Reginald Laubin

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Reginald Laubin (born December 4, 1903 in Detroit , Michigan , † April 5, 2000 in Urbana , Illinois ), who later also bore the Native American name Tatanka Wanjila , was an American writer, musician, ethnographer and interpreter of Native American dances. Together with his wife, Gladys Laubin (1906–1996), who, like him, was fascinated by the Indian way of life and culture, he lived and worked for many years among various Indian tribes in the reservations of North America. The focus of this work was the learning of ancient Indian dances, which the couple then performed publicly as dancers - interpretative Indian dancers - for several decades in the United States and also worldwide in countries in Europe and Africa.

Reginald and Gladys Laubin around 1934 with two Sioux chiefs (among other pictures)
photography

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Origin and childhood

Reginald Karl Laubin was, as his name suggests, of German descent. He had two brothers and a sister, all of whom were born after him. His parents loved music: his father, a tailor by trade, was also an oboist in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and his mother a skilled piano player. When Reginald was seven years old, his father gave him a violin, which he learned to play and practiced more or less seriously until he was sixteen. Since he was very musical, his parents wished that their son would one day go to Leipzig in Germany and study music at the local conservatory.

In 1914 the family left Detroit and went to Lima , Ohio , where the father opened a tailor shop. Probably in the same year a fateful encounter took place for Reginald in the new town when he saw two Indians hired for advertising reasons dancing in front of a cinema. He was immediately very enthusiastic about this performance and also about the appearance of the two dancers. After that Reginald began to occupy himself very intensively with everything Indian and never let up in it. Sometimes this occupation took on almost scientific traits. For example, when he became interested in the Indian bow, he didn’t just build a “flitzbow” like most children did, but went to the libraries in Lima and looked for books in which he could learn something about it could. But he only found literature there on the English longbow , which he then immediately recreated. (Later he built a lot of bows and his first book, which came out in 1923, dealt with the Indian bows. It was not yet a very extensive work and the other editions were then further edited and completed by him together with Gladys. )

1920 was a very tragic year for Reginald and his siblings, when first the mother and a few weeks later the father fell victim to a flu epidemic in Lima. However, the four children could be accommodated with friends and relatives. Reginald came to live with an uncle who lived with his family in Hartford , Connecticut . There he continued to attend high school, and when he graduated in 1922, his uncle offered him to go to college; but Reginald Karl Laubin had other plans.

Learning and dancing

In Norwich , a small town about thirty miles southeast of Hartford, he began studying at an art school (probably soon) after leaving school. One day he met a young woman there who, almost instantly, he discovered was an interesting person; her name was Gladys Winfield Tartachel. That started something that would last for over seventy years and become a very strong Alliance. Gladys Tartachel, who actually wanted to become socially active later, found, however, when Reginald Laubin had told her how he would imagine life with her as an Indian dancer in the future, that this project could contribute to a better understanding between whites and Indians and thus would also be a meaningful life task for them. In the next few years they developed their dance technique and tried to complete and deepen their knowledge of everything Indian. They read books and documents, everything that was tangible to them on the subject. At some point during this time Reginald graduated from art school and got a job as a draftsman in a company that provided linen fabrics with some kind of pattern; Gladys was also hired by this company at some point.

In 1927 they appeared publicly as dancers for the first time. The concert took place in Buffalo in New York State in the auditorium of a local museum instead. They already knew quite a few Indian dances and songs from literature and thus had put together a very good program. The music they used included Indian melodies by Charles Wakefield Cadman and piano reductions by Victor Herbert . The concert was quite successful and inspired by it, they decided to continue on this path and to break with their previous life as soon as possible.

They dared to take this step as early as 1928. When the opportunity arose to continue appearing in public in the near future, they quit their company and in the fall of the same year they took another step when they got married in Norwich. Their conviction of what they were doing must have been very great and must have given them strength that was also very much needed in the near future. The Great Depression was just around the corner and the years to come would be quite difficult for her.

The year 1934 was probably the turning point in their life's work when they traveled to the Indians in August and they were on a path that Frederick Weygold had already taken thirty years ago . Stanley Vestal had put them in touch with a tribe who, to his knowledge, still knew the traditional dances they wanted to learn. As charismatic, or rather, as natural people who did not know the disguise that the Indians had so often experienced from the whites in their past history, they succeeded in making many friendships with people from different tribes over time. It was very accelerating right at the beginning that they were adopted in a ceremony by One Bull , a very old chief of the Lakota at that time , and thus gained a lot of respect among the other Indians than Tatanka Wanjila (One Bull) and Wỉyaka Waṡtewỉn (Good Father Woman) as they were now called Indian.

In the years and decades that followed, they literally pitched their tents with various Indian tribes, their tipis, some of which they probably made themselves in the course of their lives. There they learned quite a few Indian songs and dances and, as much as possible, memorized the dwindling culture and tradition of these people. In addition, they continued to perform as dancers in many cities in America and eventually became internationally known. The music (probably in arrangements of old Indian tunes) for some of their listed dances came from well-known American composers such as Arthur Farwell or Charles Sanford Skilton . They also came to Europe and Africa with a dance troupe they had put together from seven Crow Indians of both sexes. When they performed in Paris in the winter of 1953, the orientalist and philosopher Frithjof Schuon also attended one of their performances. He made their acquaintance, but was particularly interested in the Crows, because he was also fascinated by the Indians and later wrote a book about the philosophy and art of the Plains Indians. The Laubins, as they were now generally called, were also very much celebrated in the press during this time and after reading a particularly euphoric article Reginald lost direction a little and spoke of major events, film contracts and the like. According to Starr West Jones, a friend and biographer of the couple, it was Gladys - "Hollywood makes and breaks [...] and it has no soul" - who brought him back. The two have undoubtedly formed a strong alliance and belonged to the (not so rare) people who, as whites, feel this world and the great connection with it all Indian.

In 1972 Reginald and Gladys Laubin (together with La Meri ) received the Capezio Dance Award , which is a great honor for those who have made an important contribution to the art of dance. They had not retired at the time and have continued to perform afterwards. As long as possible, they tried to bring the traditional Indian dances closer to the whites, who had a completely wrong idea of ​​them and almost always only thought of war dances, thereby expanding their world experience a little. (For the Indians, dancing was mainly a religious act and also a social event in which not only men, but also women and children took part.) - Reginald and Gladys Laubin gave their last public performance in August 1988.

In 1996 they bequeathed a collection to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , which specially built a museum on their campus for this purpose. The collection contained over one thousand nine hundred items, including a tipi and sixty arches, all of which Reginald had made himself.

Gladys Laubin did not live to see the opening of the museum in 1998. She died in October 1996 in a house in Grand Teton National Park , Wyoming . Reginald Laubin followed her three and a half years later. He died on April 5, 2000 in Urbana , Illinois .

bibliography

  • Reginald Laubin, Gladys Laubin: American Indian Archery (Civilization of the American Indians) , University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1980
  • Reginald Laubin, Gladys Laubin: The Indian Tipi: Its History, Construction, and Use , University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1977, ISBN 978-0-8061-2236-6
  • Reginald Laubin, Gladys Laubin: Indian Dances of North America: Their Importance in Indian Life , University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1977

literature

  • Starr West Jones: Reginald and Gladys Laubin, American Indian Dancers , University of Illinois Press, Champaign 2000, ISBN 0-252-06869-6
  • Paul Christopher Eells: Now I must try to live as they did: Reginald Laubin and American Indian representation , a dissertation, Verlag University of Wyoming. Dept. of History, Laramie 2009
  • Charles Wakefield Cadman: Four Americans Indian Songs, Opus 45 , Boosey & Hawkes, London 1909
  • Frithjof Schuon: The Feathered Sun: Plain Indians in Art and Philosophy , World Wisdom Books, Bloomington 1990

Web links