An ephemeral booklet eulogising the vaudeville circus performer Princess Chinquilla (c.1863?-1938), also known as Mary C. Newell. A self identified member of the Southern Cheyenne Nation, Chinquilla had claimed to have been separated from her parents at birth, and though raised by a white family, sent to the Carlisle Indian School at twelve years old. At other times she mentioned being of Iroquois and Mohawk heritage. The veracity of Chinquilla’s Native identity was called into question, notably by Yankon Dakota co-founder of the National Council of Native American Indians Gertrude Bonnin, and it remains unclear whether she was a white woman “playing Indian”, or an Indigenous woman playing into racial tropes and expectations on the vaudeville stage.
This rare booklet is authored by Abram Bliss Newell, the full name of Major A. Edward Newell, self professed cowboy-juggler and “world traveler, musician and pistol shot” (Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, ME, Nov 27, 1909), who toured as a double act with Chinquilla, and in 1915 became her husband. They lived together in Queens NY, and housed an Indian Museum in their garden. This booklet was the final of several published by the couple at their home museum. Chinquilla died of injured incurred in a car crash in Montana, discussed in this eulogy.
As well as her stage acts, Chinquilla taught Indian crafts and customs in a white private school on Long Island, and many other schools across Manhattan. She gave lectures on Indian basketry, weaving and pottery at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as to clubs, societies and on the Chautauqua circuit. She toured extensively across the US, but also internationally including through Japan and the Pacific.
Often described in terms of her refinement and proximity to whiteness, Chinquilla’s career was characterised by a kind of exceptionalism that is borne out in her eulogy:
“She is gone! That strange transcendent personality which has flashed across the continent in every State in the Union, a score of times; and in spite of the fact that she was born of Indian parents in Indian Territory, She has always been to biologists a veritable Enigma. From whence did come that charming cultured voice, that never was cultivated; from whence; came her powerful dramatic ability?”
There is a strange undercurrent of eugenicist thought running through the text of the booklet, with Chinquilla’s charms characterised as an exception or “THROWBACK from a civilization which inhabited the continent of North America, a thousand years before the Indian.” This, plus her association with Rev. Red Fox James, another public figure whose indigineity was under question, only adds to the suspicions surrounding Chinquilla as a spokesperson for American Indian concerns.
Contemporary historian Christine Bold, has done much to research Chinquilla’s layered identity and performance career.
OCLC finds one copy only at Cornell.
Carpenter, C. “Detecting Indianness: Gertrude Bonnin’s Investigation of Native American Identity” in Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Colonization/Decolonization, II. Spring, 2005. pp.139-159.
