Joshua Bellin's Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824–1932 offers an exemplary model of how to synthesize the diverse fields of performance studies, American history, and literary analysis. The result is an eminently readable and insightful exploration of how representations of Native American (or Indian) sacred performance permeated Euro-American culture, and how Euro-American interpretations of those rituals subsequently shaped the development of Indian society in the United States. The study begins with the 1824 creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and ends in 1932 with the publication of what Bellin describes as “arguably the single most widely read and influential work of American Indian literature, Black Elk Speaks” (8).

In his introduction, Bellin parses the complicated terms embedded in his title. “Medicine bundle” represents the “complex, conflictual, cross-cultural acts” of the Indian performance of Indianness and the white performance of Indianness that came together in a process of “interaction and cocreation” (4). “Indian medicine” refers specifically to Indian sacred performance.

Bellin also distinguishes his use of “performance” from some applications which make it “synonymous with most if not all human activities” (16). Instead, he notes,

Bellin offers a compelling rationale for his choice, suggesting that Native American culture infuses the quotidian with the performance of the sacred in a way often inaccessible to Euro-American observers.

The rest of the book consists of three substantial and interconnected chapters. The first examines the strange career of George Catlin, who performed a distorted vision of “Indian medicine” that simultaneously erased and reinscribed sacred Indianness onto Euro-American identity (often Catlin's own). The second chapter explores how native peoples inscribed “Indian” performance onto themselves. The third traces the fusion of the utopic and the apocalyptic in the performance of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian culture.

For Bellin, George Catlin epitomizes the early Euro-American impulse to consume (literally and figuratively) Indian medicine as a “cure-all” for the ills of the young republic. It would have been particularly helpful to include samples of Catlin's visual work in this chapter. Bellin describes Catlin's paintings (and his obsession with recording images, even when holding his gun in one hand and his pencil and sketch pad in the other), but opportunities for the reader to see Catlin's images alongside Bellin's interpretations might have underscored how performative they actually were (35–36, 47, 53–54).

Bellin invokes Joseph Roach's concept of “genealogy of performance” and its “intricate unraveling of the putative seamlessness of origins” (11), and this theme recurs throughout each of his chapters – perhaps most strongly in the final one, in which Bellin imagines how Indian sacred performance “ghosted” Euro-American and Native American culture at the end of the frontier era. As Bellin notes in chapter 2, rituals such as the “Ghost Dance” had once offered “evidence of social upheavals within the Cherokee Nation” (117). By the time of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, practices such as the Ghost Dance “adhered to a core configuration from which outside influences were barred” (156). Yet Bellin challenges the reductive notion that the late nineteenth-century performances of Indianness “preserved” an authentic culture. Rather, he argues persuasively that “Indians … became themselves by playing a role … tribal tradition in Euro-American shows was transmitted through transformation, transformed through transmission” (162).

Bellin's thoughtful study invites scholars to rethink the ways in which they imagine the performance of “Indian medicine” (in all its permutations), and to reframe the role that both Indians and Euro-Americans played in those cross-cultural acts of creation.