About the Author

Bunny McBride, a writer with an M.A. in anthropology from Columbia University, is an adjunct lecturer at Kansas State University and the author or coauthor of numerous articles and books.

Reviews

Born on the Penobscot reservation in northern Maine, Molly Spotted Elk (1903-1976) was the oldest of eight children. Because her family was poor, she worked as a domestic helper from the age of 11 until her talent for dancing and singing earned her a place in an Indian performing troupe. Drawing on Molly's diaries (numerous excerpts are printed here) and interviews with family members, McBride, a freelance writer who specializes in cultural survival, provides an engrossing account of Molly's adventurous life. Although she was a successful vaudeville dancer and appeared in the silent film The Silent Enemy (1930), the discrimination she suffered because she was Native American led her to pursue a dancing career in Paris, where she met Jean, a French journalist with whom she had a daughter and whom she eventually married. McBride documents Molly's escape from France during WWII and the suffering she endured after Jean's death. A moving life of a Native American. Photos. (Sept.)

From 1494 on, Native Americans have held a niche in show business while facing special trials. Here, journalist/ anthropologist McBride (Our Lives in Our Hands, Tilbury House, 1991) empathetically reconstructs the life of famed "Indian entertainer" Molly Spotted Elk, using the rare first-hand source of the dancer's own diaries. "Being appreciated on stage did not translate into being appreciated as a friend," writes McBride of the predicament facing Spotted Elk, an independent, ambitious artist whose life was filled with success, illness, and tragedy. Her biography reveals a woman who entered vaudeville at age 14, appeared on Colliers's cover (April 1927), and was a Texas Guinan dancer and docudrama star of The Silent Enemy (1929). (The discussion of this filming is a highlight.) She found her greatest happiness in Paris in the 1930s through acceptance of the authentic Native dances she preferred over vaudeville and in life with her journalist lover, a period that ended in 1940 with a harrowing forced exit from German-occupied France. An intriguing work on a subject that has received little attention; recommended for both lay readers and specialists.‘Margaret W. Norton, J. Sterling Morton H.S., Berwyn, Ill.