ABSTRACT

This chapter examines indigeneity in the librettos from Zitkala-Sâ’s The Sun Dance Opera (1913) and Maria Elena Yepes’ El Circo Anahuac (2018). The articles examined in this essay interfere with Western aesthetics in order to repurpose the language and sound of colonizer-situated “culture” toward the survivance of native cultures in the Americas. Reading these librettos and aspects of the produced operas as translated works, through theoretical points from Gerald Vizenor, Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Octavio Paz, reveals the subversive and counter-historical import of the librettos from Zitkala-Sâ and Yepes. Both librettists and their respective producers/composers decolonize the language (lyrical and visual) of Euro-American operatic tradition in order to translate indigenous knowledge and philosophy into a tradition which was not intended to speak for and to the descendants of those whom Thomas Jefferson called “merciless Indian savages” (Declaration of Independence). Zitkala-Sâ’s libretto draws from Sioux oral tradition and the librettist’s own experience as an indigenous woman with Western training in classical music. Yepes’ libretto draws from Aztec myth and Náhua poetics; it features a hybrid linguistic palette of English, Spanish, and Nahuatl. In the over one hundred years between The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac, native perspectives in the arts have chipped away at the monolithic and reductive nature of “Indian” as a singular historical figure. The deployment of opera as a vessel for indigenous archive subverts the othering power dynamics at work in the civilized world vs. savage world dichotomy. Zitkala-Sâ and Yepes’ librettos translate indigenous aural traditions into a hybrid form of expression which archive points within a continuum of indigeneity. Their librettos nurture the decolonizing efforts of indigenous memory keepers, while maintaining a hostile stance toward the white-washing of indigenous aural tradition.