Bronitsky and Associates Blog

The Quest:  An Academic Institution Seeks to Honor Native Americans

My experience at McMurry University was very exciting.  First of course, it was good to see Jerry Hollingsworth, my student from long ago at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. The symposium was “The Quest:  An Academic Institution Seeks to Honor Native Amerians” and its purpose was to “educate and share diverse perspectives about the Native American culture; to provide an academic venue for students, faculty and alumni to wrestle with what it means to honor our Native American heritage, and to establish a clear understanding of our identity as a university with, and apart from, a mascot.”

Jerry Hollingsworth and Gordon Bronitsky,
McMurry University 3-11-10

It was quite an experience to be with people who were honestly struggling with McMurry’s heritage of Indian mascots and interest in Indians–students even assemble tipis at homecoming.    I learned much from the other two speakers, C. Richard King, the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, who spoke about the use and abuse of Indians as mascots, and the Reverend Dr. Thomas Fassett, who provided the theological background for the discussion.

It was an exciting two days.   Reviewing its past and considering the future, McMurry University has a unique opportunity to begin to honor its Native American heritage in new and powerful ways.  McMurry University can benefit from its historic interest in Indians and its deep and abiding Methodist heritage to partner with American Indian communities, organizations and institutions to create new spaces  in which things happen, in which the power and diversity of American Indian voices can be heard and experienced.  It can create an international Indigenous gospel festival.

What would such a space look like?  It could:

• Start small but with excellent production values and always focus on large long-term visions.
• Showcase the best Indigenous gospel performers and artists of today and the future.
• Work with Indigenous community and institutional partners to train American Indigenous young people how to run the space.
• Introduce Indigenous performers and artists to the business–what is an agent?  what is a contract?–since many people come from isolated rural and urban communities where this information is difficult if not impossible to find.
• Eventually, serve as a performing arts showcase as well, introducing the best Indigenous performers to venues and booking agents from around the world.

It’s an exciting goal and one that needs to happen.  McMurry University can be the place where it happens, and I was privileged to be a participant.

I’ve been invited to speak at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas March 10-13.  Jerry Hollingsworth,  former student of mine from my teaching days at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa (truly a galaxy long ago and far away), has invited me there to speak.  I haven’t been back to Texas since I left Odessa in 1981 and I’m looking forward to the experience.

I’ll be a panelist participating in The Quest.  Historically, McMurry has used American Indian mascots and imagery and is now working to change and find new directions.  Rather than focus on the past, I intend to map out some possibilities for honoring American Indians in the future, through the creation of spaces where Indigenous voices can be heard in all their power and diversity–theater, dance, music, film/video and much more.  I think the University has the opportunity to create a new beginning and develop something entirely new.  Stay tuned!

Seems like I’ve barely had the chance to catch my breath since the last entry.  To bring you up-to-date–I’m not going with Mariachi Imperial de America to Albania and Macedonia, due to lack of sufficient funds, but audiences there are in for a real treat.  I still remember their tour of Armenia as an 8-day musical party.  What a pleasure!

And I just purchased the airplane tickets for Sami rights pioneer Magne Ove Varsi’s US tour–Texas, Arizona, Hawaii and Minnesota.  It’s going to be quite an experience, as he’ll be speaking at a human rights center, tribal colleges, and public universities too.  Still trying to figure out what to pack–Minnesota AND Hawaii in April?  Maybe fur-lined sandals?!

The highlight since my last post, of course, was the trip to Israel.  Ten very full days–sightseeing, friends, and family.  My new grandniece really is incredibly cute!  And two days packed with meetings with museums, embassy staffs, venues and organizations to share with them the power and diversity of Indigenous performing and visual artists from around the world, from Tibetan singers to Hopi reggae to Mexican son jarocho and so much more.  I really believe that much will come from these meetings–a museum is seriously considering an American Indian singer-songwriter, a puppet festival asked for materials from an Indigenous puppet theater, and an embassy is looking at materials that could lead to a veritable mini-festival.  Stay tuned!

The end of the old year, the start of the new year, both approaching fast! 2009 was quite a year. I initiated and produced an international Indigenous theater festival in London in May–ORIGINS™ (www.originsfestival.com), something I’ve been dreaming about since 1998. What an incredible experience! And I toured Sami playwright Harriet Nordlund from Sweden to the US and Apache playwright David Velarde from New Mexico to Sweden.

2010 promises to be even larger, bolder, and more exciting:

• touring Mariachi Imperial de America to Albania and Macedonia under the auspices of the US embassies there, and meeting with Albanians about coproducing an Albanian performing arts festival to bring the best Albanian performers to the world
• touring Sami rights pioneer Magne Ove Varsi from Norway to the US in April–including Hawaii! University of Minnesota is also one of the stops, so it will be interesting figuring out what to pack for tropical Hawaii and, shall I say, less than tropical Minneapolis
• speaking of cold weather, the Chinle Valley Singers have been invited to perform in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada in May, pending funding, and I’ll be accompanying them to speak to people there about creating a Nunavut performing arts event. I’ll definitely have to take a sweater!
• funding permitting, though, I’ll be able to warm up in June, going with the Chinle Valley Singers to the San Juan Fiesta in Lima, Peru, and meeting with Ashaninka and Yanesha performers and artists
• there may even be another tropical jaunt, with Mariachi Imperial de America in July to the Dominican Republic, as they’ve been invited to perform at a formal reception at the home of the US ambassador there
• maybe I’ll even produce an event in Santa Fe, as Bruce Bernstein, the director of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA), has invited me to produce a throatsinging concert in Santa Fe during Indian market with Lois Suluk and Maria Illungiayok from Nunavut and a throatsinger from Mongolia. I’ve toured Lois and Maria to Ireland and Mexico and enjoyed working with them–but I haven’t met them yet. This could be my big chance!

There will be more coming in the year ahead, but that should give some idea of what’s going on.

And now that I’ve turned 60 and been doing this for 15 years, I’ve been thinking about where I want to go next–not geographically, but professionally. But you’ll have to wait til my next blog entry!

I’m often asked how I got to where I am now, working with Indigenous people around the world in the performing arts (traditional AND contemporary) and festival development.  I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state with an American Indian population of about 10%, one of the highest percentages in the US.  I knew Indian people growing up, went to school with them, worked with them.  

By the time I was 12, I knew I wanted to study about American Indians past and present–I wanted to be an archeologist.  I wanted to be an archeologist so much that when I was in college at the University of New Mexico and had to choose a minor (my major was anthropology, of course!), I couldn’t think of anything that interested me nearly as much as anthropology and American Indian studies, so I chose English as my minor, figuring I would have a head start, since I already spoke the language. 

Then I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona, again in anthropology.  The focus of the department was on the totality of the human experience so I studied all of the traditional four fields of anthropology–archeology, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology and linguistics.  I focused on the archeology of the Southwest and Mexico but gained valuable experience in classes in other aspects of anthropology (a special thanks to Keith Basso in that regard) and in work projects (a shout out to Bill Rathje and the Tucson Garbage Project!).  

And PhD in hand in 1977, off I went. I taught at several colleges and universities as an archeologist and anthropologist, usually teaching courses in the all the basic fields and introduction to American Indian studies.  I was on my way to tenure, a tweed jacket, and ivy–all the traditional accouterments of the professoriate.  

And then two things happened which started me on the road to where I am now. In 1984-85, I served as a Senior Fulbright Professor at the Johan Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in what was then West Germany, at the Institut für Historische Ethnologie.  It was the year that changed my life.  My teaching area was American Indians, and I lectured all over Europe and Israel on a broad range of American Indian and archeological topics.  In a sense, I saw the demand side of the equation of my future, and had a wonderful year. 

Then in 1987-88, I was a professor in the Cultural Studies Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe (www.iaia.edu), the only American Indian-controlled institution of education in the arts in the United States.  I was amazed by the breadth of its offerings and the talent of its students–here I saw what could be termed the supply side of the equation of my future. 

In all of these academic wanderings (at one point, I moved six times in nine years), I didn’t get tenure.  I faced a choice–I could be an adjunct gypsy academic, teaching a course here and a course there, no hope of a future, living on my knees.  Or I could move on.  So about 1994, I decided to plunge full-time into what I had been doing on a small scale for a few years.  It took a while to figure out what to call it but I finally settled on the term, international cultural marketing. I didn’t want to just tour powwow groups, although I had sung with the Red Thunder Singers at UNM as an undergraduate and still the enjoy the music very much.  I wanted to show the world the incredible depth and breadth of what American Indians were actually doing.  

I decided early on that my work would be based on two principles.  One was a business principle, which I called “one-stop shopping”–whatever a venue would want, I would either know who did it or could quickly find out.   The second principle was more of a philosophical one.  I wasn’t Indian and never pretended to be one–I was happy being what I am.  In my business, Native people would choose the message, whether that message was a traditional Navajo music group, a Navajo language writer, or an Australian Aboriginal rock band–and I’ve worked with all of these.  My job would NOT be to tinker with the message, adding a feather here, a feather there.  My job would be to CRANK UP THE VOLUME!

And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, whether getting a Navajo writer published in Ireland in Navajo, English and Irish, touring a dance group from Zuni Pueblo to Mongolia, touring Mariachi Imperial to Armenia, and most recently, bringing Indigenous theater companies from Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand onstage in London.

In retrospect, there was one other key turn in the road to where I am now–the Chinle Valley Singers.  But I’ll tell you about that in the next post.   

Click on any picture to see a larger version:

Mariachi Imperial and Susan Bridenstine (Public Affairs Officer, US Embassy, Armenia) on the steps of the Armenia Marriott Hotel

Mariachi Imperial on the steps of the town hall, Dzoraget, Armenia

Mariachi music at Susan’s home

Judy Gonzales at Susan Bridenstine’s home

A Mariachi conga line in Yerevan