Pink Horse and Rose-Marie the Indian settings are manifestations of what Dean MacCannell calls "staged authenticity." Despite the differences in climate and geography, these similarities indicate shared ideologies about western communities. Exchange the desert mesas, adobes, and Pueblo Indians with snowcapped mountains, coureurs de bois, and Montagnais and you have a mise en scene similar to the bustling northwestern trading post of Rose-Marie. The Canadian location thus exhibits its own tri-culturalist discourse—French colonial presence, Montagnais, and Anglo-Saxon Mounties—that parallels New Mexico's promotion of intertwined Hispano, Native, and modern Anglo-American cultures. However, Hollywood did not act alone in fabricating these artificial displays. Rather, the film industry responded to the commodified spectacles of Indian culture perpetuated by the tourist industry since the late-nineteenth century. The popularity of films such as Rose-Marie and Ride the Pink Horse, in turn, further encouraged the use of Indian-ness in tourist promotions.

Notwithstanding the inauthenticity, Marie de Flor and Lucky Gagin's interactions with quasi-authentic Indians serve an important diegetic function. Contact with the Other enabled the protagonists' personal transformations. In re-fashioning the identity of the Anglo-American/Euro-Canadian protagonists, the films speak to larger processes of non-Native identification. As I have argued, in both the Canadian Northwest and in the U. S. Southwest, Native peoples not only attracted tourists, but also furthered the process through which Anglo-Americans/Euro-Canadians invented their regional/national identity.

In Rose-Marie, Marie de Flor's experiences with nature and her encounters with Indian culture liberate her. The film introduces the protagonist as a diva who values fame and money. According to producer Hunt Stromberg, Sgt. Bruce shows her a new life set apart from her artificial world.⁷² Isolated forest cabins and the stillness of un-trodden snowfields provide a tranquil backdrop for introspection and mental renewal. After a brief courtship, Bruce and Marie declare their love for one another with an "Indian Love Call." This call and response song, which also appears in the original stage production and 1954 film, evokes the spirit of two dead Indian lovers said to haunt the sacred woods. By singing the Indian Love Call, Marie is able to let go and realize love and spirituality by channeling the spirit of esssentialized Indian-ness. Due to societal constraints against intercultural romance and the Production Code's explicit rules against miscegenation, Sgt. Bruce also functions as a Euro-Canadian stand-in for the Indian Other. The Mountie self-identifies as a primitive at heart. For example, he tells the urbane Marie that he has lived "alone" amongst the Indians for months on end and that he belongs in the woods.

The film's iconic vision of the Mounted Police supports larger discourses about the Canadian Northwest by encapsulating the contradictory forces of modernity and primitivism. The Mounties promoted a vision of the Canadian Northwest as different from the American West. In spite of the Canadian government's assimilation policies (as seen in the Indian Act of 1876), a vision of the peaceful and lawful settlement of the Canadian Northwest, as opposed to the bloody conquering of the American frontier, has persisted. Since the late-nineteenth century, the Mountie has stood as an internationally recognizable symbol of one of English Canada's most venerated institutions and an "authoritarian and authenticating sign" in the narratives of the nation.⁷³ Nevertheless, although the Mounties symbolized imperial order and authority, their daring exploits in the rugged wilderness positioned them outside the bounds of civil society.

Gallantly clothed in his scarlet tunic, the Canadian Mountie was a recurrent character in American feature films until the 1950s. Of the 575 films that Hollywood made with Canadian themes, 256 featured the Mounted Police.⁷⁴ For inspiration, Hollywood drew from a large body of Gilded Age dime novels featuring Mountie adventures in the Canadian Northwest. Widespread popularity for this romanticized hero pointed to shared anxieties surrounding industrialism and urbanization, as well as nostalgia for the disappearing frontier.⁷⁵ Typically, these northwestern melodramas and their cinematic adaptations were simplified tales of good and evil, where a stouthearted Mountie must choose between duty and love. Disciplined and dedicated, he usually selected the former.

Hollywood played a crucial role in sanitizing the public image of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP), renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1919. Canadian tourist promotions further commodified the iconic Mountie in dress uniform. Elevated from a police force to mythical status, Mounties functioned as "tourist bait," luring Americans to travel across the border.⁷⁶ Despite the efforts of Commissioner James H. MacBrien to modernize the police force in the 1930s, the romantic image of the Mountie created by such films as Rose-Marie and in tourist promotions endured. D. Leo Dolan even suggested to the federal government that retired Mounties could add to the general Canadian atmosphere by singing arias from Rose-Marie for tourists.⁷⁷

Therefore, Hollywood and the tourist industry depicted the Mounties as being simultaneously part of the natural environment, yet beholden to conquer it. In Rose-Marie, the Mountie myth reinforces the regenerative and romantic qualities of the Canadian Northwest. As Sgt. Bruce says to Marie, whilst slowly paddling a canoe, "If you came up here for romance, I don't know why you have to go anywhere further than this; look around you—you've got everything here." The combination of a primitive Bruce, shimmering moonlit lakes, peaceful forests, and Indian legends, transforms the opera singer. Bruce tells Marie: "It's this place, and the woods...it makes you lose your sense of values." To which Marie replies: "[I]t has made me realize them." In the end, the lofty Marie de Flor becomes reincarnated as the simple Rose-Marie. Her experiences within the sublime wilderness and indirect relations with Indians enabled the formation of a novel identity.

Just as Marie initially held mistaken priorities, greed and vengeance motivates the cynical protagonist at the beginning of Ride the Pink Horse. Yet his relationships with the cultural and racial Other profoundly change Gagin. The first shots of San Pablo underscore the presence of Pueblo Indians and mexicanos. Gagin, an easterner, seems to be marked as a foreigner in his own country. Shortly after arriving in San Pablo, Gagin encounters a young indigena named Pila (Wanda Hendrix) and she becomes his guardian angel. Soon after, Pancho (Thomas Gómez), the proprietor of San Pablo's carousel, Tio Vivo, befriends Gagin and offers him a place to stay. After the war profiteer's gang assaults Gagin, Pancho and Pila bring him to the merry-go-round where they nurse him back to health. Tio Vivo symbolizes regeneration and signals a carnivalesque entry into a Bakhtinian "new order of things." When the thugs come to the carousel searching for Gagin, Pancho and Pila hide their newfound friend. Upon refusing to give Gagin up, the hoods severely beat Pancho, while a group of horrified children riding the carousel looks on. In his review, James Agee thus calls Ride the Pink Horse "practically revolutionary for a West Coast picture; it obviously intends to show that Mexicans and Indians are capable of great courage and loyalty, even to a white American, and can help him out of a hole if they like him."⁷⁸ While Gagin's relationships with Pila and Pancho are caring, his confrontations with Hugo's Anglo-American goons are violent.

Ultimately, Gagin's interactions with Pancho and Pila humanize him. Gagin initially went to San Pablo to extort money from Frank Hugo. He refused to cooperate with the federal government's attempt to arrest the war racketeer. Moreover, throughout most of the film, Gagin's behavior towards the gentle Pila is racist and misogynistic. He refers to her as "Sitting Bull" and requests that she "go home and play with [her] buffaloes." Gagin even calls Pila "a freak." He gives her money and instructs Pila to replace her Indian "costume" with Anglo-American attire in order to look more "human." Yet the acerbic Gagin gradually develops feelings for Pila. Despite the unspoken rule that non-whites are unwelcome as patrons of the La Fonda, he invites her to lunch at the hotel restaurant. Before leaving town, Gagin struggles over how to say goodbye to Pila. Gagin's intercultural relationships with Pila and Pancho have prompted a sincere transformation. In the end, Gagin has a change of heart and provides Bill Retz with the information he was using to blackmail the war profiteer so that Hugo can be arrested. The symbolic power of fire during the burning of Zozobra thus foreshadowed Gagin's eventual renewal and spiritual uplift.

This paper has compared Rose-Marie and Ride the Pink Horse to demonstrate the way in which the interplay of tourist and filmic representations of the northwestern and southwestern landscapes and of Native peoples has privileged certain cultural symbols. Marie and Gagin are unintentional tourists; neither protagonist intends to seek a commodified tourist experience at their respective locations. Yet they ultimately become tourists by consuming the physical and cultural attractions of the western landscapes. Although the Canadian Northwest and the U. S. Southwest are strikingly different in terms of their iconography—a sylvan landscape versus the barren desert, they share significant thematic and symbolic elements.

The films reveal how Classical Hollywood indirectly worked alongside various tourist agencies to represent the Canadian and American Wests as symbolic of their respective nations as a whole. The cinematic and tourist representations of domesticated nature and tri-culturalism echoed various movements of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely Romanticism, Anti-modernism, and Primitivism. Images of the Northwest and the Southwest straddled the line between romance and danger thereby enhancing the exciting qualities of these regions. These portrayals were also situated in the expanding consumer culture of North America in the 1930s and 1940s. The tourist industries in Canada and New Mexico presented their respective landscapes as not only refuges from modern and industrial America, but also as accessible and up-to-date tourist destinations.

Though released nearly ten years apart, the films reveal shared utopic and dystopic characteristics and exhibit a tension between modern progress and primitive space. Tourist and filmic images reconciled this slippage between past and present, civilized and savage. As such, Canadian and New Mexico tourist promotions used images of vanishing Native peoples to generate and satisfy consumer demand for a distinctive, pre-industrial experience. Furthermore, commodified spectacles featuring essentialized Indians enabled the construction of Euro-Canadian and Anglo-American subject-identities. The festival sequences in both films uphold the hegemonic tourist gaze of Marie and Gagin and the scopophilic gaze of the cinematic audience. On-screen, mediated encounters with the primitive Other facilitated the spiritual renewal of the non-Native protagonists. Both Marie and Gagin are interlopers who became profoundly altered by both their organic surroundings and by consuming Native culture. The tourism and mainstream film industries thus operated in an interconnected web, which similarly portrayed the Northwest and the Southwest as locations of redemption and regeneration, not only via the landscape but also through racial and cultural difference.

DOMINIQUE BRÉGENT-HEALD, assistant professor of history at Memorial University of Newfoundland, thanks Andy den Otter, Nora Faires, Merrill Heald, and Jeff Webb.

NOTES

¹ Sgt. Bruce describes a Native festival to Marie de Flor in Rose-Marie (W. S. Van Dyke, 1936). FBI Agent Bill Retz discusses the San Pablo fiesta with Lucky Gagin in Ride the Pink Horse (Robert Montgomery, 1947).

² 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.

³ 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.

⁴ 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); Rose Marie (Mervyn Leroy, 1954). Hereafter, Rose-Marie shall refer to the 1936 version.

⁵ See Pierre Berton, Hollywood's Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image (Toronto, ON, 1975).

⁶ Daily (Los Angeles, CA) Variety, 19 October 1935, 2.

⁷ Frank S. Nugent, "The New Version of 'Rose Marie,' at the Capitol," New York Times, 1 February 1936, 9 and The Commonweal 23 (31 January 1936): 386. Emphasis added.

⁸ 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).

⁹ See E.J. Hart, The Selling of Canada: The CPR and the Beginnings of Canadian Tourism (Banff, AB, 1983).

¹⁰ 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.

¹¹ See Patricia Jane Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto, ON, 1995).

¹² Carl Berger, "The True North Strong and Free," in Nationalism in Canada, ed. Peter Russell (Toronto, ON, 1966), 3–26.

¹³ See Eva Mackey, "Death by Landscape: Race, Nature, and Gender in Canadian Nationalist Mythology," Canadian Woman Studies 20 (Summer 2000): 125–30 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.

¹⁴ See Ian Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal, QC, 1997).

¹⁵ H.W. Wack, "The Wonders of American and African Travel," Arts & Decoration 33 (May 1930): 74–5. Emphasis added.

¹⁶ John MacCormac, "The Dominion Realizes its Travel Trade is One of Its Greatest Industries," New York Times, 16 June 1935, sec. 11, p. 3.

¹⁷ "Canada Beckons to Vacationists," Literary Digest, 121 (6 June 1936): 36.

¹⁸ Canada, Parliament, Senate. Debates, 17th Parl., 5th sess., 25 April 1934 (Ottawa, ON, 1934), 294.

¹⁹ Ibid., 296. In 1933, tourist expenditures in Canada of tourists from other countries amounted to $117,000,000, down from $309,379,000 in 1929.

²⁰ 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.

²¹ Canada, Parliament, Senate. Debates, 17th Parl., 5th sess., 25 April 1934 (Ottawa, ON, 1934), 303.

²² Ibid., 296.

²³ New York Times, 12 May 1935, sec. 4, p. 7. Emphasis added.

²⁴ "Canada Eases Entry for Tourists," Literary Digest 119 (July 1935): 39.

²⁵ Back page advertisement, Travel 75 (May 1940).

²⁶ 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.

²⁷ Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, KS, 1998), 40.

²⁸ Patricia Nelson Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounters with American Deserts (Albuquerque, NM, 1985), 167.

²⁹ Ibid., 71.

³⁰ See Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC, 2001).

³¹ See Keith L. Bryant, Jr., History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (New York, 1974).

³² See J. Valerie Fifer, American Progress: The Growth of the Transport, Tourist, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-Century West (Chester, CT, 1988) and John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln, 1985).

³³ Mildred Adams, "The Blooming of the American Desert," New York Times Magazine, 25 May 1930, sec. 5, p. 12.

³⁴ Ride the Pink Horse clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.

³⁵ 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.

³⁶ See Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900–1942 (Norman, OK, 1983) and Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer's Era, 1916–1941 (Santa Fe, 1982).

³⁷ "Tourists follow artists to nature's hideouts," Literary Digest 118 (15 December 1934): 24.

³⁸ Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC, 1996), 183.

³⁹ See Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver, BC, 1992).

⁴⁰ Eva Mackey, "Becoming Indigenous: Land, Belonging, and the Appropriation of Aboriginality in Canadian Nationalist Narratives," Social Analysis 42 (July 1998): 150–78.

⁴¹ J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto, ON, 1989), 213.

⁴² See Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes & U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT, 1982).

⁴³ Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989), 70.

⁴⁴ Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 77–124.

⁴⁵ New York Times, 29 May 1938, sec. 11, p. 4.

⁴⁶ Stella Burke May, "Vacation across the Border," Parents' Magazine 11 (May 1936): 32.

⁴⁷ Michael E. Zega, "Advertising the Southwest," Journal of the Southwest 43 (Autumn 2001): 281–315 and Shelby J. Tisdale, "Railroads, Tourism, and Native Americans in the Greater Southwest," Journal of the Southwest 38 (Winter 1996): 433–62.

⁴⁸ 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.

⁴⁹ Pedro J. Lemos, "An Old World Trip in our Own United States," School Arts Magazine 30 (March 1931): 403–16.

⁵⁰ F. Gonzalez Gamarra, "Ancient America Inspires the New Decorative Vogue," Arts & Decoration 20 (December 1923): 38 and "American Indian Modern," American Home 22 (July 1939): 25.

⁵¹ Rothman, Devil's Bargains, 81.

⁵² Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque, 1997), 80.

⁵³ 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. 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.

⁵⁴ 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.

⁵⁵ Paul A.F. Walter, "The Santa Fe Fiesta of September, 1924," Art and Archeology 28 (November–December 1924): 181.

⁵⁶ Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 3.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 212.

⁵⁸ The other painters were Józef Bakos, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, and Willard Nash. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Modernist Painting in New Mexico, 1913–1935 (Albuquerque, 1984).

⁵⁹ "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.

⁶⁰ Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies, 97. 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 Cohen-Stratyner, Biographical Dictionary of Dance (New York, 1982).

⁶¹ Theatre Arts Monthly 11 (August 1927): 635.

⁶² Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 34.

⁶³ Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 123.

⁶⁴ Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 3rd ed. (New York, 1976; Berkeley, CA, 1999).

⁶⁵ 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.

⁶⁶ Hide-Out (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) and Naughty Marietta (W.S. Van Dyke, 1935).

⁶⁷ Stuart Hall, "The Spectacle of the 'Other,'" in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifiying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1997), 223–79.

⁶⁸ Rose-Marie Script, 13 August 1935, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.

⁶⁹ Notes from Chester Hale for Rose-Marie, 5 November 1935, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Ibid.

⁷² Hunt Stromberg's Conference Notes on Rose-Marie, 8 August 1936, Turner-MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS.

⁷³ 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).

⁷⁴ Berton, Hollywood's Canada, 111. On the Mounted Police in popular culture, see Michael Dawson, The Mountie From Dime Novel to Disney (Toronto, ON, 1998).

⁷⁵ Keith Walden, Visions of Order: The Mounted Police in Symbol and Myth (Toronto, ON, 1982), 5. 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.

⁷⁶ "Selling them the Blue Sky," Christian Science Monitor, 22 June 1938, 5.

⁷⁷ Ken Tingley, "125 Years: The Prairie Legacy of the Mounted Police," Legacy: Alberta's Arts, Heritage, and Culture Magazine (November 1999–January 2000), 15.

⁷⁸ The Nation 165 (8 November 1947): 511.

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