Julianne Newmark

"'Inner life of people little understood': Gertrude Bonnin, William F. Hanson, and The Sun Dance Opera"

Abstract: Nearly one-hundred years ago, Gertrude Bonnin collaborated with William Hanson on The Sun Dance Opera, an opera which, according to the 1938 publicity materials, would provide white audiences a glimpse into the “secret life” of Native people, in fact, the “inner life of people little understood.” This paper examines the collaborative relationship between Bonnin and Hanson and the dynamics of cultural translation that occurred during their work together and that emerged for the first time on the stage in 1913 in Vernal, Utah, and finally in New York City in 1938.

Bonnin’s collaboration with Hanson, a white Mormon music teacher, began in about 1910. P. Jane Hafen has commented on the differences--some productive, some impossibly dissonant—between American Indian music and Western music, differences that Hanson and Bonnin had to face during their collaboration. This paper takes as its text the final manuscript of the opera, in which one can see what these musical traditions share: “cultural representation and performance” (Hafen 126). Yet, we also must consider the power dynamics that are sublimated in the manuscript, the traces that reveal the ways in which Bonnin’s offerings of “traditional Sioux melodies” are ultimately “rendered unrecognizable” in the final score (127). Hafen offers an explanation of this, based on the radically different codification practices of Native and Western musical traditions. Bonnin played traditional melodies on her violin, as it “could allow for the tonal subtleties outside the tempered scalar system” (127). “However,” Hafen writes, “by the time Hanson committed the melodies to the fixed pitch system of the keyboard, along with the formulas of manuscript, the original indigenous melodies had been rendered unrecognizable” (127).

So, then, what of The Sun Dance Opera reflects a Native past, reinscribes tradition, and projects a future? If the opera is an experience of music and narrative and image together, where can a modern reader of the manuscript locate Bonnin? The plot of the opera is indeed based on the Plains Sun Dance and its original performances included local Utes among the cast members. However, by the time of its New York City premier in 1938, the year of Bonnin’s death, Hanson no longer credited Bonnin with any involvement in the opera’s creation. If, as the 1938 publicity materials declare, the opera offers a glimpse into “Inner life of people little understood,” what can a modern scholar “understand” – about Bonnin, about Native performance, about white/Native collaboration – from the record provided by final opera manuscript? Bonnin and Hanson both navigated complicated landscapes to produce a unified opera, landscapes of culture, race, privilege, education, commerce, and politics. These "landscapes," as this paper ultimately argues, are the spaces that Bonnin --or Bonnin and Hanson -- had to occupy to transform the ritual of the Sun Dance into material for the consumption of a primarily white audience.