1 In British Columbia in the 1950s, two operas, reflecting hegemonic white privilege, mimic romantic notions of pre-European contact and early European contact First Nations as a way of constructing a "pioneer" [sic] theatre that implicitly disavows contemporary First Nations peoples in favour of pliable romantic "historical natives" that "invader-settlers" (Brydon)1 can speak for and perform. Barbara Pentland’s2 The Lake (1954) and Lillian Estabrooks and Mary Costley’s Ashnola: A Legend of Ashnola’s Singing Water (1954) ambivalently perform and mimic the Other as a way of constructing for invader-settlers a settled "native" identity that is neither British nor American, but Canadian where Canadian, in the British Columbian context, is coded as a form of white Anglo privilege.3 The following explores how these operas are embedded in a discourse of white Anglo privilege and the persistence of red face as a performative trope in defining Canadian nationalism.

2 With these operas, red face functions as a localized version of Homi Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry which he defines as the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power (1092). Red face operates as a performative tactic for invader-settlers to replace their status as newcomers who displace First Nations from unceded territories. On one level, invader-settlers painting their bodies to perform First Nations speaks to their need to regulate and discipline these representations of alterity as a way of comforting the national alibi that the pre-colonial territory of British Columbia constitutes a terra nullius. At another level, this move to perform the Other is "stricken by indeterminacy" in terms of gender and race (Bhabha 1092). Red face, by nominating the Other in order to achieve "native" status for invader-settlers, risks revealing the mechanism of white privilege and patriarchy.

3 In 1950s British Columbia, indeterminacy permeated the term "native" that denoted both invader-settlers seeking Canadian identity and a way of signaling a racialized group of original inhabitants of North America that has been displaced into a number of more recent appellations: First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous. Similarly, pace Bhabha, red face seeks to displace First Nations from the term "native" and strives to give ownership of "native" to settler-invaders who thus become patriotic "native Canadians." Both Pal Ahluwalia, writing in the Austrialian context, and Mahood Mamdani, writing in the African context, trouble similar nativist longings of invader-settlers. With the use of red face, these operas articulate a longing for whites to achieve a sense of stable independent sovereign national identity by performing "native." Thus red face enacts an alibi for invasion-settlement that theatrically displaces First Nations into "native" role play for whites.

4 In these two operas, what emerges is a process of what Bhabha terms mimicry, and what I will term red face, that ensures invader-settlers cease to be outsiders who have disposed First Nations of land, culture, and language; instead, transforming "themselves into nationals" (Thobani 62) and relying on the privilege of whiteness, they become exalted Canadians by ambivalently mimicking the Other in red-faced performances that are coded as expressions of Canadian cultural nationalism. Red face describes not just a performative mode, but a type of process whereby the invader-settler seeks the semiotic control of the Other without relenting white privilege (Goldie 191-93). Yet, red face always operates as displacement and perhaps, as the phrase literally suggests, exudes a sense of shame and "imperial melancholy," 5 despite the way white privilege sanctions it (Gilroy 90).

5 Sunera Thobani, echoing Daniel Francis, notes that this "imaginary Indian" in invader-settler culture is part of a "phantasmogoric project" that embraces colonialism as inevitable and desirable by ambivalently positing First Nations as part of a doomed race to be mourned or as noble savages requiring "forceful subjugation" (58). These operas offer a slightly more ambivalent representation of the First Nations in red face that recognizes a desire to integrate into the Canadian context a pliable, nostalgic image of the "noble native" that excludes the narrative of colonization and invasion. Glenn Willmott argues British Columbian painter Emily Carr and Métis poet Pauline Johnson recoil from European modernity (characterized by colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, etc.) to embrace "aboriginal modernity" as a utopian alternative. Meanwhile, these 1950s operas may react against aspects of European modernity like patriarchy via red face to imagine a vibrant ancient native culture and the possibility of a more egalitarian and hybridic model for invasion-settlement; however, they tend to occlude the option of "aboriginal modernity" that Carr and Johnson seek. Red face ensures invader-settler spectators maintain a heimlich distance from the Other via an appeal to ethnographic authenticity and/or a sense of parody where they know a white person exists under the red face.

6 The following essay provides a context for the analysis of the operas by briefly tracing the history of red face in Canada, considering how blackface anticipates red face in the Okanagan and demonstrating how white privilege in a range of texts from the 1950s structures red face in a way that transforms invader-settlers into "natives."

7 In Performing Canada, Alan Filewod suggests "racial impersonations" (xv), akin to what I dub red face, inaugurate pre-Canadian, colonial theatre and that this form persists in pageant form into the early twentieth century.6 He claims the performative of transforming invader-settlers into "native" begins with the French lawyer Marc Lescarbot’s 1606 masque The Theatre of Neptune in New France that offers the classical Greek god of the sea Neptune with his "aboriginal supplicants" welcoming the new governor of New France to the Bay of Fundy (xii). Filewod speculates these supplicants are played by Frenchmen but that First Nations may have observed this spectacle:

7 Filewod sees in various community pageants, parades, and private masques in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the presentation of history is regulated according to invader-settlers’ vision that champions the resourcefulness of the pioneer [sic], while relegating the native to a minor supplicant role. Moreover, this type of public national theatre works as a form of surveillance to structure the colonial vision (17), so that spectators are participants in this form of strategic nostalgia that enacts the triumph of colonialism (17). Red face persists as a strategy of empire.

8 Perhaps the question of why British Columbian settler-invaders, and more specifically invader-settler women composers in the 1950s, red faced can be traced to the performance tradition of blackface in British Columbia’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chad Evans’s Frontier Theatre: A History of Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Entertainment in the Canadian Far West and Alaska traces the introduction of the minstrel show in the Canadian West from its origins in the American South of the 1820s where it is used to rationalize the humanity of slave owning (251-260). According to Evans, from 1858 to the turn of the century minstrel shows were a vibrant part of the Pacific Northwest theatre. He suggests popularity for the minstrel show wanes in the late 1890s in part because the form is associated with young white women crossing gender in black face: "Respectable women, the British felt, would not appear in a minstrel show, let alone tights" (259).

9 In the Okanagan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, minstrel performances found special favour: Kelowna’s first mayor played the part of the first interlocutor in a 2 March 1895 minstrel show (Benmore 111), and the Kelowna Negro Minstrel Company raised funds for the Boer War (Benmore 112). The minstrel show persisted for decades in Kelowna according to the Janet E.V. Graham fonds at the Kelowna Public Archives that details a production of Showboat from 18-22 March 1969 by the Kelowna Community Theatre featuring a number of prominent members of the white community in blackface.

10 Just as the minstrel show represents African Americans as irresponsible childlike creatures who benefit from the institution of slavery, so does the portrayal of First Nations as simple childlike creatures by invader-settlers in 1950s British Columbia serve, in part, to endorse implicitly the view that colonization is part of an inevitable development of Canada into a civilized nation. These operas enact contact and pre-contact native existence and thereby regulate First Nations, who stand outside of European modernity and thus by implication the White Anglo-Canadian nation; they are apparently passively waiting to be performed by invader-settlers as a form of integrating not just their bodies, but selective "anthropological" bits of their culture into the fabric of the Canadian nation. Red Face operates as a displacement to generate multiple alibis about how invasion-colonization or settlement is inevitable and equals progress.

11 W.T. Lhamon Jr., in Raising Cain, challenges the normative reading of blackface as an explicitly racist form by asserting it is an ambivalent form that echoes Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry "stricken by indeterminancy" (1092). Lhamon recalls how the first blackface performances invert the Genesis version of Cain as a soul blackened by God for murder to embrace the rebellious energy of Cain. For Lhamon, these performers claim Cain and play "out his fugitive vagabondage, [thus] white and black performers inverted the European legend’s conservatism without erasing it" (117). Lhamon asserts that performers used blackface to invert and flout disciplinary norms in a manner that appealed to lower class whites and blacks who sidestepped the demeaning aspects of the performance to embrace "a radical fabric in a regressive narrative frame and within a repressive social context" (117). Given the hegemonic nature of Anglo-white culture in the Okanagan in the 1950s, to conclude that minstrel shows in the Okanagan offer a "radical fabric" would be a strained argument, yet the type of transgressive ambivalence Lhamon locates in the minstrel show tradition might help explain how red face is more than a specularization of the exotic Other and operates as a flexible alibi for colonization with a potential to subvert some dominant discourses. Pace Bhabha, red face in these operas "produces its slippages, its excess, its difference" (Bhabha 1092) to question elements of the patriarchal imperial project while ensuring white supremacy’s reign: invader-settlers become the native. In these two operas, White women use red face both to assert native Canadian heritage and to trouble the patriarchal elements of the colonial project.

12 An excellent historiographic demonstration of red face’s indeterminate erasure of invasion-settlement appears in the introduction to Don Salting’s Smile of the Manitou that describes the naming of the Okanagan town of Naramata.7 Most of the Okanagan, like much of British Columbia, was originally invaded-settled via the pre-emption regulation that allowed British-born adult males the right to up to 160 acres of "crown land" for agricultural development ("Pre-emption" 10). To overwrite this state-sanctioned land grab, Salting erases the Syilx’s presence8 in this region by appealing to safer forms of spectral First Nations, who are not protesting the pre-empting of their land by invader-settlers. His preface begins with an account of the origins of the name Naramata that offers a gothic level of native mimicry by invader-settlers: the town had been called East Summerland, but at a seance in 1907 at the home of the postmaster, J.S. Gillespie, his wife channels "a great Sioux Indian Chief named BIG MOOSE [. . . who] spoke of his dearly loved wife in the most endearing terms and called her by the name that I decided was a good name for our village NAR-RA-MAT-TAH as she was ‘the smile of the Manitou’" (Salting 1). This channelled Chief with no links to the Okanagan does not lament for lost land, language, and culture, but for his wife. Furthermore, this creation of a "native" name overlooks and overwrites the Syilx peoples by using a form of mimicry that settles for a form of native spirituality filtered through this Anglo invader-settler postmistress who had thought of calling the town "Brighton Beach," but settles for an abbreviated "Naramata" (1). Salting elaborates what L. Norris9 wonders in 1935 if the name was the "resurrection from the limb of forgotten memories of something previously unknown" or if "something actually happened[,] which staggers the imagination" (1). This conjectured mystical link to a native spirit receives another twist when Salting in the next paragraph adds that Mrs. G. Maisonville in 1948 suggests Mrs. Gillespie, whose first husband was from Australia, takes the word Naramata from "aboriginal Australian dialect" meaning "place of water" (1). This naming and fixing of place serves as a model for the displacement of First Nations who are no longer part of the land or cultural fabric; they serve as "colour" and as psychic outsiders (whether Sioux chief or Australian Aboriginals) and thus enable the invader-settler to play native from a safe psychic distance.

13 Salting’s version of local history as alibi for invasion-settlement provides what Thobani characterizes as the "fantasy of unsullied origins" (60). She argues in much less fantastical gestures that Canadian invader-settlers tend to mythologize the land as a way of ameliorating "colonial violence" (60). Nevertheless, Salting’s explicit, contrived, fantastical red face excuse of naming allows for "the innocence of the land to be claimed by the national subject as its own" (Thobani 60).

14 McKelvie’s populist 1955 history, Pageant of B.C.: Glimpses into the Romantic Development of Canada’s Far Western Province,10 argues British Columbia’s origins are always already "sullied" by different forms of rapacious colonialism. He provides a complex quasi-scientific alibi for the dominant invader-settler culture in tune with Salting’s civilizing themes that work to erase the notion of First Nations. Throughout McKelvie’s historical narrative, which focuses on the triumphs of developing the province into a modern industrial power, First Nations are either the loyal friends of invader-settlers or primitive, treacherous murderers who threaten civil society. McKelvie’s first chapter, called "In the Beginning," suggests the province has been occupied by "successive races" from the Pacific Rim in a way that makes modern British colonialism seem like a civilizing improvement over the series of conquests of the region and its people (1-4). The most astounding hypothesis offered is that the "Jews of China," part of Kulbai [sic] Khan’s fleet in a failed attempt to conquer Japan, were blown off course and drifted onto the Queen Charlotte Islands where they did not "intermarry with the untutored barbarians of the Coast; but any customs observed and the speech used by the strangers would be copied by the savages [sic]" (4). In this configuration, First Nations are the willing mimics of a superior culture that they can only imperfectly imitate.11 This elaborate historical narrative that posits colonialism as a constant in North American history is informed by orientalism. Edward Said12 argues Orientalist discourse relies "on this flexible positional strategy, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand (7). McKelvie clearly does not cede the "upper hand" as his narrative rests on three assumptions that buttress white privilege: one, First Nations and colonialist, whether "exotic" Jews living in China or Europeans, do not mix via marriage to produce hybridic children; two, First Nations lacking a legitimate indigenous culture must have mimicked another culture that is closely Judeo-Christian but still exotic; and three, colonialism pre-exists European settlement of the Pacific North West and thus assimilation is an inevitable constant that makes the most recent invasion-settlement seems like a kinder, gentler form of colonization. This red facing of First Nations’ history renders invader-settlers the logical and rightful heirs of a land that First Nations have never been able to exploit properly without the benevolence of others.

15 Perhaps the oddest example of white privilege in red face occurs in the 8 December 1954 Penticton Herald article titled "Ode to Winniehaha, White Chief Churchill" that reprints a story claiming Sir Winston Churchill’s American mother had First Nation heritage and offers a satiric poem. The poem mixes stereotypes of aboriginality and Churchill’s bulldog persona suggesting that only this very privileged and alleged Metis has the ability to pass in white civilization. Okanagan newspapers from the 1950s provide few accounts of First Nations, and even when they do, they seem to default toward a mythical "Indian" as in this article from The Women’s World page in the Penticton Herald which describes how the local white Women’s Institute had formed a mirror institute on the local reserve. The article begins, "[a]dopting modern customs and conforming to a way of life entirely different from that of their forefathers does not detract fundamentally from the romance and colour so closely associated with the Okanagan Indian" ("Okanagan Indian" 2). The white women associated with the Women’s Institute who initiated this "development" project for the reserve women are Mrs. Bennett, "the first white child to be born in Fernie," and "Mrs. Cawston," who is also "recognized as an authority on the customs and viewpoints of the Indian person" ("Okanagan Indian" 2). While extolling how the First Nations women are "embracing modern handicrafts, dress making, crocheting, first aid, and home nursing" ("Okanagan Indian" 2), it would seem the white women are becoming slightly more "native" with their involvement in this endeavour as passionate agents of civilizing modernity.13 With this paternalistic gesture, "native" is reduced to "romance and colour" which invader-settler women can "improve" upon by making First Nations women more civil and more white. This reading of Bennett and Cawston’s "civilizing mission" is consistent with Jennifer Henderson’s select literary analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-Canadian invader settler feminists’ narratives that demonstrates how invader-settler women are implicated in nation building and race making (16-19).

16 These various instances of red facing in newspapers and historical accounts indicate the prevailing invader-settler view of First Nations: that, like the land First Nations inhabit, they are an empty signifier waiting to be occupied and/or quite possibly improved by European modernity. In the 1950s, First Nations are a symbol to be manipulated by settler-invaders as a sign of a past pre-colonial moment that precludes considering the violence and persistence of colonialism. Red face, in its most literal theatrical form or in more abstracted and outlandish forms like Salting’s and McKelvie’s folk histories, seeks to render the invader-settler "native."

17 The operas Ashnola and The Lake each use different strategies to mimic native identities. Ashnola is set in the pre-European-contact period while The Lake is set in the early European-contact period. These operas, by avoiding representing contemporary First Nations, generate representations of the past that silence the possibility of discussing the Canadian government’s policy of assimilation embodied by the Indian Act of the 1870s (Chrisjohn, Young, and Maraun 238) or British Columbia’s14 legal position that native groups had no legal title or claim on lands and were from 1927 until 1951 prevented from raising funds for land claims ("Historical Timeline"). These operas, by representing First Nations as fossilized and often comedic types, pace McKelvie, Salting, and Winston Churchill, make possible the construction of a safe, unthreatened Canadian cultural nationalism where the invader-settlers as characters, performers, and audience can play red face. In these operas, representations of First Nations resisting the colonial process are nearly expunged or transformed into a monstrous outsider.

18 Barbara Pentland’s chamber opera, The Lake, set in the year 1873, is adapted from Dorothy Livesay’s poetry inspired by Syilx legend and from the diary of invader-settler Susan Allison15 (Eastman 61-2; Ormsby 1). The opera was written in 1954, produced as a radio play on CBC’s Wednesday Night program in 1954 (Wilson 16) and in Vancouver in 195516 ("Pentland"). The opera focuses on early colonial relations from a sympathetic albeit naïve white liberal feminist perspective that anticipates a more nationalist mode than The Lake. Pentland in her own words as quoted by the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada is a "pioneer" [sic] and champion for composing Canadian music; she based her opera on the autobiography of early Okanagan invader-settler Susan Allison who reputedly is the first European to sight Lake Okanagan’s mythic water creature Naaitka17 ("Research").

19 In this opera, Syilx’s mythology constitutes a harmonious feminine world of balance that is challenged by white patriarchal colonial values (3). The four principle characters constitute an allegorical matrix of race and gender that delineates between the imperial white male realm of rational economic exploitation of terra nullius and the First Nations-female realm of superstition and nature: John Allison, as the stiff British farmer, embodies unquestioned colonialism, patriarchy, and rationality; his wife Susan,18 a 28-year old expectant mother, is inspired by native culture19 not unlike his manservant, Johnny McDougal, a Metis guide and farmhand.20 Both liminal characters, Johnny and Susan do not entirely fit with either First Nations or colonial cultures. Apparently McDougal’s "mixed" blood and Susan’s gender put them in touch with the Syilx’s beliefs as embodied by the fourth character, Marie,21 "an elderly Indian woman from the Reserve, child nurse, and domestic to Mrs. Allison" (3), who functions as a repository of native lore. These characters’ delineated and linked subject positions are supported by the score that has characters singing different lines that overlap with each other; for example, while Marie describes the colonial project as the white man’s rapacious hunt for gold, Susan Allison sings over Marie’s critique with a paean to the Okanagan as a golden land of fruit farms that somehow redeems the colonial project by returning the earth to an Edenic form (31).22 This dialogic structure suggests that, while in some performances Susan Allison’s voice might prevail, there is still a dissonance offered unsettling the triumphant hymn to settlement.

20 The opera opens with the pregnant pioneer Susan Allison creating a list of gifts to offer her Syilx farmhands, recording native legends of half human, half fish "little people" (5), and listening to warnings about an "evil" lake creature. She is the embodiment of the invader-settler transformed into native. Her husband, John, provides a counterpoint to this Edenic colonial harmony: he plans to sail across the lake to mill his grain at the Mission despite his wife’s protests about a sea creature called Naaitka. He is the "master" who must discipline an offstage First Nations worker, Cherumchoot,23 who has gambled away his clothing and returned naked to the reserve (23-25).

21 Cherumchoot is reduced to a figure of ridicule. Accompanying John Allison across the lake is the Metis Johnny McDougal, who takes along a pig and hen that he plans to throw overboard as peace offerings to Naaitka. The stage notes direct him to stoop to catch the pig in what is called a "humorous by-play" and thus explicitly red faces his character as a buffoon (20). The menacing figure here is the off-stage, anti-colonial Naaitka, who the audience is told "long ago [. . .] devoured an Indian [sic] mad with white man’s gold" (Wilson 16).24 Naaitka will upset the colonial adventure but not the offstage male native Cherumshoot or the Metis John McDougal, who, like blackface characters, operate not as figures of menace so much as misrule. Both characters need the restraint of the rational colonial mind offered by the stern English gentleman, John Allison, who will discipline them with creaky civility.

22 The female characters of Marie, the grandmotherly First Nations elder, and Susan Allison are wiser than these two male native characters. The grandmotherly Marie offers a tale of pre-European contact civilization that suggests the coming of the "White man" with "[g]old burned in his head!" has turned the lake creature Naaitka against all men (31). Why the vengeful Naaitka would not simply prey on European colonists is unexplained. In this opera, violent resistance to colonialism can only be coded as a supernatural being; it cannot reside in the bodies of male natives. White privilege and (not literal) red face secures Susan’s grasp of First Nation’s lore, aboriginal reciprocity, so that invader-settlers and their children will become native.

23 Marie’s account of the post-European contact creating a fallen world overlaps with Susan Allison’s version of the Okanagan as a type of farmer’s Eden where it is not gold but the "green life" she seeks to cultivate (33). Susan repeatedly rhapsodizes about the land and not the people (31-33; 52-3), even though she begins the opera by writing a list of debts she owes natives: "to Yacumtecum, for bringing me a hide to tan: One bag of sugar. To Jacob One-leg, huckleberries [. . .]. One hat given woven with my own hands from the meadow grass" (2-3). The sugar, most likely the product of the Caribbean colonial project used to sweeten this exchange and the other goods crafted from the land, suggest that although she attempts to live in harmony and economic reciprocity with First Nations, her vision is essentially one of soft colonialization. Rather than relying on physical force to subdue First Nations and their land, Susan Allison, via trade, assumes First Nations are adequately compensated for "granting" land for invader-settlers to develop into an Eden-like British garden and farm system. The script, naturally, does not speak to how she and her husband acquired their farmland via pre-emption or interrogate the exalted narrative of agricultural progress that assumes settler-invaders improve the lot of First Nations by bring them the benefits of European modernity.

24 The opera concludes with Susan Allison experiencing birthing contractions as she sings, "let our children grow to love and nurture it [the land] from wilderness" (52). This triumph for her family is a triumph for white heterosexual settlement that is coded as an inevitable and pastoral white fertility. None of the native characters have offspring in this opera: Marie is literally the handmaiden to white fertility that will populate the Okanagan and erase Metis and First Nations leaving settler-invaders as the "new" natives to improve the land.

25 While crossing the lake, John Allison and Johnny McDougal encounter a storm. From the shoreline/stage, looking into the lake/audience, Susan Allison sees Naaikta. Her perspective offers an example of Bhabha’s notion of mimicry producing ambivalence since the situating of the monstrous Naaikta beyond the fourth wall in the audience suggests the monstrosity is not some ancient First Nation’s spirit, but the white audience entertained by this spectacle. Her description of Naaikta is in phallic terms as "a huge tree trunk—undulating—moving fast" (35), and is at odds with her skeptical husband’s perspective: returning from his nautical mishap, he claims to have merely experienced the storm, and not a monster, as his boat was pushed onto rocks and destroyed. John Allison as invader-settler clings to his rational explanation, while his wife Susan, via apparently empirical evidence, has ‘gone native’ and accepted a view that accommodates native spirituality and thus becomes not an unsettled invader-settler but a "Canadian" ready to birth white Canadian children.

26 The image of this monstrous phallic native spirit is used to attack patriarchal structures that see the father absent from his child’s birth and as a master over his land and people. By the end of the play, John Allison is unconvinced of this "native" superstition but agrees to stay home with his wife to witness the birth. The opera concludes with all four voices simultaneously singing "Naaitka," with the stage direction in the score indicating that John Allison sings it "scornfully" (58). John Allison’s skepticism is in a sense domesticated by his wife’s fear of Naaikta consuming the colonial patriarch; quite literally the notion of Naaitka as a threat to the colonial project is domesticated for use within the colonial economy as Susan Allison ensures her husband will remain at home during her childbirth.25 The fearsome Naaikta is placated by the Metis Johnny McDougal’s gift of domestic livestock produced by the colonial project and not other gifts like the animal hides, huckleberries, etc. that Susan Allison receives from her workers at the beginning of the opera. Like Susan Allison’s native farmhands who receive her gifts at the beginning of the opera, presumably Naaikta is appeased from biting the hand of the invader-settler that feeds. In this text, gender and race are linked in a manner that makes race subservient to a liberal feminist and Canadian nationalist project. The return of the colonial master to the domestic space marks a triumph for both white liberal feminism and Canadian nationalism in red face as Susan Allison’s sympathies for First Nation’s ways are secured by the opera’s conclusion This colonial feminist space operates as pastoral garden that has tamed the bush, First Nations, and monsters by acts of white civility that refuse to acknowledge the ongoing violence of colonialism, while offering a "limited or constrained universality that tends to proliferate and striate not only external but also internal differences" (Coleman 13). Thus Susan and John Allison function as the epitome of white civility, standing in place for the Canadian imaginary, and the racialized characters of Marie, McDougal, Cherumshoot, and even Naaitka are consigned to subsidiary roles. This view of First Nations as background is confirmed by a 1958 Canadian Music Journal article, where Pentland indicates how her violin sonata is informed by "folk" music that includes First Nation music:

26 Red face allows privileged settler-invaders to become Canadian by using "primitive" First Nations culture as background for the main exalted themes of civilizing settlement.

27 The Okanagan in the 1950s might seem like an odd place for women to cross dress and sing as First Nations on the stage of a high school auditorium, but given the tradition of blackface in the region and newspaper accounts from the period it would seem white audiences found this crossing of race and gender within a theatrical tradition acceptable. An account from the Vernon News in 1953 suggests blackface is a source of anxiety when taken out of its theatrical context: Blake Crothers, a member of "the AOTS26 minstrel show," dressed in blackface has car trouble on a rural road. Unable to flag a motorist down, he knocks on a farmhouse door and inadvertently frightens a woman. This woman frantically calls for assistance, demonstrating that although the blackened white body is designed to entertain comically, it signifies menace for white audiences ("This Minstrel" 2). Perhaps red face when used by the white women of Penticton in the "correct" theatrical context is less terrifying for invader-settler audiences than Blake Crother’s blackface in the "wrong" context; nevertheless, Ashnola speaks to invader-settler anxieties "stricken by [the] indeterminacy" (Bhabha 1092) of red body paint that reveals the excesses of white privilege seeking to represent First Nations.

28 As in invader-settler speculative historical accounts like McKelvie’s history of Jewish-Chinese influences on First Nations culture, the First Nations subject, as racialized Other, operates as a site of primitive fascination for the implied modern Anglo-white spectator. The form of the opera and perhaps the Penticton Ladies Choir’s experience with their production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas the year before meant that this "pale" mimicry of Syilx culture is inflected by Greek classical form. A caption for a promotional photograph in the Penticton Herald neatly captures this conflation as it describes a First Nation ritual as "a dance of the furies" ("One" 8). Thus the performance of the native can only occur within an ethnocentric framework that suggests this "new" primitive culture is analogous to European classical culture that has also had its rituals transformed into entertainment. As a new rendition of classical culture within an anthropological mode, the authors ambivalently claim the opera to be a clear sign of Canadian cultural maturity; yet, it is a "fantasy opera" ("Authors" 5; "All-Local" 6). Estabrooks’s postscript "How it Happened," a narrative of origins for the opera, explains that the inspiration for the opera was derived from the need to create an all-women’s opera for the Penticton Ladies Choir and occurred by chance when she was preparing a goose for a dinner and found herself rhyming "papoose" with "goose" (3).27 The women abandon dinner preparations to draft the opera. For these women, creating and playing red face quite literally results in liberation from the domestic space.

29 Counter to the narrative of "How it Happened," the libretto’s paratextual introduction titled "THERE REALLY IS..." indicates the opera’s inspiration is derived from the Okanagan’s geography and its first peoples, who are clearly not part of modernity: "[t]here really is a Band of Ashnola Indians [sic]. Their village is a cluster of log cabins nestled in the trees on the other side of the Similkameen River from the highway and cannot be seen unless one crosses the river." Ashnola never crosses this metaphorical river to locate the Other in "this cluster of cabins" but offers an impression of what life would have been like prior to colonization infused by the sensibilities of musical theatre. The third paragraph of "THERE REALLY IS..." describes a violent post-invasion-settlement history wrapped in heresy that once again maintains the explicitly colonial ethnographic distance:

30 This description of the violent Other from across the river seems to be more about myth than about fact since none of its assertions are supported and its logic is scattered. Ashnola eschews this potentially unsettling narrative of a fraught settlement to offer the idyllic pastoral Okanagan in a pre-contact period that is reflected in how the paratextual introduction shifts from this violent narrative of Chief Ashnola John to a description of how the opera perfectly mirrors the geography of the region. The introduction concludes with the disclaimer, "[t]he story itself is entirely a figment of the imagination" that ensures this mimicry is only representing, with red paint, fanciful First Nations and not the ones that inhabit the cluster of cabins cut off from exalted European modernity in 1954.

31 The libretto begins in rhyming lines with "Ashnola: Fantasy" that establishes the audience’s Anglo-white perspective: "[t]his story is a tale of the ancient Band/ of Ashnola Indians/ Who live in the land/ Of the dashing, splashing Ashnola River". By representing a gendered division of labour in this representation of pre-European-contact civilization where the men hunt while "[t]he old squaws sit/ And brood in the sun,/ While the young squaws fulfil/ A playful desire/ To sing and dance around the fire," the libretto designates an ethnographic view of "Edenic" traditional native culture, but also by extension an anxiety about the role of white women in the post-World War II era, many of whom are expected to return to the home after working traditionally male jobs in ammunitions factories (Honey 20-24). The second line the dancing squaws sing confirms a traditional view of women as domestic labourers: "We work all day as willing slaves." The young dancing women also describe how they are empowered as the makers of the domestic sphere who "spear the fish and snare the hare,/ And scrape the hides for the clothes we wear./ We pluck the feathers from the goose/ To make a bed for the wee papoose./ We also weave the baskets fine/ From tiny roots of shrubs and vine." The libretto demeans the patriarchal elements of pre-contact native culture as represented by the hollow authority figure Chief Ashnola who is described as "covetous" and "wily."

32 The trajectory of the mechanical and predictable plot supports this liberal feminist reading that sees First Nations as raw material in order to critique "primitive" patriarchy: act one begins with the arrival of a young "prince" from the Squamish nation, called Shining Arrow, who immediately falls in love with Chief Ashnola’s daughter, Singing Water. After a competition, the Chief agrees to marry his daughter to this outsider who is described as royalty. Predictably complications ensue in act two, when the jealous local "brave," [sic] Rushing Wind, seeks magic from the Shaman to poison Shining Arrow. However, Rushing Wind’s conversation with the Shaman is overheard by the "squaw," Meadow Lark, who wants to marry Rushing Wind and thus needs to ensure Shining Arrow marries and departs with Singing Water, reforming the love triangle into a harmonious square. In act three, the Shaman attempts to discredit and poison Shining Arrow, but he is upstaged by a wise old woman, Old-Seeing Owl, who reads her version of a dream while Meadow Lark poisons the Shaman. In lines perhaps inspired by The Wizard of Oz, Old-Seeing Owl declares, "[t]he Shaman is dead-/ The Shaman is dead – is dead – is dead" with the rest of the cast beginning to chant this phrase. The murder of the Shaman as the repository of native cultural belief is swept away by the climax that focuses on happy marriages for the young couples.

33 The libretto clearly characterizes the Shaman not as a respected religious leader but as a purveyor of evil fakery. A note on the original 1954 playbill offers this "ethnographic" detail:

33 This use of the past tense and the adjective "malevolent" consign First Nation spiritual beliefs and practices to a remote past outside modern rational thinking. Shamanism is reduced to malevolent fakery rather than a spiritual belief that might also involve healing, an alternative world view, etc. In this case, red face uses ethnographic distance to appropriate, authenticate, and insist on the primitive values of the Other.

34 Meadow Lark’s status as a femme fatale in the plot is not factored into the over-determined joyous ending where marriage resolves all complications. Given the persistence of residential schools and the Indian Act’s policies of assimilation, the shaman’s un-criminalized murder operates as an apt metaphor for how dominant invader-settlers deploy red face to imagine and erase First Nations culture.

35 By shifting the focus away from the poisoned shaman to the two couples married with the chief’s blessing, this representation of marriage prohibitions uses First Nations cultural capital much like Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado uses Imperial Japan to discuss the arbitrary values of late Victorian morality.28 Red face permits these women to stage cross-dressed male leaders as buffoons and to show older wise women subversively in control of a society. Thus this opera speaks more to post-World War II gender issues for white women29 than to the specifics of First Nations cultures via an anthropological lens.

36 Ashnola’s authors, Mary Costley and Lillian Estabrooks, are part of this liberal feminist movement to provide "culture" but also to provide professional space for female musicians.30 In 1982 Penticton Herald recounting of the opera’s genesis, they describe how the cooking of their New Year’s Eve dinner is disrupted by repeatedly running into the kitchen to write down bits of the opera ("Ashnola" 6). The inspiration for Ashnola’s plot and scenes are located in the fusion between public music and domestic labour. That the opera’s feminism, underwritten by white privilege, is consistent with Henderson’s thesis that early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century "Anglo-Protestant feminism [was] committed to race making" that sees white women gaining status on the backs of Others (Henderson 43).

37 In material terms, the opera supported and promoted white women. The local chapter of the Soroptimists, a North American-wide club dedicated to supporting and promoting women’s rights, sponsored the original performance and witnessed the last performance of the opera in 1977 ("Ashnola" 6; "Estabrooks "How it Happened" 6).31 The playbill of this first performance advertises a number of businesses including Monica Craig Fisher, a piano instructor and pianist for the event (Ashnola: A Legend, 4), and the composer Constance Waterman. Additionally, the choreographer Marcia Rowland later had a career in New York in ballet ("Ashnola" 8). The 1955 performance in Vancouver for the 10^th Biannual Canadian Music Teachers conference was sponsored through the City of Penticton with Penticton’s first woman alderman [sic], Elsie MacCleave, as an "official representative" with the group (Estabrooks 5). Materially, this musical’s red face operates to place white women in the public sphere within an emergent Canada free of American or British influences where white women are full citizens able to speak for and represent Others as a way of becoming "native."

38 Ashnola’s limited Anglo feminist project, with its use of First Nations culture as the raw material for invader-settler imaginings, dovetails with Pentland’s feminist nationalist project in The Lake. Costley and Estabrooks are proud of creating a libretto based on "original" material that suits the vocal range of their all-female chorus and speaks to local interest rather than simply relying on European scripts written for male voices. On the evening of the 1955 performance, the Vancouver Sun reported the libretto’s authors "hope [that] Ashnola will inspire other operas for women’s choirs. Inspiration is plentiful in Canada they point out. It lies in the folklore of the country and in its colourful history waiting for writers and composers to take up their pens and write" (Nicholson 8). Descriptions of pre-European contact native culture are the raw material that these women use to create a nationalist culture for consumption by opera fans seeking to see "Canadian" content on the stage.32

39 Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Ashnola’s first production is that 26 native children from the Penticton Reserve attend it ("‘Ashnola’ Seen"). Did these children see the play as just more of the dominant Canadian culture’s mimicry that seeks to confine native identities to unthreatening pre-contact natives (like Edward Curtis’s photography and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North) or to more negative portrayals like that of the 1950s Hollywood Western (e.g., John Ford’s 1950 Rio Grande). Or is the reception of this opera by these children something more profoundly brutal because it was not acted by people on a screen but by prominent local white settlers in drag? I was unable to answer these questions when I asked people at the En’nowkin education and cultural centre on the Penticton Band Reserve. I also sense that it is not my role to re-traumatize someone with a hopefully faded childhood memory, but it is my role to unpack how white privilege operated in the 1950s and lingers in the Okanagan and elsewhere in Canada where notions of being Canadian exploits quaint notions of aboriginality as symbolic capital.

40 In The Lake, Naaitka poses a monstrous but temporary threat to the colonial order of John Allison. Ashnola consciously rejects the portrayal of resistant "savage" natives to defuse menace in Gilbert and Sullivan style. Perhaps the unspoken monster in these two 1950s operas is resistance to the colonial project of assimilation. Instead of showing this "monster," these operas attempt to integrate representations of "historic" First Nations into a national agenda to generate a progressive liberal feminist project that maintains white privilege.

41 In the post-World War II, emergent-Cold War era, the federal government began to frame an essential bilingual and humanist notion of Canadian identity as augured by Vincent Massey’s On Being Canadian (1948) and made more manifest by the publication in 1951 of the Massey-Léveque Commission report calling for the state to intervene in constructing a common culture for Canada via institutions like the CBC, NFB, Canada Council, and universities (Grace 5).33 I cannot, in good faith, argue that Ashnola consciously aims to contribute to a national or even provincial cultural imaginary given its limited and very local performance history. Yet, like Pentland’s The Lake, which was broadcast on CBC radio (Wilson) and clearly devised within an explicit Nationalist Canada Council-like vision, the amateur Ashnola red faces the image of First Nations to secure cultural capital to make the invader-settler "native."

42 These operas may reflect the dominant invader-settler view of colonization, but in this same region later in the 1950s and into the 1960s, an explicitly anti-colonial perspective emerges that, instead of offering red face’s generic representation of pre-contact aboriginality, focuses on representing the material conditions of contemporary First Nations. British Columbian interior playwrights, George Ryga, a resident of Summerland in the south Okanagan, and Gwen Pharis Ringwood, a resident near Williams Lake area north of the Okanagan, explicitly wrestle with the legacy of colonialism as filtered via the state, church, and school system in a way that problematizes the National project. Ringwood’s combination of myth and social realism in Lament for a Harmonica originally performed in 1959 and George Ryga’s expressionistic and sentimental tragedy The Ecstasy of Rita Joe performed in Vancouver in 1967 mark a distinct shift by representing contemporary native life under this policy of the assimilation (Ryga 36). Ringwood’s three indigenous themed plays: Lament for a Harmonica (1959), The Stranger (1971), and The Furies: A Tragedy in One Scene34 (1980), offer a mix of myth and social realism as they deal with miscegenation and assimilation from First Nations heroines’ perspectives. Her heroines are self-destructive femmes fatales caught in a colonial patriarchal trap by lecherous white men. The first of these plays Lament for a Harmonica offers a degree of social realism mixed with expressive elements. The set’s upstage centre space has "the shape of a high-steepled church against the darkening sky," as if to assert Christianity casts a long shadow over the heroine Maya Samuel (339). This young, intelligent half-native woman, who bears a child out of wedlock and with no support from the white father, resists various forces in her quest to declare "I’m an Indian" (347). Maya is acutely aware of assimilation as she explains to her white ex-lover Allan that their child had few options:

43 The play concludes in a tragic farce with Maya killing her would-be lover William,35 a young man from the reserve, who decides he must take revenge on Allan. Maya, like Ryga’s First Nations Rita Joe, seeks to escape definition: she ends the play pleading, "I thought to be something different" (353). The inability to self-define indicates how the dominant invader-settler society has inscribed her role as a First Nations woman.

44 Ryga’s and Ringwood’s representations of contemporary natives are still fraught and no doubt imbued with problematic stereotypes. Lane, in his 2003 "Performing History: The Reconstruction of Gender and Race in British Columbia," describes how contemporary productions of Rita Joe offer two meanings: the first "a genuine well-meant text, and the performative re-enactment of appropriation" (268), but compared to Ashnola and The Lake, they mark a significant, albeit small, step towards de-colonizing Canadian invader-settler society.

45 Attempts to describe performance history in British Columbia have missed the notion that white privilege in the 1950s structured representations of First Nations via red face to construct a national figure. In 1995, Denis Johnson’s "Drama in British Columbia: A Special Place" boldly claims, "[i]f Canada can be described as a land with too much geography and not enough history, then British Columbia has more geography and less history than anywhere else" (171). Johnson’s account of the province’s theatrical history and sense of its spatial history as terra nullius fails to account for the gaps in representation generated by invader-settlers who have erased or re-cast pre-contact history in the drive to tell their own exalted narratives of settlement. It is the history of white privilege in performance in this region that bears more scrutiny to excavate how Johnson’s supposedly excessive "geography and lack of history" is closely regulated by invader-settler privilege. Lane sees the 1951 removal of the ban on potlatch36 as a defining epoch for a later period associated with socially committed theatre produced by Ryga, Pollock, Hollingsworth, and others from the 1960s forward, which again assumes sympathetic white artists have been working in solidarity with First Nations to address colonization. James Hoffman’s "Shedding the colonial Past: Rethinking British Columbia Theatre" provides a good glimpse of how BC theatre history can be productively excavated from a postcolonial past, but I wonder if it, like Lane’s history, too optimistically assumes the province and country have shed their collective colonial past. It is important to keep in mind how red face in these operas and various local historical pageants and narratives defines Canadian cultural nationalism in the 1950s and, in many shapes, persists and continues to perpetuate neo-colonialism with the discourse of Canadian Cultural Nationalism.

46 Sunera Thobani’s Exalted Subjects maintains that Canadian cultural nationalism evacuates the native presence from the national imaginary:

46 I am intrigued by how red face, particularly in 1950s British Columbia, like the iconic image of Trudeau, provides a form of mimicry that strives to secure "authentic" Canadian identity via red face: to be Canadian is to wear the buckskin coat and paddle a canoe without naming invader-settler privilege. The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler sparked "a return to native" theme with Bruce Ruddell’s Beyond Eden, a rock opera devoted to dramatizing the 1957 trip to Haida Gwaii islands by a group of anthropologists bent on preserving First Nations culture (Harris; Beyond Eden), and Margaret Atwood’s libretto to be performed by the Vancouver opera based on the life of Metis Poet Pauline Johnson ("New"). These contemporary operas suggest the echoes of The Lake and Ashnola persist in a manner that hints invader-settlers are constructing a slightly more "unsettled" version of the national imaginary in 2010. Yet the persistence of symbols like the Vancouver-Whistler 2010 Inukshuk and its red faced cartoon mascots Miga, Quatchi, and Sumi37 suggests there is more work to be done to decolonize Canada’s exalted invader-settler society.