Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement –

History of Native American Theater

[In my introduction to “‘Staging Our Native Nation’” on 24 March 2018, the start of a series of articles from American Theatre I reposted, I said that I was introduced to Native American theater by a script I read in 1996. In that same introduction, I confessed: 

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.

[What I did perceive from my limited exposure led me to formulate a sort of general characterization of the theater form devised by Indigenous American writers and directors.  In 2018, I wrote:

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.

[From what I’ve read on the field then and afterwards, my impression wasn’t far from the prevailing wisdom of the theater experts and academicians.  (What’s missing from the literature is the descriptive opinions of the Native practitioners—but I guess most of them are busy inventing their theater instead of writing about it.)

[(The play I read in 1996 was Call the Serpent God to Me by M. Elena Carrillo and I posted my script evaluation on Rick On Theater in “Two Script Reports” on 20 February 2020.  With my evaluation, I was required to write a letter to the playwright; here’s some of what I said to Carrillo:

Reading your script was a great pleasure!  The juxtaposition of Aztec, Catholic, and Tejano cultural elements provides a unique perspective that makes reading Serpent God a constant surprise and keeps the reader—and most likely, an audience—intrigued and rapt.  The incorporation of the images of Aztec gods, as well as the figures of Domitila’s Lamentation and Fernando’s Diablo [characters in the play and spirit figures who haunt them], gives the script a theatrical aspect that is also theatrically provocative.  The addition of appropriate music as you call for should make Serpent God a truly magical theatrical experience.  The only appropriate comparisons for this piece are non-Western: Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Kathakali—all highly theatrical, multi-disciplinary forms.)

[I won’t be going deeply into the structure or content of Native American drama.  There are lists of Indigenous dramatists and collections of Native plays, and the same is true of Native American theater troupes and companies that present Indigenous dramas.  I may reference them, but I won’t make my own list here.  I intend to lay out the progress of Native American theater, sticking pretty close to the historical outline.

[A note on usage: ROTters will note that “Staging Our Native Nation,” the American Theatre series on Native peoples’ theater, also covers the theatrical efforts of native Hawaiians and Inupiat (native Alaskans), and in those articles, the term “Native American” includes those peoples as well as American Indians.  For the purposes of this post, however, the terms Native American, Native, American Indian, Indian, Indigenous American, and Indigenous will all refer to the Indigenous peoples of North America—principally, the United States and Canada.  (If I need to make a distinction, I will say so specifically.)

[For this post, I relied heavily on Sidoní López and Hanane Benali’s “Native American Theater: A Concise History” from Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies v. 54 (July 2016).]

Although contemporary Native American theater emerged during the second half of the 20th century, its origins draw from an extensive oral tradition which was mainly based on Indian traditional storytelling.  Stories of all kinds about Native tribes and cultures were passed down from generation to generation for purposes of education, entertainment, and the preservation of the Native American cultural heritage. 

Most of these stories were performed and dramatized by Indian storytellers for their audiences, suggesting the first literary, historical, and cultural antecedents of contemporary Native American theater.  Most Indigenous American cultures didn’t have a written language before the arrival of the Europeans, so transmission was oral.

(Without recapping a detailed history of the writing systems of the Native peoples of the Americas, I’ll simply state that no indigenous writing system was known among North American Indians at the time of first European contact—neither the 11th century with the Vikings nor the 15th century with Columbus, et al.—unlike the Indians of Mesoamerica, who’d developed their own writing systems as early as the 3rd millennium BCE.  

(A number of writing systems for different North American Indian languages were developed in the early and mid-19th century as a result of the influence of European writing.  Several systems, based to one extent or another on the Latin alphabet, were invented and introduced by European and Euro-American missionaries, teachers, and linguists.)

When American Indian writing emerged, Native Americans went from telling stories to writing them down, using different literary forms, such as the novel, poetry, autobiography, and short story.  Indigenous drama, however, wasn’t part of Native writing during this period. 

Since ancient times, Native Americans have relied upon a diverse and vibrant oral tradition, often seen as oral literature.  This consisted of stories, accounts, tales, myths, legends, epic narratives, and songs about Indigenous cultures that were intended to educate and entertain members of the tribe, and to preserve its cultural traditions. 

When the tribal culture bearers told these stories, they were accompanied by songs, dances, music, pictographs, wampum (belts woven from beads used as a memory aid in oral tradition), and dramatic presentations.  Essentially, Native American storytelling consisted of a solo performer, without props or costumes, telling a story to an audience and passing down important cultural values and tribal histories through the generations.

Native storytellers practiced their art by giving life and voice to different tribal stories and by making use of certain theatrical elements such as distinct intonation patterns and rhythms, visual images, introductions to tales, word exaggeration, gestures, and body movements.  Handed down from generation to generation, these practices show the similarities and closeness to theater of the performance and dramatization of Native American oral storytelling traditions. 

(Several examples of Native American storytelling from various Indian nations are described in “Native American Theater: A Concise History” by Sidoní López and Hanane Benali, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies [Zaragoza, Spain: Univ. of Zaragoza, Dept. of English and German Philology] V. 54 [July 2016]: 94-96 [Native_American_theater_A_concise_history.pdf].)

The existence of storytelling and its performance in early Native American oral traditions and literature demonstrates that contemporary Native American theater comes from this tradition.  The Oneida/Chippewa playwright Bruce King (b. 1933) states that “theater is about storytelling,” whereas the American scholar and professor Christy Stanlake talks about the “close connection between Native American theatre and Native storytelling.”  

In the same line, the Cherokee playwright Diane Glancy (b. 1941) suggests that “story-telling in the oral tradition could be called an early form of theatre, a one-character play.  [It’s probably more accurate to call storytelling a one-actor play, since the storyteller may personate many characters.]  The action or plot was the voice telling the story that was integral for survival.” 

It wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that Native American playwrights and Indigenous theater companies started to write and produce Native plays, leading to the emergence of contemporary Native American drama. 

The proliferation of Native plays has continued into the 21st century with academic study starting to be conspicuous in the field, paving the way for the consolidation of a diverse, vibrant, and evolving genre that continues to expand, making itself more available to both Native and non-Native audiences.

While it seems accurate to label these traditional tales and stories as early forms of Native theater, the notion of considering or categorizing them as theater is debatable.  Although many Native playwrights assert that storytelling is a central element of their dramaturgy, they don’t categorize or define storytelling as theater per se. 

Storytelling’s a venerable art form of its own, but in itself, it’s not theater.  It’s a different art the way ballet is different.  Critics and scholars agree that there are similarities between storytelling and theater, but they also point out fundamental differences that set them apart.  So, to be precise, it’s more accurate to see telling stories as the antecedent of contemporary Native American theater.

According to Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller in their introductory survey in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993), there were proto-theatrical performances in the Americas before Columbus.  The Spanish found “Aztec performances in Mexico that blended song, dance, comic byplay, and animal imitations.”

In North America, Native tribes performed multifaceted rituals with decided performative elements with complex stage effects, masking, magic tricks, and clowning, along with singing or chanting and dancing.  The performances Indigenous peoples of the Southwest and in Canada were even more elaborate and by the early 16th century in New Spain were acted in Spanish and by the 17th century, in French in Quebec.

The dramatic presentation of the American Natives, unlike that of their Western counterparts, were “charged with cosmic significance that sets it apart from events in the ordinary world, and the ‘audience’ are participants rather than passive spectators.”  The Native American theatrical landscape was diverse, covering a wide range of forms.

When Native American writing emerged in the 18th century, Indian authors began to produce and compose a wide range of literature in English.  They started to write about their own stories in a diverse and expanding literary field, including novels, poetry, autobiographies and short stories.  However, Native theater was not being published and thus became the only main literary form that didn’t appear among the surge of Native American literature in print starting in the late 18th century.

(Samson Occom [Mohegan; 1723-92] was a Christian preacher who published his autobiography, A Short Narrative of My Life, in 1768.  William Apess [Pequot; 1798-1839] saw his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in print in 1829.  In 1883, Sarah Winnemucca [Paiute; 1844-91] wrote about her tribe’s first interactions with European Americans in Life Among the Paiutes, and in 1854, John Rollin Ridge [Cherokee; 1827-67] published what’s considered the first novel by a Native American, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, about a Mexican figure of disputed historicity, 1829-53, called “the Robin Hood of the West” or “the Robin Hood of El Dorado.”)

Among the reasons for the dearth of Native plays during the period of European settlement are colonialism itself.  Most of the Native American languages, traditions, customs, rituals, ceremonies, and religions were suppressed. 

Entire nations were destroyed, along with them, their culture, language, history, philosophies and religions, and arts.  The loss of tribal lands, forced resettlement, and confinement to reservations left them without a sense of belonging, which was the basis of much of the Native peoples’ literature, oral or written.

The dominance of the Western culture suppressed, both intentionally and circumstantially, the Indigenous lifestyle, making the Indians strangers in their own land, the foundation of much of their beliefs and their art.  As Western consumerism and capitalism came to dominate the Americas, and poverty in this unfamiliar economic environment overtook the American Natives, time and inclination to make art was supplanted by the need to subsist and survive.  The development of Native American theater was suppressed for more than two centuries. 

The Indigenous writer, video producer, storyteller, popular theater worker, and actor Cat Cayuga (Onandaga/Mohawk Nation) points out that “when the first colonists arrived they considered our art forms crude and primitive.  They had the idea that no form of Native Theater existed prior to the ‘discovery.’  It is this attitude which has made the development of our art difficult for us.  The dominant society has always used its own terms to define art.” 

During the first years of the 20th century, there was no publication or production of Native American plays, but there were some Native American theatrical performances based on traditional storytelling, which again could be considered as being among the antecedents or predecessors of contemporary Native American theater. 

The effects of colonialism explain the relegation of Native theatrical traditions to the fields of anthropology, religious studies, and ethnology.  Consequently, Native performance traditions weren’t explored as theater, and treating them as products of other disciplines contributed to the silencing and displacement of Native theater until the 20th century.  

The only drama possibly written by a Native American author before 1900 is Wep-ton-no-Mah, The Indian Mail Carrier by Go-won-go Mohawk (1860-1924), a Seneca playwright and actor, and Charles W. Charles, her husband, who served as a captain with George Armstrong Custer.  Wep-ton-no-Mah was first performed in Liverpool, England, in April 1893, and became incredibly popular.  A copy of the script is held by the Library of Congress and has been digitized.

As the new century dawned, Te Ata’s one-woman performances of Native American traditional stories and legends made use of Indian props, such as a drum, a bow and arrow, and an Indian costume.  Although Mary “Te Ata” Thompson Fisher (1895-1995; Choctaw Nation) had difficulties as a Native American performer, her career went on for over 70 years.  She educated Euro-American audiences about Native America by presenting accurate information about Native cultures and Indian storytelling was again performed and dramatized.

It wasn’t until the end of the century’s first third that Native American plays were produced in professional mainstream houses.  Rollie Lynn Riggs, a Native playwright of Cherokee origin, wrote Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), the play on which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II based their musical Oklahoma! (1943), but Riggs (known professionally as Lynn) first saw his Big Lake and Roadside staged on Broadway (1927 and 1930, respectively).

Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night was staged in 1932 at the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.  It’s a theatrical piece offering a portrayal of Native life in eastern Oklahoma during the 1920s, but Broadway producers said that New York audiences weren’t ready for the non-chronological, episodic play. 

Although the author gained nationwide popularity with his plays—he had three other plays (not counting Oklahoma!) on Broadway after Roadside—he often neglected to point out his Indian heritage, which was not generally known. 

The rise of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a reawakening of Native cultures since it appeared as a movement in which minorities and the societally marginalized demanded an end to discrimination and the right to speak for themselves.  In addition, there were a series of social and political incidents that helped increase and renew Native American cultural and ethnic pride.  

This period of social and political upheavals is widely known as the Red Power period and includes major events such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay on 20 November 1969, the so-called Trail of Broken Treaties from 6 October to 3 November 1972, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington D.C. from 3 to 9 November 1972, and The Longest Walk across the United States from 11 February to 15 July 1978 (3,200 miles).

Within this context of self-expression, social and political movements in favor of Native American cultural traditions, performances and ethnic renewal, a period of literary brilliance for Native literature emerged under the name of the Native American Renaissance, a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln (1983) that refers mainly to the literary works following N. Scott Momaday’s (1934-2024; Kiowa) 1969 Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn (1968). 

During this literary period, indigenous writers were not only telling their stories in novels, autobiographies, poetry and short stories, but also bringing their storytelling and performing traditions to the stage through the writing and production of various contemporary plays.

When these contemporary Native plays started to be written during the 1960s and 1970s, many of them were performed and produced for and by various Native American theater companies.  Since their emergence in the 1960s, these Native drama companies have been relevant to the development of contemporary Native American theater, having promoted and produced numerous theatrical works by Native dramatists in the United States. 

The first to form Native companies with indigenous actors was Arthur Junaluska (1912-78; Cherokee) in New York during the 1950s.  One decade later, Jay Silverheels (1912-80; Mohawk), George Pierre, Noble ‘Kid’ Chissell (1905-87) and others created the Indian Actor’s Workshop in Los Angeles, a company intended to coach Indian actors to work in film while also staging some productions. 

In addition, the foundation of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the 1960s is also considered one of the earliest and most significant contributors to Native American drama.  The IAIA “sought to balance the education of students with training in both Native American and European theatrical forms, and was dedicated to developing a contemporary Indian Theater which has meaning to contemporary Indians.“

The Institute of American Indian Arts also created an amphitheater for the performance and representation of plays, such as Monica Charles’s Mowitch (1968), a play about Indian Shakers, and Bruce King’s Evening at the Warbonnet (1989), which deals with political issues, especially those related to the American Indian Movement.

Several years later, in 1972, the American Indian Theater Ensemble was founded by the Kiowa/Delaware dramatist Hanay Geiogamah (b. 1945) in New York City with the help of Ellen Stewart (1919-2011) of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club.  Later known as the Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE), this Native theater company was founded upon Geiogamah’s belief that “plays for and about Indians, their past, their despairing present, their hopes and dreams and daily lives, presented by Indian artists could be of inestimable value in uniting and uplifting the 850.000 Indian people in the United States.”

One of the most prolific Native playwrights and a crucial figure in the history of contemporary Native American drama, Geiogamah created the first all-Indian repertory company, which produced his first play Body Indian (1972).  Dealing with the problem of alcoholism and self-destructiveness among Native Americans, Body Indian became the most highly acclaimed of Geiogamah’s theatrical pieces and was later included in the first collection of Native plays, New Native American Drama: Three Plays (1980). 

This collection also contains Geiogamah’s Foghorn (1973), a play dealing with Indian stereotypes, and 49 (1975), a theatrical piece that provides a blend of contemporary and traditional elements in Native American cultures.  Both plays were performed and produced by NATE along with Robert Shorty’s and Geraldine Keams’s (b. 1951; Navajo Nation) Na Haaz Zaan (1972), focusing on the Navajo myth of creation; Geiogamah’s monologues Grandma (1984) and Grandpa (1984); and Bruce King’s ghost story Whispers from the Other Side (1985).

By the mid-1970s, the Kuna/Rappahannock Muriel Miguel founded the Spiderwoman Theater, a feminist theater company which recruited various groups of women from different ethnic backgrounds and that mainly intended to promote and foster Native women’s contribution to Native American theater. 

Based on the story-weaving technique, which “combines the philosophies and styles of feminist theater with a traditional understanding of the power of storytelling and oral history,” Spiderwoman Theater in New York City created and produced several plays that combined traditional Native storytelling with the procedures of contemporary Western theater.  Examples of these plays include Women in Violence (1977), The Three Sisters from Here to There (1982), Reverb-ber-ber-rations (1991) and Power Pipes (1992), which mainly focused on gender issues, oppression, poverty, racism and violence.

By the 1980s, the Colorado sisters of Mexican-Indian ancestry created the Coatlicue Theater Company at the American Indian Community House in New York City.  Taking inspiration from Spiderwoman Theater, Elvira (1931-2016) and Hortensia Colorado (Chichimec/Otomi) wrote and produced plays that bridged both traditional and contemporary stories. 

These plays include 1992: Blood Speaks, which deals with the significant role that Christianity played in the oppression of Native Americans, and A Traditional Kind of Woman: Too Much, Not ‘Nuff, a play that centers on the stories and experiences of Native women as they struggle with issues such as alcoholism, violence, and rape.

In the 1990s several other Native American theater companies emerged in response to the needs of individual playwrights.  Such is the case of the Red Eagle Soaring Theatre Group, which was founded in Seattle in 1990 and aimed particularly at advising young Indians about AIDS and other current issues.  Another troupe is the Red Path Theater Company in Chicago, which was founded around 1995 and produced plays mainly focused on contemporary American Indian urban life.

Alongside these Native theater companies, there were also festivals of Native American plays.  The Native Voices Festival was first held at Illinois State University in Normal in 1994, becoming the resident theater company at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles in 1999.  In the following years, Native Voices hosted festivals developing and producing plays by Native American writers from both the United States and Canada. 

In addition, one of the most important initiatives in Native American theater was the creation in 1996 of Project HOOP (Honoring Our Origins and People Through Native American Theater), which emerged as “a national, multi-disciplinary initiative to advance Native theater artistically, academically, and professionally.” 

Project Hoop aims at “establish[ing] Native theater as an integrated subject of study and creative development in tribal colleges, Native communities, K-12 schools, and mainstream institutions, based on Native perspectives, traditions, views of spirituality, histories, cultures, languages, communities, and lands.”  

The emergence of all these Native American theater companies, the celebration of festivals, and initiatives in Native American drama helped promote the great proliferation of Native plays across the United States.  There are currently over 250 published and far over 600 unpublished plays by some 250 Native American and First Nations (the Canadian designation for its Indigenous population) playwrights and theater groups in North America. 

In the wake of this diversity and proliferation of Native American plays came a considerable body of scholarship in the field that started to be noticed at the beginning of the 21st century.  The first book of essays on Native American theater appeared in 2000, published and co-edited by Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby under the title American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader.  This book represents the first step towards the development of Native American theater as a field of study. 

The Geiogamah-Darby collection was followed by Birgit Dawes’s Native North American Theater in a Global Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference (2007), a monograph that addresses the most relevant theoretical aspects of contemporary Native North American theater, including an historical overview of the genre, its categorization and definition, the controversies about its geographical, political, and cultural boundaries, while also providing in-depth analyses of 25 plays by playwrights both Native American and First Nations. 

Contemporary Native American theater has been promoted not only by the availability of plays in publication and scholarship in the field, but also by various institutions.  Such is the case of New York City’s Public Theater, an institution that has been active in this promotion through the celebration of an annual Native Theater Festival in which the works of Native playwrights, actors, directors, and musicians are highlighted as part of the Native Theater Initiative initiated in 2007. 

Similarly, OKC Theatre Company in Oklahoma City launched an annual Native American Play Festival in 2010, offering Native playwrights the opportunity to submit new plays, from which some are chosen for staged readings and one is produced and given a two-week run.  That festival is now housed at the Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company on the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma. 

In addition, Native Voices at the Autry, America’s leading Native theater company devoted exclusively to developing the work of both emergent and established Native playwrights, continues to offer an annual venue for the stage, production and performance of Native American plays.

[Native American plays have been included in several collections and anthologies.  Among such works are Hanay Geiogamah’s New Native American Drama: Three Plays (1980); The Institute of American Indian Art provides three plays written by its own students in Gathering Our Own: A Collection of IAIA Student Playwrights (1996); and Diane Glancy’s War Cries: Plays by Diane Glancy (1997) offers nine plays, which combine both a vision of contemporary life and traditional aspects that connect Indians with their past. 

[Two anthologies appeared in 1999: Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, which includes five theatrical pieces by Native American authors, one play by a Native Hawaiian dramatist, and another play by a First Nation (Canadian Indigenous peoples) playwright; and Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays, which contains eleven plays by Native American dramatists.

[In 2003, the first anthology of Native women’s plays was published under the title Keepers of the Morning Star: An Anthology of Native Women’s Theater.  This was followed by another anthology, entitled Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English (2003), which was the first collection to be published in Canada. 

[In 2009, the second volume of Staging Coyote’s Dream was published, including seven plays by Native Canadian playwrights and one theatrical piece by Spiderwoman Theater’s founder, Muriel Miguel, and another play published by her daughter, Murielle Borst.

[The Native American Women Playwrights Archive also brought out some anthologies during the 2000s.  Footpaths and Bridges: Voices from the Native American Women Playwrights Archive was published in 2008, the second collection of Native plays by indigenous women in the United States and Canada—including a play by a Native Hawaiian dramatist as well. 

[The NAWPA 2007 conference “Honoring Spiderwoman Theater/Celebrating Native American Theater” also generated the publication of another anthology entitled Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater (2009), containing several plays, interviews, production histories and academic articles.

[Several authors saw their works published not only in these anthologies but also in individual collections of Native American plays:¨William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s Where the Pavement Ends: Five Native American Plays (2001), which combines stories of the hard lives and experiences of Native Americans in Fort Peck Indian Reservation with comic relief, in matters dealing with Native identity, tradition, and oppression; E. Donald Two-Rivers’s Brief-Case Warriors: Stories for the Stage (2001) offers a series of plays focusing on the contemporary lives of urban Indians who are especially concerned with their survival from alcohol problems and discrimination. 

[Occasionally alternating between prose and poetry, Diane Glancy’s American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays (2002) contains different plays with a great poetic sense that include traditional and contemporary stories about Native Americans, while being mainly concerned with themes of gender, acculturation, survival, generational relationships, and the tensions and confrontations between Native American traditional values and white American values, customs, and religious beliefs. 

[Equally important to note is Bruce King’s Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays (2006), an individual collection of plays that includes great moral content and a sense that the characters are struggling between good and evil.  In addition, King offers a combination of traditional and contemporary elements such as humor, music, debate, histories, and experiences, which take the reader on an impressive journey through Native cultures.

[In addition, Alexander Street Press’s North American Indian Drama, a collection of digital plays which contains more than 250 plays by both Native American and First Nations playwrights is another resource for theater by Indigenous Americans.  The collection starts in the 1930s with Lynn Riggs’s first Native American plays to be published and produced in the United States, and progresses through the 20th century.]