The Museum of Music History holds an important collection of images relating to the enormously popular productions of Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Hiawatha’ at the Royal Albert Hall in the 1920s and 30s. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 1875, we will be exploring the lives and careers of a few of the musicians who took part in these performances.

The singer with perhaps the most enduring association with the Royal Choral Society’s staged productions of ‘Hiawatha’ at the Royal Albert Hall in London was Chief Os-ke-non-ton of the Mohawk Nation, who appeared annually in the role of the Medicine Man from 1925 to 1939.

Born around 1888 near the Lake of Bays, north of Toronto, Os-ke-non-ton was orphaned as a child and brought up by relatives. His talent was ‘discovered’ by the Toronto soprano and recitalist Leonora James-Kennedy, and he was encouraged to move to New York to study music. He developed a career as an actor and singer in the United States, Canada and Europe and first performed in England in 1923. He also worked as a spiritual healer at the Lily Dale Assembly in New York State until his death in 1955.

Wherever he travelled he sought to raise awareness of Native American culture, and was the subject of countless newspaper articles – and even a Pathé newsreel.  He was often photographed in his full regalia, and he broadcast regularly on the radio. Of the many 78rpm recordings he made, four are listed in a book by recorded-sound archivist Edward B. Moogk, Roll Back the Years: History of Canadian Recorded Sound and Its Legacy (Genesis to 1930) (1975), and one is held in the collections of the Canadian National Library.

In addition to appearances at prestigious venues such as the Wigmore Hall in London, he was invited to perform and give lectures all over the UK and Ireland, and it is clear from the many press reports that his performances were much anticipated and enthusiastically received. Whilst the reports invariably describe Native American people and culture in language that is unacceptable today, most appear to show a real appreciation and interest in Os-ke-non-ton and his national culture, albeit imbued with an underlying sense of imperial condescension.

Often the high point of his recitals, for his audiences, was the ‘authenticity’ of the tribal songs in which he accompanied himself with a tom-tom, rather than the westernised versions of traditional Native American music with piano accompaniment that filled most of his programmes. Yet it is a matter of debate whether his performances and publicity appearances helped to engender genuine awareness and appreciation of his nation’s culture or merely confirmed contemporary Western stereotypes of indigenous cultures.

To place this debate in wider context we have included the following extract from Dr Chamion Caballero and Laura Smith’s fascinating article for the Mixed Museum’s online exhibition ‘A Tremendous Ovation’. The article is about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s appearances at the Dome in Brighton in 1908 and the staged performances of Hiawatha that took place there in the 1930s.

Hiawatha: homage, solidarity or cultural appropriation?

Today, it is difficult not to draw comparisons between the blackface portrayals of the minstrels that preceded Coleridge-Taylor’s appearances at the Dome and the ‘redface’ portrayals of Native Americans in both the Dome and Albert Hall’s Hiawatha productions. To a modern audience, both are highly offensive; it is impossible to imagine any venue staging a production with a majority white cast donning makeup and tribal costumes today.

And what of the cantatas themselves, which so heavily draw on the mythology and imagery of Native Americans? Not of Native American heritage himself, might accusations of cultural appropriation also be levelled at Coleridge-Taylor here? What drew him to write the work?

The story of Hiawatha and Minnehaha’s lives and community – in the end, missionaries convert the tribe to Christianity – resonated deeply with Coleridge-Taylor. So much so that he named his son Hiawatha. He was an active participant in the Black civil rights movement. In addition to his role in the Pan-African conference of 1900, he hosted and connected many leading Black intellectuals from the UK and USA. In the story of Hiawatha, he saw parallels between Native American and Black American histories. As Richards (2001) notes:
Coleridge-Taylor’s choice of words, in fact, wove together a set of themes of considerable sociological significance. The marriage feast binds groups together in alliance; famine and sickness then destroy an entire community (as personified in Minnehaha’s death); contact with Europeans threatens cultural annihilation; and finally, the death of Hiawatha, portrayed as the climactic event, serves to produce memory, ancestors, and prospects of societal continuity.

Black American audiences adored the work, also seeing their struggle against oppression it in, as well as taking pride in the achievements of Coleridge-Taylor on a world stage. His tour of the US in 1904 – where he became the first man of Black heritage to conduct a white orchestra in America – saw him treated as a celebrity, with an invitation to the White House to meet President Roosevelt.

It has also been argued that Hiawatha is a remarkable anti-imperialist work for its time. Richards further notes that, unlike Coleridge-Taylor’s contemporary Elgar, ‘Coleridge-Taylor’s concerns, as expressed in the Hiawatha trilogy and later works, lay not with the glorious deeds and self-doubts of the conquerors but with the dignity of the oppressed races’.

Yet, for all this, Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha is a representation of Native American culture through the eyes of a British man building on the work of a white American. What did Native Americans feel about this work?

We have not been able to uncover any records of Native American responses to Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha cantatas or productions, though we do know that Chief Os-ke-non-ton of the Mohawk tribe was an advisor to the stage performances. Raised in the Six Nations Reserve in Canada, Os-ke-non-ton became an internationally celebrated opera singer, spiritual leader and spokesperson. He heavily supported the interwar productions of Hiawatha, acting as a costume advisor alongside his role as the Medicine Man at both the Royal Albert Hall and the Dome.

Interestingly, Mullin (2001) notes some contemporary Native American criticism of Os-ke-non-ton when he appeared alongside other Native Americans who had become known as public performers in Edgar Lee Hewlett’s Indian Fairs in the 1926. She comments that literary critic Ivor Winter wrote that the ‘Pueblo Indians in attendance appeared to find Hewett’s performers – including Oskenonton – hysterically amusing in their pseudo-Indianness’ (p195).

Coleridge-Taylor never conducted or saw Hiawatha performed in costume during his lifetime, though he had seemed to approve when Fairburn initially raised the prospect to him. As Coleridge-Taylor’s work is increasingly revived, it is interesting to reflect on where Hiawatha fits into our worldviews now.

References:
Mullin, M. (2001) Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Richards P. (2001) A Pan-African Composer? Coleridge-Taylor and Africa. Black Music Research Journal, 21(2): 235–260.

With thanks to Dr Chamion Caballero and Laura Smith for giving us permission to use this lengthy extract from their exhibition ‘A Tremendous Ovation’, which can be found on the website of the Mixed Museum.