TY - JOUR
AU - Garrett-Davis, Josh
AB - Abstract The Indians for Indians Hour, a Native Oklahoma radio show founded by Don Whistler (Sac and Fox) in 1941 and continuing to the present day, was from its start a landmark in Indigenous media history and community radio more broadly. The show’s extensive audio archive reveals the way it worked to connect many communities otherwise poorly served by mass media. Indians for Indians demonstrated under-recognized dimensions of radio during its so-called Golden Age, and helped build an intertribal community in twentieth-century Oklahoma. Every Tuesday afternoon at 1:00 p.m., beginning April 1, 1941, and continuing for decades, tens of thousands of radio listeners across Oklahoma heard a variation of this sequence: A formal, professional voice announced without evident emotion, “This is WNAD, the broadcasting service of the state University of Oklahoma in Norman. And now: Don Whistler, with Indians for Indians.” Then, with verve, echoing the welcoming tone of the late Cherokee radio star Will Rogers, followed: “Ahô nîhkâne! Kesh-ke-kosh a nîna! This is the”—tenth, eightieth, or two hundred ninety-fifth—“program of the Indians for Indians Hour. Kesh-ke-kosh speaking.”1 The “hour” that followed—actually half an hour, a fact ripe for some Indian humor—varied tremendously in style and content and even language from week to week. One week, Comanche singers performed Rabbit Dance and Round Dance songs.2 The next, junior high students from the Pawnee Indian School a hundred miles northeast of Norman read their compositions (“We are proud,” one declared, “that the red man is never red in politics”).3 One week an evangelist unspooled a rapid sermon-song in Creek; three weeks later a Kiowa guest defended the Native American Church and its use of peyote as “an agent facilitating the Indian’s adjustment to the imposed white man’s culture.”4 A remote broadcast shared perspectives from the Oklahoma Intertribal Council about Indian schools and the U.S. Congress’s bills to create the Indian Claims Commission.5 The Indians for Indians Hour quickly became the self-proclaimed most popular show on the 1,000-watt noncommercial AM station, a weekly program that linked almost twenty tribes in central and western Oklahoma through music, event announcements, and cultural politics.6 The show was founded in 1941 by Kesh-ke-kosh/Don Whistler, who was also the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation.7 By 1948, on the 351st program, Whistler told his listeners that they numbered between fifty and seventy-five thousand, “probably the largest audience” for the “oldest program on WNAD.”8 Whistler became a kind of celebrity in Native Oklahoma.9 As the show’s creator and host during its first decade, he deserves much credit for its success. He had a remarkable career decades before his radio show achievement. However, a thorough listening to the extant archives indicates that Whistler himself consistently sought to turn the microphone over to the community of the show’s listeners and performers. In this article, I follow his lead by placing the show itself at the center of the history, sketching his biography only briefly below. Whistler died in 1951, but the show continued in various forms and is still on the air on KACO Superstar Country 98.5 FM in Anadarko—now a three-hour affair on Saturday mornings. The current host is Edmond Mahseet (Comanche), and the block of time is sponsored by the Comanche Nation. In 2016, the show celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary.10 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide An unidentified group of performers on Indians for Indians, 1943. The University of Oklahoma Libraries are planning an exhibition on the show and hope visitors will help identify some of the performers. OU Photo Service image 18779, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide An unidentified group of performers on Indians for Indians, 1943. The University of Oklahoma Libraries are planning an exhibition on the show and hope visitors will help identify some of the performers. OU Photo Service image 18779, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma. Focusing on the show’s first decade, I argue that the program was both a pioneering intertribal institution and an unheralded model of community radio.11 Directly serving rural Native Americans and Indian boarding school students—profoundly underserved populations in this so-called Golden Age of Radio—Indians for Indians constituted an exception to the medium’s predominant Whiteness and the growing triumph of commercial over public-interest radio in the same period.12 The show’s early years also coincided, in Native Oklahoma, with a period in which many American Indian communities were dispersed via boarding school systems, economic pressures, and eventually relocation programs before, during, and after World War II. At the same time, many tribes reorganized under new, more administrative constitutions during the New Deal, serving more diasporic and intertribal constituencies.13 The medium of a weekly radio show helped connect this world as an audio message board and cultural hub. Historians of radio have scarcely considered the presence, or absence, of Indians as broadcasters and listeners before Native-owned stations arrived in the 1970s. Media historian Michael C. Keith has chronicled much of the recent history of such stations, and scholars have considered the Native perspective voiced on earlier national broadcasting by the hugely popular comedian Will Rogers or musical performers like Kiutus Tecumseh (Yakama-Cherokee). But few historians have touched on broader Indian radio history, despite the medium’s obvious importance in recent decades. Today at least fifty-seven Native-operated stations transmit across the United States, and internationally the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has acknowledged the “right to establish their own media in their own languages and to have access to all forms of non-indigenous media without discrimination.”14 Alongside the exceptionally rich sound archive of Indians for Indians, future studies of other pioneering Indigenous radio programs can help expand our understandings of the “mediascape” in these communities and counteract what the historian Philip J. Deloria has identified as the strong cultural “expectation” that Indians and modern technology do not coexist.15 Indians for Indians speaks productively to both Native American and media history. Though mostly unknown outside Indian Oklahoma, the show was a pioneering and exemplary Indigenous media institution, part of a tradition that stretches back to Native innovations in print and phonographic media and continues in Native media today.16 The show enriches our understanding of how various Native people built and strengthened cultural and political networks in modern America. They advanced tribal nationhood and intertribal organizing while participating in American nationhood through the war and through Cold War sentiment such as the student formulation “the red man is never red in politics.” The show also adds a new dimension to historians’ understanding of radio (and other mass media) as a complex web that linked listeners at many geographic and cultural scales. Several recent histories have fractured an earlier understanding of radio between the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the rise of television in the 1950s. Where previously scholars viewed this period as a golden age of English-language-only broadcasting, national network hegemony, and formatting consensus, the media historian Alexander Russo has described American radio of this era instead as a “hybrid system with local, regional, and national interests, tastes, and concerns intermingling throughout institutions, programming, and audience responses.” Fleshing out this hybrid system, other scholars have explored Spanish and Yiddish radio, African American programming, labor radio, border-buster radio, and consumer activism.17 Adding Oklahoma’s Indian Country to the dial yields yet more complexity, including many more languages and musical traditions; a historical and ongoing colonial relationship between the United States and numerous sovereign nations; and radio as a bridge reconnecting Indigenous people who had been removed from their homelands and communities through land dispossession, boarding schools, and wartime upheavals and opportunities. Indians were relentlessly represented via radio and other mass media—and scholars have extensively studied the “White man’s Indian” of caricature and fantasy—but relatively few historians have engaged those Native people who ignored expectations of their primitivism and became media innovators.18 Additionally, the Indians for Indians Hour, more lively than other public-service programs on WNAD, was an innovative deployment of noncommercial radio in an increasingly commercialized American radio landscape. The Native people who created the show built an “imagined community”—to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase—and an “acoustic community” that was simultaneously local, regional, national (in both tribal and American senses), and international.19 The broad intellectual history around radio has also failed to include Indigenous theorists and practitioners. Tendencies and possibilities of the medium were taken up in its first several decades by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Marshall McLuhan. Some such observers showed dismay at the ways radio seemed to push toward nationalism and demagoguery, in the United States and especially in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, while others heard an overwhelming corporate intrusion on the airwaves. Decades later, McLuhan would famously describe the “tribal drum of radio,” a supposed primitive and hypnotic quality that pushed toward fascism.20 Including Whistler and other Native voices in this conversation offers a different understanding of the medium. The intertribal drum of radio in Oklahoma represented a constructive, participatory form of call and response, broadcast by people regarded as backward by many non-Indians (like McLuhan). No written manifesto for the Indians for Indians media philosophy survives, but the schedule was the message—listeners mailed postcards to Whistler, requesting specific dates to perform, and he included all Native performers of any variety. Only a “White person” was expressly denied the microphone.21 Akin to many other versions of public-interest and citizens’ media around the world, but with a unique intertribal Native Oklahoma character, the program demonstrated how radio could be local and non-demagogic, enlisting listeners as performers and allowing the community to shape the programming. In the vast and complicated field of American radio history, the Indians for Indians Hour stands as a significant, listener-built landmark. Native Oklahoma was polyglot and diverse: a state built on top of Indian Territory, the land of exile for Southeast and Old Northwest tribes—terminus of various trails of tears and other pressured emigrations—and constrained home (and sometimes prison) to Plains and western tribes after devastating military defeats in the nineteenth century. By the time of its statehood in 1907, Oklahoma was home to more than thirty tribes (or nearly seventy if combined tribal backgrounds are disaggregated) with ancestral roots from across the continental United States, enmeshed with substantial populations of African Americans and Euro-Americans in a cultural landscape of almost indescribable complexity. The Indians for Indians Hour broadcast many of the varied voices of what was truly an international Indian Country.22 Principally, guests were powwow singing groups, Indian boarding school or college groups, religious representatives, and attendees of intertribal political or cultural gatherings. That varied lineup hardly represented all of Native life in the state: notably missing were representatives from far eastern Oklahoma, for example from the large Osage, Cherokee, and Choctaw nations, and a host of others, as well as the Chickasaw nation nearby. WNAD’s signal faded toward the East, but it is unclear why Chickasaws were not represented (see map). Nor were the number of appearances of given performers and tribes proportionate to their populations. Still, over time Whistler and his listeners curated what we could aptly call a variety show, one with a strong regional following. Live studio broadcasts of Indians for Indians followed a pattern. Whistler opened with his signature Sauk address (“Ahô nîhkâne!”) and sometimes made some initial announcements. He turned the program over to his guests as quickly as possible. As he once put it, moving away from the microphone, “I’m gonna let Amos [Komah] do the talking and save my breath to cool my coffee with tomorrow.”23 Whistler’s economy of chatter was partly archival: he recorded the show primarily on 16-inch acetate discs, with each side holding about 15 minutes of music, with a stated intention of preserving it for the future. He delivered powwow and meeting announcements and get-well greetings at the show’s midpoint as an engineer flipped the disc. Small excerpts of announcements were recorded, incidentally. A significant number of Indians for Indians Hour shows had no live guests and were not archived. On these shows, Whistler sat in the studio “Solo,” as he noted in his log, giving new announcements, replaying earlier programs, or even spinning some of the few commercial records of Indian music that were available. For one September 1947 show, he noted: Part of Program #309 – (June 17) Navaho “No Vacancy” Round dance – Brought by Scott Victor 91-B: Navaho Night Chant.24 Figure 2. View largeDownload slide The broadcast range of WNAD 640 AM, shown with the Native American nations of Oklahoma. Map based on maps of tribal jurisdictions, and maps prepared for the sale of the WNAD station in 1970, e.g.: “Analysis of WNAD Operations,” University Archives, WNAD Collection, Box 4, Folder 1. Map by Deborah Reade. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide The broadcast range of WNAD 640 AM, shown with the Native American nations of Oklahoma. Map based on maps of tribal jurisdictions, and maps prepared for the sale of the WNAD station in 1970, e.g.: “Analysis of WNAD Operations,” University Archives, WNAD Collection, Box 4, Folder 1. Map by Deborah Reade. Central to the show’s character was the way it ceded ownership of each live program to a group of listener-performers who determined the content. Whistler’s successor as host, Boyce Timmons, described this approach in a later oral history: “We made it feel like it was their program. If they’d ask us ‘What would you like for us to do?’ I’d say, ‘It’s your program…. It’s up to you what you want to do with it. You’ve got the time, and you just step in there and take it over.’”25 As a social institution, the show helped create a regional, intertribal acoustic community among its fifty to seventy-five thousand listeners, who were likely almost all Native. Gauging audience reception is always difficult, but it is clear the show’s fan base was loyal. As Timmons recalled: I went to Anadarko one time, and this was at its height, and I came on Tuesday…. I was looking for some Indian people in Anadarko, and they said, “If you want to find them, go down to somebody’s hardware store, and in the back room.” I went down there, and all my Indian friends that I was looking for were down there listening to WNAD, Indians for Indians program. And the agents there at Anadarko, the BIA agents told me that they seldom ever tried to do any business on Tuesday afternoons at one o’clock. Nobody would come or talk to them or anything, just listen to WNAD.26 Two short national articles about the show, in Variety and Time in May 1943, both noted the same loyal audience who listened together. “Every Tuesday,” reported Variety, “as the time for the broadcast approaches, the Indians throughout the area gather at stores, lunchrooms, gas stations, schools, etc., to hear the show. It is the only program permitted to be heard in the local Shawnee hospital.” At Indian schools, too, students gathered in classrooms to listen to Indians for Indians before resuming study after lunch on Tuesdays.27 Listening in such forums surely derived from cultural traditions of fellowship, but also from a scarcity of radios. The Indians for Indians Hour became a central hub with spokes running out to different tribal communities.28 An announcement from April 23, 1946—falling between announcements for a box supper at the Sac and Fox community house and upcoming summer powwows—shows how Whistler’s communication with his audience was dialogic and sometimes almost instantaneous: Now about an hour ago I had a telegram from an old pal, Frank D. Bushy, well known to this radio audience for the number of good programs he’s given on the Indians for Indians Hour. The telegram was sent from Kingfisher and says, “Please make announcement that we will come on April the 30th to give program on Indians for Indians Hour of Sun Dance Songs”—and good ones too—signed, “Sun Dance Group, Frank D. Bushy.” Well, thanks a lot, Frank, and we’ll all be looking forward to hearing your Sun Dance group next Tuesday.29 Whistler also announced that he was beginning a centralized calendar of Oklahoma powwows and other celebrations to “prevent having two or three big powwows one week and nothing the next.”30 Usually Whistler avoided politics, yet at crucial moments he used the show as a public discussion space or a megaphone to discuss Indian affairs. He was, however, careful when programs covered politics. “When you know something good about a person, you should tell it,” he once said; “but if it’s bad, well, you don’t tell it.”31 When representatives from the advocacy group the Intertribal Indian Council of Oklahoma came on the air in 1946, their remarks were non-confrontational, sometimes cryptic, and not forcing consensus or action. One representative, the Rev. White Parker, son of the Comanche chief Quanah Parker, noted that Native soldiers “have made one of the greatest contributions to winning the war because of our language,” alluding to Comanche and other Indian code talkers (another group of media pioneers).32 The National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944, found Whistler willing to sound an alarm about bills in the U.S. Congress that encroached on tribal sovereignty and historical claims against the United States. One week in April 1948, he began: “Before we start on this program, which is going to be a continuous affair without me buttin’ in anyplace, I’ll make one little announcement here. It seems that someone is always introducing bills in Congress asking for things for Indians without ever taking the trouble to ask the Indians whether they want it or not….”33 Access to media infrastructure was a powerful tool to organize Indians to tell Congress what they did want. Whistler’s style of politics combined Indigenous exhortatory traditions such as repetition of crucial details with literacy and modern technology as he urged listeners to send telegrams or postcards to congressional representatives to, for instance, protect the Indian Claims Commission.34 Overall, Indians for Indians used calendars and conversations with listeners to assemble an interactive radio newsletter predating the era of the widespread call-in show. Who was represented on the program? On the 113 extant programs from the first decade, members of fourteen Oklahoma tribes appeared as tribally specific groups, according to a tally made by the American Folklife Center. They are listed here in order of frequency (number of shows): Kiowa (35), Cheyenne (18), Comanche (16), Creek/Seminole (8), Pawnee (8), Arapaho (6), Sac and Fox (5), Apache (3), Caddo (3), Otoe (3), Iowa (1), Shawnee (1), and Wichita (1). The tally also lists Indian schools (11) and “Intertribal” programs (23)—college groups, church groups, and so on.35 Under these “intertribal” headings are subsumed individual guests from many additional tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, Ponca, Potawatomi, Kaw, Tonkawa, Kickapoo, Osage, Delaware, Wyandotte, and even Sioux, Pueblo, and Navajo students from other states.36 Those numbers did not include the broadcast of commercial or non-commercial recordings such as the Navajo records mentioned above or those featuring music of various other western tribes.37 The predominance of western Oklahoma tribes like the Kiowa, Comanche, Pawnee, and Cheyenne-Arapaho on live shows reflected not only the broadcast radius but also the geography of the powwow and “celebration” circuit on which Whistler informally recruited guests and on which he became a kind of celebrity.38 A tribe-based tally, however, is only partly useful for understanding the show. Such a tally not only homogenizes intertribal shows; it also lumps together, say, a group from Red Stone Indian Baptist Mission Church singing Kiowa choral hymns with the Kiowa chapter of the Indian War Mothers singing Round Dance Songs and Raid Songs.39 Sometimes citizens of one tribe played songs from others, reflecting the variety of musical traditions in Native Oklahoma as well as cross-cultural interaction and sharing. Some listeners wished to hear Stomp Dance music (generally associated with tribes with historical homelands in southeastern North America) in addition to powwow music (stemming from Plains traditions like the Omaha Grass Dance). But as Whistler put it once when suggesting that a group of Kiowa and Sac and Fox singers perform a Stomp Dance, “Remember now, all these folks in the east half of the state like to hear a Stomp Dance, but they won’t come over and make a record for me, so I’m kind of up against it. I’ve got to ask folks in this part of the state.”40 On some shows, particularly by school or church groups, so-called authentic Indian music might precede a live piano and vocal rendition of “Far Off I Hear a Lover’s Flute,” an Indianist ballad by Charles Wakefield Cadman.41 Given all these blurred categories, a tabulation of Indians for Indians by tribe or musical style would misrepresent the character of the program. Whistler’s any-and-all-comers curatorial aesthetic made a virtue of necessity. Even seventy-five thousand listener-performers were barely enough to supply a weekly show, owing to a varying but real scarcity of money and paved roads, and owing to family, work, and ceremonial obligations among listeners. Whistler regularly served visiting performers “an Indian meal, sometimes from a big iron kettle,” at his home after the show, Timmons recalled. Whistler’s programming log suggests that he initially had trouble finding performers for every week of the year. In addition to replaying archived shows, he asked some friends such as Spencer Asah (Kiowa), Chief Albert Attocknie (Comanche), and groups from Pawnee Indian School to come back again and again. The supply of performers did not outstrip the number of slots. The trip to Norman was an undertaking for many, especially when gasoline was rationed during the war. During powwow season the calendar filled with event hosts promoting dances, but in winter Whistler was often solo.42 Some of Whistler’s statements suggest that, had more “real Indian” performers been available, he might have reduced the number of English-language church choirs. Once, in response to a listener request that he replay a show that featured violin and piano songs, Whistler explained he seldom played it since it was “not strictly speaking real Indian.”43 When representatives of the Ponca Indian Church of the Nazarene sang a series of hymns in both Ponca and English, with both Indian- and European-sounding melodies, Whistler concluded the show by singling out for praise “those songs that are Indian words and Indian music.”44 Whistler was Catholic, and like many Native Christians of various denominations, integrated his faith with other cultural practices. For the radio show, though, he seemed to prefer older music; of Christian music, he favored examples from the rich Indigenous hymn traditions over songs from the universal hymnals.45 The weeks without guests suggest he didn’t have the luxury to impose his preferences on the live show, but the sometimes sparse schedule afforded him the inverse luxury to say yes to virtually everybody. He both adapted and refused the now-established social role of the American radio personality, the figure who entered listeners’ homes and won their loyalty. Whistler’s easy, jocular manner on the air revealed the influence of mainstream radio personalities, but he broke fundamentally from this role inasmuch as it sought to produce an audience of passive consumers.46 In Native terms, Whistler hosted an ongoing giveaway celebration, offering airtime from his modest half-hour-per-week allotment and multiplying its social value by bringing the audience into the studio. It is instructive to compare Indians for Indians and its role in Native Oklahoma with parallel examples on airwaves around the United States. For some time, various ethnic populations across the country had secured blocks of time on local stations to present programs ranging from Yiddish melodramas and variety shows to early-morning Spanish shows like Las Madrugadores. These programs shared some of the freewheeling, community-centered character of Indians for Indians: a mix of languages, performance styles, and ambivalence about inclusion in the broader nation.47 Perhaps the most revealing comparison is with Jack L. Cooper’s radio enterprise in Chicago, beginning with the similarly titled All-Negro Hour, a true hour that aired from 1929 to 1935 and was succeeded by a multiplicity of other “black-appeal” radio programming. “We’d take anybody we could find and put them on the air,” Cooper later recalled, including a substantial number of church programs—calling to mind Whistler’s format. Another significant parallel was Cooper’s innovation of using a community radio station to repair social ties severed by migration and relocation. In 1938, just three years before the Indians for Indians Hour was founded, Cooper began the show Search for Missing Persons, which was said over the next several years to reunite twenty thousand people separated through the Great Migration. Cooper’s programming, like other community-rooted programs, resembled Indians for Indians in bringing together a varied population whose histories had pulled them into a shared umbrella identity (“Negro” or “Indian”) and a shared broadcast range. A crucial difference, besides the obvious regional and ethnic differences, was that Cooper’s was, like most American radio, a commercial enterprise. It was founded on the belated recognition of African Americans as a consumer base for advertisers, which gave sponsors a voice in shaping radio content.48 The same was true for most non-English programs. By contrast, to this day many Native radio stations and programs are noncommercial—Comanche sponsorship of today’s Indians for Indians precludes other advertising—and commercial “Native-appeal” radio has rarely emerged, whether due to dispersed Indigenous communities, lack of consumer power, or other factors. The advertising of powwows on Indians for Indians was almost an inverse of commercial advertising on other ethnic radio shows, frequently operating in a gift economy where the host gave away large quantities of meat and other food to guests at great personal expense. Perhaps the most important conversation on WNAD was between old and young. Whistler made this central to his project. Consider two of the first shows, both from April 1941. First, Whistler invited as his principal guest Yellow Fish, whom he later described as “a full-blood Comanche, eighty-two years old, who told us the Indian side of the story of the Battle of Adobe Walls, which occurred in June of 1874.” Whistler called this the inaugural show and invited Yellow Fish’s son-in-law, Chief Attocknie, back each April for the anniversary program.49 A week or two later, Whistler hosted the Indian Club from Pawnee Indian School, about one hundred miles northeast of Norman in Pawnee, whose members performed Eagle Dances, War Dances, Forty-Nine Songs, and other genres. This club, too, would return at least annually.50 This pairing epitomized a key part of Whistler’s vision—to share old songs and the Indian side of the story with students whose school curricula were only barely beginning to do so, and to allow those students to perform for their elders. Despite important reforms, the Indian boarding school system, the military draft, war industries, and other forces of a powerful colonial culture continued to rend connections between generations. Indians for Indians helped repair them. Occasionally singers brought children to the studios—babies and children can occasionally be heard in the background. On other shows, older performers sounded explicitly didactic. In 1950, Willie Wilds (Sac and Fox) introduced songs with short historical lessons linking the World Wars to earlier warrior traditions, as if directly for young listeners: In our modern times, these songs are now have different meanings. Yet the signification was same as of our forefathers…. Each tribe had a song which was known as a Wounded Song. When the warriors went into combat, surely there were warriors who were wounded. They were the only ones that had the privilege of dancing in this song. But in our modern times, this song is now known to us as the Purple Heart Song.51 On the sixth anniversary show, Attocknie dedicated a song to “my brother’s boy, Paulie Attocknie at Pawnee.” A minute and a half into the song, as the drum still played, he interjected, “Paulie, if you are listening, dance! That’s your song…. Paulie, don’t be ashamed you are a Comanche Indian!”52 Whatever personal stories underlay such communications, they brought Native elders into all students’ lives at the schools that played the Indians for Indians Hour each Tuesday. The Indian schools within WNAD’s broadcast radius included Chilocco, Concho, Eufaula, Fort Sill, Riverside, St. Patrick’s Mission, and others.53 By 1948 Indians for Indians had become a regular enough institution to merit a metatextual moment when a group of girls from Concho recited a skit on air about their life in homemaking class. “I have just come from the laundry,” said one girl, “and the girls and boys over there are listening to the Indian program, and doing a beautiful job ironing the boys’ shirts this afternoon.”54 The show also offered young people the chance to innovate. For instance, Pawnee School boys repeatedly sang a popular “Forty-Nine” dance song (a genre derived from Kiowa War Journey Songs) with saucy lyrics in English: “Oh my sweetheart, she got mad at me because I said hello to my old-timer, but that’s just OK with me.” Forty-Niners were considered a sometimes-risqué genre for “crazy kids,” at which elders might look askance.55 Young singers might also add tempo to traditional styles. Whistler once described the Fast War Dance as an innovation on the “real War Dance… like a modern jitterbug” for those “young enough to keep up to it.”56 Young performers could also experiment with new gendered traditions, as when a Pawnee School group in 1947 included a separate girls’ singing group. Whistler told the audience, “Folks, this is an unusual sort of a program, because we have two groups of singers. The boys are seated around one drum and one microphone, and the girls are seated around another drum and another microphone. And they’re not going to sing together; they’re gonna sing separate. I don’t remember of having a program just like this before.”57 Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Chief Albert Attocknie (Comanche), center, and University of Oklahoma President George L. Cross, with unidentified students from Pawnee Indian School, at the fifth anniversary celebration of Indians for Indians, April 1, 1946. Published in The Oklahoma Daily, April 26, 1946, p. 1. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Chief Albert Attocknie (Comanche), center, and University of Oklahoma President George L. Cross, with unidentified students from Pawnee Indian School, at the fifth anniversary celebration of Indians for Indians, April 1, 1946. Published in The Oklahoma Daily, April 26, 1946, p. 1. Beyond connecting the generations in general, Indians for Indians connected displaced individuals as an audio message board. Amid community displacement, dedications and greetings helped people maintain connections to their communities. During World War II, on one of the Pawnee School’s visits to the show, the Indian Club’s adviser made this announcement: “I’d like to say a word. I’d like to tell the folks that Foster Hood, one of our former chiefs, is now out to San Diego, or out to California, somewheres out that direction, I don’t know how far. But he’s doing a wonderful job out there with the Navy.”58Time reported that listeners “generally get a brief resume of what Joe Yellow Horse, Chauncy Matlock, Sleeping Rain or some other Indian boy is doing in the Pacific or North Africa.”59 Other performers dedicated songs to their family members back home, to their towns, or to the local businesses that helped pay for their travel to Norman. In what ways was this show unique to Native Oklahoma? The state was an exceptional corner of Indian Country, in which many tribes sat side by side within the radius of a single station. This geography had already proved fertile ground for a powwow circuit to sprout, one less far-flung than its cousin on the northern Plains. After World War II, scholars began to notice what they called “pan-Indian” cultural practices—more accurately “regional intertribal” practices—and Oklahoma was a national hotbed of intertribal powwows, regalia styles, shops, and religious traditions.60 Kindred creations included the long-standing American Indian Exposition in Anadarko, the American Indian Soundchiefs record label founded by Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) at the encouragement of Whistler, and the photographic oeuvre produced by Horace Poolaw (Kiowa).61 The number of Indian schools in WNAD’s radius was remarkable. Oklahoma was also home to a number of Indians with substantial wealth and political power, from one of its first U.S. Senators decades earlier, Robert L. Owen (Cherokee), to the oilman and art collector Thomas Gilcrease (Creek). Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone (Creek and Cherokee) had found international success as a singer, Te Ata (Chickasaw) in folklore, Will Rogers (Cherokee) in comedy, and Allan Houser (Apache) and the Kiowa Six (including frequent Indians for Indians guest Spencer Asah) in sculpture and painting. The University of Oklahoma’s support for the Indians for Indians Hour is difficult to assess. In one sense it appears the show was an anomalous filler show on WNAD alongside Fun with Philately or Furniture Yesterday and Today—and peripheral to the station’s mission. WNAD never mentioned the show in its descriptions of its public service filed with the Federal Communications Commission, highlighting instead programs like Legislative Report, the Economics Forum, and O.U. Roundtable (“one of the oldest programs on our station” featuring “both sides of an issue presented by scholarly men who have analyzed the issues in a thoroughly unemotional manner”). These shows fit the model of programming for democratic citizens that predominated on American radio, so-called town halls of the air. Although they welcomed “critical comment from the listening audience,” such programs aired mainly expert and official points of view.62 In another sense, though, the university was indeed supportive as Indians for Indians continued to air year after year. University president George L. Cross graciously accepted a war bonnet, an honorary Comanche chieftainship, and the name Chief Arrowpoint from Chief Attocknie at the fifth anniversary celebration. Cross declared, “I listen to it on every possible occasion. I believe, and there are many who agree with me, that it’s one of the finest and most original programs on the air today. I am proud that it goes onto the air from our own radio station, WNAD.”63 Others at the university had supported Native activities for years: The Swedish art professor Oscar B. Jacobson had mentored the Kiowa Six and promoted Indian art in general; the historian Edward Everett Dale had worked on Indian affairs projects; and the school hosted a small but growing Sequoyah Club for Native students. WNAD staff in the 1940s supported the show. One director, John Dunn, was a family friend of Whistler’s; another director, Virginia Hawk, hoped to secure support for the show from the Rockefeller Foundation and sent discs of two shows to the Library of Congress in 1944 (she may have sought the coverage in Time and Variety as well).64 While material support for Indians for Indians was limited to regular studio and engineer time—the station provided no direct financial support—few if any other institutions in the United States appear to have offered even that much. The University of Oklahoma Libraries is currently planning an exhibit on Indians for Indians, in recognition of the show’s history and the archive’s enduring value for scholars and community members. One of the necessary conditions for the show was Whistler himself. Born December 9, 1894, at the Sac and Fox Indian Agency in Oklahoma Territory, he was the son of a Sauk father and a mother who identified as White, though she may have had Ojibwe or Potawatomi ancestry. Whistler was educated at agency and mission schools, and then at the University of Oklahoma, where he did not finish his engineering degree. His mother’s sister, despite an ambiguous Native heritage, had attended Haskell Indian School in Kansas and become a successful Indian musician and storyteller who toured the East Coast and Europe in the 1910s as the “full blooded Ojibwa Indian maiden” Pe-ahm-esqueet before returning to Oklahoma. When Whistler was a young man, her eastern connections secured him a job as a curator and lecturer-performer at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia from 1924 to 1926. When he returned to Norman, he helped run the family business, the Teepee banquet hall located next to the university campus. Despite living seventy-five miles from the Sac and Fox tribal headquarters in Stroud, Whistler became involved with tribal politics and in 1938 became first principal chief elected under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act (OIWA), the extension of the “Indian New Deal” to Oklahoma. In adopting an OIWA government, the tribe changed from the governance of a business committee to a majority-rule council—a controversial transition at first, but one that has endured. Whistler served as chief throughout his tenure on Indians for Indians, until his death in 1951.65 He appeared to bring elements of his personal experience to the radio show. The genial, jocular persona and desire to teach students through experience likely drew on his lecture-performances at the Penn Museum. His diligent effort to build an archive, for which he favored “real Indian” music, adapted but fundamentally transformed the “salvage ethnography” practiced by the anthropologists at the museum. And his work on behalf of new forms of tribal and intertribal sovereignty underlay the social and political functions of the show. In some ways, Whistler’s background was typical of American Indian public intellectuals of his era. But the Indians for Indians Hour was an important departure from the work of the authors, ethnographic informants, filmmakers, and vaudeville performers who made up what Philip J. Deloria has called a “cohort” of unexpectedly modern Indians in preceding decades—including Whistler himself when he sang, danced, and lectured to Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in Philadelphia in the 1920s, endeavoring to “bring to the white race an understanding of the red,” as he told a journalist in 1924. Deloria has argued that, by around 1930, a “window of opportunity” closed for such figures to achieve a complicated inclusion in the broader culture of modern America.66 Whistler’s career offers an illustration of Deloria’s point and an example of what came next. Creating Indians for Indians, Whistler turned from the mainstream toward the intertribal studio, where he used modern technology to build a cultural as well as political sovereignty behind walls that muffled what we might call the colonial din of other representations of Indians in the media. Yet the studio was not a hermetic chamber. While the powwow circuit and other intertribal cultural events did not cater to non-Indians in the way Pe-ahm-esqueet or the young Whistler had back East, the mature Whistler moved nimbly between non-Indian and Indian realms in Oklahoma. He was a member of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and during the 1930s became a superintendent in Oklahoma’s Indian-Pioneer History Collection, a large oral history project funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).67 (His aunt Bee M. Barry—or Pe-ahm-esqueet—recorded Native music through the Federal Music Project beginning in 1936. Some recordings may even have been played on a short-lived WNAD folk-music show, Hunting with Bow and Fiddle.68) The name of the Whistler family enterprise, the Teepee, also suggested a playful engagement of outside expectations in a largely non-Indian town. In 1950, Whistler contracted Asah (for ninety dollars) to arrange a performance of Indian dance and singing at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association—the precursor to the Organization of American Historians—when it landed in Oklahoma City. Whistler, who emceed the performance, revealed himself as a broker with the non-Indian academic world when he wrote Asah wryly, “Alice and I are planning on attending the Banquet before the show, so I probably will only arrive just in time to change into feathers and moccasins.”69 Whistler’s effort to preserve recordings of Indians for Indians and to share music in real time over the air was influenced by a “salvage” practice with both Native and non-Native roots. Since at least 1890, ethnographers both Indigenous and non-Indigenous had been collecting Indian music and speech with phonographs. While this practice was often fueled by erroneous and racist illusions of a vanishing race, Indian performers participated in the project in great numbers, at least sometimes to salvage cultural artifacts for their own descendants in an era of intense colonial pressure. Whistler, veteran of the Penn Museum and WPA history projects, also intended to build an archive. In part he recorded shows to replay on solo weeks. But he also looked beyond his own needs. “I want to tell you folks listening in,” he announced at the end of a 1947 program, “that we put those [performances] on a record and put it away with our other good Indian music to be kept for a long, long time.”70 Whistler’s practice of numbering the shows (his memorial program would be #520) also reflects his record-keeping intention. This archive hewed to the Native side of the salvage tradition, preserving the show not as a vestige for a non-Indian posterity but as inspiration for vital cultures, whether a month or a century after being recorded. Recordings’ return to their home communities has emerged as one of the gifts of such technology.71 While the Indians for Indians archive has attracted relatively little attention from scholars, relatives and community members of performers on the show regularly request copies of historic shows.72 The show preserved its guests’ voices for a “long, long time” but also innovated by sharing them immediately over the airwaves. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Don Whistler (Sac and Fox), right, the founding host of Indians for Indians, with Albert Attocknie (Comanche). Published in the article “Radio Warpath,” Newsweek, April 20, 1942, p. 60. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Don Whistler (Sac and Fox), right, the founding host of Indians for Indians, with Albert Attocknie (Comanche). Published in the article “Radio Warpath,” Newsweek, April 20, 1942, p. 60. The Indians for Indians Hour also responded eloquently to mass media that often spoke of Native people but very rarely allowed their voices to interrupt the din in which Indians were enemies and outsiders—either savages or noble savages. Will Rogers had proved a powerful exception to this whenever he interjected an explicitly Indian perspective on his program in the 1920s and 1930s. But overall, network and local radio excluded or distorted Native voices. For instance, in July 1937, NBC broadcast an hour-long program from the eighth annual Southwestern All-Indian Powwow in Flagstaff, Arizona. Directed at both American and European audiences, and broadcast from 11:00 p.m. to midnight, it was a stark contrast to the tone of Indians for Indians. Though it represented tribal traditions as disparate as Kiowa, Navajo, Hopi, and Yaqui, the various Indian performers became a backdrop for the announcer’s incessant description of what he repeatedly characterized as “grotesque” dances and costumes. A listener might hear a more complicated scene: a cosmopolitan gathering of peoples who had survived the crucible of colonialism and were now sharing their voices with some seven thousand fellow Indigenous people from “twenty-odd tribes,” and with listeners across the continent and across the Atlantic Ocean. But the commentator hardly let ten seconds pass without a purple description like “an almost endless forest of tall braves… a brilliant and realistic reminder of the pages of the past.”73 In its brief appearance in national media, Indians for Indians too was subject to a Hiawatha treatment. Time described Whistler as a “rugged Sac and Fox Indian” and wrote that the show included “many a tall tale from an elder brave.” Variety reveled in the same supposed paradox implied in McLuhan’s “tribal drum” metaphor: the show was “unique in that it combines one of the oldest and most primitive means of communication, the tom-tom, with the newest and fastest, radio.”74 It is impossible to fully excavate the phenomenologies of actual Native listening in this era, but scholars have found evidence that by the 1940s many listeners had become savvy sound consumers, tuning in and out as they saw fit. Many Americans had learned “distracted listening” while others had become active and demanding consumers. It is likely that for Native Oklahoman listeners, Indians for Indians stood out from the din of portrayals like the NBC broadcast or Western genre programs.75 In any case, the presence of a frequency that carried Native voices, alongside all the other invisible cultural structures on the air, added dimension or interference to the sonic Indian that most other Americans heard on the radio. Intellectual and political histories of radio seldom engage with Indigenous thinkers and practitioners.76 But Indians for Indians—and other Native radio histories yet to be written—can offer important insights to conversations that have emerged across the show’s (and radio’s) long run. In 1930, the playwright Bertolt Brecht described a “utopian” reinvention of radio that might transform it from “distribution system” to “communication system”—“capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of making the listener not only hear but also speak, not of isolating him but of connecting him.”77 Walter Benjamin, Brecht’s comrade in cultural politics, defined the medium’s “critical error” as its tendency “to perpetuate the fundamental separation between performer and audience… Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity.”78 Benjamin’s own radio programs between 1927 and 1933 affirmed what one scholar called “the intrinsically progressive, antielitist potential of radio as a medium of communication, capable of establishing a new form of folk culture.”79 Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno made an extensive study of American radio, which did not result in a kindred optimism. In 1945, while Indians for Indians was quite vibrantly on the air, Adorno condemned the medium writ large for its “musical fetishism,” “increasing standardization,” and jazz. “[M]usic under present radio auspices serves to keep listeners from criticizing social realities,” he wrote; “in short, it has a soporific effect upon social consciousness.”80 Twenty years later, McLuhan was scarcely more positive. He regarded radio as an inherently “hot” medium, suited to demagogic figures like Adolf Hitler and Senator Joseph McCarthy. “For tribal peoples,” he wrote—referring to Germans as well as a stock non-Western “native”—“radio will continue to be a violent experience.” The violence of World War II arose because radio was “specially attuned to that primitive extension of our central nervous system, that aboriginal medium, the vernacular tongue.”81 Here “aboriginal” oral traditions, and new media that facilitated them, became dangerous backsliding in a cultural evolution. Yet American radio activists at the time—ranging from labor and civil rights organizations to anticommercial listeners—heard radio as a medium for possible social change. The Federal Communications Commission itself issued a bold document, the 1946 Blue Book, issuing guidelines for radio station relicensing. In part, the Blue Book laid out public-service goals for radio stations, including a “balanced interpretation of public needs,” “programs for significant minority tastes and interests,” “programs devoted to the needs and purposes of non-profit organizations,” and experimental and noncommercial programming.82 The Indians for Indians Hour and the media experiences of American Indians in the twentieth century can add to our understanding of radio at mid-century. The show itself, created collaboratively by Whistler and his diverse acoustic community of listener-participants, proved an exemplary model of local media democracy—“making the listener not only hear but also speak” (in Brecht’s words) and bringing “anyone before the microphone at any opportunity” (in Benjamin’s). Whistler once quipped, comparing Indians’ development of the Fast War Dance to the jitterbug: “Of course they was ahead of the white man as usual.”83 The colonial din Native people heard across the radio dial may have reinforced the fears of media theorists and activists who pushed against standardization and corporatism in radio. Still, Indians for Indians thrived long after the Blue Book’s defeat as a policy document. Following Whistler’s death, Timmons (Cherokee), a university administrator and adviser to the campus Sequoyah Club for Native students, hosted the show. It continued to innovate and evolve—playing tapes sent in by a penitentiary’s Indian club, founding an annual campus powwow, and creating an offshoot TV program. Decades later, in the 1970s, WNAD itself became a CBS affiliate and commercial pressures forced the show to Sunday mornings and eventually to other stations.84 But the show, despite these challenges, endured. Kevin Bruyneel has written of a political “third space of sovereignty” that Indigenous nations have built over two centuries along the borders of the United States political structure, both inside and outside the intruding colonial nation state, using resources such as federal law to negotiate independence from the federal state.85 The Indians for Indians Hour and similar institutions may have created a cultural third space, a distinctly Native realm developed using state university resources and primarily the English language to build an independent (in this case intertribal) musical, cultural, and political sphere. Embedded as dispersed, removed, colonized peoples within the United States—and participating at times quite willingly in that broader nation and its empire, whether as soldiers or shoppers—Indian people in the listening radius of WNAD could turn to 640 kilocycles and reinforce their tribal and intertribal identities and communities. By focusing on this show’s untold history, and noting its singular longevity (over seventy-five years and counting) and archive, I do not mean to exaggerate its importance relative to cultural and political practices off the air. Indians for Indians flourished in concert with countless other efforts in tribal nations, intertribal organizations, and the rest of its historical context. Yet modern media have played crucial roles in Native American cultural and political history, and tuning in historically to those signals helps us understand both Indigenous histories and media histories more fully. In 1970, the Indian movement leader and scholar Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) wrote of activists’ postwar efforts to revitalize Native philosophy, government, and religion: “In an age dominated by tribalizing communications media, their message makes a great deal of sense.” This conclusion transformed the menace of the “tribal drum”—by which “the old web of kinship began to resonate once more,” in McLuhan’s words—into opportunity. Deloria argued, for example, that oral media like radio could support open tribal councils in place of the tribal governments enacted during the New Deal. Deloria concluded, “it will become apparent that not only will Indians survive the electronic world of Marshall McLuhan, they will thrive in it.”86 Highlighting one history of thriving helps dismantle damaging expectations and also supports calls by present-day activists for media self-determination in Indigenous communities.87 Whistler expressed confidence in the continual return of the Indians for Indians Hour, and what it represented, with his enthusiastic sign-off each week. The Sauk words translated roughly I’ll be back again, as he said, “Until next week, this is Kesh-ke-kosh saying ‘neh nâhkachi hey!’”88 Footnotes 1 These words or very similar ones appeared on many shows. See, for example, Program #295, 11 March 1947, AFS26,090, Indians for Indians Collection, 1988/037, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter IFI-LOC). Almost all extant recordings of Indians for Indians are held at the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman (hereafter IFI-WHC). Copies of all Whistler-era shows are held in IFI-LOC, along with a very thorough finding aid. The American Folklife Center holds two additional shows, in the Virginia Hawk/Indians for Indians Hour Collection, AFS 7062–7063 (hereafter VH-IFI-LOC). All transcriptions of these recordings—and characterizations of non-verbal sonic qualities such as “tone”—are by the author. Don Whistler’s greeting translates from Sauk as “Hello, friend! It is I, Kesh-ke-kosh.” See Gordon Whittaker, A Concise Dictionary of the Sauk Language (Stroud, OK: The Sac & Fox National Public Library, 2005). 2 Program #352, 6 April 1948, AFS 26,123, IFI-LOC. 3 Program #353, 13 April 1948, AFS 26,124, IFI-LOC. 4 Program #399, 1 March 1949, AFS 26,139, IFI-LOC; Program #403, 29 March 1949, AFS 26,142, IFI-LOC. 5 Program #255, 4 June 1946, AFS 26,072, IFI-LOC. 6 While the name including “Hour” is unofficial and technically erroneous, Don Whistler almost always used it on air, so this article generally follows his lead. 7 Hereafter, this article will primarily use Whistler’s English name. 8 Program #351, 30 March 1948, AFS 26,122, IFI-LOC; Time magazine estimated 50,000 listeners in 1943. “Indians for Indians,” Time, 31 May 1943, 42. I will discuss this press coverage below. 9 David Whistler (Don Whistler’s son), interview by author, 3 June 2015. 10 I was a guest on Indians for Indians on 12 September 2015, broadcast remotely from the Comanche Nation’s visitor center in Lawton, Oklahoma. 11 Much research remains to be done for the period after 1951. The IFI-WHC has efforts underway to make recordings and documents from the 1950s through the 1970s more accessible and organized. Lina Ortega, WHC Head of Operations, personal communication, 27 August 2017. 12 Derek Vaillant argues that local stations and national networks “shared an unspoken agreement that a racialized white identity should continue to serve as the basis of American broadcasting” beginning in the 1920s. See Derek Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1920–1935,” American Quarterly 54 (March 2002): 30; Victor Pickard describes how, in the 1940s, corporate media interests overpowered advocates of a social democratic model of broadcasting. See Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13 See K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Jon S. Blackman, Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); and Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 14 Michael C. Keith, Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). On Rogers, see Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11–53 and Amy M. Ware, “Will Rogers’s Radio: Race and Technology in the Cherokee Nation,” American Indian Quarterly 33 (Winter 2009): 62–97. Ware describes Rogers as a media pioneer akin to Sequoyah. On Tecumseh, see John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 244–51. The number of tribally run stations comes from Native Public Media: https://www.nativepublicmedia.org/about. The United Nations, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 16.1, 13 September 2007, http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. 15 On mediascapes, see, for example, Clemencia Rodríguez, Fissures in the Mediascape: An International Study of Citizens’ Media (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2001); Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Radio archives are becoming more accessible, and other archives certainly await preservation and study. 16 Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Robert Warrior has also emphasized the importance of journalism as Indigenous writing directed toward an Indian rather than non-Indian audience. See Robert Warrior, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xvii. 17 Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 189; Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 21–50; Ari Y. Kelman, Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Mark Newman, Entrepreneurs of Profit and Pride: From Black-Appeal to Radio Soul (New York: Praeger, 1988); Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale: How WDIA-Memphis Became the Nation’s First All-Black Radio Station and Created the Sound that Changed America (New York: Pharos Books, 1992); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio, 1933–1958 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 120–58; Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987; repr.; 2002); and Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 18 These studies of media innovators include Deloria, Unexpected Places; Round, Removable Type; May, Big Tomorrow; Ware, “Will Rogers’s Radio”; and Troutman, Indian Blues. On portrayals of American Indians in the non-Indian media, see Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). 19 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991); acoustic community comes from scholar Barry Truax, quoted in Kelman, Station Identification, 14. 20 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 298. Many scholars have discussed the Benjamin-Adorno debates, but particularly useful with the broader American intellectual history of radio in the 1930s is Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 21 Program #103, part 2, 13 August 1947, AFS 26,104, IFI-LOC. 22 An overview of the full state is the Choctaw historian Muriel H. Wright’s A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951; repr.; 1986), for which Don Whistler contributed some Sac and Fox information. Numerous studies of particular regions and tribes add more depth. 23 Program #334, 2 December 1947, AFS 26,113, IFI-LOC. 24 Program #321, 2 September 1947, “Whistler IFI” log book, Box 8, WNAD Collection, Record Group 44/08, University Archives, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman (hereafter WNAD Collection). 25 Tape 2, 6 April 1986, Boyce Timmons Interview Collection, AFC 1986/046, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 26 Tape 1, 1 April 1986, Boyce Timmons Interview Collection, op. cit. 27 “Lone Indian-Language Program Going Into 4th Yr. On Oklahoma Station,” Variety, 19 May 1943, 28. See also “Indians for Indians,” Time. 28 On urban areas like Norman as Native hubs with spokes leading out to tribal homelands as a tool for cultural “re-memberment,” see Reyna K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 29 Program #249, 23 April 1946, AFS 26,069, IFI-LOC. 30 Ibid. 31 Program #300, 15 April 1947, AFS 26,094, IFI-LOC. 32 Program #255, op. cit. 33 Program #353, op. cit. 34 Program #354, 20 April 1948, AFS 26,125, IFI-LOC. 35 For 111 of these shows, see the document “Notes for Scope and Content Note regarding coverage in the collection,” Indians for Indians Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The two additional shows are in VH-IFI-LOC. 36 See, for example, Program #255, op.cit.; Program #246, 1 April 1946, AFS 26,068, IFI-LOC; Program #300, op. cit.; I have not heard any reference to performers from the following Oklahoma tribes: Alabama-Quassarte, Chickasaw, Delaware (who participated in later years), Miami, Modoc, Ottawa, Quapaw, Wyandotte, and Yuchi (it is possible Alabama-Quassarte or Yuchi performers participated and referred to themselves as Creek). 37 Whistler’s log book includes a list of commercial records from Taos, San Ildefonso, and Santa Ana Pueblos, as well as the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Pima, Papago (Tohono O’odham), and Mojave, all in the Southwest, and Blackfeet from the Northern Plains/Rocky Mountains. “Whistler–IFI” log book, WNAD Collection. 38 Clyde Ellis, A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003) and David Whistler interview, op. cit. 39 Program #390, 28 December 1948, AFS 26,138, IFI-LOC and Program #401, 15 March 1949, AFS 26,140, IFI-LOC. 40 Program #171, 17 October 1944, Tape 1, IFI-WHC. 41 Program #111, 10 August 1943, AFS 7062, VH-IFI-LOC. Interestingly, the Cadman song is not listed in the log made of the show. 42 Tape 1, 1 April 1986, Boyce Timmons Interview Collection; “Whistler IFI” log book, WNAD Collection; “Inventory of Performers,” IFI-LOC. 43 Program #281, AFS 26,082, 3 December 1946, IFI-LOC. 44 Program #334, AFS 26,113, 2 December 1947, IFI-LOC. 45 On Kiowa hymns, see Luke Eric Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 46 Michele Hilmes discusses the rise of the radio personality in the 1920s and 1930s “bringing nationalized celebrities into the private sphere,” through a male figure who fostered “the idea of this new mass audience as feminized and easily led” into purchases in Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 58–9 and 141–4. 47 Kelman, Station Identification, 128–73; Casillas, Sounds of Belonging, 41; Las Madrugadores translates roughly as “The Early Risers.” 48 Newman, Entrepreneurs, 65, 68 and, on advertising, 69–75; See also Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 239. 49 Neither of these 1941 shows survives on a record. Quote from Program #352, op. cit. Also see “Whistler IFI” logbook, WNAD Collection. 50 I am presuming the types of songs from later Pawnee School appearances on the show; Program #129, 14 December 1943, AFS 7063, VH-IFI-LOC; and Program #353, op. cit. On Program #353, Whistler mentions that the Indian Club appeared on the second show. 51 Program #454, 28 March 1950, AFS 26,158, IFI-LOC. 52 Program #298, 1 April 1947, AFS 26,092, IFI-LOC. 53 “Fourth Annual Report of the Supervisor of Indian Education for Oklahoma,” 16 August 1935, Historic Oklahoma Collection, Series 30, Native American General, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, OK; School listenership is mentioned in “Lone Indian-Language Program,” Variety. Pawnee School principal L. E. Larsen mentioned that students there listened every week on Program #353, op. cit. 54 Program #354, op. cit. 55 Program #129, op. cit.; Program #300, op. cit. The phrase “crazy kids” comes from William R. Kennan and L. Brooks Hill, “Kiowa Forty-Nine Singing: A Communication Perspective,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 4, no. 2 (1980): 157. 56 Program #110, 3 August 1943, Tape 1, IFI-WHC. 57 Program #300, op. cit. This innovation perhaps paralleled the rise of young women fancy dancers (a conventionally male dance) in the powwow circuit from about 1938 to 1948. See Ellis, A Dancing People, 152–3. 58 Program #129, op. cit. 59 “Indians for Indians,” Time. Today’s technology allows military members serving even overseas to listen to Indians for Indians and connect instantaneously via social media or even online telephone calls. 60 See James H. Howard, “Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma,” The Scientific Monthly 81 (November 1955): 215–20. 61 E. R. Gaede Jr., “An Ethnohistory of the American Indian Exposition at Anadarko, Oklahoma: 1932–2003” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2009); on Pauahty, “The Chants Are Safe,” Daily Oklahoman, 7 October 1951; Nancy Marie Mithlo, ed., For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 62 Fun with Philately and Furniture Yesterday and Today are both listed on the program schedule alongside Indians for Indians in 1941, “WNAD Schedule: Monday, December 1, through Saturday, 6 December 1941,” WNAD Broadcast Application, Accession 58-A-4, Box 220, Broadcast Station License Files, 1934–1983, Mass Media Bureau, Federal Communications Commission, Record Group 173, National Archives and Records Administration–College Park (hereafter BSL Files); The public interest information comes from “Exhibit 4: Statement Regarding Giving of Time to Discussion of Public Issues,” 1953 WNAD Broadcast Application, Accession 62-A-55, Box 165, BSL Files; and “Exhibit 5: Statement of Policy,” 1949 WNAD Broadcast Application, Accession 58-A-4, Box 220, BSL Files. On radio town halls, see Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Lenthall, Radio’s America, Chs 3–4. 63 Program #246, op. cit. 64 “Lone Indian-Language Program,” Variety, VH-IFI-LOC. The Rockefeller Foundation’s archives do not have any record of a grant application for the show, despite the mention in Variety and a memory by Whistler’s son David that his father received a grant from the foundation. Rockefeller Archive Center, personal communication, 7 October 2014. 65 Whistler’s biography is assembled from various documents in the Jerry Whistler Snow Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman plus letters between Whistler and George Byron Gordon, Office of the Director, Alphabetical Correspondence, 1910–1928, Folder 1, Collection, 0001.03, University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives; “Pe-ahm-e-squeet” advertisement, undated, Connecticut Images Collection, Connecticut Digital Archive, Connecticut Historical Society, http://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/40002:20799; Jerry Whistler Snow, “Sac and Fox Tribal Government from 1885 through Reorganization under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act in 1937,” (master’s thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1970); David Whistler interview, op. cit.; and Blackman, Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal, 135–6. 66 Deloria, Unexpected Places, 229–40 and 284n5; Whistler quote from D. G., “Indian to Help School Children to Know Indians,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 December 1924. 67 See, for example, Bulletin No. 1, Office of Don Whistler, Superintendent, undated, E. E. Dale Collection, Box 208, Folder 2, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman (hereafter Dale Collection). 68 Peter Gough, Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 184–5. 69 E. E. Dale to Don Whistler, Letter, 14 April 1950, Box 72, Folder 14, Dale Collection; E.E. Dale to Don Whistler, Letter, 26 April 1950, Box 72, Folder 14, Dale Collection; and Don Whistler to Spencer Asah, Letter, 16 April 1950, Box 72, Folder 14, Dale Collection. 70 Program #334, op. cit. On salvage anthropology, see Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); and Hochman, Savage Preservation. 71 “Whistler–IFI” log book, WNAD Collection; Brady, A Spiral Way, 118–25; and Hochman, Savage Preservation, 177–88. 72 Tape 1, 1 April 1986, Boyce Timmons Interview Collection, op. cit.; Lina Ortega, personal communication, 27 August 2017. 73 “Flagstaff All-Indian Pow-wow,” 3 July 1937, RWA 2238 1–4, NBC Radio Collection, Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 74 “Indians for Indians,” Time and “Lone Indian-Language Program,” Variety. 75 David Goodman, “Distracted Listening: On Not Making Sound Choices in the 1930s,” in Sound in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 15–46 and Newman, Radio Active. 76 Exceptions include: Clemencia Rodríguez and Jeanine El Gazi, “The Poetics of Indigenous Radio in Colombia,” Media, Culture & Society 29, no. 3 (2007): 449–68; Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, “Indigenous Interference: Mapuche Use of Radio in Times of Acoustic Colonialism,” Latin American Research Review 48 (2013): 50–68; and Kristina M. Jacobsen, The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 77 Bertolt Brecht, “Radio As a Means of Communication: A Talk on the Function of Radio,” original 1930, trans. Stuart Hood, Screen 20 (December 1979): 25. 78 Walter Benjamin, “Reflections on Radio” in Radio Benjamin, ed. Lecia Rosenthal (New York: Verso, 2014), 363. 79 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 35. 80 Theodor W. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Kenyon Review 7 (Spring 1945): 212. 81 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 300 and 306. 82 Quoted in Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy, 67; on labor and civil rights activists and radio, see Ibid., 33–5. 83 Program #110, op. cit. 84 Boyce Timmons Interview Collection, op. cit.; Robert D. Thompson to Boyce Timmons, Letter, 8 February 1973, Folder: American Indian Institute/WNAD 1973, Box 8, American Indian Institute/WNAD: Indians for Indians–Correspondence, 1972–1973, WNAD Collection. 85 Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-Colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 86 Vine Deloria Jr. “This Country Was a Lot Better Off When the Indians Were Running It,” New York Times Magazine, 8 March 1970, 54 and 56; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 297. 87 See, for example, Tristan Ahtone, “Tribal radio stations may go dark under Donald Trump,” Al Jazeera, 14 February 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/02/tribal-radio-stations-dark-donald-trump-170212093921927.html. 88 This appears on virtually every recorded show Whistler hosted. See Whittaker, A Concise Dictionary. Thanks also to Lina Ortega for advice on rendering and translating this sign-off. © The Author(s) 2018. 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TI - The Intertribal Drum of Radio: The Indians for Indians Hour and Native American Media, 1941–1951
JF - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/why051
DA - 2018-05-19
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-intertribal-drum-of-radio-the-indians-for-indians-hour-and-native-Ply2erisVz
SP - 1
EP - 273
VL - Advance Article
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
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