"The Festival Where Being a Female Playwright Isn’t a Rarity"

by Jeffrey Brown

[I recently posted a series of articles from the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine that covered various aspects of theater by America’s indigenous peoples—American Indians, Native Hawaiians, and Native Alaskans.  Among those reports and articles was Celia Wren’s “Law of Nations,” on the production of Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle, directed by Molly Smith at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage from 12 January to 18 February.  Nagle is a member of the Cherokee Nation and her play was Arena’s entry in Washington’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival (15 January-15 February), the only play in the festival by a Native American.  

[On 5 February 2018, the PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown presented a segment on the festival, in which 25 Washington-area theaters produced plays written by female playwrights.  The presenting group started with the originating companies of the 2015 festival: Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.), Ford’s Theatre (Washington), Round House Theatre (Bethesda, Maryland), Shakespeare Theatre Company (Washington), Signature Theatre (Arlington, Virginia), Studio Theatre (Washington), and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington).  Joining them this year are 4615 Theatre Company (Silver Spring, Maryland), Ally Theatre Company (Washington), Baltimore Center Stage (Baltimore, Maryland), Brave Spirits Theatre (Alexandria, Virginia), Convergence Theatre (Washington), dog & pony dc (Washington), Folger Theatre (Washington), Mosaic Theater Company (Washington), Nu Sass Productions (Washington), Olney Theatre Center (Olney, Maryland), Pointless Theatre (Washington), Rainbow Theatre Project (Washington), Rapid Lemon Productions (Baltimore), Rep Stage (Columbia, Maryland), Spooky Action Theater Company (Washington), Strand Theater Company (Baltimore), Taffety Punk Theatre Company (Washington), and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington).]

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which produces works written entirely by women, opened in Washington last month.  Jeffrey Brown sits down with three of the featured playwrights to discuss why they believe festivals like this are meaningful, the #MeToo movement, and the unique perspective female playwrights can bring to the stage.

John Yang:  Turning from the political theater of Washington to the dramatic stage.

Almost two dozen theaters around D.C. are producing the second Women’s Voices Theater Festival.

Jeffrey Brown sat down with three of the playwrights to discuss why this effort is meaningful, particularly now.

Jeffrey Brown:  A play about a young American moving with her family to Nigeria in the 1960s by Caleen Sinnette Jennings.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  As progressive as theater is in many ways in the United States, there’s still something around the edges that says women’s stories are maybe more precious, less edgy, less intellectually challenging.

There’s a sort ugly cloud that hangs over it, and I think this is a way to dispel all of those notions.

Jeffrey Brown:  A 17th century comedy becomes a story of rich and poor in America today in the hands of playwright Theresa Rebeck.

Theresa Rebeck:  The fact is, women do tell stories in a different way. And there are mighty stories out there waiting to be told. And I don’t believe that playwriting is a gene on a Y chromosome. None of us believe that, right?

Jeffrey Brown:  A personal history that’s also an unsettling piece of American and Cherokee tribal history by Mary Kathryn Nagle.

Actress:  Today, Native women face rates of domestic violence and sexual assault higher than any other population in the United States.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  Part of dehumanizing a people is silencing them. And I think the more women’s stories are told on stage, the more our culture will start to shift. It’s not a coincidence that we face such high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault, and at the same time our voices have not been presented equally.

Jeffrey Brown:  These are just three of the plays and playwrights of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, a month-long, 24-theater project now under way in Washington, D.C., with all new plays, including 13 world premieres.

It’s the second such festival here, the first held in 2015, and the largest of its kind in the country, taking direct aim at a fact of life in American theater:

the paucity of productions by female writers, around a quarter of plays across the country, according to several studies.

At Arena Stage, one of the originating companies heading the festival, I talked with three women whose work is on display.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings, a professor of theater at American University, took part in the first festival. She’s back with a sequel to her earlier play [Queens Girl in the World at Theatre J], both based on her own life.

The new one is titled “Queens Girl in Africa.” [Performed at the Mosaic Theater Company]

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  It’s semibiographical, so nobody else could tell the story. But what’s important is the fact that the story is worth telling, and the story is worth seeing.

I think, particularly women of my generation wrestled with that thought. And it’s good to see younger women coming along saying, why was this even a question? Of course your story is worth telling.

Jeffrey Brown:  Are you surprised, though, that it’s still a thing that there would be a need for a festival of women’s voices?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  No, because racism is still here, sexism is still here, everything is still here, just wearing different clothes. So, it’s all here.

Jeffrey Brown:  Pulitzer Prize-nominee Theresa Rebeck, a veteran of television and film, as well as the stage, decided to redo an English Restoration era comedy, “The Way of the World,” written by William Congreve.  [Rebeck’s play, presented at the Folger Theatre, uses Congreve’s title.]

Theresa Rebeck:  It’s not like I looked that play and said, I want to do a feminist retelling of the Congreve play. But there is no mistaking that a woman wrote it, that I inhabit the female characters in a completely different way than what Congreve did.

Point of view is one of the tools you have as a writer, and this is the point of view of a woman. It’s not an agenda. It’s the truth. If our agenda is always to tell the truth, the truth out of a woman’s mouth is going to sound different than the truth out of a man’s.

Jeffrey Brown:  Mary Kathryn Nagle, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, also works full-time on behalf of tribal rights as a lawyer.

Her play “Sovereignty” [at Arena Stage (see “Staging Our Native Nation,” Article 3, posted ROT on 30 March)] presents another window into that world, and is set in the past — Andrew Jackson is one of the characters — and in the present-day Supreme Court.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  When anyone tells me that some plays are political and some are not, I think it’s all political. We can say it’s just art, but I think we’re political beings. We’re humans, right?

And I don’t see any art in this world as apolitical. And, as a woman, the political is deeply personal. It affects our lives in such profound ways. And getting to see that on stage is exciting.

Jeffrey Brown:  Do you think of yourself as a woman playwright?

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  I do, yes. Yes. I also think of myself as a Cherokee playwright. And I think that combination is terribly exciting and new.

Theresa Rebeck:  Can I answer that as well?

I have to say, when I was just starting out as a playwright, I had a mentor who said very clear to me, you have got to be careful not to let them categorize you as a woman playwright. It was sort of said as a kind — as kindly meant advice.

And I — in my youth, I was like, well, I am a woman and I am a playwright, so it’s unclear to me, like, why that would be something I needed to be careful about.

Jeffrey Brown:  During the recent women’s marches, close to 100 theaters in more than 30 states hosted readings of new works by women. The Washington, D.C., festival was planned well before the explosion of the MeToo movement.

I asked the playwrights if they were surprised by recent events.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  We are in an extraordinary time in our history. Something major happened in our last inauguration. And I think this groundswell comes from that. So I think theater has often challenged the norms and sort of — and the artists have stepped up and led the wave of change. But it’s not surprising to me that this is happening now.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  No, all these women coming forward with stories, it doesn’t surprise me that the stories exist. I knew they existed. I have done work…

Theresa Rebeck:  Yes, we all knew.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  Right? We all knew.

Theresa Rebeck:  And we’re stunned that people are saying, we didn’t know. I’m like, oh, come on.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  Right. That’s shocking.

The people who claim they didn’t know, that’s shocking to me. And, in fact, thankfully, I think a lot of men are now coming forward to say, well, I knew, but, you know, how could I take down this man in power, because my career was dependent upon him accepting me?

Theresa Rebeck:  I had a moment where I thought, I wish this felt better. I don’t understand why it doesn’t feel better, you know?

And I think that must be because I don’t believe that real change is coming. My heart doesn’t believe it, somehow.

Jeffrey Brown:  On this issue of how hard it is just to make it as a playwright, how hard is it?

Theresa Rebeck:  It’s really hard. I have been through so many ups and downs that they finally.

The Dramatists Guild, they do a little magazine, and they put me on the cover of the issue about survival.

(LAUGHTER)

Theresa Rebeck:  Right? I was like, I am the poster child for survival. That’s what you know me for.

Jeffrey Brown:  Caleen, what do you hope comes out of this?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  Much harder to say, well, I just know any women playwrights. Much harder to say.

And I hope — I hope this model will be replicated all over the country.

Theater is also a very important place, because, yes, we are all the same. Yes, we’re incredibly different. But that difference need not frighten you. That difference need not be a mystery. That difference should be something you walk towards in order to build that empathy.

Jeffrey Brown:  The Women’s Voices Theater Festival runs through February 15.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Dylan Gets Religion

by Kirk Woodward

[This will be Kirk’s fourth post on Bob Dylan, of whom, ROTters will know, he’s a big fan (see “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” 8 January 2011; “Bob Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; and “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017).  That makes Dylan Kirk’s second-most frequent subject on Rick On Theater after the Beatles (six posts, including again “Bob and Ringo,” which does double duty).  (I count posts on Shaw as three, though one of those is a five-part series.)  “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion,” however, covers a different aspect of the folk-rocker’s work from his musicality.

[Another part of Kirk’s background and focus, equal in strength and influence—perhaps even greater—to his interest in theater and music, is his faith.  Kirk, as he affirms below, is an active Christian.  Dylan was born into a Jewish family, but in the late 1970s, after a profound spiritual experience, he became a “born-again” Christian, a conversion that’s reflected in his songs.  It is at this phenomenon at which Kirk looks in “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion.”  (According to various biographical notes, the artist returned to Judaism, even flirting with orthodoxy, after three years.)  It’s certainly a part of Dylan’s musical life about which I was unfamiliar, and I imagine many ROT-readers will find it at least a little surprising, even in the complex career of Bob Dylan.]

Years ago, while I was a college student, I did the most daring thing I’d ever done up to that point: I went to a record store in town and asked for a copy of an album known as The White Wonder, by Bob Dylan. What was daring about this transaction was that the album was a bootleg – an unauthorized recorded compilation of a number of songs written and sung by Dylan.

Bootlegs are so common now that it’s hard to believe anyone was ever as skittish about buying one as I was then. I imagined the Record Industry Police descending on me, I suppose, and in fact the record industry has pursued a number of cases of bootlegging, using batteries of lawyers. However, no one pursued me for my illicit purchase.

A few recording artists endorse bootlegging, notably the Grateful Dead, who encouraged their fans to record their concerts and circulate the recordings. Bob Dylan very definitely has not encouraged bootlegging. He has been remarkably protective of his copyrights. All the same, a great deal of unauthorized Dylan material is available.

Columbia Records (now Columbia/Legacy), Dylan’s record company, took an audacious step to control the amount of unauthorized Dylan material that’s circulating. Starting in 1991, it began what it calls the “Bootleg Series” of outtakes, concert records, and miscellaneous items Dylan has created, but not officially released, in the course of his career.

Thirteen volumes of this series have been released to date, comprising into the hundreds of CDs, with more presumably on the way. Each volume covers a different period or aspect of Dylan’s career, and much of the material is invaluable. The fecundity of Dylan’s writing is simply staggering.

The latest bootleg series volume, Trouble No More 1979-1981, released on November 3, 2017, is of particular interest, because it represents what’s often referred to as Dylan’s “Christian” period. Dylan, born (in 1941) to a Jewish family and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, had a sort of “born again” or “conversion” experience in late 1979-early 1980.

He released three albums during this period: Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981). The single release “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Vocal, came from this time. The songs on the first two albums all specifically relate to Dylan’s current religious beliefs; those on Shot of Love have a somewhat wider focus.

This period of Dylan’s career was, needless to say, controversial. He did some “preaching” to audiences during his concerts. He made no secret of his strong beliefs. He gained some audience and lost some. By the end of 1981 he was playing more not specifically religious songs, a trend that soon dominated.

My own experience with Dylan’s “Christian period” amounted to this: I heard about it; my sister loaned me the first album of the period, Slow Train; I listened to it, found it harsh and unappealing, returned it to my sister, and didn’t listen to any new Dylan albums again until the early 1990s.

What a difference almost four decades make! The Trouble No More collection is – pardon a probably inevitable Biblical reference – a revelation. In order to describe why I think so, let me present some comments I’ve either heard or made myself about the music of this period, and give my new opinions on them.

I’ve already mentioned my own initial opinion that the albums sounded harsh. There’s something to this opinion. There’s a great deal more in the songs about God’s judgment than about God’s mercy – an approach that one often sees in new converts to a faith, who can be highly critical of what they themselves had only recently believed.

However, in the recordings on Trouble No More this harshness, if real, is leavened – there’s that Biblical vocabulary again – by Dylan’s exuberance and his humor, not to mention by his art. Sometimes he is charming, as in the children’s song “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” Sometimes he is droll, as in the rollicking, previously released “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell (For Anybody).” Often it’s the flow of the lyrics, with their mix of the highfalutin’ and the conversational, that provides relief:

You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
You may be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
You may be living in another country under another name

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody…

Some reacted to Dylan’s “Christian” songs in surprise that he was suddenly so involved in religion, but that in itself shouldn’t have been surprising – his songs have always had strong religious tendencies, sometimes explicit, as in much of the album John Wesley Harding (1967). The song “All Along the Watchtower” on that album, the one Dylan has played most in concerts (2257 times to date), conjures up Old Testament imagery:

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants too

But the album also contains a splendid summary of Christian theology in the song “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”:

The moral of this story,

The moral of this song,

Is simply that one should never be

Where one does not belong.

So if you see your neighbor carrying something,

Help him with his load,

And don’t go mistaking Paradise

For that home across the road.

Dylan’s songs have always had a sense of right and wrong, of sin and righteousness, of darkness and light. In other words, they often exhibit a religious sensibility, the surprise in the 1979-1981 period being that that sensibility is made explicit. The same may be said for the theme in many Dylan songs of an approaching judgment. This sense is strong in early songs, like “When the Ship Comes In” (1964):

Oh, the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'
Like the stillness in the wind
Before the hurricane begins
The hour that the ship comes in

That vision is apocalyptic, and not at all out of keeping in tone with Dylan’s “Christian” period.

I remember reading a review around 1980 suggesting that Dylan embraced Christianity as a way of reinvigorating his creative processes. I doubt that, both because his “conversion” is clearly genuine – I defy anyone to listen to these recordings and doubt it – but also because he leaps into the new subject matter with such energy and skill that it’s hard to imagine he was having any problems to start with.

I’m talking here primarily about the numerous concert recordings included in the release. In concert he betters the three studio albums in every case that I’m aware of. In the concerts he sings as well as he ever has. A friend of mine said once that he thought Dylan was the greatest rock and roll singer, and these concert recordings justify that remark. He sings with abandon.

He also sings with a double dose both of determination and of discipline. Notoriously, as a live performer Dylan is capable of giving his supporting musicians fits, as he changes set lists, song words, and arrangements with abandon.

These recordings, however, are musically focused, crisp, and tight. Dylan still experiments with musical styles, tempos, and textures, not to mention words, as he has throughout his career. But there is no feeling here that his changes are arbitrary. He explores restlessly. That’s a theme of his entire body of work. But the work in Trouble No More has focus.

I’d always heard that people were furious at Dylan’s new direction, but on the concert recordings we hear crowds whistling and applauding. There are other surprises, too. Dylan notoriously almost always says little or nothing to his audiences. In these recordings he is practically friendly, introducing the band several times, thanking people for coming and hoping they’ll come again the next night, and at one point saying something like "I heard a request from somebody in the crowd. Was that for 'Solid Rock'?" – a question that would be unthinkable through most of his career.

Speaking of Dylan’s band, it is crackerjack. Dylan has said that "nobody listens to my music for the solos," but many of the solos from these recordings are outstanding, particularly those of the lead guitarist, Fred Tackett (b. 1945). There is also impeccable work from the drummer, Jim Keltner (b. 1942), once the intermediary who got me Ringo Starr's autograph!

Dylan is also accompanied on these recordings by a group of gospel singers (first three, then increasing in number). I have heard people refer to this feature as a sign of laziness on Dylan’s part. Not on these recordings – the backup singers work hard but they don't work any harder than Dylan does. The effect is blistering.

The songs on the new release – many not available on recordings before – are outstanding, unless one rejects them simply because their subject is religion. In a sense, that’s not their subject, because Dylan’s interests are always wider than one category. He looks, with a skeptical eye, at human behavior (particularly his own) in every sphere of life, a vision that gives his lyrics wide scope.

One of the fascinating features of Trouble No More is liner notes by Penn Jillette (b. 1955), the magician and, in his own words, a “lifelong atheist.” Jillette describes his early feelings about the albums from Dylan’s “Christian” period – pretty much the same as mine, although he’s an atheist and I’m a Christian – and his different response to these recordings – also pretty much the same as mine. His notes are well worth reading for an insight into what art can offer beyond its immediate subject matter.

So what happened to Dylan’s Christian fervor? Maybe nothing – who knows? I have no idea what goes on in Dylan’s mind, and that’s fine. His published comments are ambiguous. He has never wanted to be a “thought leader” – he has always wanted people to think for themselves. As noted above, he eventually returned to playing songs in concert that he’s written over the last fifty-five years or so.

However, he still plays songs from the “Christian” period now and then. He participated in the album Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan (2008), singing his “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” with Mavis Staples (b. 1939). [Mavis Staples is a rhythm and blues and gospel singer, actress, and civil rights activist and a member of her family’s singing group The Staple Singers.  She was nominated for a 2003 Grammy Award for her duet with Dylan on “Gonna Change.”]  He has performed “Gotta Serve Somebody” in concert as recently as 2011.

Besides, which Dylan songs are “religious” and which aren’t? Like his contemporary Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), Dylan fills his songs with religious imagery – and with imagery of many other kinds. Perhaps we need a wider definition of “religious.” Listening to Trouble No More can help.

Dispatches from Israel 14

by Helen Kaye

[Helen Kaye is back again with a pair of reviews from Israeli theaters last month.  Both plays, Jeff Baron’s Visting Mr. Green and Dario Fo’s The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, are translations in Hebrew of plays that have been around for some years and have been staged around the world (including New York City).  Both plays have been produced in Israel previously as well, but Helen, whose last contribution to Rick On Theater was “Dispatches from Israel 13” on 27 February, has found both these revivals worthy of praise and great enthusiasm.]. 

Visiting Mr. Green

By Jeff Baron

Translated by Ido Riklin

Directed by Natan Datner

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 7 March 18

On the face of it, nothing could be more straightforward. A hard-nosed judge sentences young executive Ross Gardiner (Ido Rosenberg) to six months of weekly visits to the very elderly, very cantankerous Mr. Green (Gadi Yagil), the penance for nearly running him down. What starts with overt and near mutual hostility mutates over time into intimate friendship that tentatively begins when the old man discovers that Ross, like himself, is Jewish. It survives Ross’ disclosure that he is gay and Mr. Green’s revelation that he has a daughter, disowned and mourned as dead because she married a gentile.

The delight of this jewel of a performance of this jewel of a play was the appearance of a genuine cockroach that appeared in Mr. Green’s seedy flat designed as inside/outside – the fire-escapes – by Alessandra Nardi, and exited, scuttling, stage right to the guffaws of the audience.

And when you think of it, the cockroach is a perfect metaphor for this not-so-straightforward-after-all, play. Cockroaches are shy creatures, preferring concealment, like Ross and Mr. Green.

The latter is at first shattered and repulsed when Ross discloses he is gay, just as Ross is appalled at Mr. Green’s emotional intransigence when he learns of it.

Visiting Mr. Green is a very funny comedy, but it is also an uncompromising and penetrating examination of prejudice and irrational hatreds, and if that doesn’t strike a chord, then we are beyond redemption.

The play is so good that it seemed sometimes that we were eavesdropping on the neighbors, and indeed, it has worked in some 45 countries and been translated into 23 languages, Mr. Riklin’s seamless effort being one.

The acting: Mr. Yagil is beyond superb. An experienced comedian, he has schticks, but here he shapes, pares, and edits them so that the few he employs in his metamorphosis into the character become intrinsic to it. Mr. Rosenberg, not to be outdone, makes sure that Ross stays clear of excess, which leaves plenty of space for his compassion and innate decency.

Finally, the two men genuinely work together, each complementing the other. If you don’t walk out of the theater on cloud nine, you must be an Alien.

[I had never heard of Visting Mr. Green, or couldn’t remember having heard of it, so I checked its stateside production history.  I was shocked to see that the play ran for a year in New York City in 1997-98  with El Wallach as Green, and that it played at the Union Square Theatre, which is right across the square from where I live.  How could I have missed it?  Before the New York début, the play also ran for a year at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, also with Wallach in the title part.]

*  *  *  *

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

By Dario Fo

Translated by Nissim Aloni

Adapted and directed by Michael Gurevitch

Khan Theater, Jerusalem; 21 March 2018

When you have a certified nutcase (Erez Shafrir) making twice-ground mincemeat of four cops (Itai Szor, Yoav Hyman, Nir Ron and Yossi Eini) with most certainly guilty consciences then you have a certifiable probability of farce which Mr. Gurevitch’s production of Death of an Anarchist provides in most generous measure.

More simply, if you’re not rolling around laughing ¾ of the time from the quartet’s verbal, facial and physical antics, you need to get a refund on your sense of humor – disclosure: the other ¼ is for thinking.

Because you have to think that if it takes a maniac to uncover the cover-up of a probable murder by the police (because nobody else is), then the corruption goes further and gets broader, which is the point the play makes, adding a few (unsubtle) and comical comments about certain Persons (here) and a President (elsewhwere).

In 1969, in the wake of a series of thought-to-be anarchist bombings in Milan, known anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli was arrested, questioned and either jumped or, as was more commonly thought, was pushed out of a fourth floor window at the Milan Central Police Station. 

Fo wrote the farce the following year; the authorities fumed; the public flocked, and has flocked ever since.

For this one, Svetlana Brega did the set – a shabby office, oh, and it would be patently unfair of me to reveal how the set is changed from the 1st to the 4th floor – and the costumes which are completely, if not nattily, attuned to the various characters. Daniel Salomon did the music and Roni Cohen the lights.

Now then. Mr. Gourevitch directs comedy with the deftest, lightest and most assured touches and the actors in Anarchist are accomplished comedians all.

It’s Mr. Shafrir’s show all the way from his first entrance as a bag-laden Maniac with papers to his exit as a clown-like character in a red fright wig and piratical overcoat. He conducts most of his “investigation” in the character of a judge who goes from ingratiating to terrifying, from jovial to hectoring in the blink of an eye with tone, stance, and gesture to match. It’s bravura and hilarious.

As a young cop and (partial) straightman, young Itai Szor is lovably clueless and admirably loyal. Yoav Hyman, equipped with excess weight, bad hair and awful clothes is the ultimate in bumbling, incompetent, ineffectual cop-hood in the person of Inspector Bertozzo. Nir Ron, who has been blessed with the ability to shift his face and body into innumerable subtleties, uses them to the full as the equally bumbling etc. Inspector Pissani. Like a demented train, Yossi Eini charges electrically about with gruesome purpose as the wannabe ferocious Superintendant. Carmit Mesilati-Kaplan cameos most brightly as journalist Feletti.

Loverly. Go see it.

[Dario Fo (1926-2016), for those who have forgotten, was the Nobel Prize laureate in literature in 1997.  The Accidental Death of an Anarchist was presented with a cast that included Jonathan Pryce and Patti LuPone on Broadway in New York City in 1984 but only ran for 20 regular performances and 15 previews.  The production originated at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage.]

"Native American Imagery Is Everywhere But Understanding Lags Behind"

by Jeffrey Brown

 [I just posed eight articles from the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine on the emergence of indigenous American theater (see “Staging Our Native Nation,” posted from 24 March through 8 April).  No sooner had I uploaded the last of the six posts in the Rick On Theater series than the  PBS NewsHour ran a segment on 29 March 2018, reported by Jeffrey Brown, that touched on one of the points of the articles:  that there are “symbols of Native American life and culture all around,” in the words of anchor Judy Woodruff.  I think the segment dovetails perfectly with the AT native theater series, so I’m posting the transcript of the broadcast for ROTters.]

Native imagery is embedded in the national subconscious, whether we're paying attention or not. A new exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian is titled simply "Americans" and shows how all aspects of life have been touched by the history and symbols of native culture. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Judy Woodruff:  Now a change of pace, history, mythology, imagery. A museum exhibition opens our eyes to the symbols of Native American life and culture all around.

Jeffrey Brown has our story.

Jeffrey Brown:  A 1948 Indian brand motorcycle, one of the sleekest machines you’re likely to see, clothing with the logo for your local sports team. And perhaps in your refrigerator right now, a box of Land O’Lakes butter.

Paul Chaat Smith:  She’s on her knees, and she’s holding the box that she’s on. So it recedes into infinity. So there’s something really profoundly weird going on.

Jeffrey Brown:  Even more profound, just how pervasive Native imagery is embedded into the American subconscious. That’s according to Paul Chaat Smith, a member of the Comanche Tribe and co-curator of an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Paul Chaat Smith:  It’s really this paradox that the country, 330 million people today, 1 percent of that population is Native American. For most people, they don’t see or really think about Indians, yet they’re surrounded by Indian imagery, place names, and have connections with Indians on a kind of deep, emotional level.

Jeffrey Brown:  Whether we know it or not.

Paul Chaat Smith:  Whether you know it or not.

Jeffrey Brown:  Yes.

To that end, the exhibition is titled, simply, “Americans,” and shows us Indians everywhere in all aspects of life. Overhead, a prototype of the Tomahawk missile, on loan from the nearby Air and Space Museum.

On one large wall, clips from films and TV shows. A side room takes us through the strange history of Pocahontas, known, but not really known, by all. Around the gallery, headdresses everywhere, in signs and advertising.

The image of the Native American or Indian — the museum uses the terms interchangeably — as a symbol of ruggedness or bravery, but often with no discernible connection to the products, as in ads over the decades for Calumet Baking Powder.

Paul Chaat Smith:  An Indian in a feather headdress has nothing to do with baking powder. It’s a completely artificial connection. Yet it sometimes works, because I think it talks about a kind of Americanness and quality that people say, OK, well that baking powder is probably pretty good because there’s an Indian in a headdress in it.

And note that it is a red, white and blue headdress.

Jeffrey Brown:  Yes.

A history of extermination and appropriation of lands, and yet an embrace of American Indians as a symbol authentically American.

Paul Chaat Smith:  There’s certainly explicitly racist imagery, but it’s a pretty small minority of it, because the whole way that Indians have been objectified in the United States is about a kind of noble Indian idea, which is a different kind of caricature than one that’s explicitly vicious and that we’re dirty and backward and unintelligent.

But, obviously, it is — even though it’s flattering in some way, it’s still another kind of a stereotype.

Jeffrey Brown:  It’s also, of course, about images and myths, and not about the actual people themselves.

Smith says this distinction began in the late 19th century after the protracted armed conflict between Natives and settlers, and later the U.S. Army, had come to an end.

Paul Chaat Smith:  It was like there was a big meeting of the American collective unconscious to say, now we’re going to freeze Indians in the past.

The actual Indians that are on reservations in 1895 or 1910, or the actual Indians who might [be] living in L.A., living lives like the other people in Los Angeles, they’re not going to appear in entertainment.

Jeffrey Brown:  One area of continuing contention, sports names and logos.

In recent years, some schools and universities have stopped using Native American nicknames. Earlier this year, Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians announced they will stop using the cartoonish Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms. But they’re keeping the Indians name.

More controversially, the National Football League’s Washington Redskins are keeping their name. Smith is a fan of his local team, but not its name, though he understands the strong feelings.

Paul Chaat Smith:  I have great empathy for fans, especially here in D.C., but fans don’t choose the name of the team, right? A rich owner chooses it. And in the case of these names, it usually goes back a century sometimes.

I get why people aren’t pleased when someone like me comes in and says, you know, this name is a dictionary-defined slur, as it is in D.C. But if you come in and try to take it away from somebody, I get that that’s — you know, you feel attacked.

Jeffrey Brown:  No one would name a team the Redskins anymore, but not long ago, Victoria’s Secret dressed model Karlie Kloss like this, only to apologize after criticism.  [The model, who’s of northern and eastern European extraction, was dressed in a suede-like bikini with fringe, an oversized, feathered headdress, festooned with turquoise jewelry in Native American motifs, wearing high-heeled pumps. ~Rick]

The museum wants people to think about the images around them and what they convey. Visitors are encouraged to write of their own experiences.

Look at this one. “I had a dream catcher over my bed as a kid. Why?”

Paul Chaat Smith:  I think what the show is designed to do is to say, you’re not alone with these stories.

Jeffrey Brown:  And for the country as a whole, Smith says there’s something more at stake.

Paul Chaat Smith:  There’s this challenge to the United States’ idea of itself to have to acknowledge that the United States national project came about at great cost to Native people.

So, what do we think about that? That’s what this exhibition is saying. How do we come to terms with that? Should Americans just feel guilty? I don’t think so.

All Americans inherit this. How do we make sense of it? And a starting point is kind of looking at Indians in everyday life.

Jeffrey Brown:  For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

[I’ve mentioned the NMAI, both the New York City branch and the main museum in Washington, D.C., where Americans is mounted, in several posts.  See, for example, “Fritz Scholder,” posted on 30 Mach 2011; 'Awake and Sing!, et al.,” 3 April  2017; and “Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait,” 15 January 2018.]

"Staging Our Native Nation

Articles 7 & 8

[Here are the final two articles in the American Theatre series, “Staging Our Native Nation.”  (A list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, appears at the end of this post.)  As usual, I strongly recommend that Rick On Theater readers who haven’t read the foregoing pieces in this collection go back and read the earlier articles; the previous five installments began on 24 March and ran every three days until this concluding post.]

NATIVE IRON WORKERS AND 9/11 LINKED BY ‘MANGLED BEAMS’

by Christie Honoré

[As far back as the mid-1880s, men of the Iroquois nation, mostly Mohawks (upstate New York, southern Quebec, and eastern Ontario), worked steel in  construction.  It began with bridge-building along the St. Lawrence River and moved into high-steel work on the skyscrapers of the early 20th century.  And where else is the modern skyscraper most prominent in this part of the world?  Why, New York City, of course, whose skyline has been dominated by tall buildings since before World War I.  The iron workers for most of those iconic New York City edifices have been Iroquois Indians for now well over 100 years.

[As you’ll read in Christie Honoré’s “Native Iron Workers and 9/11 Linked by ‘Mangled Beams,’” these same Native American high-steel workers, descendents of the men who built the Twin Towers in the 1960s and ’70s, were engaged in the recovery and clean-up at Ground Zero after the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001.  Honoré’s article, the seventh in my series from American Theatre’s “Staging Our Native Nation” special feature from the April 2018 issue, is about the new play, Mangled Beams, by Dawn Jamieson, which tells the stories of four of those steel workers.  It begins previews on 13 April at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at the A.R.T./New York Theatres on West  53rd Street in Manhattan.  (The production will run through 29 April.)]

In Dawn Jamieson’s new play, four Iroquois high-beam walkers reckon with trauma past and present.

To find compelling inspiration for her next play, Cayuga-Iroquois [the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York] playwright Dawn Jamieson didn’t have to look very far. She was a member of the board of directors of the American Indian Community House in New York City [on the Lower East Side] when Native American iron workers came to town to join in the search-and-rescue effort around Ground Zero after 9/11.

“They were welcomed and given the support of other Native people, some who had come from the same reservations,” Jamieson said. “Later, some of the workers came to attend a support group there. After a few years, I contacted and interviewed some of them.”

Brad Bonaparte, a worker who died from cancer developed after exposure to the air at Ground Zero, became a particular inspiration. The characters in Jamieson’s Mangled Beams—opening April 19 at A.R.T./New York, in a production from NYC-based American Indian Artists Inc., a.k.a. AMERINDA [in the East Village]—are four Haudenosaunee (Iroquois [upstate New York]) high-beam walkers who contribute to the Ground Zero cleanup efforts. Along the way, these iron workers—whose trade tends to be passed down from father to son in Native American families—strive to reclaim their identity by untangling beams laid by their own ancestors.

Diane Fraher, the Osage [Great Plains] and Cherokee [American Southeast] artistic director of AMERINDA, was eager to support Jamieson’s project. “We are a community-based organization, so we have known Dawn for quite some time. She’s worked very hard on it for a number of years.”

Now in its 31st year, AMERINDA is a Native American arts organization working to make the indigenous perspective accessible to a wider audience through the creation of new works. Throughout the next few years Fraher plans to focus on supporting female playwrights like Jamieson who have emerged from the New York contemporary Native American art movement. “It’s a little known art movement here in New York City which is very vital and dynamic, with this really really rich texture to it that stretches back generations,” said Fraher.

Jamieson has felt firsthand the positive impact the movement has had on Native artists. “The support and encouragement are invaluable, as well as the feeling of being part of a vibrant whole—an ensemble, a network, a support group, an audience, a movement,” she said.

But despite the progress made both by the movement and the support of organizations like AMERINDA, Native artists still often must fight for authentic Native American representation in the arts. When she first began booking acting jobs, including two on Broadway [The Price, 1992; Inherit the Wind, 1996], Jamieson was cast according to her Caucasian appearance. But after she listed Native American on her résumé, she received very few non-Native parts.

“I’ve been asked to get a tan, wear a wig, and ‘sound Indian,’ and these suggestions often come from well-meaning people who are looking to promote Native work,” Jamieson marveled. “Until it’s generally accepted that Native people vary in appearance and voice, the situation won’t change.”

Fraher has seen the slow progress made in the battle for representation, first for Native actors to be able to play Native roles and now for Native playwrights to be able to tell their stories. “Perhaps the next big thing we want to conquer is developing leadership—we need to develop Native directors in theatre,” she said.

These advancements are especially important in dispelling the notion that Native American culture exists only as a part of history.

“We’re a living culture—we’re not just figures of the past, so our stories are not just about our historical past,” says Fraher, “It’s really important for people to recognize us as a living culture that’s a part of the whole in order for us to take our place in the American theatre and the canon of American theatre.”

And take their part in the story of one of 21st-century America’s defining traumas.

[Christie Honoré is a writer, editor, and theatermaker with experience in dramaturgy and teaching.  She’s a recent graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.] 

*  *  *  *

A TROUPE THAT TURNS TROPES INTO TAKEOFFS

by Anne Hamilton

[Until now, most of the AT series on native theater has been serious business—most of the plays are dramas (Randy Reinholz’s Off the Rails, a Native American adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is one exception) and the issues have all been profound and addressed with solemnity.  Well, the guys of the sketch troupe the 1491s take a different tack.  The subjects may still be significant to Native Americans and non-natives as well, but the approach is comedic . . . even silly at times.  And it’s apparently been working since the four-man group, who came together by serendipity, have grown in popularity and demand—and they still have a point to make.  Anne Hamilton’s “A Troupe that Turns Tropes into Takeoffs” is a brief profile of this out-of-the-ordinary comedy quartet.]

The 1491s have gone from YouTube videos to live sketch comedy to a major play commission, and they’re laughing all the way.

The travel route from Minneapolis to Tulsa runs right down the center of the country. If the Midwest is the heart of the country, this route looks like a jagged scar from open heart surgery.

This is the path that members of the nearly decade-old sketch comedy troupe the 1491s travel to meet up with each other and work on their shows and sketches. And if they have their way, their comedy will help to heal an ancient divide as sharp and deep as a scar.

Their work has had national play: In Al Jazeera’s 2012 piece “A dynamic year of indigenous communication,” reporter Manuela Picq led with a nod to the 1491s’ video “Geronimo E-KIA,” which riffed tellingly on the controversial use of the Apache warrior’s name for the Osama bin Laden raid. And members of the group of five appeared in 2014 on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” in a segment called “The Redskins’ Name – Catching Racism” about the controversial name of Washington, D.C.’s football team.

I recently interviewed three of [the] troupe’s five members, then followed up with a more in-depth talk with Bobby Wilson, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota artist and educator. I also spoke with Migizi Pensoneau, an Ojibwe and Ponca writer and producer, and Ryan RedCorn, a[n Osage] portrait photographer and graphic designer from Oklahoma. The group is rounded out by Dallas Goldtooth, a Dakota and Navajo comedian and environmental organizer, and Sterlin Harjo, a Creek and Seminole filmmaker from Oklahoma.

Goldtooth and Pensoneau are stepbrothers who grew up together in northern Minnesota. Deadpanned Pensoneau: “My name is Migizi—it’s spelled like it sounds, only the e is silent.”

I’ll admit the discussion was slightly disconcerting; I felt a bit like I was interviewing frat brothers the day before Spring Break. Topics were introduced rapid-fire and ideas batted around with good humor. Laughter was abundant.

I learned that all their work is co-created. “We aren’t reinventing any wheels—it’s sketch comedy, but we are a different voice,” says Pensoneau. “We like to make what we like to make. We have our own guidelines. Five of us work as a collective. We are a unified voice.”

Wilson agrees: “There’s so much expectation put on indigenous people in the arts, especially in the media. It comes from a longstanding tradition of non-Native people, most often white men, writing stories for Hollywood and the stage. We’re fighting those tropes. If they show up in our work, it’s just to lampoon them.”

The five members met for the first time in 2009 at a festival called the Santa Fe Indian Market, which has been a national gathering place for almost 100 years. “It’s just where all the top Native artists and artisans go to sell their wares and party it up,” says Wilson. “Okies tend to travel in packs. We didn’t have a place to stay, so Ryan RedCorn invited us to stay in a hotel room.” They told stories and laughed for hours, and the group was born. They took their name in oblique reference to Charles C. Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a touchstone of Native Americans’ culturally rich and advanced civilizations.

Since then the group has made and posted 150 videos to YouTube on topics from film depictions of Native Americans to sovereignty, from cultural appropriation to Halloween to Columbus Day. Their work traffics in silliness as much as satire, breaking up stereotypes and turning tropes around.

They say [they] made their initial video just for fun: To satirize the depiction of the werewolf pack in the Twilight films, they shot “New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions!!!!”, presided over by Harjo, they borrowed a camera for the day. The video took off and won them many fans who asked for more, leading in turn to requests for live performances.

“The videos were a blast,” says Wilson. Then, he said, they got queries from tribes who “asked us if we had ever done live comedy shows. They would ask us to come. They were pretty small venues. The demand for it became so frequent that we do three or four shows a month. As far as we know, we’re the only indigenous sketch comedy troupe in the U.S. If there is even one Native kid in a school district, they often ask for us.”

November has them touring most of the month, as it’s Native American history month. “It’s the only time you’re allowed to be Indian in public,” Wilson quips.

It was while the 1491s were performing at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa that they got a big break of sorts: The Twin Cities’ New Native Theatre took note and brought them to the attention of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Alison Carey, director of OSF’s American Revolutions program, offered them a commission. The troupe has finished their play’s second draft, about which they say there have been no restrictions.

Wilson explains their approach to playwriting: “We asked ourselves, what does a comedy look like in this space? We played around with the idea of doing a musical until we realized that none of us are musical, but there are some components that will end up in this production. We thought, let’s insert music for the comedic timing, and the sake of the storyline.”

As a subject they settled on pivotal moments in American history connected to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The action starts with the American Indian Movement’s occupation of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1970s, and flashes back to events at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1890. The title: Between Two Knees. [No date had been announced for a production of the 1491s’ play. ~Rick]

While the consensus is that they want to act in the play’s first production, they hope it has a life of its own. “Our dream is that it will go out and there will be people producing it, and it will have a life outside of us,” says Pensoneau.“I would be thrilled if some tribal high school out in the middle of nowhere would put it on.”

There may be an even broader appetite for their work. The troupe recently gave a very well-received show at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. ([Friday, 2 March,] during a nor’easter, no less). “It’s super inspiring to know that Native jokes are landing with a non-Native crowd that is younger,” Wilson said. “A lot of the stuff that we do is regional, but being at Vassar, we were way far away from where we were raised. It gives me a lot of hope that there is definitely a shift and a change.”

By sharing humor with Native and non-Native audiences, the 1491s may just patch together a new American consciousness.

[Anne Hamilton is a New York City-based freelance dramaturg who’s worked with Andrei Serban, Michael Mayer, Lynn Nottage, Niegel Smith, and Classic Stage Company, among others.  Her specialties include new-play development, production dramaturgy, new musicals, career advising, advocacy, and oral histories.  She has an MFA from the Columbia University School of the Arts and was a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow.

[When I got the April issue of American Theatre in the mail—it came last month—and I started leafing through it, I found the series of articles on theater by indigenous Americans.  American Indian theater, from what little I knew of its history and development, is a fascinating phenomenon.  (I knew nothing of native Hawaiian and native Alaskan theater efforts, which are covered in the AT series.)  It’s a little like Inuit art (on which I’ve blogged a few times), except that was originated and subsidized by the Canadian government and Indian theater is organic.  Since Indians didn’t have a theater tradition, they took European theater but turned it to telling their native stories and incorporated their various storytelling techniques and styles.  It took time for that marriage to work integrally—and also for mainstream theater people (producers, agents, literary managers, non-native directors/artistic directors, and others) to accept it as a mature, stageable American theater art.  According to the articles in AT, that’s been happening slowly, still mostly out west, but it sounds like it’s at a tipping point.

[I read the articles as I got them ready to post, and they proved to be really interesting.  I believe they’re perfect for ROT!  I hope ROTters have read them all; I’m sure you’ll learn things about our theater, as I have.  They’re absolutely engrossing.  (That promised list of native theater resources is below.)]

*  *  *  *

A LIST OF NATIVE THEATRES AND THEATREMAKERS

by American Theatre Editors

Resources, institutions, and more than 100 artists spanning North America.

This list of Native American theatres and theatremakers was compiled in part by Madeline Sayet, with suggestions from Randy Reinholz and with help by Jerald Raymond Pierce.

Native-run theatre companies:

Amerinda (American Indian Artists) Inc. (NYC)

Dark Winter Productions (Alaska)

The Eagle Project (NYC)

Native Voices at the Autry (L.A.)

New Native Theatre (Twin Cities)

Oklahoma City Theatre Company’s Native American New Play Festival

Raving Native Productions (Twin Cities)

Red Eagle Soaring (Seattle)

Safe Harbors Indigenous Collective (NYC)

Spiderwoman Theater (NYC)

Thunderbird Theatre (Kansas)

Turtle Theatre Collective (Twin Cities)

Two Worlds Theatre (New Mexico)

Other producing organization and university resources:

Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)

Project HOOP at UCLA (dir. Hanay Geiogamah)

Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (dir. Mary Kathryn Nagle & Reed Adair Bobroff)

Writers/theatremakers:

Ishmael Angaluuk Hope (Iñupiaq/Tlingit)

Alani Apio (Native Hawaiian)

Jules Arita Koostachin (Attawapiskat, Cree)

Annette Arkeketa (Otoe-Missouria)

Jaisey Bates (Longhouse Huron, Algonquin)

Nick Bear (Penobscot)

C.W. Bearshield (Sicangu Lakota)

Diane Benson (Tlingit)

Columpa Bobb (Tsleil Waututh/Nlaka’pamux)

Reed Adair Bobroff (Navajo)

Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock)

Ed Bourgeois (Mohawk)

Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki)

Margaret Bruchac (Abenaki)

Candice Byrd (Cherokee/Quapaw/Osage)

Julie Cajune (Salish)

Marisa Carr (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe)

Lee Cataluna (Native Hawaiian)

Monica Charles (Klallam)

Vic Charlo (Salish)

Dillon Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw/Laguna/Isleta Pueblo)

Marie Clements (Métis)

Montana Cypress (Miccosukee)

Maulian Dana (Penobscot)

Joseph Dandurand (Kwantlen)

Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit)

Daystar, a.k.a. Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippewa)

Ty Defoe (Oneida/Ojibwe)

Darrell Dennis (Secwepemc)

Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)

Ed Edmo (Shoshone-Bannock-Nez Perce)

Steve Elm (Oneida)

Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota)

Lori Favela (Yankton Sioux)

Stephanie Fielding (Mohegan)

Charli Fool Bear (Yanktonai Dakota)

Eric Gansworth (Onondaga)

Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware)

Diane Glancy (Cherokee)

Kim Delfina Gleason (Navajo)

Terry Gomez (Comanche)

Moses Goods (Native Hawaiian)

Jason Grasl (Blackfeet)

Tammy Haili`opua Baker (Native Hawaiian)

Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek)

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee)

Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway)

Lance Henson (Cheyenne)

Tomson Highway (Cree)

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw)

Philip Hooser (Choctaw)

LeAnne Howe (Choctaw)

Claude Jackson Jr. (Pima/Hopi)

Dawn Jamieson (Cayuga/Iroquois)

Terry Jones (Seneca)

Frank Henry Kaash Katasse (Tlingit)

Aassanaaq Kairaiuak (Yup’ik)

Margo Kane (Cree-Saulteaux)

Ajuawak Kapashesit (Ojibwe/Cree)

Bruce King (Oneida)

Martha Kreipe de Montaño (Prairie Band Potawatomi)

Donna Loring (Penobscot)

Nancy McDoniel (Chickasaw)

Gloria Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)

Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)

Duane Minard (Yurok, Piaute)

Kohl Miner (Ho-Chunk)

Sam Mitchell (Yaqui)

Monique Mojica (Kuna/Rappahannock)

N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa)

Vicki Lynn Mooney (Cherokee)

Tara Moses (Seminole)

Jay B. Muskett (Navajo)

Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee)

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (Native Hawaiian-Samoan)

Michael Nephew (Cherokee)

Judy Lee Oliva (Chickasaw)

Robert Owens-Greygrass (Lakota)

Richard Perry (Yup’ik)

PJ Prudat (Métis/Cree/Saulteaux)

Kalani Queypo (Blackfeet)

Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora)

Randy Reinholz (Choctaw)

Marcie Rendon (White Earth Anishinabe)

Mark Anthony Rolo (Chippewa)

Lucas Rowley (Inupiaq)

Madeline Sayet (Mohegan)

Laura Annawyn Shamas (Chickasaw)

Kim Snyder (Oglala Lakota)

Vera Starbard (Tlingit/Dena’ina Athabascan)

Arigon Starr (Kickapoo)

DeLanna Studi (Cherokee)

Cathy Tagnak Rexford (Inupiaq)

Xemiyulu Manibusan Tapepechul (Salvadoran Nawat)

Maya Torralba (Kiowa)

Joseph Valdez (Navajo)

David Velarde Jr. (Jicarilla Apache)

Rhiana Yazzie (Navajo)

Dianne Yeahquo Reyner (Kiowa)

William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine