By Barbara Lee Bragg

When I was sixteen years old, going down to my dad’s basement office felt like moving back in a time machine to the nineteenth century. Although we lived in a suburban house in Casper, Wyoming, that basement was filled with antiques from our family’s turn-of-century ranch in No Wood, a few miles away. (Just like so many names of towns in Wyoming, No Wood was near a river with no woods on it—just like Ten Sleep is a town where ten people slept.) Among the lines of pictures of five generations of our family’s Wyoming pioneers on the wall, a painting of Silver Jack Steele hung over the television where we all watched Star Trek and I Dream of Jeannie on Sunday evenings.

Barbara Lee Bragg, creator of Tales of the Old West

Even while my Dad, William F. Bragg, Jr., served a term as Wyoming state legislator and worked as a history professor at Casper College, he wrote every day, no matter what. All hell might be breaking loose in the world or in our family—but he would disappear down the stairs into his lair and write. It was his life.

His characters were colorful. Whether he was talking about Big Nose George Parrott, the Cannibal—with whom my mother was not so pleased—or Cantaloupe Jones, a cowboy who could unhinge his jaw, I was always in awe of his imagination. I have no idea whether he was telling the truth, but isn’t that why they call them tall tales? I’d listen to the tap-tapping of the old hulking typewriter filtering up through the heating grates. His characters were so vivid that I swear I could hear them talking to him down there. Lying in bed at night, I’d see a stagecoach rushing by me or Silver Jack Steele come to life.

One night, he marched up the stairs, out of the darkness of his office, and woke me at 3:00 a.m., throwing the manuscript of “Ten Sleep Mail” on my bed. He demanded I read it then and there—and bristled at my high-school analysis of his punctuation and spelling. As for my critique of his storytelling, he couldn’t bear it.

I remember being incredibly embarrassed because he would hold court for hours at family gatherings with his stories. How my eyes would roll! But my attitude changed suddenly on July 4, 1976, at a bicentennial celebration at Independence Rock, 60 miles outside of Casper. This huge granite outcrop in middle of the prairie is right on the Oregon Trail. Folks coming west in the 1800s would have to arrive there by the Fourth of July in order to be sure they could cross the Sierra Nevada before the snows set in. The pioneers carved their names in the rock as a reminder for future generations that they had made it that far.

Anyway, I had recently graduated from Natrona County High School, and the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with my Dad and listen to his stories—again. I felt humiliated because, at the wheel of the blue station wagon, with all of us piled inside, he had driven off the road right in front of my friends and rattled across the prairie to park the cruiser  at the base of the rock. There was a natural amphitheater there.

Mom insisted we have a picnic—fried chicken, green grapes, and iced tea—while we waited for God knows who to arrive. All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends, so I went up on the rock and pretended I wasn’t related to those people in the car. Before long, a steady stream of traffic appeared on the highway coming from town. People, old and young, started to . . . show up. Five hundred men, women, and Boy Scouts all came out from Casper, driving 60 miles to listen to my dad. I was dumbfounded.

Mr. Bragg waited until everyone had eaten and watched the spectacular sunset. Then, when the stars started to twinkle and the Milky Way appeared like a theatrical backdrop in a wild Wyoming sky, he stood up and everyone got quiet. He took a small lectern out of the back of the station wagon, put it on top of the hood, flicked on a pen-light and read “The Ghost of Ft. Laramie” to a rapt audience. And then he read another story, and another. We were completely silent in the hands of a master storyteller for two hours. I finally got it. My dad was awesome.

In the seventies, my Dad, a proud Republican for many years, was deeply affected by national scandals such Watergate and the secret war in Cambodia. A man of conviction and loyalty who was the former executive secretary of Wyoming’s Republican Party, he felt bitterly betrayed when Nixon had to resign in dishonor. He openly wept about it. I told him to get the hell out of politics and write his cowboy stories, full time. He walked away from politics, saying, “I wash my hands of it.”

Because of this, his last ten years were fruitful and joyful, and we have his stories to share. He published three novels and two short story collections, along with a history of Wyoming. Unfortunately, he was taken from us far too early, by cancer, with five novels and many stories still percolating in his head. On his deathbed, I promised him I would continue to share his work with the world.

For many years, William F. Bragg, Jr., charged nothing for his lectures at schools and in the community, and many of my friends who have contributed to our show remember him vividly from when they were children. One still reads the stories from Wyoming, Wild and Wooly to his kids at bedtime.

What a tribute to my Dad. He would be so pleased to know that his legacy lives on.

By Wade Graham

When is a tale true, and when is it tall?

In the Old West, myth and history were always blurred, two sides of the same spinning coin. Think no further than Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, sometimes featuring Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors, acting out cowboys and Indians for paying crowds before the Indians wars were even over. From the beginning the American West was both things, mythic history and historical myth-in-the-making. It was a terrain of experience and fantasy, at once physical and psychological, and a stage for deadly serious action and for enacting individual, cultural, and national dreams. It was where the post–Civil War United States worked out a new national narrative of race, destiny, and violence. It was also where the country renewed its myth of individual freedom, shimmering on the wide horizon of “empty” lands ripe for the taking.

Graham

The Bill Braggs, Senior and Junior, were exemplary Westerners—ranchers, soldiers, politicians, and writers of fiction and history, simultaneously curators and creators of Wyoming’s mythic history. Wyoming was the scene of some of the last Indian battles, and the last of the Plains and Rockies territories to succumb to statehood, in 1890. It was also where, five years later, Buffalo Bill—returned from entertaining kings and Kaisers across the Atlantic—minted a town of his very own.

“Tales of the Old West,” at the Autry April 3-6, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.

When is fiction literature, or history pulp? Even as it was being invented, the Western was genre—popular, lowbrow, full of exotic scenes and characters; of violence, danger, thrills, and suspense. The audience member or the reader could be the hero, rescuing the girl, shooting the Indian, beating the Mexican, outsmarting the evil banker/rancher/miner/thief. The gunfight, the horse chase, and the shady, greedy frontier characters were renewed versions of ancient archetypes set on a new, raucous American stage.

Every era needs its own cheap entertainment for ordinary folks—stories that stir the passions and don’t take too long to get to the climax. Shakespeare wrote a version of it. American pulp is said to date from 1896, when the first cheap magazine filled with exciting stories was steam-printed on thin paper. It’s no coincidence that three years before, at the Chicago World’s Fair, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the end of the American frontier. Thereafter, most Americans would aspire to live in towns and cities, not on remote farms or ranches. Ironically, after Turner, they believed even more fervently that it was the frontier that defined them as Americans. As direct contact with it faded, the frontier became ever more important as vicarious experience. As the country became more homogenized and every place became more like any other place, the regional flavor and specific exoticism of the West became ever more alluring. The West, so recently new, became Old.

If pulp fiction’s heyday ended in 1941, when the war effort commandeered all the paper, it didn’t disappear. Far from it: pulp found new media and new relevance, from short stories to radio plays to dime store paperback novels like Louis L’Amour’s. Genres multiplied: crime, horror, war, sci-fi, adventure, and romance. The magazine became the comic book, and the hero became the superhero.

Pulp was first printed on paper in the days when movies and television didn’t yet exist. As pulp magazines entered their real golden age, the Western ruled the screen, transubstantiating the magazine stories into moving, talking images. Each era rewrote the scripts and reshaped the characters, from  the Lone Ranger to Rooster Cogburn. Later, for a more cynical age, Clint Eastwood’s taciturn stranger approached from the distant desert. With Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino today has rewritten the Western as a Southern. But it remains exemplary of the genre, with the same dramas of racial struggle, manly valor, romantic love, challenge to authority, gunfights, noble and ignoble death.

These Tales of the Old West being put onstage at the Autry are also typical, containing every trope in the bag, but deployed with wit and showmanship. They also show how the Western can open up for a new era, stretching its horizons for new dimensions of action and dreams. Bill Bragg Jr.’s tales are definitely twentieth-century Westerns, allowing space on the wild frontier for the perspectives of those of people who hadn’t been included in Turner’s white male American saga: Indians, people of mixed ancestry, women, Mormons. Even ravenous wolves are granted a sort of humanity. Bragg’s Old West is no longer simply a space for heroism, but is reinterpreted, in postwar existential fashion, as a place where good and evil are no longer fixed, clean categories. Instead, it is a place where unintended consequences and accidents push events out of any individual’s control, where bad things happen to good people. In Bragg’s West, heroism only goes so far.

And so, pulp lives on—some of it “literary,” but most of it as cracklingly successful lowbrow genres: young adult, sci-fi, ghosts, vampires. If today the screen is ruled by superheros and teenage vampires, the Western still has an honored place, and that place testifies to the ongoing vitality of what some would classify as regionalism—the persistence of which demonstrates the need for a history and mythos of places in America, and to the timeless allure of good stories, yarns, and tales, tall and true.

By Corey Madden

Artists, unlike academics, are not focused as much on authenticity as they are on artfulness. The research I do as a writer/director doesn’t begin to approach the painstaking work of a curator or historian, but the process of creating Tales of the Old West has employed historical source material at every step along the way. Whereas a historian exhaustively documents facts to build a hypothesis and argue for it, a theatrical creative team sifts through primary and secondary sources to find kernels of “truth” that help focus a production concept. Happily, I’ve found that museums like the Autry offer a unique opportunity for scholarship and art-making to intersect, and that exhibition spaces can be remarkably theatrical spaces where fact and fiction meaningfully inform one another.

Corey Madden, director of “Tales of the Old West” and creative force behind L’Atelier Arts (Photo courtesy L’Atelier)

Everyone on a theatrical creative team is encouraged to do their own research, but we always share what we’ve discovered in order to develop a unified interpretation and production plan. Composer Bruno Louchouarn has done fascinating research on songs of the nineteenth century, the period in which Tales of the Old West is set, and I’ve been consumed with finding images of the diverse people who lived in and around Fort Laramie between 1855 and 1880.

Because Tales originator Barbara Bragg and I have worked closely on her adaptation for two years, my research process started as we sat across from each other at my dining room table. As we worked through the adaptations of her father’s stories, I asked a lot of questions and Barb generously shared her knowledge of her father’s life and of Wyoming’s history. After our sessions, I did my own research, reading about key events, and in particular collecting images. (Check out my Facebook page to see some of the images that inspired me.)

Key pieces of research for this presentation at the Autry come directly from Barb telling me how these stories were shared. Barb’s dad first developed them when, as a young man, he worked as an interpretive guide at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site near Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Barb also told me that he scared the hell out her friends when he told the stories around the fire at backyard camp-outs. Both these “facts” inspired me to create a production that emphasizes the power of telling stories and the intimacy of hearing them in informal settings.

At the beginning of a rehearsal the whole company spends several days doing “text work”—going through the script line by line, asking questions about why the characters make the choices they do, and consulting various references. As director, I usually share images, quotes, and short articles that I think will help the actors begin the process of building a character, but I’m careful not to overwhelm what is fundamentally a personal creative process.

Actors often do research on a particular period’s manners and customs, as well as on the attitudes, accents, dress, and activities. They also invest considerable time finding the motivation for their character’s actions, using research as a foundation for their interpretations. Over the course of a career, an actor may develop a lexicon of human behavior, allowing him or her to produce portraits of incredible nuance.

Bringing stories to life is one of the most ancient forms of knowledge creation and dispersion that we have, not to mention one vital to our survival. There’s fascinating research going on at the University of Southern California (USC) Brain and Creativity Institute to better understand what happens cognitively to audiences when actors perform for them. Dr. Antonio Damasio, the Director of the Institute, has Magnetic Resonance Imaging evidence that actors and audiences mirror each others’ neuron activity “as if in a body loop”—a connection between actor and audience that is measurable in the level of brain activity of both. His hypothesis is that storytelling helps humans develop empathy as well as prepares them for challenging, unfamiliar circumstances. In other words, as humans, we can “mimic” the experiences we hear about in a story, without having to take the real-life risk.

For more on theatre in the Autry’s galleries, read this.

By Bruno Louchouarn

Music and instruments follow people through migrations and relocations, and to the most extreme places and climates. On the way to the American West, settlers, pioneers, and cowboys brought instruments on the wagons (including pianos, which more than once had to be jettisoned on the trail because of their weight!). Fiddles, much smaller and better able to endure trips over land and ocean, became the most popular musical instrument. Musicians in the West were rarely professionals—rather, they tended to be gifted local amateurs. Even so, they were sought after. In a letter to his family back East, a doctor recounted barely making a few dollars treating an occasional settler, while his fiddling was in such constant demand that it could fetch $20 a night, quite a sum at the time.

Bruno Louchouarn, musical director of the production “Tales of the Old West” (Photo courtesy L’Atelier)

For Americans who had heretofore remained in the same community for generations, as well as for immigrants on the move, the Civil War and the migration West meant being exposed to new people and new traditions. And the reality was that at the end of a long journey West, the settler could look forward to an isolated life with few neighbors. But the increasing availability of mail-order sheet music helped spread new tunes of the day. Also, dances were important social events and people sometimes traveled dozens of miles to attend them and to dance to local musicians. After the Civil War, the patent medicine industry exploded, and hundreds of “doctors” took to the highways and open country, with small troupes of entertainers in tow, to peddle their elixirs from town to Western town.  These were places that until then had limited access to large traveling entertainment shows. The medicine shows had only a few musicians and a preference for string instruments: banjo, violin, and guitars. Even so, they were welcome in these lonely settlements.

Music-making in the West was a blend of the old and the new. The gut-stringed parlor guitar, with its European aspiration, was a serviceable enough supporting instrument for singers, and the Civil War–era gut-stringed banjo, of West African origin, became a nationwide craze. Mandolins also started appearing in the later part of the century. Touring professional entertainment groups such as minstrel shows, as well as international troupes like the Tyrolese Minstrel Family, popularized novelty songs. “Old-time” tunes, traditional songs originating in Ireland, Scotland, England, French Canada, the American Northeast, the Ozarks, and Appalachia, spawned regional styles like the contradance, among others. Some of those songs eventually became classics, such as “Home Sweet Home,” written by Henry Rowley Bishop as part of an opera in early nineteenth-century England. Some tunes, such as “Elzic’s Farewell,” which is attributed to a soldier and recalls Scottish bagpipe tunes, reflected on the experience of the Civil War. Others were regional songs, such as “The Coo-Coo Bird,” an English traditional song with many variants that became part of the Appalachian tradition. “The Lily of the West,” an Irish song of the early nineteenth century, became an iconic American murder ballad. Singing cowboys traveling between Texas and Wyoming were also an important source of new music. Some cattle drovers actually hired singers to take part in the cattle drives to help keep the cattle quiet at night. Songs like “Good-Bye Old Paint,” written in the 1880s by Charley Willis, a black cowboy, became staples of the West.

In Tales of the Old West, we set the tone in the pre-show performance with a blend of old-time popular tunes from across North America, including an old Mexican song. We use combinations of instruments that might have been used in Wyoming or across the West. The songs are not necessarily famous now, but they are representative of the times. Settlers who could play music kept notebooks filled with tunes collected along the way. Surviving documents showcase a broad variety of genres.

The score to the play takes material from period songs and weaves in dramatic textures and moods that shift from the world of the characters to the narrative world of the imagination. The music does not seek to be nostalgic but follows the story through ironic, dark, or poignant moments. The musicians are also actors, further blurring the distinction between reenactment, storytelling, and myth, perhaps in keeping with the way Western entertainers and storytellers of old moved from working to performing to celebrating. For me, it is an exciting and moving opportunity to participate in the retelling of these stories so heavy with history and lore.

For more on theatre in the Autry’s galleries, read this.

I am delighted to introduce this series of blog posts providing insights into the making of Tales of the Old West, the Autry’s latest experiment in bringing theatrical performance to our galleries.

“Tales of the Old West,” at the Autry April 3-6, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.

Tales of the Old West is an immersive in-gallery performance of stories by classic Western author William F. Bragg Jr., adapted for the stage by his daughter, actress, producer, and writer Barbara Bragg. Performances are at the Autry, April 3–6, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.,.

We asked Barbara, director/producer Corey Madden, composer Bruno Louchouarn, and historian Wade Graham to help us better understand the inspiration, creative process, and historical context involved in adapting three timeless stories of the nineteenth-century American frontier.

Barbara and Corey had already been working on Tales of the Old West for a while when they approached me about performing it here. I knew Corey from her years at the Mark Taper Forum as well as through the growing reputation of her company, L’Atelier Arts, which creates site-specific theatre. It wasn’t hard to imagine collaborating, especially with the wonderful source material penned by Barbara’s father, a man steeped in the land, history, and characters of Wyoming. Through our conversations, it became apparent that the theatrical experience would best be served not on our stage, but in the Autry galleries.

This project builds on recent efforts to animate our galleries with live performance. In 2010, during the run of our major exhibition Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied, we first took the plunge, mounting a one-act opera about the making of Siqueiros’s famous mural América Tropical. The next year, we invited About Productions to stage a workshop version of their play Evangeline, the Queen of Make-Believe among the art on view in our Art Along the Hyphen exhibition. It was a perfect fit, as both explore aspects of the Chicano experience and social change.

With Tales of the Old West, we reach into the Autry’s core galleries, presenting theatrical stories surrounded by objects and art that tell interconnected stories of the Western experience. We hope the exhibits will help inform the three Tales plays, and that the performances might provide new ways of thinking about the content of our galleries. Enjoy the blogs and then please join us for a memorable evening in old Wyoming—at the Autry.

David Burton is Senior Director of the Autry Institute.

Her name is Alice, and she watches, unblinking and curious, while her parents deal with their alcoholism, while her mother struggles with schizophrenia, while her grandfather’s illness worsens, while her young life spins into chaos. This is the world that Nora Pierce introduces us to in The Insufficiency of Maps, her 2008 debut novel. But as the story progresses, we see it’s not all misery.

Nora Pierce’s debut novel (Courtesy norapierce.com)

“As a child, though she is subjected to stereotypes or has chaos in her life, what makes her her [Alice] is that she retains the ability to remain completely open to everything,” Pierce said in our phone interview last week. “She is not working backward. She is moving forward from this openness. In other words, ‘This is the way my world is and these are the things I love in it.’ I thought of (the book) as a love letter to the world in general. Alice grapples with really hard things, but she is open to and loves the world.”

Pierce, who is scheduled to talk at the Autry about her book on Sunday, February 17, says she finds real magic in life lived on the fringes.

“My great hope  is that the reader will be able to see the people and not necessarily just the issues,” she said. “While the people are flawed, and have to face poverty or homelessness, hopefully the reader will be able to see that these are amazingly beautiful people. So often, we can erase the person by speaking of them as poor and marginalized . . . they can seem like the other, alien to you. It can be a way of erasing the person.”

Author Nora Pierce (Photo norapierce.com)

Pierce has had people in her life who struggled with schizophrenia. And growing up, she never knew very much about her father, who left her mother early on, or the Native American heritage she had from him. These experiences helped inform her years of work on this first novel.

“You see what it’s like to grapple with alcoholism or with being unmoored from society, to be homeless, and all that is painful,” Pierce said. “But there is also a gift there, a freedom. Not that there’s anything ennobling about poverty. But these are real people, and there are moments of real beauty as well.”

And the beauty, Pierce says, can grow out of that very poverty.

“It carries through from the circumstances that they’re in,” she said, “all the great challenges they are facing.”

Pierce believes readers can gain a new perspective on problems like alcoholism and poverty, and learn to see them as part of lives that are complex when they approach stories like Alice’s. She believes that, as a storyteller, it’s her mission to reveal that complexity, and that everyone’s life can be enriched by it.

“I guess maybe part of my duty is to take the humanity and beauty and poetry that exists in the margins and bring it to the reader,” she said. “The most important thing I can do is to offer a way into the experience of the other.”

Pierce grew up in urban Baltimore, Maryland. But as she began making her way west as a young adult, she discovered similarities between her own life and that of young people on reservations.

“It is true that I had some very unusual experiences in my upbringing,” she said. “The book is partly informed by my feeling that I had an unknown heritage.”

As the book progresses, Alice grows from age five to fourteen, gradually losing all her family until she is adopted into a foster family, where she is forced to adapt in a different way. Her foster sister takes ballet classes, but she is encouraged to learn Indian dancing, though it doesn’t quite fit with her experience. Pierce spends some time examining this disconnect.

“She’s feeling the pressure to enact or perform it, but she doesn’t know what it really is because she hasn’t lived it,” Pierce said. “It’s a false connection. Indian dancing is not going to connect her with her roots. And in a way, her family is not letting her have her own stories. They’re very well-intentioned, but hopefully the reader can see what’s really happening.”

Pierce believes this same kind of pigeon-holing happens on a grander scale, with people who are Native American, living in poverty, or who have other issues that are considered Social Problems (capital S, capital P).

“There’s an American literature that’s wanting to talk about the American spirit, about an undiscovered American landscape,” she said.

“But Native culture doesn’t exist on a linear continuum. We’re not one or the other (colonized or colonizing). We are our parents, we are the children, we are what our experiences have made us.”

Pierce will speak at 2:00 p.m. After the talk, she will be available to sign her book.

Image of Kateri Tekakwitha on the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, with celebrants below (Photo by Clementine Bordeaux)

Rebecca Hernandez Rosser (Mescalero Apache/Mexican-American), assistant director of UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, and Clementine Bordeaux (Sicangu Oglala Lakota) academic coordinator for the UCLA American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program, attended St. Kateri Tekakwitha’s canonization ceremony on October 21, 2012.

“There were two Mohawk women at the altar,” Bordeaux said. “(One) read a prayer for Kateri, and she read it in the Mohawk language. The fact that an Indian language was being read and spoken at the Vatican, that was one moment that I really felt proud to be a Native person. For Native people, those moments during the canonization mass are the most significant.”

Hernandez Rosser said the ceremony raised awareness about Native Catholic people and demonstrated their long history as part of the worldwide family of Catholic believers. For many of them, Tekakwitha already was a saint.

“Many Native peoples have been Catholic longer than the United States has existed,” she said. “For Native Catholics, the canonization was deeply validating, and for non-Catholics, it speaks to the fact that Native people have been Christian for as long as Europeans have been on this continent — as far back as the encounter.”

Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in upstate New York near present-day Auriesville, the daughter of a Mohawk chief. When she was four years old, her family died during a smallpox epidemic. Scarred on her face and weak, she survived the illness and was taken in by an uncle who hated Europeans because of ongoing hostilities and because he believed they were responsible for the smallpox — something that most historians agree is true.

Rebecca Rosser (left) and Clementine Bordeaux at the canonization ceremony in Rome (Photo by Clementine Bordeaux)

In 1674, Tekakwitha began her Christian faith instruction in secret. Her uncle eventually accepted this, and she was baptized on April 5, 1676. But others in her village ostracized Tekakwitha until she ran away to the Mission of St. Francis Xavier, a settlement of Christian Indians in Canada.

There, she taught and cared for the sick and elderly for several years, until she became ill. She was known as the Lily of the Mohawks for her extraordinary devotion to the Cross and to the Virgin Mary, to whom she had consecrated her lifelong service and her virginity. She died on April 17, 1680. According to some accounts, the smallpox scars on Kateri’s face disappeared soon after her death, constituting the first of two miracles required to be attributed to her to satisfy the Catholic church’s requirements for sainthood.

The second, accepted by the Church in 2011, was the 2006 cure of a Seattle boy, Jake Finkbonner, who was afflicted with a flesh-eating bacteria after he was injured while playing basketball. The infection swelled his head and consumed his flesh for nine weeks as doctors raced to contain it. Because he is of Lummi Indian descent, friends prayed for Kateri’s intercession. Jake was administered last rites. But then, a member of a Kateri circle gave Jake’s parents a pendant with Kateri’s face on it. Elsa Finkbonner put it on her son’s pillow, and as of that day, the infection seemed to stop.

Prayers being read in the Mohawk language at the canonization ceremony for Kateri Tekakwitha (Photo by Clementine Bordeaux)

Hernandez Rosser corrected me during our interview when I referred to Kateri as the first American Indian saint.

Strictly speaking, the first indigenous saint from the Americas was Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, the Chichimeca Indian convert who, according to Church teaching, in 1531 happened upon the Virgin Mary on a hilltop near what is today Mexico City. She asked that a church be built for her there, but Cuauhtlatoatzin had trouble convincing the bishop of what he had witnessed. Until, on a subsequent appearance, Mary instructed him to gather in his cloak some roses that were growing on the hill. When he returned before the bishop and unfurled the cloak, Mary’s image had been imprinted there. A church was built on the site where the Virgin Mary had appeared. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was canonized in 2002.

St. Kateri is venerated by Native Americans from indigenous groups in what is today the United States and Canada. Her story is perhaps less well-known by lay people worldwide than Juan Diego’s, but that is not the case among Native Americans and First Nations peoples, who consider her their own. Kateri circles have been working for Tekakwitha’s recognition for generations. Bordeaux, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, said she became aware of Kateri Tekakwitha through conversations with her grandmother, who for years worked as a secretary at her church.

“She helped start the Kateri circle at our parish,” Bordeaux said. “I grew up knowing about the conferences and about Kateri Tekakwitha. She’s important for Native people and for those who chose to convert to Catholicism. They now have a saint that is theirs, something positive for their lives. It reaffirms the choices they made for themselves and their families.”

Below is a video diary that Bordeaux produced of the ceremony:

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) in an official Senate photo (Wikimedia photo)

W. Richard West, Jr.

He is particularly esteemed in the Native American community for his advocacy on behalf of initiatives to protect Native American heritage, such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), and for his guidance in the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

W. Richard West, Jr., the president and CEO of the Autry, served as the founding director of the NMAI, and worked closely with Inouye. Here are his thoughts on Inouye, his career, and his passing.

It is hard to even know where to begin. He was a hero figure writ large in the Congress, Native America, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Candidly, there would be no National Museum of the American Indian had there been no Dan Inouye.

His passing marks the end of one of the most successful collaborations with Native communities in American history. And much has been written about Senator Inouye’s well-known military career as well as his deep commitment to the civil rights movement.

But his special resonance with Native peoples and communities—at its core—was far more than a “political collaboration,” of course. He had an abiding and deep-running commitment to the proposition that the painful, tragic chapters of American history and how it dealt with America’s first citizens had to be rectified and made right in fundamental and transformational ways.

The National Museum of the American Indian (Wikimedia photo)

He believed that historical wrongs should be corrected. That commitment led to the enactment, among his many initiatives relating to Indian Country, of the seminal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.

NAGPRA was human decency in his view and directed that museums across the country return the human remains and funerary materials that sat in their collections to the Native communities from which they came. It also mandated the return of religious and ceremonial objects in museum collections—in hopes that cultural practices in contemporary Native communities might remain vital in the present and the future.

But surely his capstone achievement for Native America, which is where I knew Senator Inouye so well as a beloved supporter and counselor, was the National Museum of the American Indian—a cultural and spiritual monument to the past, present, and future of Native peoples and communities.

As our “angel on Capitol Hill” and a member of the charter Board of Trustees, a Native museum director like me could hardly have been more blessed. He watched over us every step of the way, protecting us and our progress in ways large and small and so numerous that they cannot be counted. The NMAI he so loved is not only a living monument to the first peoples of the Americas, it also is elegant testimony to the persistence and determination of an eloquent public citizen whose mind and heart knew no boundaries.

Oh, how I shall miss this gentle man, this Japanese American from Hawaii of the perpetual, gracious smile and the ready “aloha.”  But what a legacy he left us—certainly to Native peoples of the United States, but, no, even more than that, to all of us who call ourselves Americans.

Antonio Espinal, founding director of Harmonies Girls Choir, leads a practice with soloist Crisia Guadalupe Regalado (Photo by Tessie Borden)

The group of about twenty girls and women, ranging in age from eight to nineteen, is the brainchild of founding director Antonio Espinal, whose musical training has spanned two countries and a cross-border mix of traditions.

For twelve years, Espinal trained opera singers at Ópera de Mexico, Mexico’s national opera company at the Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. He later became the founding artistic director of the choir at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels here in Los Angeles before earning a master’s degree in the United States.

He said he hoped for years to found an all-girls choir. Sure, every choral director’s biggest dream is to work with a mixed choir and an orchestra to accompany them. But a girls’ choir has its own attractions.

“I was attracted to the idea of starting an all-girls’ choir,” Espinal said. “I like that because when you have children, it’s a different color than having adults. Now, having girls, specifically speaking, creates a different sound. Because when you have boys and girls, boys, when they grow, their voices change. So that doesn’t happen with girls …. The voice changes, obviously. It grows. But it will never change like it does for a boy.”

Espinal has worked with mixed church choirs before. In fact, Harmonies began out of his job as choral director for church and a Catholic school in Los Angeles. But he said that almost from the very beginning, girls from outside the school asked to audition.

“Immediately it attracted girls from other areas, and from the very beginning I had girls coming from Sylmar, from Long Beach,” he said. “Now I have girls coming from West Covina, Pasadena, all around greater L.A., not only L.A.”

Espinal with another of his students who is training as a soloist (Photo by Tessie Borden)

The group now performs regularly — almost every day during this Christmas season, in fact — and has appeared with Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl and at the Basilica de Guadalupe, singing Ave Maria during mass. Last year, they also performed with the artist Demi Lovato for the Alma Awards. But Espinal prides himself on giving his personal attention to each singer.

“For me, having a well-developed voice is not the requirement,” he said. “I basically want to know the girl. I want to see if she really wants to be here. I can tell you, I have had girls who really cannot even match the pitch, what we call tone-deaf … but I know with my training, and over time, we will fix that. And at that age, it’s not important to do it. As an adult, it’s really, really, really hard. So it’s better at that age, and if that’s really what they want, they will do it.”

Espinal believes training can correct a lack of tone perception, or an unsophisticated singing voice. But it can’t make up for lack of dedication. So he says one of the important things, for him, is to ensure that the girls in the choir truly want to be involved with it.

Crisia Guadalupe Regalado during practice (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“When I see that it’s the parents, the mom or the dad who want to push, saying the girl really has to be in the choir but the girl really doesn’t want to be there, I tell them, ‘Please, don’t force her to be here.’ Because she will hate this, she will never like it, and anyway she is going to be very unhappy. Better to put her in something that she wants …. I have had girls who were off key at the beginning, and right now I have two opera singers. And one of them had that problem when she was little.”

One member of Harmonies who says she was tone deaf when she first joined is Crisia Guadalupe Regalado, fifteen, a featured performer at Sunday’s Las Posadas celebration at the Autry.

“It’s like a miracle,” Regalado said of her development as a singer. “In the beginning I didn’t really sing that good. I’ve always had the passion for singing and I loved singing since I was very little, but I didn’t know how to sing. So when I came here I started to develop a different voice by listening to the older girls and trying to imitate them.”

Regalado says Espinal from the beginning taught the girls techniques for opera singers.

“All the exercises that he does when we vocalize, they’re more like vocalizations for opera singers,” Regalado said. “It’s difficult, but once we get it, it helps us a lot to develop …. He’s applying everything he learned with the opera singers in Mexico in Bellas Artes. He’s trying to teach us like we are professionals, which is working very good.”

Regalado, who joined the choir when she was ten, sings not just operatic classics like Carmen, but she also belts out mariachi songs like “Cielo Rojo” in her performances with Harmonies. It’s part of Espinal’s philosophy that any one of his singers ought to be able to perform any kind of music.

“To me, singing is one thing,” Espinal said. “But most singers think that they have to specialize only in one type of singing. So opera singers always sound like opera singers. You can see Plácido Domingo, and no matter what he wants, what he sings, he will always sound like Plácido Domingo. He doesn’t change the style to sound like pop, for instance. And that’s fine. He’s Maestro Plácido Domingo. He’s a specialist in opera. Now, ranchero singers only sing ranchera music. For them, it’s impossible to sing high notes the way opera singers do. So what I discovered is that it’s possible to train the voice to do different styles of music, because that’s what it’s all about, is new styles of music.”

In any case, Espinal can’t afford to have Harmonies specialize.

“That is another one of the beauties of this choir,” he said. “It’s not that I could keep them always singing in churches or classical music in concert halls. The kind of events that we are hired (for) require us to sing even pop music, mariachi music.”

Espinal says that kind of versatility allowed the choir to grab the opportunity last year to back Lovato in concert.

“Last year the pop singer Demi Lovato was looking for a choir and they called me (to say) that they needed twenty girls onstage performing for the Alma Awards,” he said. “So last year we were, in September, singing, with Demi Lovato, a pop song. And they know how to do that, how to change their voice to sound pop.”

Below is a clip of the NBC network broadcast of that performance.

Scharff (Autry Photo)

“Women made a huge difference in this election, and they elected people who know they make a huge difference,” said Scharff, the Autry’s Chair of Western Women’s History and a historian at the University of New Mexico, who on Sunday kicks off the Autry’s Women of the West lecture series with a look at how the study of women’s history has changed over the years. “Everyone I know posted on their Facebook page the picture of (Senators-elect) Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren walking around with their freshman orientation portfolios. That’s different. That really makes a difference that they are there.”

HISTORY CHANGERS: Sen-elect Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., left, and Sen-elect, current Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis. walk together to freshman Senators luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Scharff, who began her academic career with a desire to explore topics like women’s suffrage and political activity, said she learned something else along the way: it isn’t just the women in the public eye that change history. Much more, it’s women in their everyday roles who are the history makers, using the tools and opportunities available to them as they  navigate their lives. For a very long time, Scharff says, the history of the West was the history almost exclusively of men — white men in particular.

“Putting women in history makes history look different,” Scharff said. “We’re accustomed to seeing the story of the West as the story of individual men discovering empty space and putting a claim to it, conquering it. But once you understand that women were always in the West and in that space, then it becomes a story of communities that have claimed the West as their home space for millennia. It becomes a longer and more complicated and much more interesting story.”

To illustrate, Scharff talked about some of her favorite items from the Autry’s Home Lands: How Women Made the West exhibition, from 2010, which focused on the role women played in the history of the West. One of those items was a colcha blanket from New Mexico that was made out of cactus fibers. Another was a Cheyenne dress decorated with metal bells, cowrie shells, and beads.

“If you think about the kind of work that it took just to harvest the materials to make it — first of all, think of what that does to your hands!” Scharff said of the blanket. “So out of these very tough and resistant fibers came something that is beautiful. I thought it just embodied the spirit of Home Lands.”

As for the Cheyenne dress, Scharff says it is a perfect illustration of trade and how different cultures bumped up against each other in the West.

“On the surface, it is a garment that is extremely beautiful; but also it is beautifully adapted to life on horseback,” she said. “We see things like metal tinklers, cowrie shells, and beading on the dress. What are seashells doing on the Great Plains? There are also Bohemian beads, and the metal that comes through changing patterns of trade. The owner of this dress is a person who is at the center of an incredibly cosmopolitan world. Think about all the genius and experience that’s in that. This is a garment that really embodies someone at the heart of a lot of complex social relations.”

Cheyenne woman’s dress, circa 1860. Gift of Mr. Fred Hinchman, Southwest Museum, Autry National Center; 535.G.1001

Scharff says ferreting out women’s history is a particular challenge because apart from the fact that until recently history tended to be about the work and actions of men (the military and political arena), women are just harder to see in the records that are historians’ primary tools, like censuses and civil registries. For one thing, they haven’t been voting for very long, historically. They weren’t subject to military drafts. Their names didn’t even stay the same.

“We’re trying to track women’s movements at a time when their names change a lot,” she said. “Tracking records is a little harder. Also, especially in the West, women may have had good social reasons to hide their tracks. There are very strong barriers for women to express themselves publicly. There was an imperative to hide your work, cover your tracks, veil your actions or body or self.”

Unless a woman is a Calamity Jane or an Unsinkable Molly Brown, one of those larger-than-life personalities that were really atypical in history, the tendency would have been for a woman to remain invisible.

One way to counteract this obstacle, Scharff says, is to look at material culture: the objects of daily living. To Scharff, it is these things that “show the contours of women’s lives.” Scharff confesses that she didn’t set out for her scholarship to go in that direction.

“I started my career as a historian looking at the crusade for women’s suffrage. The last thing I was interested in was bunch of pots and pans. Women crusaded to escape from work and to seek power. Women got the vote in Wyoming first. I wanted to write about that.”

However, as she progressed in her work, Scharff found that the stories arising from what would normally be considered the ordinary life of ordinary people could be just as fascinating and important as the quest for political legitimacy. That realization, she says, was life changing.

“I’m the last person on the planet to say that the stuff Hillary Clinton does is not important. It clearly is,” she said. “But as a historian, I’ve come to believe that the people who live ordinary lives are as important as someone like Clinton. That is the texture of history. Small changes in out-of-the-way places can create enormous consequences.”

Below, a trailer from our 2010 exhibition, Home Lands: How Women Made the West.