Overlooked No More: Molly Nelson, Steward of Penobscot Culture

This article is a part of Overlooked, a collection of obituaries about exceptional folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In 1931, when the Penobscot dancer Molly Nelson arrived in Paris to carry out on the International Colonial Exposition, she was pleasantly shocked. To win audiences in North America, she had discovered, she needed to resort to Native American stereotypes, like sporting a floor-length feathered headdress — and never a lot else. But in Paris, she discovered an enthusiastic, unbiased reception for her conventional tribal dances.

After the expo ended and the opposite members of her group, the United States Indian Band, returned dwelling, she determined to remain.

“Maybe I am foolish, with no money, but hopes galore,” she wrote in her diary. “But I DO want to do something with my Indian dancing here in a serious artistic way. And I’m willing to take a great chance to accomplish it.”

Nelson, whose stage title on the peak of her profession was Molly Spotted Elk, was a Penobscot dancer from Maine who spent a lot of her younger grownup life performing each conventional and fashionable dances in vaudeville troupes, refrain strains, Wild West exhibits and nightclubs.

She was additionally a prolific author who, over 40 years, stored diaries that give uncommon perception into the hardships confronted by Indigenous ladies within the early twentieth century. She additionally labored as a journalist in the course of the Paris expo, writing a protracted account of her experiences for a Portland, Maine, newspaper.

“She played a dual role,” Bunny McBride, the creator of “Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris” (1995), stated in an interview. “She was on exhibition with other colonized people, yet she was also an observer who chronicled the event for a major newspaper back home.”

By a number of accounts, Nelson was a exceptional dancer and a bridge between Indigenous America and Western audiences. One journalist famous that she might carry out conventional dances and fashionable ones with “equal grace.” In Paris, her audiences demanded encores.

Nelson mingled with artists and intellectuals, gave lecture-recitals at salons and museums and fell in love with a French journalist, Jean Archambaud.

In July 1939, the publishing home Paul Geuthner gave her a possibility that she had lengthy pursued: to publish her assortment of Penobscot folks tales.

But that September — when promotional supplies had been set to flow into — the Nazi invasion of Poland threw France into struggle, setting off a collection of occasions that may finish Nelson’s guide deal and upend her life.

She married Archambaud quickly after Poland’s give up and, aided by the philanthropist Anne Morgan, made plans to depart Europe. But she couldn’t safe papers for her husband, and the following yr, after Germany had invaded and occupied France, she left with their 6-year-old daughter, additionally named Jean, fleeing throughout the Pyrenees into Spain, largely on foot.

The oldest of eight siblings, Mary Alice Nelson was born on Nov. 17, 1903, on Indian Island, the center of the Penobscot nation about 15 miles northeast of Bangor, Maine. Penobscots known as her Maliedellis (pronounced MAH-lee-DEL-us), which she shortened to Molly.

The Nelsons sustained themselves principally by promoting baskets, together with her mom, Philomene, weaving and her father, Horace, accumulating the uncooked supplies. Horace would go on to function the tribal chief and the nonvoting Penobscot consultant within the State Legislature.

As a lady, Molly confirmed an curiosity in tribal traditions, asking adults to inform her legends in change for doing chores. Revues and musical occasions had been fashionable on the island, giving youngsters alternatives to carry out; in her first public efficiency she danced an Irish jig in an area contest. By the time she was a younger teenager, she was incomes dimes dancing for vacationers.

To make much more cash for her household, she left dwelling at 15 to journey with a vaudeville act underneath the title Princess Neeburban, selecting up varied Indigenous dances alongside the way in which. She typically felt torn between a love for her dwelling and an insatiable curiosity in regards to the bigger world.

In 1924, on a tour of schools with an organization of Indigenous dancers, she was in Philadelphia when she grew to become reacquainted with an anthropologist she had identified from childhood. She left the tour and remained behind there to audit anthropology and literature lessons for 3 semesters on the University of Pennsylvania. When she ran out of cash, she joined her sister in a Wild West present headquartered on an Oklahoma ranch, the place she labored as a waitress, danced and discovered to carry out on horseback.

Nelson quickly moved to New York and began utilizing the stage title Molly Spotted Elk. She modeled for artists between auditions and finally joined the Fosters Girls, a refrain line that traveled to San Antonio for an prolonged run.

When that run ended, Nelson returned to New York and made a reputation acting at nightclubs. When the screenwriter and naturalist W. Douglas Burden heard about her, he solid her within the starring position of “The Silent Enemy” (1930), a docudrama a couple of harsh winter confronted by pre-Columbian Ojibwe in what’s now Canada. Burden sought to solid solely Indigenous actors and make a movie with out stereotypes. In addition to enjoying a lead position, Nelson additionally suggested on searching scenes and canoe constructing.

A silent movie in an more and more talkie period, “The Silent Enemy” flopped on the field workplace however was lauded for its relative realism and beautiful scenes of animals in nature.

While Nelson aspired to behave in different movies, she discovered only some bit elements. But her ambition to proceed to carry out set her on the street to Paris.

Some time after returning to the United States, she discovered that her husband had died as a refugee in occupied France in 1941. Suffering from melancholy, she spent a yr in a psychological hospital. She lived the remainder of her life on Indian Island, the place she contributed to Penobscot analysis, made dolls and baskets and advised tales to her neighborhood.

She died on Feb. 21, 1977, after a fall. She was 73. Her daughter died in 2011 at 77.

Nelson’s long-delayed collected legends, after years of labor, had been lastly printed in 2009 by the University of Maine. The assortment, “Katahdin: Wigwam’s Tales of the Abnaki Tribe,” included a dictionary of phrases with French and English translations. At the time, most Indigenous tales had been handed orally from a storyteller to a white historian or anthropologist, making Nelson a uncommon instance of an Indigenous documentarian.

“There’s a real difference in the voice, and there’s a real difference in certain emphases that she put on certain aspects of the stories,” John Bear Mitchell, a Penobscot storyteller and educator who knew Nelson, stated of the gathering in an interview.

“To hear them in her words,” he added, “is to hear them in her elders’ words.”