How Did American English Become Distinctly American?

 

[In the longer version of the conversation transcribed below, News Hour correspondent Judy Woodruff observes, “Language is not something we all spend a lot of time talking about.  We kind of take it for granted—it’s just how we communicate, it’s what we engage in every day.” 

[Then she asks her two interview subjects, “How much is English, is our language part of our identity?”

[Responds Valerie Fridland of the University of Nevada, “Language is a repository of our culture, our identity, and of our knowledge.”  Anne Curzan, University of Michigan, adds, “Language is so powerful.  It is core to our identity . . . .” 

[Curzan continues, “It is also one of our most powerful tools as humans to hurt people and heal, and include and exclude.  It is a very, very powerful part of human society.”

[That’s what this podcast is about at bottom.  It’s why, aside from the fact that I’m fascinated with language (as even casual readers of Rick On Theater will know from the frequent appearances of language-related posts on this blog), that I’m posting the abbreviated version of this transcript.

[(I had contemplated posting the full version of the podcast, but this version, from the regular News Hour broadcast, is only about four minutes long, while the full podcast, a link to which is provided below, is 40 minutes and there’s no online transcript I can use.  I can recommend that anyone interested in this topic give it a listen.)

[As PBS transcripts are hybrid human/machine-made, and can include mistranscriptions occasionally, I’ve edited this one slightly.]

“HOW AMERICAN ENGLISH EVOLVED FROM ITS BRITISH ROOTS”
by Judy Woodruff 

[The segment transcribed below aired on the PBS News Hour of 6 August 2026.  It’s posted on the website for Channel 13 (WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City).]

How did American English become so distinctly American? On her “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast, Judy Woodruff sat down with linguists Anne Curzan and Valerie Fridland. They look at how Americans from the very beginning reshaped the English language by changing pronunciations and spellings, creating new words and evolving dialects.

[In Pursuit of Happiness with Judy Woodruff is a limited six-episode series of podcasts, aired in the summer of 2026 as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. Woodruff explores the stories behind the milestones of American history and looks at some of the culture, places, and ideas that have defined us.]

GEOFF BENNETT [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Finally, tonight: How did American English become so distinctly American?

AMNA NAWAZ [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Judy Woodruff explores that question and others in this week’s “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast with two linguists, Anne Curzan [b. ca. 1970] and Valerie Fridland [b. ca. 1969].

JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to ask the two of you to take us back to that period and even before, Anne, and remind us what was it about the English language at the time of the Declaration, and even before, that was – it was beginning to be different from British, or was it?

Was it all sounding British?

ANNE CURZAN, Linguist, University of Michigan: It’s such a great question.

And I think that, when we look at the language of 1776, it can look really familiar because we can read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and understand them.

And so sometimes I will hear, well, English really hasn’t changed since then.

And I say, oh, yes, it has.

And you can find all these things in the Declaration of Independence, for example, like a ‘hath’ instead of a ‘has.’

And that’s – there’s a reason when you study the history of English for that, or there’s a reason that the spelling actually still looks British in the Declaration of Independence, because we had not yet had this American reform of spelling, which we can talk about.

So I’m going to let Valerie talk a little bit about sort of the sounds of the language in terms of what was happening in the United States as English had been brought to North America and where – and it’s really important for people to remember how many languages were already being spoken in North America.

So you have hundreds of Native American languages, along with French and Dutch and Spanish, all of these languages being spoken in the U.S. as English arrives, and that’s really important for understanding what happens to English as different settlers from different parts of England and then Scotland and Ireland come to the United States.

So, with that, Valerie, I have set you up . . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes.

ANNE CURZAN: . . . to talk a little bit more about the sound.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It is astonishing to hear you say hundreds of Native American languages.

But fill this out for us, Valerie.

How were we sounding back then?

VALERIE FRIDLAND, Professor of Sociolinguistics, University of Nevada, Reno: I get asked a lot, what would we have sounded like at the time of the revolution?

[Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shaped by and used differently within any given social group.]

Would we have still sounded British?

That’s actually a question that people want to know a lot.

And there are – it’s – obviously, we didn’t have iPhones back then.

It would have been super helpful, but we did have people that wrote more like they spoke.

So we do have some misspellings, particularly in the colonial period, that give us hints as to how people sounded.

We also had, as Anne referenced, a period of spelling reform following the revolution [late 1780s-1828] that was both part of this simplified spelling movement, which was English doesn’t look like how it sounds, and can we make that less complicated?

Noah Webster [1758-1843; American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author] was part of that.

So was Benjamin Franklin [1706-90; a Founding Father of the United States; American polymath; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; first U.S. Postmaster General: 1775-76].

But, also, can we make American English different from British English in part by changing the way it is spelled?

So someone like Benjamin Franklin is very helpful for telling us how people sounded at that era because he actually made a phonetic alphabet . . .

VALERIE FRIDLAND: . . . to represent things as they were spoken and wrote that way, until he kind of gave it up, realizing that no one else was going to jump on his bandwagon.

But there were three main periods in how we sounded, and one would have been the very early colonial period, where it would have been very British for the British settlers, but also you had, as Anne referenced, a lot of other settlers.

But the basic answer is, yes, at the time of the revolution, it probably would have sounded more British than American to us.

There probably wasn’t that big of a difference between the way that a lot of Southern British people spoke in the way they did in, for example, Philadelphia or Boston at that time.

But it would have sounded very different from both modern British speech and modern American speech, because many of the vowels were in flux at the time, and some of the consonant differences that we have now, like the way we flap the T to make it more D-like in words like ‘water’ or ‘bottle,’ would not have yet happened.

So it would have been quite different from speech in either place today.

AMNA NAWAZ: And you can watch this full conversation and all episodes of “Pursuit of Happiness” on our YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.

*  *  *  *
“HOW POP CULTURE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
ARE CHANGING HOW PEOPLE TALK”

[The segment transcribed above, “How American English evolved from its British roots,” aired on Thursday, 6 August.  On the following Monday, the 10th, News Hour broadcast another small excerpt from the sixth podcast in Woodruff’s In Pursuit of Happiness series.  I decided to append it to my post, even though it’s little inside-baseball and likely to be of less interest to someone who’s not into languages or, more specifically, linguistics. 

[(It will probably surprise no one who’s read more than a couple of ROT posts that I took a course in linguistics in college.  Paid off in spades for me, too.  But that story’s irrelevant here, though I’ve told it on the blog before (see “Dodging Vietnam” in “Short Takes IV” [22 February 2013] or “Berlin Memoir, Part 1” [16 December 2016]).]

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, over the past few weeks, our Judy Woodruff has been speaking to a host of experts about the country’s 250th anniversary for her “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast.

That includes conversations about the role satire, national parks, and music have played in our history, as well as the latest episode looking at how American English has evolved.

As it turns out, there’s more than one way that the English language reveals a lot about the way we speak.

VALERIE FRIDLAND: I think a really accessible example of how these kind of intrinsic tendencies we have towards change is in the way that we pronounce ‘butter.’

So, if you’re a British – southern British English speaker, a standard Southern British English speaker, you will say something like but-ta.

(LAUGHTER)

VALERIE FRIDLAND: If you’re an American, you will say BUD-der.

And there’s a natural tendency in language when you have an unstressed syllable because it doesn’t get as much attention and love, for things to reduce, for sounds to reduce.

And so in British English, especially southern British English, you drop the R. But in American English, we kept the R. So we didn’t do that to reduce.

Instead, we reduced with the T. But they start to be imbued with social meaning, so that if you say but-ta, you’re standard southern British.

If you say BUD-der, you’re American.

And so you see a difference between social status in Britain, where it’s not geographic distance, but it’s social distance.

And then you see geographic distance that separated people, leading to the difference between the but-ta and the BUD-der pronunciation.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You know, I’m listening to the two of you.

I have so many, so many other questions, and I’m thinking about how much Americans move around now.

You may be born in the North, but you move to the South, and vice versa, born in the East, move to the West.

Of course, media, movies, television, radio, listening to other voices, what kinds of – how has all that, and especially the media, the presence of the media, begun to change, or has it changed, or is it changing how people talk?

ANNE CURZAN: There are the changes and things that people really notice.

So, new slang comes out and everybody wants to talk about ‘six, seven’ or ‘rizz’ or what – these sorts of things.

But one of the things that I study is the more subtle changes that are still happening that tend to go below the radar.

So they’re the sorts of vowel changes that I was talking about.

But, for example, I think some people have noticed that the word ‘shall’ is not healthy.

It is dying out of the language.

What many people have not noticed is that the word ‘must,’ in the sense of obligation, like ‘I must run errands’ – and you can you can hear I do it very seriously, ‘I must run errands.’

Because what I would tend to say is, ‘I have to run errands’ or ‘I need to run errands.’

JUDY WOODRUFF: Or ‘I need to run errands.’

ANNE CURZAN: So ‘have to’ and ‘need to’ are replacing ‘must’ in this sense of obligation.

These – if you hang out with young people, as Fridland does as well, that ‘on accident’ is coming into the language, and ‘by accident’ is moving out of the language.

Like, we’re getting a prepositional shift there.

GEOFF BENNETT: All six episodes of “In Pursuit of Happiness” are out now.

You can watch them on our PBS News YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.

Subway Newsstand Art Project

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”   

[I’ve posted several reports on art in the New York City subways; see, for instance, “Tom Otterness & Life Underground” (27 April 2011), “A Helluva Town, Part 2” (18 August 2011), and “Can Art Be A Crime?” (9 July 2025).

[The article below is a little different.  The art installation here is sanctioned, but dynamic—it changes regularly—it’s multifarious, and it’s housed in a disused newsstand on a train platform.  The rest you’ll read for yourself.  Oh, and it’s called the W4 Newsstand Project (because it’s at the West 4th Street station on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village for the Brooklyn-bound B, D, F and M trains).]

“A SUBWAY DIVERSION THAT AIMS TO DELIGHT”
by Winnie Hu 

[This article ran in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on 2 August 2026; it’s on the paper’s website as “A Newsstand That Aims to Delight N.Y.C. Subway Riders,” dated 28 July 2026.]

Whimsy and freebies at a vacant newsstand in a West Village station.

Trading cards that highlight fun facts about retired subway conductors and operators. Key chains with a fake rat’s foot for “good train luck.” A bucket hat with a sliding veil that riders can borrow to cry in private.

These specialty items for straphangers, which they may not have even realized they need, or want, will be available for free starting this weekend [1-2 August] at a former newsstand inside the West 4th Street station in Manhattan.

The transit-themed newsstand will have no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers — or console them on a bad day — and make their commutes just a little better in the nation’s largest subway system.

It is the latest creation of Al Mullen, 37, a comedian and writer known for his humorous and upbeat takes on the transit world. The newsstand “snowballed” from his free zine, Public Transport Magazine, which he started in 2022 from his Brooklyn apartment and leaves on trains and in stations for riders to discover.

“Everyone’s on the subway,” Mr. Mullen said while fixing up the newsstand on a recent afternoon. “It’s a place where I can meet all kinds of people and see if they’ll be delighted.”

Mr. Mullen partnered with Art on the Ave NYC, a nonprofit that displays art in vacant storefronts, and the David Prize, a philanthropic initiative of the Walentas Foundation [aka: the Walentas Family Foundation; a New York-based private grantmaking organization founded in 2013 that supports civic institutions, the arts, public spaces, and education], to secure a one-year license for the shuttered newsstand from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Then, Mr. Mullen enlisted the help of his friends and fellow transit enthusiasts to transform it into a place where busy New Yorkers would actually want to stop. Edward Steed, a cartoonist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, designed a whimsical mural of trains, buses and people to wrap around the newsstand. Comedians, writers and artists are creating travel guides to the city’s 472 subway stations, which will be handed out at the newsstand.

Mr. Mullen also plans to offer live entertainment, including puppet shows that will run between train arrivals and departures. He is installing a photo booth with a subway pole that commuters can grab to find out “their inner train line.” The picture will show a colored circle around them, which corresponds to a particular subway line and reveals their “train aura.”

Even in its unfinished state, the newsstand on the downtown platform for the B, D, F and M trains has buzzed with activity. Riders have come over to ask directions to their trains. A group of teenagers on scooters zipped behind the counter and made themselves at home, pretending to hawk Newport cigarettes.

The other day, five big round clocks were behind the counter, all displaying the same exact time. Below each clock was a yellow sticky note with the name of one of the city’s five boroughs scrawled in red.

Markus Kusano, 35, a software engineer, stopped to tell Mr. Mullen how much he liked the clocks.

“I thought it was funny,” Mr. Kusano said afterward. “It’s kind of a New York or nowhere kind of thing — that’s all the time you need.”

Mr. Mullen grew up in the coastal town of Scituate, Mass., and later studied film at Occidental College in [Los Angeles,] California. He arrived in New York City in 2011 and worked as a film and video editor. In his free time, he wrote and performed stand-up comedy.

But by 2019, Mr. Mullen was ready for a change. While reporting for jury duty one day, he looked around at all the different people in a Brooklyn courthouse and realized how small his own world was. “I wanted to reach out to people in some way,” he said. “I realized the closest thing to jury duty was the subway.”

So Mr. Mullen made the subway his stage. He created Public Transport Magazine on a home printer and distributed it with guerrilla-style drops on trains. It looked like a school project but was packed with a slew of talented comedians, writers, cartoonists and illustrators, including Jack Handey, an author and former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” and David Cross, an actor and comedian.

As it gained a following, he met Erika Augustine, the executive director of the David Prize, in 2024. He applied for the prize, which awards a total of $1 million annually to five New Yorkers who are working to make the city a better place. Though Mr. Mullen did not win, he made an impression.

“His love for the transit system, I think, is so uniquely New York,” Ms. Augustine said, adding that Mr. Mullen has inspired other straphangers to look past the usual gripes about train delays and rats.

Last year, Mr. Mullen reached out to Ms. Augustine with his idea for a transit-focused newsstand. She connected him with Barbara Anderson, the executive director of Art on the Ave NYC and a 2025 finalist for the David Prize.

Ms. Anderson’s group has organized art exhibits in 106 vacant retail spaces around the city since 2020. Last year, the group converted a newsstand in the West 81st Street station in Manhattan into a sound booth [named Sound Booth] where riders can drop by to sing, play the piano, D.J. and catch live performances.

On a Saturday in June, Mr. Mullen held up the keys to the newsstand for the first time outside the West 4th Street station. “It feels like I’m holding the smallest trophy,” he said, before heading down the stairs to see what he had gotten himself into.

A few minutes later, he unlocked the newsstand to find Us Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazines from 2016 still sitting on the shelves and an unplugged Coca-Cola refrigerator in a corner. There was graffiti on several display cases and a thick coating of grime over everything.

“I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here, a lot of dirt and no rats that I can see,” he said.

Mr. Mullen returned with cleaning supplies and friends to scrub the newsstand. They found a quarter and placed it on the counter. A man ran up, grabbed the quarter and jumped onto a train. “It was a heist,” Mr. Mullen said. “He hopped on a getaway train.”

The former newsstand was licensed rent-free through an M.T.A. program [Vacant Unit Activation Program] started in 2023 to activate former retail spaces in the subway with public art exhibits. Currently, there are 17 sites, including the newsstand-turned-sound-booth and another former retail unit that became a bodega for dinosaurs [Rex’s Dino Store] at the Grand Army Plaza station in Brooklyn.

Mr. Mullen received $10,000 in initial funding from the David Prize to develop and open his newsstand. He spent $4,200 on the mural, which included getting it made on vinyl. He plans to pay $100 each to other contributing artists and writers, including those creating the station guides.

Mr. Mullen, who works as a writer for a game show app, has not paid himself. He said he saw the newsstand as a space where he could collaborate with more people. “The New York thing is being in company with people, being in community,” he said. “And this is definitely an extension.”

Mr. Mullen and his friends will take turns staffing the newsstand from Friday to Sunday [Gothamist says 1-4 p.m., Saturday and Sunday]. He hopes to raise more money to keep the newsstand running for the next year.

Lily Crandall, 28, a textile artist, volunteered to make the trading cards of subway workers and even has a personal connection — her great-grandfather was a construction worker on the 8th Avenue line. “I love all of his ideas,” she said of Mr. Mullen. “They’re really fun to be a part of.”

The other day, Harris Alterman, 34, and Dave Ross, 43, both comedians, were taking measurements at the newsstand. In June, they had made a video of themselves putting up fake (and temporary) tech ads in Brooklyn subway stations to spoof the real ads that they said were annoying and ugly [see We put up fake tech ads and We put more fake tech ads].

After their video went viral, Mr. Ross posted on social media asking if anyone had access to a space in the subway. Mr. Mullen replied, “Weirdly I do.” Now, the newsstand will host a one-day installation of their fake tech ads on August 8.

“I love how much art and music is in the city — and how much isn’t in the zeitgeist but the city supports it anyway,” Mr. Ross said. “There’s a little scene for everything if you can find it.”

[You know from above that Al Mullen is originally from Scituate, Massachusetts, which is in the northwest corner of Plymouth County on Massachusetts Bay.  (Plymouth County is northwest of Barnstable County, which is Cape Cod.)  He went to college in Los Angeles and came to New York in 2011, when he was about 22.  Here, Mullen works as a freelance film and video editor and writes and performs stand-up comedy.

[Brooklyn-based, Mullen is heavily engaged in New York’s alternative comedy and live performance scenes.  He’s best known for his work with the sketch and performance group Channel 101 NY.

[His work explores the absurdities of daily life and corporate structures.  His satirical prose has been featured across prominent humor platforms, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency (a Patreon page), The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post.

[Beyond his solo writing, Mullen focuses heavily on collaborative and live performance formats.  With Max and Al, he performs alongside comedian Max Brand as half of this live musical-comedy duo.  Mullen manages the New York chapter of Channel 101, a monthly non-profit short film festival where creators submit short, episodic video pilots to be voted on by a live audience.  

[His comedic work and digital projects have earned him industry opportunities with the largest and most prestigious stand-up comedy festival in the world, Just For Laughs (Montreal, Canada), and the once wildly popular live, interactive game show app HQ Trivia.

[Winnie Hu is a New York Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.  She writes about demographics, immigration, public spaces, and socioeconomic trends that shape the urban landscape and help explain how people live, work, and move around the city. 

[She’s lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades and has written stories about nearly every aspect of urban life, including transportation, crowding, education, and city and state politics.  Hu joined the Times in 1999, having previously worked as a reporter for the Pensacola News Journal in Pensacola, Florida, and briefly for the Dallas Morning News.]

The Reviews of 'Dreams of Violets'

 

When I posted “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première” on Sunday, 7 June 2026, I promised to return and add a survey of the film’s reviews published after the opening at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 10th.  I got distracted, but now I've typed up the review round-up.  It came out longer than I anticipated, so I decided to post it as a separate piece.

[I strongly suggest, however, that readers who haven’t seen the first report on the film go back and read it before trying to make sense of the reviews.  I explained and defined a lot in the original post that I haven’t duplicated below.]

The Tech

In his review of Dreams of Violets in Variety (“‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? AshKoosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still aStartling Portent of the Future”), Owen Gleiberman stated:

[T]hose of us at the premiere were really watching—and evaluating—two films at once.  The first is a drama, set in Tehran . . . .  But the other movie, which is far more interesting and significant, is the one that demonstrates, simply by virtue of its existence, what some of the possibilities might be for the use of AI within the world of feature filmmaking.

I also see the criticism of Dreams of Violets as the evaluation of two aspects of the film: the AI technology in all its implications, including its ethical considerations, and the cinematic or artistic assessment—how good a movie it is, irrespective of how it was made.

I think I covered the ethical debate over AI filmmaking in the original post, and I don’t think seeing the movie has changed people’s minds about where they stand in that debate.  So, let’s see what reviewers said about the effectiveness or lack thereof of the technology.

In “Iran’s Political Violence In A.I.-Generated Film” (online: “The Violence in Iran Was Real. The Film Showing It Was A.I.”), Malia Mendez and Matt Stevens reported in the New York Times that among viewers, “Some felt it was evident that the footage had been generated by A.I. and not filmed, while others said they were shocked by how real the people looked.”

“Andres Ramirez, a filmmaker [Mexican; b. 1996; independent filmmaker],” from whom they quoted, “was critical, calling some scenes ‘cartoonish’ and akin to ‘early PlayStation 2 graphics.’  The characters’ emotional reactions, he added, did not always look genuine.”

The filmmaker added “that atrocities depicted by A.I. just do not have the same impact as ‘the real thing,’ and continued, ‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

In the Financial Times (“AI-generated film about Iran protests turns tragedy into slop”), Nicolas Rapold expressed the opinion that “the movie . . . arrives with the growing pains of AI evident in every aspect—less proof of concept than cautionary tale.”

Observes Rapold, “technically [the movie is] a mess.  The AI-generated humans have vacant eyes, the usual bland burnish and push-button emotional expressions.  They move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.  In an astonishing unforced error, their dialogue sounds muddy, even garbled . . . .”  He adds, “AI’s tendency to homogenise [sic] reality keeps undermining any attempts to make the portrayal of resistance feel grounded.”

In conclusion, Rapold asserts, “Dreams of Violets is better described as a vibe—a prolonged evocation of concussed trauma—rather than a fully realised [sic] movie.  AI cinema still awaits its Lumière brothers.”

[The most significant accomplishment of the Lumière brothers (Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948), French manufacturers of photography equipment, was the invention of the Cinématographe (1895), an all-in-one device capable of capturing, printing, and projecting motion pictures.  This breakthrough paved the way for the birth of cinema as a mass medium and entertainment industry.]

Gleiberman, in his Variety notice, first asks “an aesthetic question: Is ‘Dreams of Violets’ a weirdly distant and unsatisfying movie because it was made with AI?  The strange answer to that is yes, but not really.”  (I’ll get to his “aesthetic” answer in a bit.)

If you see a soldier killing a civilian in a documentary, it’s horrifying, but the effect is 100 times less powerful in a film that simply looks like a documentary, since we know, in our gut, that we’re not watching reality.  That’s why the quality that draws us into a movie, even if it is a documentary, is the connection we feel to the people we’re watching.  But Ash Koosha hasn’t scripted “Dreams of Violets” that way.  He has made a movie with an uncanny-valley problem, an “existential” drama that’s all “authentic” but abstract moments: the vérité political-war-movie equivalent of calendar art.  It’s like synthetic prize-winning photojournalism that moves.

[I was unfamiliar with the expression “uncanny valley” (or “uncanny valley effect”) so, for others in the same boat, according to Wiktionary, it means:

Digital or ambiguous physical spaces that create a sense of unease or eeriness due to deviations from familiar patterns that challenge perception and categorization, leading to discomfort. (e.g., liminal spaces, haunted houses, the Backrooms, etc.).

[The phrase is a literal translation of a Japanese expression first used in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori (1927-2025) from his essay entitled “Bukimi No Tani” (“The Uncanny Valley”).  The terms both come up often in reviews of Dreams of Violets.]

“But if ‘Dreams of Violets,’ as a movie, is mostly a bust,” concludes Gleibman, “as an AI showreel it’s something more.”  He elucidates:

[W]hat I saw in “Dreams of Violence” looked plenty textured and realistic.  Does this mean that AI can “make a movie”?  No.  But it does mean that AI can give you scenes of roiling tumultuous Civil War set in the hurly-burly of Tehran at sunset, with soldiers roaming the streets and forcing citizens into vans as others scurry out of the way, and it can make you believe your eyes.  

Then, his clincher:

And here’s the buried lead: The film’s entire budget was $2,000. . . .  [T]he most powerful message to emerge from “Dreams of Violets” isn’t that the Iranian regime is a ruthless pack of totalitarian oppressors.  It’s that $2,000 can now buy a hell of a lot of motion picture.

In “‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: An AI-Generated Movie Is Worrisome for All the Right Reasons” on The Wrap, Matthew Creith observes, “Memories blur together, and faces appear and quickly vanish like vignettes without a motive.  Whether intentional or not, the dreamlike nature of AI-generated moving imagery often mirrors emotional reality rather than depicting actual emotions through acting or historical reenactments.” 

The Wrap reviewer continues:

The limitations of current technology are impossible to ignore on the artificial intelligence front.  Characters frequently move with an unnatural stiffness while [Ash] Koosha lingers on close-ups of eyelashes and tears to signify the detail that AI is supposed to be good at creating.  Facial expressions often feel generic rather than lived-in, and frequent quick cuts are distracting at best.  The dialogue, much of it generated from Koosha’s own vocal performances and modified through common AI tools, can sound muddy and disconnected from the images on screen.

When a film like this, despite its short runtime, is asking viewers to engage with real human suffering, that emotional disconnect can be difficult to overcome.

Describing what I understand as the “uncanny valley effect,” Creith reports:

The faces in “Dreams of Violets” often feel ghostly, almost suspended between existence and disappearance.  The streets of Tehran seem simultaneously real and imagined, sort of like Spike Jonze’s [b. 1969] “Her” [Warner Bros., 2013] without the authenticity of its central characters.  Rather than recreating reality with documentary precision, the film exists in a liminal space between memory and testimony.

In The Indypendent [sic] (“The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movie Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical”), a progressive newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York, that covers local, national and international news; food; cinema; and culture, John Teufel complained that

at no point does the film allow you to forget that it was made with AI—which makes sense, as we will see (cash-grab!).  Everything is exaggerated past reality in an attempt to show off how “good” the AI is, but it overshoots, and becomes hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense.   When a character has wrinkles, they have the most wrinkles.  More wrinkles than any man you’ve ever seen.  When a woman looks concerned, she looks comically concerned, because someone typed MAKE HER LOOK VERY CONCERNED as the prompt.

[Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies.  He’s best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication.  His concept of hyperreality is complex and hard to explain in a few words, so I suggest readers who want to unpack this comment look it up for themselves and try to sort it out.  The simple definition is that Baudrillardian hyperreality is a condition in which what is real and what is fiction blend together so seamlessly that we can no longer tell the difference.  In this state, simulations, images, and media models replace the original reality, becoming “more real than real.”

[As for “cash-grab,” Teufel reports later in his column, “[Ash] Koosha has a long history of trying to make money from AI, which undercuts any claims that the tech was forced on him to represent the horrors inflicted on his people.”  He lists some of Koosha’s tech holdings to suggest that the film’s creator is promoting his commercial enterprises to sell his services.]

The AI also chooses the same type of shots, again and again . . . .  Most scenes, particularly ones with a lot of people on screen at once, have a weird blur effect around the edges, so the viewer can’t make out details.  Nothing about the film feels like deliberate artistic choices—all of it feels like “what could the computer do.”

The Indypendent review-writer notes that the movie “is filled with glitches and what we would call “bugs” if it was a video game.  A man has nothing on his face, wipes it off his face, and has nothing on his hand.  A man is pushed against a wall face-first and suddenly turns face-out.  Someone is shot—there is no bullet wound.”  And so on. 

The Art

The Times didn’t have much to say about the movie as a movie, but filmmaker Ramirez, while offering the opinion that “‘Dreams of Violets’ would be the most-talked-about movie of the festival,” mused, “‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

FT’s Rapold found “The film’s very loose train of events returns to a few largely perfunctory characters—a doctor, a young pianist, a boy in a wheelchair watching from a window—while cycling through street scenes of security forces attacking protesters.”  He added that the characters “move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.

“There’s also no substitute for good writing,” he admonished: “the wheelchair-bound boy and his caretaker brother are cornily sketched out, as is the pianist who declares: ‘I don’t have anything but music.’”

“Koosha . . . appears to weave in actual audio recorded by protesters,” reports Rapold, which a “more documentary-oriented version of the movie might have emphasised [sic] . . ., so it’s maddening to hear sometimes barely audible snippets playing in the background of scenes.” 

Rapold observed that “scenes are shoddily realized [sic]: a tone-deaf replay of the wheelchair-bound child’s parents dying in a car that flies off a cliff; a street scene involving a falling loaf of bread that wobbles in slow-motion.”

In his assessment of Dreams of Violets in Variety, Gleiberman said of the “first” movie, the “drama set in Tehran,” “I didn’t find that movie to be particularly effective.  In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying.”

I gave the Variety reviewer’s technical response to his “aesthetic question above, but here’s the artistic response:

It’s actually the form of the movie that’s odd and off-putting: a barely scripted series of anecdotes, or mere moments, with little in the way of dramatic development. . . .  But though the characters in “Dreams of Violets” look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn urban streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn urban streets, we’re barely given a context for what we’re seeing . . . .

“Koosha doesn’t create fully realized scenes,” writes Gleibman.

“Dreams of Violets” is not a days-of-rage tale of inspiration.  It’s set after the protests have already been contained (the country’s police are doing a clean-up operation), and what it offers, mostly, is raw snapshots of state-sanctioned murder and political oppression.  Yes, we “get to know” half a dozen characters—a boy in a wheelchair, his physician older brother, a reminiscing old woman, a music student, and several others.

The justification Koosha gives for making Dreams of Violets with AI is that it couldn’t have been made any other way.  Says Gleibman:

[B]ut effective art needs no justification.  If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could say that Ash Koosha is exploiting the tragedy of his homeland to have the best possible excuse to craft an AI showreel.

This is Gleibman’s version of the “cash-grab” scenario, and makes the same point that The Indypendent’s Teufel made about Koosha’s AI businesses.

On The Wrap, Creith observes, “Rather than following a traditional narrative, the film drifts between interconnected stories . . . .” 

The result often feels less like a conventional feature and more like fragments of memory stitched together.  Scenes emerge and fade as characters cross paths, without necessarily creating a clear narrative throughline.  At times, the experience is meant to feel like watching a documentary, though it evokes emotions akin to flipping through a collection of postcards from a traumatic moment in history.

. . . .

The strongest moments arrive when Koosha focuses less on spectacle and more on human experience, though these are few and far between and obviously not actually human.

The Wrap review-writer concludes:

As an experimental and timely film, “Dreams of Violets” is uneven, frequently frustrating, and undeniably flawed.  As a snapshot of where both filmmaking and AI technology currently stand, it may ultimately prove more significant than the movie itself.  What cannot be denied is that it leaves an impression, whether good or bad, and the movie deserves the conversation that will undoubtedly surround it.

At the very least, “Dreams of Violets” remains one of the most unusual and thought-provoking films playing at Tribeca this year.

At the start of his review, The Indypendent’s Teufel gives his mindset away: “Before I attended the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Dreams of Violets . . . I had one serious fear: what if it was good?”  His fears don’t materialize: “As it turns out, Dreams of Violets is awful, and if this is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art.”

“I am just here to inform you this is, possibly, the worst film of all time,” he confirms.  (Do you suppose it’s relevant that Teufel is German for ‘devil’?  Naah!)

The reviewer expands a little on his pronouncements:

If you are going to see Dreams of Violets—which you should not—I urge you to read up on these events [the January 2026 protests in Tehran] before you watch, because nothing is explained, including the demonstrators’ motivations, which adds to the film’s torture-porn vibes.  Essentially, you are going to watch a bunch of strangers get killed, with some brief, emotionally manipulative backstories for some of those strangers.  There is even a sad handicapped child sadly wheeling his way through scenes (although, weirdly, his legs appear to work fine at one point).  If this was well-made, it may have been upsetting.  As it stands, it is mostly just eyeroll-inducing.

“The film entirely lacks narrative logic,” complains Teufel, “making it impossible to follow, much less become engaged by.  After just the first few scenes it becomes little more than a series of images.”  Adds the reviewer, “And the images themselves are astoundingly ugly, far worse than even uncanny valley-fests like The Polar Express [Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004].”

[Some critics panned The Polar Express’s character animation for dipping into the uncanny valley, because it seemed to falter in mimicking realistic facial expressions and emotions.]

“It is typical at film festival screenings for movies to get applause,” Teufel concluded. “When the lights came up on Dreams of Violets, nobody clapped.  The vibe was funereal.”

[It seems to me, from reading these and other reviews, that the artistic weaknesses in Dreams of Violets are the fault of the fact that Ash Koosha isn’t either a screenwriter or a filmmaker.  He’s essentially an amateur and he worked alone, without even an editor to advise him. 

[So, when it came to making choices about how to frame a scene or write a piece of dialogue, he had nowhere to go except his untrained eye and ear.  No wonder he made bad choices.

[On the other plane, however, where his expertise lay, he had to contend with the inherent weaknesses of the medium.  But that’s just temporary.  Variety points out that

the baby is going to grow up.  And what will it look like when it does?  “Dreams of Violets” offers indications of at least a few of the places that AI, as its symbiosis with the industry grows and gathers force (which it surely will), might go.

[Some day, and probably soon, given the speed at which time passes in the cyber world, AI will be able to compensate for all the problems the reviewers above all spotlighted.  That may or may not be a goof thing for the industry, but it’s gonna happen sure as God made little green apples.

[In the hands of an actual filmmaker with a real screenplay, Dreams of Violets will become just a far-off—in computer terms—memory, like black-and-white TV or color TV with the colors that bled.]

Zitkála-Šá

 

[On 21 July 2026, I posted “250 Years of Theater History,” which was an article from the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled “We the (Theatre) People” by Charlotte M. Canning.  Late in the semiquincentennial survey, Canning introduces Zitkála-Šá, a Native American theater artist and activist.  Canning’s mention is brief, but I found her biography fascinating and compelling, so I first added a rather long note about her and now, I’m going to write up what I can find on her life and work. 

[I’ve published several posts on Native American theater, including two series, “Staging Our Native Nation” (six parts with eight articles: 24, 27, and 30 March, and 2, 5, and 8 April 2018) and “Superheroes on Native Land” (three parts and two supplements: 21, 24, 27, and 30 January, and 2 February 2024). There are more, if you search the archive.

[One of particular note relative to this entry is “Go-Won-Go Mohawk (1859-1924)” (23, 26. and 30 December 2024), a post similar to “Zitkála-Šá” in that it’s also about the life and work of a little-known American Indian theater artist—an actress and playwright in this case.]

Zitkála-Šá (pron.: zit-KAH-lah-shah; 1876-1938), a Yankton Dakota Sioux whose name in Lakota means ‘Red Bird,’ was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in the Dakota Territory in what’s now Charles Mix County in southeast South Dakota.  She was also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a name she was given at the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. 

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was her married name; her husband, Raymond Talephause Bonnin, was also a Yankton Sioux.  We’ll see that she condemned the cultural erasure she suffered at the hands of the missionaries and teachers at the school and rejected her English name.  So I’ll call her by her Yankton name, Zitkála-Šá, as she did herself.

Though she suffered anti-Indian prejudice, discrimination, and attempts to erase her native culture, Zitkála-Šá became a musician, music teacher, composer, writer, librettist, editor, translator, and educator.  She was also a lobbyist for indigenous peoples’ right to United States citizenship and other civil rights, and one of this country’s most influential political activists for Native Americans.

Zitkála-Šá was born on 22 February 1876, ironically, George Washington’s birthday and a federal holiday from 1879 until 1970, and the year (on 25-26 June) that the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations defeated the U.S. Army under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer (1839-76; brevetted brigadier and major general [1963-66] during the American Civil War [1861-65]) at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Her mother, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ (tha-TAY ee-YOH-hee-wing; 1828-1914), ‘Reaches for the Wind’ (aka: Ellen Simmons), was of Dakota Sioux heritage and her father, William Felker (1830-?), was a transient white trader of European (likely German) descent.  Felker, who wasn’t legally married to Zitkála-Šá’s mother—they had what was characterized as a common-law marriage—abandoned the family when his daughter was very young, and she was raised by her Dakota mother and aunts on the reservation in her native language.

Because Zitkála-Šá’s father left, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ did not use the surname Felker for her daughter when she was growing up.  Her mother later took the surname of her previous husband, a man named John Haysting Simmons (d. 1874).  

When Zitkála-Šá was taken to a Quaker missionary boarding school at age eight, the administrators forced her to register under her anglicized name Gertrude Simmons. Later in life, she cast off this identity and named herself Zitkála-Šá.

(Just for the record, Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ was first married to François St. Pierre [dates unknown]. He was a French-Canadian or Métis [member of a Canadian mixed-heritage ethnic group] fur trader.  Zitkála-Šá had three older half-brothers: Henry St. Pierre [1848-1925], Peter St. Pierre [1851-1930], and David S. Simmons [1866-1946]. 

(That last is “Dawee,” whom Zitkála-Šá writes about fondly in her memoirs, American Indian Stories [Hayworth Publishing House (Washington, D.C.), 1921]; also in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” [Atlantic Monthly, Volume 85 (February 1900)].  Dawee, ten years Zitkála-Šá’s senior, was at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute with his sister.)

[nb: The layers of Zitkála-Šá’s family history feature conflicting documentation, in particular the marriages and relationships of Thaté Iyóhiwiŋ, including the correct names, marital status, life dates, and ultimate fates of the fathers of her children.  I have tried to keep to academic consensus and genealogical studies to follow the correct lines and omit errors and perpetuated misreadings.]

In 1884, when Zitkála-Šá was 8-years-old, Quaker missionaries came to the reservation to recruit children for their boarding school, the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana (775 miles east of the reservation), established in 1861 through the bequest of Josiah White (1781-1850; Pennsylvania industrialist and philanthropist).  The “recruitment” was a Mephistophelean bargain hidden behind a snake-oil sales pitch. 

The Quaker “recruiters” articulated a highly targeted, deceptive, and manipulative sales pitch that promised children like Zitkála-Šá western knowledge, wonder, the thrilling prospect of riding on the “iron horse” (the train), “all the red apples she could eat,” and a glamorous life.

Just as in Damn Yankees, Applegate was selling Joe Hardy a life as “Shoeless Joe,” baseball star—with the devil lurking in the background ready to take his soul—Zitkála-Šá willingly, even eagerly, signed the contract, despite her mother’s disapproval, blinded by the immediate, glittering prize of a free education. 

Just as Joe Hardy didn’t initially grasp the horror of losing his soul to become a baseball star, 8-year-old Zitkála-Šá didn’t understand that the “land of red apples” was actually an engine of institutional erasure designed to “kill the Indian, save the (wo)man.”

[“Kill the Indian, save the man” was the motto of Richard Henry Pratt (1840-1924; U.S. Army officer: 1861-1903), founder (1879) and superintendent (1879-1904) of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania where Zitkála-Šá later taught.  The school closed in 1918.]

Zitkála-Šá begged her mother to let her go, and her mother, aware of the advantages that an education offered, reluctantly agreed.  The missionary school, however, wasn’t the adventure that the recruiters had seemed to promise.

At White’s Institute, she was registered under the missionary name Gertrude Simmons.  There she was forced to speak English, wear only Western dress, adopt the customs of her Quaker teachers, and to pray as a Quaker. 

At the school, the practice of indigenous cultural and religious traditions was banned.  While the missionary school taught her English literacy, Zitkála-Šá was beaten and punished for speaking her tribal language or practicing her Sioux culture.

Perhaps the most humiliating and traumatic indignity was the cutting, or “shingling,” of her hair.  In most Native American cultures, long hair is deeply sacred, serving as a physical extension of the soul, representing cultural identity and a connection to the Creator and ancestors. 

Shingling meant cutting the hair into a severely short, severely cropped “bob,” the result of which was the elimination of traditional signifiers like long braids, intricate parts, or tribal hair ornaments.  Indian children were instantly stripped of their unique tribal appearance. 

While shingling became a popular fashion trend for Western women in the 1920s, because the school staff or older students performed these haircuts rapidly and en masse, the results were often jagged, uneven, and unattractive, adding to the humiliation.

In “The School Days of an Indian Girl: The Cutting of My Long Hair” (Atlantic Monthly, Volume 85 [February 1900]; republished in American Indian Stories), Zitkála-Šá recounted:

I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly.  In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.  I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.  Then I lost my spirit.

She added: “Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy.”

Studious and talented, Zitkála-Šá excelled at her studies, winning prizes for essay-writing and oration.  Zitkála-Šá slowly adapted to her new environment, but the price of success was estrangement from her cultural roots. 

The off-reservation boarding schools like White’s Institute deliberately made it difficult and expensive for students to return to their homes for holidays and family visits or for parents to make the journey to the school to see their children.  The great distance between Wabash and the Yankton Reservation, as well as the cost of the train trip, meant that Zitkála-Šá was pretty much isolated from her mother and aunts, not to mention her tribe.

She later learned that the government paid the schools a bounty for every child successfully removed from reservations.  Zitkála-Šá realized that the schools were operated for cultural erasure.

Alongside the racism and ridicule she encountered, Zitkála-Šá felt a deep conflict between her native identity and the dominant white culture, the sorrow of being separated from her mother, and her joy in learning to read, write, and play the violin.  She later wrote that she quickly came to regret her decision to come to White’s Institute.

In 1887, she returned to the reservation.  She found that after her three years at the Institute, she no longer fit in her native home.  The forced assimilation was taking its toll.

So, after three years at home, Zitkála-Šá decided she wanted to continue her education and at age 15, returned to Wabash.  For the rest of her life, Zitkála-Šá lived in two worlds.

She studied piano and violin, and taught music from 1891 to 1895 when the Institute’s music teacher resigned.  She earned her first diploma and made a speech at graduation that advocated for women’s equality.  It was praised in local newspapers.  She had a gift for public speaking and music, and it was recognized.

Instead of returning home after graduation as her mother wished, Zitkála-Šá accepted a scholarship at Earlham College—a Quaker school like White’s Institute—in Richmond, Indiana, where she was one of the few indigenous students, and enrolled in a teacher-training program.  At Earlham, she began to collect stories of Native American tribes, which she translated into Latin and English.

In 1897, six weeks before she was to graduate, Zitkála-Šá had to leave Earlham for financial and health reasons.  Again, she chose not to return to the reservation but moved to Boston, where she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music to study and play violin. 

In 1899, she took a job as music teacher at Richard Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School.  She also hosted debates there on the issue of Native American treatment and assimilation, a fundamental principle of Pratt’s and his school’s that caused her great grief and pain from the loss of her heritage.  

Ironically, the school used Zitkála-Šá to impress the world and recruit students, and in 1900, it sent her back to the Yankton Reservation.  She was distressed to find her family home poverty-stricken and some of its land occupied by white settlers.  

Zitkála-Šá returned to Carlisle and began writing about Native American life in publications like Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly.  In 1901, she wrote a piece for Harper’s, “Soft-Hearted Sioux” (Volume 102 [1 Dec. 1900]), that described the profound loss of identity felt by a student at the Carlisle Indian School.  Pratt called it “trash,” and she was fired from Carlisle that year.

Zitkála-Šá wrote pieces that portrayed Lakota people as generous and loving, actively fighting stereotypes in the mainstream that were used in arguments supporting assimilation.  She went back to the reservation to look after her mother, who was in failing health, and continued to collect Sioux stories.

In 1901, she published Old Indian Legends (Ginn and Company [Boston]), a collection of 14 Sioux tales, some she learned as a child and others she gathered from different tribes.  It was directed principally at children in an attempt to preserve Native American traditions and stories, and to gain respect for Native cultures from Euro-Americans. 

At this time, Zitkála-Šá also took a job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, inhabited by Sioux peoples approximately 320 miles northwest of the Yankton Reservation.

Working at Standing Rock, she met Captain Raymond Bonnin (1880-1942), a mixed-race Yankton Dakota and former U.S. Army officer (1914-20) who followed Yankton culture; they married in 1902.  For the next 14 years (1902-1916), they were assigned to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the homeland of the Ute Indian Tribe in Vernal, Utah, where Bonnin served as the BIA school superintendent.

In 1910, while she was living and teaching on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá attended a local Ute performance of the Ute Sun Dance ritual.  There, she met William F. Hanson (1887-1969; composer and music teacher), later a professor of music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who specialized in Native American music.

[Hanson was in Vernal, near which he was born and raised, after completing a two-year program in music at BYU and his two-year stint as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  He was teaching at the Uintah Academy, a private LDS-operated school in Vernal, at the time that Zitkála-Šá taught music at the federal Uintah Boarding School located in Whiterocks, on the reservation.]

Hanson and Zitkála-Šá began discussing the cultural significance of the ceremony, which led the Native American musician to propose they co-write an opera to preserve the music and rituals.  Over the next three years, they collaborate on The Sun Dance Opera, the first opera co-written by a Native American.  She wrote the libretto and the songs, while Hanson wrote the score.  

Zitkála-Šá played melodies on the violin and flute, and Hanson wrote them out and orchestrated them to use as the basis of his composition.  The songs were based on the sacred ritual of the Sioux Sun Dance to explore Ute and Yankton Dakota cultures.  The Sun Dance was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978, so by folding the sacred ritual into a Western operatic structure, the librettist legally bypassed federal restrictions and preserved her culture.

[There were several Sun Dance rituals, including a Ute ceremony and a Sioux ceremony.  The Ute dance is derived from the Plains version, brought home by a Shoshone visitor, who passed it on to the Utes.  While there are distinct Sioux and Ute variations of the ritual, they share the same Great Plains root.

[In the Sioux tradition, on which the opera is based. the Sun Dance is the most sacred spiritual ceremony practiced among the Plains Indian nations.  It’s held during the summer solstice and serves to renew the community’s connection with the Earth, the spirit world, and the Creator. 

[Tribe members unite for prayer, healing, and cultural renewal.  A specially chosen cottonwood tree is erected at the center of a circular dance lodge to represent the connection between earth and sky.  Participants fast from food and water for several days while dancing continuously. 

[To demonstrate ultimate devotion, male dancers often endure flesh piercings on their chests or backs. They are attached to the sacred pole by leather thongs, dancing until the skin tears away as an offering for the well-being of the tribe.  (The Utes don’t practice this ritual.)  Dancers look directly at the sun to absorb its spiritual power, offering their personal sacrifice so that the earth, the buffalo, and the tribe will be spiritually renewed for the coming year.]

The storyline of The Sun Dance Opera takes place in the Pipestone Quarry near Yankton, South Dakota, in some unspecified, pre-colonial time.  The plot centers on the pursuit of Winona, a chief’s daughter, by two suitors: Ohiya and Sweet Singer.  (nb: Zitkála-Šá and Raymond Bonnin’s son was named Raymond Ohiya Bonnin [1903-39].)  The climax features the Sun Dance ritual.

In the prologue, Sweet Singer, a Shoshone man, violates his nation’s religious rules and travels to the land of the Sioux.  Sweet Singer is set up as the piece’s villain.  He commits blasphemy by stealing and misusing sacred medicine.  He steals “sacred love-leaves” belonging to a holy Medicine Man and uses them selfishly and “lightly.”  

By doing so, he unwittingly forces a Shoshone maiden to fall deeply in love with him.  This spiritual transgression brands him an immoral outcast, forcing him to flee his homeland and travel into Sioux territory, where he sets the main plot in motion by pursuing Winona.

The narrative proper starts off with the Sioux protagonist, Ohiya, pledging to win Winona’s affections.  To win her hand, Ohiya must prove his endurance and bravery in the grueling Sun Dance.  The opera culminates in this intense physical and spiritual ritual (the singers and actors feigned the body piercing), and the chief sanctions the union of Ohiya and Winona, as Ohiya has fulfilled his Sun Dance vow.

The Sun Dance Opera premiered for three nights in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, performed by members of the Ute Nation who lived on the reservation.  The performance received immense regional praise and community pride locally. 

The enthusiastic reviews, however, often carried a highly patronizing tone typical of the assimilation era.  The Vernal Express reviewer wrote very positively about the artistic spectacle but viewed the ritual through a lens of exoticism.  

The writer said that the indigenous performers “danced and forgot the present while they dreamed of battles, a trail of blood and a pile of scalps,” mirroring the government rhetoric that stereotyped Native traditions as inherently violent.

The LDS-owned Deseret News of Salt Lake City, the major state paper, framed the première as an “event of more than passing importance to the people of Utah.”  The review-writer focused heavily on the deep emotional impression the opera left on the audience and praised the “sympathy with which the native peoples are represented.”

The opera was performed several times at BYU, including twice in 1914 and once in 1935.  Then, on 27 April 1938 (three months after the librettist’s death), the opera débuted at the Broadway Theatre, where it was put on by the New York City Light Opera.  Reviews were universally bad and a planned second performance was cancelled.

At the New York production, the critical elite universally dismissed the work, entirely failing to understand its cultural or political significance.  New York papers expected the rigid, grand operatic structures of Europe.  Confronted with a hybrid of Western operetta melodramas and traditional Native melodies, critics panned it as a failure of authenticity on both sides.

They viewed the music as primitive or mismatched, failing to see the opera as a deliberate act of indigenous self-determination and political resistance.  Rather than viewing it as a historic piece of art, they treated it as an unpolished, outdated regional novelty.

In the New York Times, Howard Taubman (1907-96), a prominent music critic and reporter for the paper at the time (he eventually became the Times’ chief music reviewer [1955-60] and later its chief theater reviewer [1960-66] when Brooks Atkinson [1894-1984] retired), wrote:

The performance did not persuade a listener that Mr. Hanson had succeeded in welding his material and his knowledge into a cohesive work for the stage.  In transforming his studies into an opera, Mr. Hanson produced, although he evidently did not intend it, a score that is reminiscent of the European operettas of the nineteenth century and at times of a hokum treatment of the Indian.  The music is light and tuneful, but it could be applied with equal success to a story about Graustark [i.e., a highly implausible and melodramatic piece of writing].

Hanson received all public credit for the opera, with no mention of Zitkála-Šá, which was also true in 1935 at BYU.  She wasn’t involved in the production, nor in the revisions made to her libretto and Hanson’s composition which doubled the show’s length. He added a number of songs and rewrote those remaining from the original text.

After 1916, when she and her husband left the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Zitkála-Šá never returned to public music-making.

While on the reservation, Zitkála-Šá continued to write articles about her life and native legends for English readers. In addition to Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly, her essays also appeared in American Indian Magazine (published by the Society of American Indians, Washington, D.C., 1910-19), which she edited from 1918 to 1919.  

[The SAI American Indian Magazine should not be confused with the current American Indian, the quarterly magazine published since 2000 by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.]

She joined the Society of American Indians, a group founded in 1911 with the purpose of preserving traditional Native American culture while also lobbying for full American citizenship.  She became increasingly vocal in her criticism of the Bureau’s assimilationist policies and practice, reporting abuse of children when they, for example, refused to pray as Christians.  

[Prior to 1924, American Indians could only obtain citizenship through specific treaties, military service, or complex naturalization processes.  While the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (1868), which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law, excluded indigenous people, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 to grant full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S.

[Despite gaining U.S. citizenship, some states actively barred American Indians from voting for decades, a disenfranchisement that wasn't fully resolved until the 1960s.  New Mexico was the last state officially to grant Native Americans the right to vote in 1962. 

[(Full access to the ballot box was not guaranteed, however.  Many states continued to use indirect suppression tactics similar to Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise indigenous communities as they did for other minorities.  These pervasive barriers prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided federal oversight and outlawed discriminatory voting mechanisms nationwide.)]

While Zitkála-Šá’s pieces were often autobiographical, they were still political and social commentary that showed her increased frustration with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which fired the couple in 1916.

In 1916, the couple moved to Washington D.C., where Zitkála-Šá served as the secretary of the Society of the American Indian.  In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians, an organization that worked to improve the treatment and lives of Native Americans.  

At the same time, Zitkála-Šá also worked with white suffrage groups and was active in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) beginning in 1921.  She created the Indian Welfare Committee of GFWC in 1924.

That year, when the Indian Citizenship Act passed Congress, she ran a voter registration drive among Native Americans, encouraging those who could to engage in the democratic process and support legislation that would be good for Native Americans.

In 1923, Zitkála-Šá published a report entitled “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery” (Indian Rights Association).  This article was instrumental in getting the government to investigate the exploitation and defrauding of Native Americans by outsiders for access to oil-rich lands.

By 1928, she was an advisor to the Meriam Commission, which would lead to several improvements in how the Federal Government treated native peoples.

[The Meriam Commission, led by technical director Lewis Meriam (1883-1972), was a team of researchers who published a landmark 1928 report titled “The Problem of Indian Administration.”  Commissioned by the Institute for Government Research (later the Brookings Institution) and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, it investigated the devastating social and economic conditions of Native Americans.

[The Meriam Report documented widespread, extreme poverty, highlighting how assimilation policies stripped Native Americans of millions of acres of land.  Federal boarding schools were heavily criticized for providing substandard vocational training, severe overcrowding, malnourishment, and actively destroying indigenous cultures.

[The report identified dismal healthcare, resulting in high rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and trachoma.  The commission recommended moving away from harsh, forced assimilation, improving education, granting Native Americans more autonomy, and enhancing the protection of their property rights.

[The report caused a national outcry, ultimately laying the legislative groundwork for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which promoted tribal sovereignty and self-governance.]

Zitkála-Šá lectured across the country, promoting the preservation of Native American cultural and tribal identities while continuing to write.  Her books and essays became more political in such works as American Indian Stories (1921) and “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” published in 1923 by the Indian Rights Association. 

American Indian Stories was a mix of tales and legends, non-fiction essays about her culture, and other indigenous peoples’ customs and beliefs, but it also included several autobiographical articles and so, serves as her memoir.

Zitkála-Šá continued to work for improvements in education, health care, and legal recognition of Native Americans as well as the preservation of Native American culture.  She died at 61 on 26 January 1938.  She’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Viginia, with her husband, who died on 24 September 1942 at 62.

[Zitkála-Šá had only a brief encounter with theater.  Among her other talents—and she had many, as we’ve seen—she was a consummate professional musician on both the violin and piano.  She had a special gift for composition, and she was a devoted music conservationist.  But she had other drives in her life.  Marisa Mathias of the National Women’s History Museum characterized her thus:

Zitkála-Šá was one of the most important reformers of the 20th century.  She helped empower Indigenous people by writing about their culture, history, personal experience, and concerns.  Her writings forced the audience to face the complexities and beauty of Indigenous culture and the tragedy of the Native experience in America.  And her activism influenced change that advocated for citizenship rights, better educational opportunities, improved health care and cultural recognition and preservation for Native Americans.

[Many of Zitkála-Šá’s works are accessible online.  Here are a few links: Old Indian Legends (Standard Ebooks), Old Indian Legends (Project Gutenberg), Old Indian Legends (Electronic Text Center), American Indian Stories (University of Wisconsin – Madison), American Indian Stories (Standard Ebooks).]