"Staging Our Native Nation"

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[From 15 January to 15 February this year, 25 theaters in the Washington, D.C., area staged the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which presented works written entirely by women.  Among those plays was Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty, performed at Arena Stage from 12 January to 18 February under the direction of artistic director Molly Smith (who founded Juneau, Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, featured in Article 2, “Indigenous States,” of this series, posted on 27 March).  Celia Wren’s “Law of Nations,” below, recounts the development and staging of that production, which was also part of Arena’s Power Plays initiative to commission and develop new plays and musicals  that will center on politics and power, and examines some of the special issues faced by Smith, her cast, and her creative team to stage this play about Cherokee history and current concerns.

[As always, I strongly urge readers of Rick On Theater to go back and read the previous installments in the “Staging Our Native Nation” series: “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet (posted on 24 March) and Frances Madeson’s “Indigenous States” (27 March).]

LAW OF NATIONS

by Celia Wren

At Arena Stage, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s ‘Sovereignty’ set out to reclaim Native stories—and bodies.

                                                 

“There’s a lot of humor in the play. Don’t be afraid to laugh,” artistic director Molly Smith said to spectators seated in an Arena Stage rehearsal room on a brutally cold January afternoon. The circumstances seemed to demand such encouragement. Performed for designers and other need-to-know folk, the pre-tech run-through for Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty had begun with a fight call in which, in slow motion, with matter-of-fact professionalism, actors had practiced a sexual assault and a racial-slur-charged drunken brawl. Not exactly mirth-inducing fare.

Then, too, there were the play’s weighty themes: law, justice, politics, and the inherent rights of the Cherokee Nation. A buzzed-about world premiere, Sovereignty was an installment in Arena Stage’s Power Plays initiative, a project designed to commission and develop 25 new works exploring politics and influence in American history. Sovereignty would also be one of the marquee titles in the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival in and around Washington, D.C., which ran Jan. 4-Mar. 4.

As if that context didn’t provide enough gravitas, Sovereignty was, on one level, an effort to address and correct the culture’s habit of ignoring, or at best misrepresenting, the Native American experience. “This will be, for many people, probably the most exposure they’ve ever had to anything Cherokee,” playwright Nagle had observed in an interview that morning. For this reason, she added, the play “needs to be as authentic as possible.”

Nagle has a rare vantage on the matter. An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she is not only a playwright but also a lawyer who has written briefs for federal appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. As a partner with Pipestem Law P.C., she has focused on working to safeguard tribal sovereignty  and the inherent rights of Indian nations. In her view, this work is by no means separate from her playwriting, since the realms of law and representation are entwined. To erase or debase a people’s stories paves the way for the undermining of their rights, she suggests. Conversely, to tell a people’s story authentically is to take a step toward preserving those rights. As a lawyer, she said, “I’m doing work to restore the sovereignty and jurisdiction that the Supreme Court has taken away [from Native people]. You can’t do that work unless you change the narrative that allows the court to take it away. And part of that narrative is erasure! So to me, that’s a responsibility that I have.”

If the Oklahoma-based 35-year-old felt a professional obligation to make Sovereignty ring true, she also had a personal stake in the matter: Her script recalls a turning point in the lives of her great-great-great grandfather, John Ridge, and his father, Major Ridge, who reached a risky decision to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in 1835.

Just a few years prior, in Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court had ruled for Cherokee Nation sovereignty. But the U.S. government, then led by President Andrew Jackson, declined to enforce that 1832 decision. So, under pressure from whites who coveted Cherokee land in the East, the Ridges signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which ceded Cherokee land east of the Mississippi in return for payment plus land further west. The treaty—which paved the way for the Trail of Tears—was hugely controversial among the Cherokee people and was opposed by the tribe’s principal chief, John Ross. In 1839, after relocating west, the Ridges were assassinated.

Sovereignty doesn’t just revisit a 19th-century story, though: It also imagines a contemporary tale (technically, set a couple of years in the future) about a Cherokee lawyer named Sarah Polson, who champions Cherokee Nation sovereignty. This plot strand turns on the historic 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which, when renewed and expanded in 2013, gave tribal courts jurisdiction over non-Native Americans who assaulted women on tribal land. In Sovereignty, a case involving such an assault goes all the way to a Neil Gorsuch-era Supreme Court. The play darts back and forth in time, paralleling its 19th- and 21st-century court cases, as well as two bittersweet interracial love stories.

Nagle explained that she regularly makes a point of including contemporary Native American narratives in plays that otherwise depict history. “I feel I cannot write a play that only takes place in the past, because that could, and would, likely promote the narrative that we [Native Americans] only exist in the past,” she said.

The ingredients of Sovereignty have been brewing in Nagle’s brain for a long time. Born in Oklahoma and raised in part in Missouri and Kansas, she grew up hearing about the Ridges, whose portraits hung in her grandmother’s home, and stories about Worcester v. Georgia fed her aspirations to a legal career. In law school, while studying the many milestone legal cases that hurt the Native American cause, she began to mull writing a play that would “deconstruct” the myth of Native inferiority that arguably underlay such rulings.

Enter Molly Smith, who was on the lookout for vibrant, diverse American works for Arena Stage. As it happens, the artistic director has long been interested in Native American issues and culture: Prior to assuming Arena’s leadership in 1998, she headed Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, where she oversaw productions drawing on indigenous voices and stories. What’s more, Smith’s partner, Suzanne Blue Star Boy, hails from the Yankton Sioux tribe of South Dakota.

Smith says she first heard about Nagle’s work from an Arena associate who passed along the playwright’s script Manahatta, about a 21st century securities trader whose ties to New York reach back to Native American history in the area in the 1600s (the play opens next month at Oregon Shakespeare Festival). “I read it, and I thought, this is a very interesting writer,” Smith recalls. A subsequent meeting with Nagle led to Sovereignty’s joining Arena’s Power Plays slate.

For Nagle, it was particularly meaningful to get a production in the nation’s capital, where decisions related to Native American rights have so often been in play. “The sovereign-to-sovereign relationship between Tribal Nations and the federal government—this is the seat of it,” she said.

And there’s that word: sovereignty. The legal concept of sovereignty refers to the right of a people to govern itself. A recognition that Native American tribes are equivalent to sovereign nations stretches back centuries. Around the time of the American Revolution, a Sovereignty character says, “The whole world recognized the sovereignty of Indian Nations, but no one recognized the United States.” Native tribes’ sovereignty was implicitly recognized in myriad treaties that tribes and the U.S. signed over the years.

The concept of sovereignty underpins some landmark Supreme Court cases, including 1978’s Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, which ruled that tribal courts did not have jurisdiction over non-Native individuals charged with committing crimes on tribal land. More recently, in Dollar General v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a 4-4 Supreme Court split, issued months after Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2016 death, left intact a lower court’s ruling upholding the jurisdiction of a Choctaw tribal court to hear a civil suit against the low-cost retailer.

Nagle’s play Sovereignty adds another layer of resonance to the eponymous legal and philosophical concept: The play’s contemporary plotline, which touches on sexual abuse and VAWA, draws a parallel between the idea of nation-level sovereignty and the right of a woman to protect, and determine the integrity of, her own body. In the #MeToo moment, that’s a concept with gale-force urgency.

The final Sovereignty script called for a nine-person cast, with five actors portraying historic and contemporary Cherokee characters and four playing white characters. Casting was a national effort, employing both Skype and a flight to Los Angeles to audition actors—a necessary step for locating Native performers, as Nagle explained, for whom the rule has been to “go to L.A. to find work or don’t find work! Because TV and film have been, for better or for worse, hiring Native actors.”

Also in L.A. is Native Voices at the Autry, a theatre company dedicated to new works by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nations playwrights. In addition to its developing and producing activities, Native Voices at the Autry has helped cast productions across the U.S., producing executive director Jean Bruce Scott says, including Sovereignty. Native Voices ensemble members Kyla Garcia and Kalani Queypo ultimately signed on to portray, respectively, Sarah Polson and John Ridge, while ensemble member Andrew Roa would juggle the roles of Major Ridge and a Ridge descendent. (Almost all the actors in the production depicted both 19th-century and contemporary characters.)

The show’s other performers included Jake Waid, an actor and Tlingit tribe member whom Smith knew from her time in Alaska, and D.C.-stage fixtures Michael Glenn and Dorea Schmidt. Some of the actors appeared in early workshops of the play; there would be four workshops in all.

Smith had decided to direct the production herself. Asked if she had had any concerns about tackling the project, as a director who is not herself Native American, she said no. “It was a subject that was important to me,” she said. “As a director, I think that’s the most powerful piece [of artistic equipment] you could have.”

As the final production approached, Smith traveled to Oklahoma, where she visited the cemetery that is the Ridges’ final resting place, and got an up-close look at letters written by John Ridge and John Ross. Such preparatory groundwork “nourishes me, in a whole different way,” she said. “I also think that it shows respect for the ideas of the project.”

Smith wasn’t the only one to plunge into research: The show’s designers also sought information that would make Sovereignty both resonant and genuine. They faced other challenges, too, given that Nagle’s storytelling zips around swiftly in time and space, vaulting between locations like President Andrew Jackson’s Oval Office, an 1830s Georgia jail, and a 21st-century Cherokee Nation casino.

The rapid leaps among eras presented an obvious challenge to costume designer Linda Cho. “What you don’t want is actors just to be inundated with costume changes backstage that could throw off their performance. I needed something that could happen seamlessly,” said Cho, a Tony winner for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and a frequent collaborator at Arena.

After putting together her usual “bible” of research, Cho came up with a baseline layering strategy: Male characters wore the same trousers throughout, varying their looks with period-specific upper-body garments or accessories (jackets, neckwear, etc.) over contemporary, generally less-bulky tops. For example, the cravat and calf-length jacket actor Joseph Carlson wore to play a swaggering President Jackson quite concealed the grungy-casual look of his contemporary character, a detective named Ben.

Set designer Ken MacDonald also found a streamlined solution for the script’s zigzags through time and space. An artist who has worked on theatre and opera in the U.S. and Canada, he devised a Sovereignty set that was simple and relatively abstract, with white surfaces for locale-evoking projections (official seals; casino iconography; a newspaper’s front page) designed by Mark Holthusen. Furniture and other elements—Windsor chairs, a bar-counter-like wall, a fold-up day bed with lashed-on pillows—would have a timeless look. And running along the back would be a basket-weave pattern.

“I did an awful lot of research on Cherokee patterns of basket-weaving,” MacDonald said, recalling a process that involved book-buying, online sleuthing, and correspondence with a former Smithsonian-museum staffer. “I wanted to make sure I was really true to [the tradition]. Mary Kathryn Nagle was very concerned—and rightly so—that these were truly Cherokee patterns and weren’t confused with other patterns.”

Sound designer Ed Littlefield did his legwork, too, hunting up Oklahoma bird sounds for a scene set in the cemetery, for instance, and finding sample-worthy music by contemporary Native artists like the Canadian DJ collective A Tribe Called Red. (He credits Candice Byrd, Nagle’s friend and fellow Cherokee theatre artist, with putting him on the right track for the musical sound.) As frequently happens in theatre, during the rehearsal process, some of Littlefield’s early ideas were shelved: A 19th-century printing-press sound he’d been thrilled to track down ultimately gave way to a more stylized drumming that still evoked machinery, for instance. “You find the best sound for the show,” he said.

During the refinement of the designs and other production elements, Nagle wasn’t merely functioning as Sovereignty’s playwright: She was also the production’s Cherokee-culture sounding board, consultant, and expert eye. Asked if all that multitasking was tiring—she was also working her law job full-time throughout—she said yes.

“It’s scary too, because I don’t know everything,” she said. “I don’t! There’s a lot that I don’t know about my own culture.” That’s hardly surprising, she pointed out, since “most Native people in this country today live with the reality that to some extent, or to full extent, their culture and identity have been taken away from them.” She is working on regaining that lost heritage, she said. In the meantime, “What I have to do, in the best way possible, is ask for help and guidance from those that know more than I do.”

For example, she wanted the play to include some dialogue in Cherokee, though she doesn’t speak the language herself. So she consulted friends, who referred her to a Cherokee Nation contact with the familiar name of John Ross; Nagle says he not only translated her English-language lines into Cherokee, but also recorded the Cherokee versions, so that Roa (whose characters sometimes speak in Cherokee) could have a pronunciation model.

Sovereignty rehearsals began in early December. Relocating from L.A. to D.C. for an extended stretch, in the winter, was a significant undertaking, confessed actor Queypo. Still, he said, he never hesitated. Sovereignty is, “in the bigger picture, important to Native people and the history of Native storytelling in the American theatre, where we’ve been invisible for a long time,” he said.

At the end of the first week of rehearsals, Smith gave out a character-development assignment that is standard for her productions: Each performer would do an in-character improvisation introducing touchstones—a significant piece of paper, for instance—from the character’s life. Other cast members watch these improvisations, but, Smith observed, “What I say is, ‘This is just for the actor. There’s no value judgment.’” Queypo said there was “a gasp in the room when she presented the parameters of what we were going to do,” because the assignment would clearly be a source of “pressure,” but also “this activating energy.” On the day in question, Queypo brought in a letter written by young John Ridge to the love of his life, Sarah Bird Northrup, a white school steward’s daughter. Discoveries from the assignment ultimately informed Queypo’s first scene onstage, early in Act One, he said.

Kyla Garcia also found the exercise hugely helpful. “I learned so much about my character,” she said. She brought in a poem that Sarah Polson had written, with a first line running, “Justice in my blood.”

Meanwhile, as preparations for the production ramped up, Nagle found herself amazed at the resources Arena Stage had mustered. Previous airings of her plays had involved smaller theatres. At Arena, “Just the sheer number of people who are touching my show in some form or fashion is really mind-blowing,” she said.

Sovereignty began previews in Arena’s Kreeger Theater on Jan. 12, 2018, with an official opening following on Jan. 24. Writing afterwards in the Washington Post, Peter Marks found the play edifying and so “worthwhile” that it practically deserved a public-service award. But he noted that, because “Nagle’s characters…spend a lot of time explaining themselves, at the expense of the more satisfying kind of revelation that allows an audience to discover on its own who they are,” the material’s dramatic potential was “not fully realized.”

Writing for the online DC Theatre Scene, Kate Colwell marveled at the “depth of historical knowledge” the play conveyed, and noted how resonant the script was at time when citizenship issues, women’s rights, and Native American activism (over the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance) have been in the news. Still, she thought Nagle’s play rushed past moments that might otherwise have eloquently expressed character. In general, “the massive scope of [Sovereignty’s] ambition also weakens its emotional impact,” she wrote.

Critical quibbles notwithstanding, Sovereignty was ultimately more than just a theatrical production: It became a national event. The New York Times ran a feature on the show. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem participated—alongside Nagle and Smith—in a panel discussion after one performance.

Anyone attending the opening night performance would have spotted another achievement. When the play evoked human foibles and discomfiture—awkward romantic chitchat, kooky mishaps at a casino, a grandfather’s unease with changing diapers—the audience responded almost as if they’d heard Molly Smith’s early January advice. They laughed.

[Celia Wren is a former managing editor of American Theatre magazine.  She writes about theatre for the Washington Post and is the media critic for Commonweal and a frequent contributor to AT and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  Her articles also have appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Newsday, the Boston Globe, the New York Observer, Smithsonian, and Broadway.com, among other publications.

[This is the last article of the “Staging Our Native Nation” series for American Theatre that appeared in the print edition of the magazine; the installments in the series that follow are available only on the website at https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.  (A list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, will be posted after the final installment of this series.)

[Article 4 in AR’s “Staging Our Native Nation” will be posted in three days, 2 April.  Please come back to ROT then and for the subsequent installments as there is still much to be learned about this maturing American theater form emerging from its nest.]

“Staging Our Native Nation”

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[Back in 1996, when I was reading scripts for the Gypsy Road Company’s 21st Century Playwrights Festival, I read Call the Serpent God to Me by M. Elena Carrillo, a native of southern Texas with Tejano and Native American roots.  I never saw a performance of Serpent God, and I have no idea what became of the play or playwright after I filed my evaluation, but I’ve often recalled that play, which I found a remarkable theatrical creation.  Carrillo incorporated images drawn from her American (Catholic), Tejano, and Aztec heritages in her dramaturgy, using both visual imagery and performative techniques from her various traditions. 

[I knew little about Native American theater before reading Serpent God and I’ve learned only a general outline of its appearance and development as part of the American theater scene since then, but I’ve felt that it’s a remarkable cultural phenomenon.  When I opened my April issue of American Theatre the other evening and started reading “Staging Our Native Nation,” a series on native peoples’ theater—which also covers the theatrical efforts of native Hawaiians and Inupiat (native Alaskans)—I discovered how far along the phenomenon has come. 

[In a very real sense, native American theater artists have invented our first truly indigenous theater.  Mainstream American theater, including African-American drama, is pretty much an adoption of existing European theater forms; we merely put an American stamp on it.  Indigenous peoples have taken the basic form of Western theater (as well as the performance forms of other cultures, I presume), and adapted it to tell their stories and, what’s more, incorporate their techniques of storytelling, including traditional music, dance, and ritual. 

[I’m republishing this series of eight articles about indigenous American theater, from the Theatre Communications Group’s AT of April 2018 (volume 35, number 4) to share this conversation about an under-covered part of American theater with ROTters.  (Some of the AT articles don’t appear in the print edition of the magazine, but are available on the TCG website; the whole series is accessible from https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.)  The first installment, “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet (a Mohegan Indian from Connecticut), appears below; the rest of the AT series will follow at three-day intervals.  ~Rick]

NATIVE WOMEN RISING

by Madeline Sayet

Why three premieres in Oregon are a sign of the times—and a long time coming.

This doesn’t happen every season: In Oregon this April, you can see three new plays by Native women produced at major resident theatres. Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play will be performed at Artists Repertory Theatre April 1-29; DeLanna Studi’s And So We Walked will be up at Portland Center Stage at the Armory March 31-May 13; and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta opens at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival March 28 and runs through Oct. 27. If you stop through Portland on your way to or from Ashland in April, you could see all three in one trip.

While the timing of this convergence is unique, FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota), Nagle (Cherokee), and Studi (Cherokee) are in no way new to the American theatre. They’ve made it this far because of their creativity, their community and ancestral support, and their unflinching belief that Native stories matter and will be told. Also: Their plays are really good. They vary widely in genre, as do the origins of each story. Each play has the ability to make you laugh and open your eyes to see the world around you in unexpected ways.

Indeed, opening eyes to an unacknowledged world was a key impulse behind Nagle’s Manahatta. As a member of the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater in New York City in 2013, she realized that none of her non-Native colleagues knew the story of the Lenape people whose land the theatre stood on. She knew that was the story she needed to write there.

For her part, Studi had been having dreams since she was a child of walking the Trail of Tears with her dad to find out where her family came from. So when a director asked about her dream project, she knew that was the story she needed to tell.

And FastHorse began The Thanksgiving Play in Ireland while staying in Tyrone Guthrie’s historic house on a fellowship from the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis that provided her with the space and time to create.

But there was another prompt behind each project as well. Each of these women had been told countless times, in countless ways, that there was no room for Native stories in the American theatre. So these plays emerged not only from the writers’ storytelling impulse but also out of their drive to create Native plays that would make it to the stage. These playwrights are the kind of people who don’t tell you you’re wrong about something; they meet you where you are and show you something you need to see.

As the narrative of each of these plays illustrates, the silencing of Native stories is common. It is also catastrophic for Native culture and community, and for the policies that affect us. For us, the stories we tell are a matter of life and death. Traditional Native storytelling molds itself to the shape of the given moment and to what is needed. The narratives we put onstage therefore have direct consequences in shaping our world.

The U.S. theatre community seems to be acknowledging that fact, examining its practices and its roots. And what American roots run deeper than indigenous stories? Yet what American stories have been more mistold and silenced than those of Native Americans?

In many ways these three plays stand as powerful acts of defiance against the silencing of Native voices. They are also savvy hybrids of indigenous philosophies and Western theatre. After all, what good is writing an amazing play if the American theatre won’t produce it?

Larissa FastHorse has been told that her plays don’t get second or third productions due to casting demands. There is a widespread misconception in the theatre field that casting indigenous actors is an impossible task. So she removed that excuse by writing a play that can be performed with four white or white-passing actors in a single setting.

“The play is still dealing with indigenous issues and the indigenous experience in America,” FastHorse insists. “The whole play is a metaphor for the invisibility of indigenous people in the narrative.”

Meanwhile, artistic directors told Nagle they were only interested in telling contemporary stories, and that Native stories take place in the past, to which she responded: “If you think our stories from the past are not relevant to what is happening today, let me show you how the past is the present.” The interlocking dramatic structure she applied to connect characters across generations when working on Manahatta as part of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group has found its way into many of her plays since, because it illustrates the historic ripples of every law we make and every story we tell.

As Nagle puts it, “So you think what happened to the Lenape on Manahatta island is something from the 1600s, not relevant today? What do you think 2008 was about on Wall Street? How do you critique Wall Street as an institution when it began as an institution that took homes from the Lenape? That no one talks about. You can’t critique it and not tell the full narrative.”

Studi is an actor who hadn’t intended to become a playwright, but like many performers from marginalized communities, limited options drove her to create her own opportunities. “People don’t think of me when they’re just casting a play like Romeo and Juliet,” Studi explains. “They only think of me when they think of Native roles. That was something I got frustrated with. I wanted more. I wanted a challenge—and I got tired of waiting for people to write a role for me.”

So in her solo show And So We Walked, she challenges herself with many complex roles, showcasing new possibilities.

The takeaway, if you missed it: indigenous peoples are alive today, and not all of their stories come from “somewhere else.” When you look around you, do you know the stories of the place you are in? Or of the contemporary indigenous people who live there? How many indigenous street names do you blindly drive past every day without wondering what they mean? If we are the storytellers of America, and we ignore the indigenous stories of America, is it any wonder that the American theatre has something of an inferiority complex vis a vis Britain?

So if this year is a big year for Native theatre—and it does seem to be—I wanted to know why. These artists have been doing great work and building their craft for years. What’s different about now?

FastHorse, who has had her plays (including What Would Crazy Horse Do? and Urban Rez) produced around the country for more than 10 years, typically as the only Native voice there, credits the influence of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), on whose board she currently sits.

“They have been providing space at both the national conference and the Fall Forum for a good four or five years now to allow myself, Ty Defoe, and other indigenous folks to have a platform at the conference, a national voice—again and again and again. Just being able to have people realize we are here, we exist, we are actually in your theatre town and you could be producing a local playwright who is indigenous, and beyond that, you have a responsibility to do that to honor the people on whose land you are standing.”

FastHorse thinks that message is now being heard, and she has enjoyed hearing increasingly good news from theatres about how they have developed new relationships with local indigenous artists.

Nagle pointed to the work that has been done by Native theatre artists in past decades to pave the way.

“You look at what playwrights like Bill Yellow Robe, Diane Glancy, Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Suzan Harjo, and Spiderwoman Theatre, what they’ve been doing for decades—I think that laid the groundwork for what our generation is now coming in and doing. There have been a fair amount of battle cries from Native artists saying, ‘Why aren’t you producing Native plays? Why aren’t you producing Native plays? Why aren’t you producing Native plays?’” She laughs: “So in many ways it’s kind of easy to show up now and be like, ‘Hey guys, why aren’t you producing Native plays?’ when people have been saying it for decades.” (An exhaustive list of Native playwrights, theatres, and resources can be found here.)

Nagle also believes that the 2016 standoff between federal authorities and Native peoples and their supporters over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock was a game changer in the conversation, because its story affected people so deeply. Suddenly the conversation moved from the assumption that Native stories weren’t relevant to people wanting to know what they could do to help. Her advice: Produce a Native play.

“The reason things like Standing Rock happen—that a corporate oil company can literally, the day after a tribe files an affidavit marking where their ancestors are buried, where their sacred sites are—you know why the next day that corporation can show up with bulldozers and bulldoze 27 burials? Because no one puts Native narratives in the media or on the stage.”

Nagle, whose play Sovereignty was produced at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage earlier this year (story here), is thrilled that theatres are stepping up to tell these stories. She believes this will have a wider impact on people’s understanding of contemporary indigenous issues.

Studi also feels that Native stories are rising to meet the current moment. “I feel with our current political climate and our current president that a lot of our people feel like they are not being heard,” Studi says. “I know I feel like the current political climate is trying to stifle my voice. That makes me fight even harder to get my voice out there, and if there is a time that our voice needs to be heard, it’s right now. It’s time.”

She’s also optimistic that Native stories, far from being checked off a list of token efforts, will only whet audiences’ appetite for more. “When we have people like Mary Kathryn Nagle, Larissa FastHorse, or William Yellow Robe go out and do their shows, the audiences are moved and they want to know more. Hopefully that will encourage those theatres to hire more Native playwrights and produce more Native plays.”

It is no accident that these leaders also happen to be women. In indigenous societies, women are often the story keepers. Still, everyone must contribute for a society to function. The complex structure of indigenous languages and cultures transcends gender binaries and hierarchies. America still has much to learn from Native people.

I have worked with and learned from these brilliant women in a variety of settings. These three theatre artists have also crossed paths with each other for some time, acting in each other’s plays and working together as activists, as when Nagle asked Studi to join her for a traveling piece about the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Sliver of a Full Moon.

Asked about their work, each describes a different approach. FastHorse describes her style as a kind of hyper-realism designed to get you to buy into a world, but where the entire play is a metaphor. Studi believes in the power of play, of modes of storytelling where things become other things and the audience jumps on board, not knowing where the journey will take them. And Nagle’s plays use real historical events and people to illustrate how everything is connected.

As a director and performer, I have been lucky to know these artists for a while. It began when I landed at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the magical moment between 2005 and 2010, when Professor Karmenlara Ely offered an annual course on Native American theatre. I enrolled in the final term of that course, in which future theatremakers studied Hanay Geiogamah, Spiderwoman Theatre, William Yellow Robe, and Diane Glancy, and read two-spirit philosophy. As one of two Native students in a class on Native theatre, taught by a Native professor, I was transformed by this palpable shift into the seat of cultural normativity.

Before then, the only thing my classmates had consulted me on was Shakespeare, since prior to college, Shakespeare and traditional Native stories were considered my fields of expertise. Much of the contemporary American theatre we were taught seemed irrelevant to my experiences. But suddenly, my classmates wanted to know about my home. About Mohegan (my nation). About our art and philosophy. About our stories. For one semester, contemporary Native playwrights were canonized in the same way as the dead white men of our other courses. Students talked about Yellow Robe the way they talked about Shakespeare, Brecht, and Beckett—with reverence.

A few months later, I visited Maine to volunteer as a performer in a reading of one of Yellow Robe’s plays, and there began my role in Native theatre. That event led to acting in readings by Nagle and FastHorse, and then into directing. When I told Yellow Robe that my non-Native professors told me not to tell people I’m Native because it would hurt my career, he laughed. “There’s enough Indians pretending not to be Indians,” he said. And that was that. That relationship changed my life.

I appreciate the effect that moment had on me. And on others: My mom recently told me she heard kids at the tribal youth center marveling that a Mohegan (me!) made this year’s “Forbes 30 Under 30” list for doing Native theatre. This was a huge surprise to them; it meant you could become successful for promoting your culture. Cultural erasure wasn’t necessary for success after all.

Building a canon is also building a community. That is why, when Larissa FastHorse’s plays are produced, she requests that her work not be the only indigenous art in the building and that she not be the only indigenous artist working on the production. For a large part of her career she has been the first indigenous playwright, often even the first indigenous artist working at a given theatre. Many or most of those institutions lack a history of engagement with indigenous communities, and in some cases, even an awareness that their local indigenous communities exist.

“It can be very tokenistic when theatres say, ‘Now we are doing a black play, so now we are going to reach out to the black community,’ or, ‘Now we are doing a Native play, so now we are going to reach out to the Native community,’” FastHorse says. “It can come across like, we’re only interested in you now. So to me it was really important to say, let’s take what resources we have and put them behind uplifting other artists.”

She believes that form of engagement isn’t just a good first step for many theatres; it’s also something that most every theatre can afford to do in some way. This policy has led to many diverse partnerships between theatres and indigenous artists in their area. These take the form of readings, dance pieces, commissioned site-specific works, Native visual artists selling work in the lobby, even indigenous catering companies who go on to have long-term relationships with theatres.

“Saying I’m not the only indigenous person they are hiring means they have to think, who else can we hire?” FastHorse adds that this approach has been very successful everywhere she has worked.

The spirit of collaboration and cooperation runs deep, Studi says. She cites the Cherokee word “Gadugi,” which means “the coming together of people to celebrate, support, and promote each other. I feel like that’s what we do as Native women. The things I am saying about Larissa and Mary Kathryn, and I will shout them from the nearest rooftop if I have to, is that I can guarantee that when people come see their plays they’ll be like, ‘Oh, yes, exactly.’ What I’m speaking is the truth. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

So this April in Oregon, as FastHorse, Nagle, and Studi begin to make the canonization of Native plays the new normal, let’s take a moment to realize what a significant a time we are living in. The erasure of stories, like the erasure of languages and sovereignty, dehumanizes us. It turns us Native people into objects. That dehumanization enables a culture where the rates of violence against Native women are significantly higher than against our non-Native sisters. But our stories, like our complex languages, remind everyone that the world still has much to learn from the indigenous cultures that spring from this land.

[Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut, is a director, writer, and performer.  For a list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, see the final installment of this series.]