Page 40 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

him. He was far away, wheeling and dealing his way through life. For a while

he used the name of Zintkala Nuni as a calling card in his truck with the
Indians; it was a profitable tactic.

When you make a stained-glass window, you begin by outlining shapes and
agonies of colour. And then you cut out the pieces of glass and you apply the
blues, the reds, the yellows, and you bake it all. Once it’s cooled, you stick a
little bit of blue glass—a blueberry blue—to a bit of red; and that creates the
outline of a hill, Hollywood, cinema’s colonial outpost. This was where the
young Indian woman settled later on, in return for a few dollars. In those days,

cameramen loaded their cameras as fast as they could, films were churned out
like hot dogs, actors were yelled at to take up their damn positions, and when
the emulsion was exposed to the light while the cameraman furiously cranked
the handle, a latent image of cowboys and Indians with horses and
stagecoaches took shape—a bit like the way in spring, before their flowers
burst open, buds give magnolias a hint of colour. But audiences had had

enough of Westerns filmed in New Jersey with phoney cowboys and fake
Indians, and they wanted the little square of celluloid to be coated for real
with dust, and its eighteen by twenty-four millimetres to be tattooed for real
by sun from the West.
The young woman performed in a few films. But if genuine Indians were
required, it wasn’t for the leading roles. So, within a few months of arriving,
she found herself destitute. It was then that, by some strange fate, she was

recruited for the opening parade of the Wild West Show. Equipped with a
feather boa and flashy jewellery, she probably had to dance and show her legs.
She knew none of the details of her own history.
Eventually, after chasing bit parts for a few years, and finding that life,
apparently, had nothing to offer her, she abandoned herself to various sordid

misadventures, and, in order to pay the rent on her room and buy herself the
sandwiches she lived on, she resorted to prostitution. And then, the Spanish
flu, which was rife at the time and picked on weaker creatures, carried her off.
There’s a photograph of her taken shortly before she died. She’s posing as
an Indian in the San Francisco Panama–Pacific International Exhibition. And
it’s strange, but in this photograph, although she’s Indian, she looks as though
she’s wearing a disguise. And if Zintkala Nuni looks travestied in this

wretched commercial image, it’s not only because the sad, worn look in her
eye screams through her costume and the circus setting that we will all die