Native Plays and the Academic Community: Field Discussion Transcription

Field Discussion
Native Plays and the Academic Community
November 14, 2008, 1 p.m.
Moderator: Terry Gomez
Panel: Randy Reinholz, Karmenlara Seidman, Dianne Yeahquo Reyner, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.

Terry Gomez: Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Terry Gomez, I am Numunu, from the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma. I am a graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts, for creative writing, and I have my MFA from the University of New Mexico in dramatic writing. I’m a playwright – a published playwright – director, actor, painter. I was invited by the festival to moderate this panel and I’m not used to moderating panels, so take it easy on me. But I’d like to introduce to you our guests. We also have this sheet of paper, so I’ll just read a little bit about them, and please take time to read everybody’s… read about them. All right. Karmenlara Seidman, Ph.D., was a dancer at NYU. She is a teacher, and she started the first Native Drama in Performance for the Tisch Drama Department three years ago. Her published work appears in Jeffrey Chock’s Trinidad Carnival, in Women in Performance and Performance in the Search. Karmenlara is also a millenary designer in New York’s East Village, where she is a collaborator with Barbara Fineman, and their headpieces and couture hats have appeared recently in high fashion editorials. Randy Reinholz is from the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, has directed close to fifty plays across the U.S. and Canada. In 2006, Mr. Reinholz produced and directed the world premieres and tours of Stone Heart and The Red Road and a staged reading of Wild Horses at the Kennedy Center’s New Vision New Voices. In 2007, his Native Voices at the Autry Equity production of The Berlin Blues premiered in Los Angeles. Mr. Reinholz has co-sponsored showcases and Native American diversity workshops for ABC and NBC, and is an annual guest artist for the Fox American Indian Summer Institute. Ms. Dianne Yeahquo Reyner, an enrolled member of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma, is a playwright, performer, director, and founding member of both the American Indian Repertory Theatre in 2006, based in Lawrence, Kansas, and Thunderbird Theatre in 1974 based out of Haskell Indian Nations University. Mr. William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. is an enrolled member of the Assiniboine Tribe of the Fort Peck Tribes, and my former professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre Company in New York, New York, and the Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul. He serves on the advisory board of Red Eagle Soaring Theatre Company in Seattle. Okay, so, today we are here to talk about academics. I’ll give you a brief overview. I am a playwright, and I was one of those people who had no intention of going any further than my associate's degree. I thought that was it. When I got it, I thought I would get fine work as an artist and writer, which I did, but very meager and hard-going. So I decided to finish my bachelor's, and as people tell me, I’m a late bloomer; I don’t know what that means, exactly, but when they say that, I always thought they’re kind of like, slumped over. So, I don’t know if that’s what that means. But I finished my bachelor's; I was the first student to complete the bachelor's degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts when they opened up their BFA program, and thought I was done again. And I was asked to come in and teach some theater classes. I had been doing what, apparently, is called Guerilla Theater. I didn’t know – I wasn’t calling it that.—but we were meeting different people and having readings at people’s houses, and having poetry readings, and doing whatever we could just to keep things moving. There’s not a lot in Santa Fe for writers outside of the Institute, and when people graduate from that college, they kind of hang around over there, waiting to see what’s going to happen next, until they all eventually go away, back to their homeland or wherever they wind up. So we were having readings like that and we were starting to produce; I was going back and asking the Institute, “If you have any students that are interested in drama, send them to me, and we’re going to have readings, and I want to hear their work, because I know for a fact that they were writing plays, but they were getting put away.” So we were doing that, and they asked me if I would come and teach some classes there. I was working under Project HOOP with Hanay Geiogamah, who had founded a three-year program there. So I was teaching a basic theater production course and a basic acting course, and about that time, Jim, from the University of New Mexico came to the Institute looking for Native writers, and he found me and asked me did I want to go and study under their program? And it’s a three-year program and I told him no, I don’t want to. Well, about that same time, the Institute told me if you want to teach any upper-level courses, you need to get your MFA. So, I called Jim back. Well, at the time, Dr. Henry Bial was the head of the department, and I had no idea of the prestige that he had, I had no idea how to go about getting into there, so I called him and I said, “Dr. Bial I’m going to be coming to your MFA program and I’m going to study.” And he said, “What if you’re not accepted?” I said, “I will be accepted Dr. Bial and I am coming over there.” And he was like, “Well, you have to send – you have to follow the procedure,” and I said, “Oh, okay.” So I didn’t even know that. So I turned around, I found out everything, and I submitted my work and got in right away. But I was that naïve, that I thought I could just go there and say, here I am. I had quick success when I was there. I was the only Native playwright in the course. There had been another man before me, David Velarde, who is an Apache playwright, he had gotten his MFA from the UNM. So I knew I could do it, and I did it in just the last three years. I just graduated in May. And so let’s go down the line.

Karmenlara Seidman: Hello. My name is Karmenlara, and I have a background in dance performance. I come from a small town in rural Michigan, and although I don’t identify as Native, I have Native relatives, and was raised in sort of a state of inbetween-ness, and have come to terms with some of the stories of my grandmother’s and some of the relatives in my family, partly through deciding that the voices of Native writers, Native history, and performance, need to be present in the drama department where I teach at the Tisch School of the Arts. And while I don’t claim to teach that material from Native background, I feel a connection to it through my grandmother’s stories, and I feel it’s essential that in academia, we have a very clear position on how unclear it is to teach Native material with some partial background in Native ancestry and some in American, European, whatever it might be, Latin American. But we present to our students this conflict of what it means to be American, what it means to be Native. I have a student here. And so I came to teach this course three years ago, pulling together the anthology by Hanay Geiogamah, Stories of Our Way: Seventh Generation, The American Indian reader that we put together, and some of the work from Plays of Women of Color by Roberta Uno, and found that as I began to teach this course, people from all different backgrounds started to have voices as they began to talk about some of these plays, but didn’t have voices in these other classes that Tisch was offering. Children who grew up in Latin America, in Mexico, in rural America who had backgrounds similar to my own, who had stories that they couldn’t quite fit in with any particular narrative or identity or ethnicity began to find that stories like Independence of Eddie Rose, gave voice to experiences they had, but they didn’t know theater could actually deal with. And sort of complicating what it means to be an actor and what it means to bring power to the stage – and wounds to the stage. So without getting into my academic background, which I think is not so relevant at the moment to this panel, as a performer myself, as a dancer, as a costumer, bringing things into reality – taking things from ideas, from abstraction and making them happen in a space, or happen in an object, for me has been sort of the art of teaching. And I find that in students, as in my student here, find their work come to life through asking these difficult questions, and having the course to say, “I don’t have a home; I don’t know where home is,” and go back and make work that is home. The story is home. And that’s been a reward for me. So that’s what I bring today to this panel – certainly no great wisdom other than just to complicate the story.

Randy Reinholz: I was thinking about… people have been telling journeys, and lately I’ve been talking about mine. I was working on a show that dealt with rural Ozarks, so often where I say how I started was we used to heat our house, when I was in high school, we had running water – we’d just got running water – but we still heated with firewood, and so my brother and I are out chopping wood one morning. And it was one of those cold mornings where we bundled up, and we’re up on this hillside, and of course, the sun had come up, so we’re kind of hot. So here we are, literally, in our overalls, with one strap down, and chopping wood. And this part of the Ozarks was starting to gentrify, and so this car, this nice car, drove past, and stopped, and it backed up and the lady gets out and she goes, “Look! Hillbillies!” And my brother and I went, “Where are the hillbillies?” And then we thought, “Oh, she’s talking about us!” So, that’s kind of where I started my journey. First of forty-two grandkids to go to college, only one with a terminal degree, and so I didn’t ever think of myself as being on that kind of journey, to become a director or a producer. Currently I’m the director of the School of Theater, Television, and Film at San Diego State, and I just think it’s such a wild journey that we’re on. And I think in some ways that’s what I have most in common with everybody in the room: is we all started off someplace so far from the Public Theater in New York with the eggheads, the intellectuals, and then, wow, I’m one. And I often think of that when I think about Native plays in the academic community, because it’s such an uneasy fit. And the vocabulary is very difficult to come by. I loved how you talked about it. I think for me, it resonated… I checked the Choctaw box when I was hired as a professor at Illinois State, and they wanted me to bring a Native play in, and full of hubris, I said, “Sure, I’ll help find a Native play.” Didn’t really know any Native playwrights, but I just assumed all of the people I knew in Native play development would. And that’s where I met Bill in 1994. So you just think of these wild journeys of how we got here and what’s happened. Anyway, we’ll talk more about the academic community, I think, later.

Dianne Yeahquo Reyner: Well, let’s see. I’m from the Kiowa Nation of Oklahoma, and there’s where my journey began, at the Lawton Indian Hospital: PHS, no air conditioning, windows open, flies coming in, in the middle of August 105 degrees in Oklahoma – not a pretty sight. But like Terry, in a lot of ways, I’m a late bloomer. And what that means, Terry, is that the petals are more beautiful. So I started school as a young woman with the encouragement of my mother. I come from a very proud people and am a direct descendant of a couple of the last chiefs of our tribe, because now we have a U.S. government structure and we all know what that brings and what that says. So my journey came out of who I am and who my people are. I went to… started college, and like so many other Native youths, I didn’t feel like I was ever going to accomplish much. I didn’t feel that I was in any way remarkable, I didn’t feel that I was going to be anything other than a secretary, maybe if I was lucky in the BIA. Because that’s where our aspirations were to go to. My mother and father – Kiowa people – always were very pushy people, were very loud people, amongst each other, and they always pushed, you know, you need to go get your education, you need to go do this. And when I didn’t, when I decided to fall in love and get married and have my first child, my mother shook her head and said, “Well, that’s that.” And so I spent the next several years raising that child and trying to make that marriage work, and it didn’t. Unfortunately, I was young and dumb and my husband was – my first husband – was Hispanic and I thought, “You know, he’s brown. Aren’t we all? You know, he’s brown, brown’s brown, you know.” And it was in the 60’s, in that generation of we’re all just people. Well, you know, we’re all not just people. There are very, very distinct differences, and I learned that very young. And a lot of that was the machismo that came into my life that I had never heard of. And that’s that Latin man, what a man is. I grew up knowing what a Kiowa man was. And so I went back to school, after working. I went back to school, and it was important for me to go to Haskell Indian Nations University and get my degree from a university that was Native American. I could have gone anywhere else, but that was a prime. I wanted my degree to say Haskell Indian Nations University, because there is nothing else like it in the United States. And so I went on and got my associate's degree and bachelor's degree and wound up going to graduate school, and reaching out. And I got involved with the theater again when I went back to school, and remembered how powerful that experience was. Now when we first started Thunderbird Theater back in 1974, we began to identify what a Native theater was, and what was such a thing, and what was a Native theater to do and what did it look like? And because there were no samples to look at. There was nothing else to look at, so we really had to self-define what being a Native theater was. And so we tried to bring those things from each of our backgrounds. We brought those from all across the United States, because at Haskell, you have representatives at any one point in time, over 150 different nations that are represented. And so when you have Kiowas, and Comanches and Tohono O’odhams, and Apaches, and Navajos, and Lakotas, and everybody else, you know, involved with that, trying to define what that is, and – I can’t tell you what that is now, because I think we’ve all continued in our progress and we’ve defined what that is for our companies and ourselves. And this is – I’m probably getting off the subject again – but it has to do with an academia. Sorry, let me back up, let me go back to the subject, in academia. But in looking at Native theater in academia – one of the reasons I volunteered to be a part of this panel is because in so many ways, academia has supported Native theater in ways that even our own communities hadn’t. In often ways, it’s given Native theater a home, it’s given Native theater a physical place to move from, and it has also been the first to publish Native playwrights and the first to – and I know that we are anthologized to death, and we are taught to death, and in so many ways, I’ve had a lot of trouble in the past trying to come to terms with academia studying Native theater and Native drama, and is this just another example of being placed under a microscope? Is this just another example of being taken advantage of in order to further somebody’s career? Because at one point, I think a lot of non-Native professors, non-Native students, saw, when they were going for their Ph.D. or their graduate work, you’re pushed to find something that hasn’t been addressed before. And they found Native theater. And it moved from being our traditions as theater to actually becoming a subject unto itself. So I think each of us have to come to grips with is that being placed under a microscope again? Is that being taken advantage of again? Are we simply being used and given nothing for our efforts and we’re the ones who are not getting published or not getting produced so we are not making royalties? We’re always expected to give, but we ourselves never benefit, and we have people with Ph.D.’s who have made their careers writing about us. Or, on the other hand, have we taken advantage of academia as much as they – have we benefited from them as much as they have benefited from us? And I think those are answers that we each have to come to grips with ourselves, as to what levels do those fit in ourselves. And I guess that’s my way of making an introduction of myself.

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.: And now for something completely different! When I look at the topic of this, I’m amazed. I think of Native plays and academic community as being two realities -- two separate, distinct realities. For myself, I never really was a great student because I realized after I graduated high school, the whole elementary school process was not meant for me or for my people. I grew up on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation where we had a high school/grade school and it was amazing because the school board was all white, and they would always downplay the Native kids. We were basically something that had to be tolerated. But here’s the irony: our tribe owned the land that the schools were on. And we actually released the land for the schools to have their little institutions. But as far as different realities, it was in high school that I had the worst time, because of the fact that I got into some personal issues. In college, I actually got back into writing and that’s when I met Dr. Roland Meinholz. Dr. Meinholz was sort of the founding father of theater here at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He taught Bruce King, Bruce Miller, Jane Miller, Joy Harjo, Gloria Bird; they were all students of Dr. Meinholz. He eventually retired, but we were very fortunate last year that he was able to attend the conference, through the efforts of Joy Harjo and that was really a blessing. But as far as the two realities, my parents really never encouraged us to go to school because they knew at a certain time, you have to understand as a child of the 60’s and 70’s, half my brothers and sisters were sent to boarding school. So you had a choice of either going to boarding school or trying to tough it out with the rednecks in Montana and get your high school diploma. I chose the latter. Big mistake. But I did do the latter. Eventually when I went to college, as I mentioned, I got into theater and I actually started to go through the rehearsal process. I started as an actor. I went to every audition. I auditioned for all-women shows just to get an audition. I auditioned for workshops, scenes, directors’ workshops, actors’ workshops, student productions, full productions at the University of Montana. And every time I went, they’d go, “Bill, you’re a good actor, but we have no Indian parts.” Then I started writing plays and they said, “Bill, it’s a good play, but we have no Indian actors, so we can’t do it.” Then the goal became an interesting process: why don’t we have a school for performing arts here in America for Native people? Why is it we don’t have our own institution? In fact, I talked about this earlier in another lecture, which is basically if you say Mormon or you say Lutheran, you can point to the church. But when you say the Native religion, what church or architectural structure do you point to? If I say African-American theater, you can point to the Federalist Theater – the New Federalist Theater. If I say Asian-American, you can point to Tisa Chang and the Pan Asian Workshop. But if you say Native theater New York, where do you point to? Where is our theater? Now as far as academia, I’ve always been amazed that, one, my father went as far as a seventh grade education, but he was fluent in two languages. See that thing of realities – we really have to examine realities – it’s amazing that this young man grew up with a seventh grade education, but was fluent in his Native language and English. That’s an incredible feat. But my mother went as far as a freshman in high school, and she became “educated,” but again, she was fluent in three different languages. Assiniboine, Cree, and English. But only barely had a junior high education. For myself, I went to college. I never really got a degree. I’m almost a professional student. I have 274 credits with a GPA of 2.74. But my study ranges everything from Native federal law to the history of Ireland to the history of Canada to the history of Africa, European-American history. I am constantly reading. And I thought I was an anomaly until I heard the story of August Wilson. And I thought, yes, it’s possible, because one of the things that has always amazed me at this day and age is if you are talking about the exploitation of Native people, there are people walking around now in the United States that have received their master's and Ph.D.’s based on my work. I’ve been always amazed by that. When we first did the playwriting for the Four Directions at Trinity Rep, a woman stood up and said, “I received my Masters degree at Northwestern based on my research of your play.” I went, “Well, gee, thanks for letting me know!” One man has actually received his Ph.D. based on my work. I just found out not long ago a woman in Germany got her degree publishing an essay on my work without even interviewing me. Now this is not exploitation, this is something that’s very unique. It’s a system. It’s a system that one, we can take, but we don’t have to be responsible. The two realities of Native communities, Native playwriting and Native academics have always been on a collision course, simply because here in American we don’t have the institutional support, other than the financial resources, architectural resources, but still no one has come forward and said, “I am going to donate a part of my theater or my institution for this to take place – for the Native voice, to provide a vessel.” That hasn’t happened yet. Unfortunately, I don’t know if it will. But the most important question is when are we going to have a Native university? And I’m not talking the community colleges, because when you go out west there are x-amount of community colleges. I was in South Dakota last year and I was brokenhearted because there was a man who actually developed a working curriculum in South Dakota at this community college, where he incorporated the Dakota language in the curriculum. He actually spent money to develop a building for art classes – Native, indigenous art classes. He actually developed a theater, specifically for the Dakota people to do their theater in Dakota language. But due to the cycle of tribal politics and corruption, it was gone. It was gone. In a month. We were doing a play called Veteran Indians at the Community House in South Dakota, and I went outside that night after setting the stage to have a cigarette like I usually do, folks. I’m outside having a cigarette, I’m not panhandling so don’t worry, but – white people, please don’t be afraid – I’m out there having a cigarette, and then I see the tribal police drive up. And I thought this could be happening. I actually saw our president of our community college going from the top stairs to the downstairs hiding from the tribal police, and I thought, “This is a problem. If education is sacred among Native people, what’s happening here we have our own community colleges and this is happening.” The police were there to escort him off the campus. So I left South Dakota, came to the University of Maine, and that’s where I’m working now with Dr. Margot Lukens, with the Penobscot Intertribal Players, and we have a different reality. In 2005 – I always hate this expression of always being the first one, I really hate that because in 2005, along with the Penobscot Intertribal Players, we produced Veteran Indians at the University of Maine. It was the first Native play they’ve ever done on that campus. The University itself is 130 years old but what makes it more ironic is the Penobscot Indian Reservation is only five miles away. Only five miles away. There is just a contrast of bringing these realities together. But for Native communities here in America, it’s going to be interesting as to how we develop our voices, how we secure the voices, and how, again, as Daniel did an earlier discussion about bringing the sacredness to stage, within that process, the razor-thin line between cultural expression and cultural exploitation. See, academia is wrestling with that. The woman I am working with right now is struggling with that aspect in working with the Penobscot and Passamaquati tribes. There are things that would go theatrically on stage, but the Penobscot Nation have told her, “We can’t talk about these things. We can’t say this name on stage.” But there’s never been a time for them to actually work out a process of where that would happen. But before I go rambling on and become a talking head again, it’s an honor to be the professor of Terry Gomez. Thank you. I also have to acknowledge another former student that I really gave a bad time to. She’s here in the audience, she was a part of Wakiknabe Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she’s a graduate now. I’m very proud of you, Rhiana Yazzie.

Terry: Thank you, Bill. All right. You’ve heard a little bit of everybody’s story, and I want to talk a little bit about where I’m coming from. I knew I wanted to be a writer all along, and I went to -- when I was 17 years old -- went to the University of Colorado, Boulder. And I was kind of fooling around, cutting up in class and stuff – I was very young – and not doing my work. And so one day, I thought, “Yeah, I guess I’d better get to work or I’m going to get kicked out of class.” So I wrote a short story, handed it in, we had a Native TA in there, so I thought, I was far from home – never been away from home before – I thought, well, I can look to this girl to like, give me a hand, or I can talk to her or something. So I handed my story in and the next day I got called into the office. And this was before the Internet, and they asked me to sit down, and I was all excited, I thought, “Wow, they must have really liked my story!” I was all happy, and they told me, “Where’d you get this story from?” I said, “I wrote it last night.” It was a story about my grandmother. I grew up in a rural community and it was a story about my grandmother. And I said, “I wrote it last night.” And I had no – my mother never went to college, she went to nursing school – and I didn’t have anybody else in my family that had gone to college. I had nobody to ask about anything. So I told them I wrote it, and they told me, “No, you didn’t. That’s plagiarism.”

Audience member: What?

Terry: That’s what I said. “What?” I said, “I wrote this, last night! You see? It’s in my handwriting.” They were like, “No, where did you copy it from?” And there came this Indian girl and she told me “I’ve read that before. Where’d you copy it?” And I didn’t know that I could contest it, I didn’t know I could do anything about it, and after that I just failed and flunked out. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have assistance from that person like I had thought. I didn’t know who to turn to and I was beside myself. I thought, “I didn’t copy this from anybody. This is my work.” And they wouldn’t believe me. And they both stood there accusing me. It felt like for hours, I felt like I was sweating like crazy. I probably was. But I was just like, “Oh my God,” I didn’t know I could do anything. So I left there. To make a long story short, I wound up at the University of New Mexico several years later, again trying to write. I wanted to be a fiction writer. So I went into the writing classes there at the University of New Mexico and when I got there, everybody else would get long, detailed critiques, and mine would be, “Your punctuation is off. You missed a comma.” And it was writing about my family, my people, Native issues, and nobody knew what to say in the class. It was a huge class, and they would just sit there and blankly look at me and that was always my critique, “You need quotation marks.” And I thought, “Man, this must be really bad,” because I thought I was doing some pretty good work. But that was what they would tell me. So once again, I stopped and I thought, “Well, okay, I guess I might as well give up.” Well, about that time, I had moved to Rio Rancho, which is a little ways out of Albuquerque, and I thought, well, I had my second child, I thought, well, it’s now or never. I might as well try the Institute, which at that time, had a very bad reputation. They were on the old campus, and there was a party school mentality: “Oh, that’s just a party school, you don’t want to go there.” And I thought, well, I’ll give it a try and if they tell me no, well, I’ll just give up. So loaded my babies into my car and we hauled over to Santa Fe, and the first play I wrote – the first page of the play I wrote – was in another professor’s class, and he asked us to start it. And I did it and I read it out loud to the class. It was a monologue about a girl and her grandmother – a girl talking to her grandmother. And after class, I read it, and I got the same kind of reaction, and I didn’t know it was a good reaction then, because all the Indian students were so quiet because we didn’t know each other yet. And so they were all just looking at me, and so I thought, okay. And so I wadded it up and threw it away, my professor told me, “Get that out of the trash right now,” and I said, “Why?” And he said, “Get it out and finish it.” So I got it out and started working on it, and then I think that’s around the time he introduced me to Bill. And that was before I was Bill’s student. And I completed that play and it was published and brought to the Public Theater that next year. So there I went. And that began my writing career. But it’s always interesting, I think, and I’m very careful when I’m working with Native students, how I relate to them. I feel like each one is a new baby, because you never know where they’re coming from. Our students come from – right now I don’t have any students there, but when I’m working there – my students would come from all different kinds of circumstances. And some stable, some not-so stable. And a lot of the times, it’s the ones that are not so stable that are going to do the best work. I feel very fortunate to be a Native teacher and work with Native students, because I can see them turn from one kind of a person into another, as they become educated, as they grow to realize their talents. It’s just like a blessing, and I really did enjoy working there with the students. And one thing I want to talk about this and ask the question of the other instructors here at the table, what issues they’re facing with their students. Because a new one that I’ve found that I never thought I would has come to light and I’ve had to learn how to deal with it. And that is working with the mixed-blood students. Now, telling you my story of where I came from – and I came from, well, we’ll use the word traditional for lack of a better word – I came from a very close family, most of my family spoke our Comanche language all the time, and I was very close-knit with them. And as Bill said, we had a lot of racism put on us, too. A lot. I grew up in Oklahoma. And all kinds of names, all kinds of – any kind of treatment you could think of – no Indians are dogs, these kinds of signs on the stores and stuff like that were still around when I was growing up. Okay. So, when I come into a classroom and I have all kind of students; there’s not only Native students at the Institute, and that’s the same place where I’ve taught. There are all kinds of students there. But I feel free to talk about that and talk about the racism that was put on, and ask the students to think about their past and what they want to write about, and everything, their cultures. And I’ve had students that were just enflamed, because they’re mixed-blood, and they get all like, super-pissed because they want to know, am I racist, or am I telling them that they should hate one side of their blood? And I’ve had that kind of a conversation with my students. And I won’t go into great detail about the conversation, but it was just shocking to me that they were not accusing me, but I felt that they were trying to make me feel guilty about reverse-racism in the classroom. And that was a place where I felt like I earned the right to be in that classroom, and just my life of struggling against racist people. And I’m not a racist person. I know I’m not. And there are people of all races that I think are pretty bad, but most of them, I think, are pretty darn good. And I’ll look at somebody as being good until they do something to me. So I feel like I’m colorblind, and I can see the spirit. So when I talk to those students, I want to know about their life, about their experiences, but they were turning it around to where they were telling me, “You can’t say anything because I’m part white.” And I thought, “Yes, I can, I can talk about what I feel white people did to my family and to myself.” I can talk about that. But they were trying to make it into this big thing. So I would like to know if any of you other professors have those kind of experiences, or what is an issue in your classroom that you would like to talk about.

William: One of the things that’s coming out through Project HOOP next January is a collection of plays that I’ve written called Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Stories. There are four plays that deal historically with the issue of blood quantum, which includes A Stray Dog, that was read last year, which is kind of ironic, because in my profession as a playwright, people have always accused me of hating breeds, because I was raised, again, in a traditional family, which I kind of find ironic. And academia really thinks that “I’m a full-blood,” but in actuality, I am five-eighths Assiniboine and three-eighths African-American. But I was raised with that. You have to understand I was raised with that. And I find it fascinating that one, America has never dealt with the issue of race, and now Native communities have to settle this for ourselves. When I came to the East Coast, it was amazing, because the two biggest tribes that had money were at conflict with each other because of the state of Connecticut made them fight, which was the Mohegan tribe and the Pequot tribe; the Pequots being predominantly African-American, the Mohegans being predominantly white. And the state of Connecticut, the governor, would pit the two against each other and have them fight. But in an academic situation, it’s amazing because in dealing with non-Indian professors, they don’t even know what a breed is. So when a student says, “This person called me a breed,” they don’t know what you’re talking about. Whereas when you go home, you tell your dad, “So-and-so just called me a breed,” your whole family goes to war on your dad. But you see it’s a concept we’ve never really addressed in academia – or academia has never addressed it – simply because of the fact academia can’t even name the local Native tribes within that reality. This year at the University of Maine, I had forty students in the class – all of them from Maine. I asked the students, “How many of you can name at least two tribes here in the state of Maine?” Only two of the students could do it. And we’ve actually stepped back in a lot of issues. Now with students who are mixed-blood, they actually have come up to me in the past and said – well, even there was an actor that came up to us during Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and said, “Well, I’m predominantly more white. I know nothing about my Native heritage.” And I asked him, “Well, are you willing to learn?” See, here’s the other thing about this. You can claim to be anything, but try to be good, at least at one thing. Try to be good at one thing. Just being a human being is hard enough. But people say, “Oh, I’m caught between two worlds!” Well, get unstuck. Let me help you. Take a direction. If you take this direction, you’ll become unstuck. Trust me. I used to do a lot of driving when I was on the rez and we went off the dirt road and got highsided it was like, find one way. You either go reverse, or you go in forward. But pick one. But here’s the other thing, too. What Terry is mentioning, I’ve seen it also at the University of Maine. Ironically, you have a class of kids who are white and Native and hate the fact they’re breeds. They hate it. There’s a self-loathing with that blood quantum issue that’s never been addressed here in America. And it’s still institutionalized here in America. I’ve met Penobscot kids who are fluent in their language, but they have blonde hair, blue eyes. And they barely got on the roll. Barely a quarter. Maybe three-eighths. But they’re active in Indian issues. But when they talk about it, they can’t talk about it to mainstream America because mainstream America has not accepted contemporary Native issues. Instead, they’re more willing to appropriate these stereotypes. And these kids basically feel that if they’re breeds, their words don’t count. Their voice doesn’t matter. Their heart doesn’t count. Because at the same time, you have extreme – as they talk about cultural cops. I mean, we had an incident, if you remember that, at IAIA regarding a group going around attacking the "breed" students, "wagon-buners." They were going around attacking students who were not “full-blood,” but it was lead by a red-headed kid. That’s what killed me the most. Who would wear this S&M jacket. It was like, okay, he’s an activist! But it was interesting, too, because these kids, even, again, back to the Penobscot kids, they have such artistry, intelligence, and for some perverted reason, they’re willing to hate that about themselves. See, that’s what breaks my heart. And they can’t find an access or a resource. Now I’ve come across people who say, “Now, I’m only one-eighth.” Well, then, define what that means for you: are you Native or are you not? And the only reason why I say this because it comes from the Holocaust opinion. My reservation was devastated. We have a Holocaust survival attitude. We look for members everywhere we can. My mother used to say, “Billy, you can marry anybody as long as it’s not a crow" - no offense [laughter]- "you can marry anybody, as long as they're not a crow." You see, it’s amazing, but it’s that Holocaust mentality that we’re so small in numbers here in America that when someone claims to be Native, we cheer you. But remember, it’s a hard life, because your own people will turn against you.

Terry: Dianne, do you have any particular issues you would like to talk about as an instructor? It doesn’t have to be the same.

Dianne Reyner: Well, I was an instructor – after I graduated from Haskell, I was an instructor as Haskell. And so I was able to go back in and teach. I taught composition and literature, and also Native American plays and playwriting, and worked with UCLA with Project HOOP, and teaching summer theater workshops at Haskell. And the issues that both you and Bill are mentioning, they’re very real. I think every ten years, we have new issues because we have new children that are coming up, and their experiences are very different. You know, I don’t know what the answers are. I know that when I was teaching composition and literature, my students tended to stay with me through both freshman semesters. And they’d challenge me. They would challenge me until they realized that I didn’t think that they were going to fail. They challenged me until I continually treated them like they were human beings – that they had some values, they had some worth. And I became more interested in them expressing themselves than whether or not they got the comma in the right spot. Now, I did teach sentence structure and paragraph structure because that’s what freshman comp does -- but first to get them to write. And there were the issues of identity, I mean, I had students who were on parole, I had students who were fresh out of prison, I had a student who had watched his father shoot his mother in front of him as a child, and students whose parents were meth addicts, alcoholics. And, you know, coming through that process, I don’t know what the answer is when we talk about our youth and our students. There’s got to be that perseverance that we each individually take, that responsibility for the generations that are coming up, because that’s what I was taught. That’s what my grandparents taught me – that you are responsible for that next person. That’s how we survived as a community. That’s how our tribes and our nations survived – because we took responsibility for one another. And that went out of vogue somewhere down the line, and to where we had to show individually what we were worth as an individual, and we didn’t bring anybody with us. You know, we went out there and we stood in the spotlight and we said, “Look what I did. Look what I’ve accomplished. Aren’t I important? I have plays who are published. My play got done. I’m doing this. These people think that I am important.” Where are these people that are supposed to come with us? It’s a hard thing you ask, and I see that not just with my students. I see it with my children, going back to that, we’re all the same, so now I have a daughter who is part Mexican and I have a son who is part white, and they don’t know what the heck they’re doing. Where did they connect? You know? So it’s something you struggle with. One time, my son asked me, he said, “What do you want, Mom? You want to go back on the plains and live on a tipi? Is that what you want?” And I’m like, “Heck, no! Do you know how hard that is? It’s hot out there!” But that teenaged identity: where do you fit? I think once we… everything happens for a reason. You go through things for a reason. I’ve experienced everything I’ve experienced in my life because there’s a reason. There’s a purpose in that. I think that purpose is to help bring someone forward. And you just have to keep it up.

Terry: Randy?

Randy: You know, I was thinking about academics and Native theater. College is the place I changed my life. I went to college, believe it or not, to play football on a scholarship. I was really fast. And then I met this wonderful professor who kind of opened the world for me and taught me to think. And I think when I was young – I’m meeting a lot of people now who are young, who thought they were coming to college for one reason, and it’s a great place to discover the rest of who you are. And I talk about this all the time with my students. And I think some of the things that are really important in the way I approach the work, I think people should belong to something bigger than themselves. I think the world is so tough right now, and they should belong to something big. And it can be cultural, it can be an art form, it could be orientation, it could be so many different things. But they need to define what they belong to, and that they’re not alone. And I think in theater, I see making theater, and then I see sort of an intellectual, literary exploration of ideas, and the world through theater and text. I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive at all; I think they’re best when they’re yin and yang and they’re working together. But I see a real give and take there, that the students love, and I think I have to pay a lot of attention to what the students tell me they need to learn. Because I don’t think you can teach anybody anything if they don’t have a need to learn whatever it is you’re talking about. And we know that model of education, if I talk, you listen, therefore you know, is deaf. So how does that interaction happen? And I think at the core, what excited me most at that age was being part of something big, and theater was the thing that was big for me. And I saw theater, and then ultimately film, and every now and then television – not very often – as this window into a hidden world. Something really secret, private, often intimate that all of a sudden I knew, even though I wasn’t from that world, I didn’t really have those experiences, I might go on a journey with a woman, I might go on a journey with a superhero. Whatever the journey was, I would see something that seemed really private and tender, and think, “That’s like something I would either want, or I am missing.” And that really started to give me meaning for my life, as a young person. I was sort of floundering all over the place. And I think that’s what I want to connect with my students about: how they go on this journey. I want them to belong to something big. And then Native theater, it’s so simple: Native theater. That’s a big thing to belong to. It’s a very diverse club, as you say. You know, we have how many nations?

Terry: five-hundred-eight… recognized.

Randy: Right, and as Bill touched on, who is and who isn’t. And so, there’s a lot of different ways to fit into that conversation. It’s not necessarily always as an outsider. And then often, those pieces of art open people in amazing ways, where they can actually find something about themselves. And then often it’ll lead them to something they belong to. It could be Native. Often – most often – it’s not. So that’s what I think about Native theater and academics.

Karmenlara: I want to address the question directly, and move on from there, which is that I think that for a lot of us, that we come to our journey with a lot of masks, and that those masks are there to protect and to attack. And I think that what you’re experiencing – and this is just my younger, less experienced point of view – but that kind of internalized racism and self-hatred, it’s a mask. It’s a performance. It’s a learned performance. And that’s the great thing about theater as a scholarship, as an endeavor, is that in thinking about theater, we can begin to see what masks we’re using against each other, and also to protect ourselves. And there’s lots of different ways to reach that with different types of students. And we’re not going to be able to reach everyone in the same way. So you may not be able to reach all of them. Somebody else is going to have to do that. I’m not saying you don’t try; that doesn’t mean you don’t really try, and keep reforming the techniques, but that it’s going to take more than one. And the reason I’m thinking of this is coming to academia myself having had a lot of masks, coming from a poor family, not educated, where even to this day to go home with a Ph.D. is something I’m ashamed of. It’s something that de-authenticates me. It’s something that I hide. I change the way I talk, I change the way I dress. And so I mask to go home, and I mask to come here. And that’s a performance. It’s not wrong, it’s not inauthentic, but it’s really difficult. And so my responsibility as a teacher is to try to talk to my students about what that process is so they recognize it when it’s happening. And they can re-script it and they can rework it, and then hopefully unpack all of the violence that led to it. So that some of the masks that we then take up are the ones we’re doing within the framework of theater, within the frame of our community, telling our stories, telling our grandmothers’ stories – as hard as they are, and as shaming as they are. And I think that self-hatred is shame, and shame is one of the greatest producers of masks. Absolutely. And also one of the most brilliant ones. It’s amazing how brilliantine and beautiful the mask of shame can produce on a person so that their violence, their racism can be somebody like David Duke, who’s got it all figured out. And you listen to their arguments and it’s that tight argument that he’s made, and he’s so convinced he’s right. And that’s about shame. It’s about the shame of white history in America, European history in America, and I think also for people of different backgrounds who come to Native theater in different ways. We all have our particular masks that we’re using to communicate what we think today, I would say. And not in an inauthentic way, or in an unethical way, but that’s the language that we’re using to reach each other. And we’ve got a certain kind of great articulation that we get from Bill that is holding forth, and speaking from experience. And I can’t actually be here or there. I can’t be in reverse or go forward. And although I hear that as a wise position I would love to figure out how to do, I only feel like I’m being honest when I say, “I don’t know where the hell I am.” And that’s why I can teach people who also might connect with me there. But you’re teaching students who need that other message. And Terry’s teaching students who need maybe another message. And so these kids who are bringing to the conversation this anger and this, “Well, I don’t want to have to hate my white side,” they actually need to be pinned down, and they need to talk about their white side. They need to be made to say, “Who is your white side?” Are they Norwegian? Are they English? Who are they? Who are you? Because white is nothing. It’s a mask. It’s not real. So make them talk about their family mythology. Make them talk about the things they’ve been told, and the shame that’s in that – and also the things in that that are great.

Terry: Thank you. With that being said, let’s go back to Native plays. We’re going to have to open it up, so we’re going to have to make our comments a little bit more quicker. I’m sorry, I’d love to hear you all speak. The last question I have – or statement I have, I guess – in regard to Native plays, how do you teach Native theater, and what aesthetics are you trying to convey? What is important in your class? Go ahead, Bill.

William: First thing is going back and learning what it is – it’s a Euro-American art form. So I’ll mention the Greek Classical; I’ll start with Aristotle, and try to do a very brief – within the first class – an introduction as to what playwriting comes from, how it’s established here in America. And remember, one important thing: this is an art form you’re working with. You’re not using it. You’re working with this art form. And the most important thing is to apply the same respect to this art form as you would any other tribal element within your community. Because you if you get a pair of moccasins, you must treat it with respect; if you’re in theater, you get a role, you treat it with respect. You take care of it, you do the best you can with it. But as far as the writing itself, I always ask my students to write from their heart. And I’m not talking the Hallmark traditional Valentines heart. I’m talking the Native aesthetic of heart – your mind, your soul, your body. Incorporate that into your writing. Why? Because eventually you’ll get in front of a bunch of actors and directors and you’re going to have to fight for your words. And you should always fight for things you care about, like your play, like your family, like your community, like your tribe. Done.

Terry: Dianne?

Dianne Reyner: How do I teach Native plays? Well, I don’t know, I’d like to kind of start a conversation with that question. As Native theater artists, how do we as Native people teach a play? How is that different from how we are taught -- how our plays are taught – how do we teach our own plays? I know when I’m talking about my plays to students – and I try not to do that, I try not to say, “read my play, let’s study it,” – I try to do somebody else’s play. But what are the differences? We have people who are teaching Native students here, and people who are teaching non-Native students, largely. What’s the difference? There are certain givens, I know, when you have a Native classroom that you don’t have when you have a non-Native classroom. And how do you bridge—because Native playwrights have been taught in non-Native classrooms, by non-Native professors and instructors for a very, very long time. And I think only recently, within the last maybe fifteen years -- ten, fifteen years? – ten, ten, have we begun identifying our own pedagogy. How are we teaching them different?

Karmenlara: I think it has to do partly with the fact that in mainstream academia, drama is taught often as literary-based – as literature – and that’s the first thing that I can find, is that the play is not just the play. The piece is not just the play; it’s not just the text. And in a way, that is different from the canon.

Dianne Reyner: Well, I know it is taught very differently in literature classes than it is in theater classes, in theater programs. It is taught very differently. But as a cultural aspect.

Vickie Ramirez: This is maybe a weird – I mean, I don’t teach, I have no experience teaching – but I had a friend who was a TA at UCSD, and she asked me for a bunch of ideas for Indian plays to teach, because she was doing a course on sense memory and cultural memory. And she ended up choosing Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and then she started asking me, “But what’s the metaphor behind… the moon, how does it…?” and I’m like, “No no no –“

Dianne Reynor: No metaphor!

Vickie Ramirez: No metaphor. It’s the moon, you know?

Dianne Reyner: It’s up in the sky!

Vickie Ramirez: So maybe that’s one way of approaching Indian plays. It’s like, I mean, we are familiar with metaphors, but when we’re writing a story, we don’t write from that perspective, as in what am I symbolizing with this, this is this, this is this.

Dianne Reyner: Well, that’s interesting; is the difference that we teach it as reality when non-Natives would teach it as a metaphor?

Vickie Ramirez: I wonder.

Dianne Rayner: I mean, it’s a question for the audience.

Rose Stella: What’s the question?

Vickie Ramirez: Well, the question is, my friend was looking to translate in metaphors and things like that, and I was like, “Metaphors? Moon is the moon in that story!” What metaphor is… I don’t think we write – I don’t know, I wouldn’t presume to judge – but when I’m telling these stories, I start with the story first, and I go backwards and add on layers if there’s layers to be added on.

Rose Stella: Well, I think it depends on the story. If the story is saying the moon is Grandmother, the story will say it.

Dianne Reyner: It won’t be a metaphor; it will be grandmother/moon, and…

Rose Stella: Exactly.

Dianne Reyner: It won’t be, “look at the moon, and then there’s a secret metaphor,” but I think, it seems as though what you’re saying is non-Indigenous people are looking for metaphors where there aren’t any when they’re teaching.

Terry: I heard something today, and it was extremely well-articulated. And I’m going to act like a teacher and call on somebody, I don’t know if they’ll do it or not, but can you talk about how you were talking about the vocabulary today? I thought that was really…

Rhiana Yazzie: Yeah, today at lunch, over my veggie burger, I was talking about the differences between world views, and the Western world view, the way that’s constructed – Western-European-Judeo-Christian-Messianic sort-of-world – and then you’ve got an Indigenous world view, where things are animate, relationships are important, and the community is important, you don’t have just this one individual or one thing that you’re sharing. So I think what I was talking about earlier was how we as Native people, we work in that vocabulary, especially if we’ve been around our culture growing up, and that sort of vocabulary we’ve been using our whole lives. And when the mainstream sees it, they don’t know how to relate to it because they don’t realize they’re dealing with another language. Like for instance when Randy and I were at the Kennedy Center with my children’s play Wild Horses, there was a white woman who played Mountain, who was Earth. And so she played it very much like “I’m Mother Nature…” – you know? But for me, writing that character from an Indigenous woman’s world view, I see this mountain as being sensual and sexual, and just embodying something completely different. And so it depends on what lens you’re looking at these characters through. You’re going to define it as something different. And if you have either the Indigenous world view vocabulary to understand it with, then you’re going to take moon and you’re going to say, oh, it’s… whatever, it’s made of cheese, but not that it’s actually a grandmother. Or it’s just the moon.

Niegel Smith: I think also what we’re speaking about is issues in translation, and specifically cultural translation: who owns the story, who is telling the story, how do we receive the story? That, how do you start the discussion around the play at the beginning of the class in order for all of the participants to have a common language, a common perspective of what we’re approaching. I really key on this world view comment, because I think the groundwork you have to lay in the classroom is, what are the world views that we bring here?

William: The other thing, too, is you have to look at the source, because it’s interesting, within – what’s interesting in the Native American communities is that you have people who are ingrained within the Native culture who grew up speaking their language, English isn't their first language. But at the same time, you have a group of people who have just discovered their Native-ness. I mean, I used to have a cruel joke at one time. I used to say there are four types of enrollment, which is federal, state, tribal and then academia. But you see, here is the interesting aspect. Where did this source come from? How did this source get the information? Because if we were to tell one story, for example, “Inkthomie taking on bear”, and you tell it from a cultural standpoint and it then see how it appears within an anthropologist’s written literature. And now, someone who is not familiar with their culture takes the story and does a translation of it, and tries to bring it on stage, and even worse, bring it to the community where the language is fluent, we have a whole new ballgame.

Ed Bourgeois: Another example of this difference in world views in the work that we’ve done in Alaska, working with traditional people, is in academia, those of us who are trained in Western theater have a language, have a vocabulary, that is often at odds with what people who are in their culture are familiar with: like, irony. I’ve had this experience in Alaska, where there was some real tension with people from the North Slope who were working with us, who did not appreciate what our contribution was to this collaboration. Because our characters were speaking something evil, speaking something angry, putting it out on stage and leaving it there. Which, for a traditional person who believes that what we say, and those words – the power of those words – is as important as how and what you say. And they’re not dealing with irony in the same way that those of us raised with Greek tragedy on and Moliere’s comedies; there’s a cultural context there.

William: See, the generalization of theater. I was working with Trinity Rep, an all-white theater company, and the next year I’m working with Lou Bellamy Penumbra Theater Company, which is an entirely African-American theater company. They had whole different stake and translation of theater as to what theater meant to them. So even that concept of theater being a generalist thing for everybody is not true.

Victor Maog: We’re talking about the idea of what is a cultural default. I think we could say in this country that the religious default would be Christianity. Or an acting style could be like, Stanislavski. And so there’s always a justification… how do we then reach that new place when people have this perceived conception of what a thing is?

Gloria Miguel: I don’t even know if it’s a new conception, because anybody who’s been with children – very young children -- and you just tell a little story, and automatically, they are into metaphors, they are into motion, they are into song. It’s all there when we’re born. Something happens to it. We lose it. Because every child, if you tell any child – even disabled children – will see, you know, say, show me the moon, and they go something like this. Show me the stars, they’ll go something like this. Grow like a sea, they’ll go to the ground. Children have it. So I think it’s all in us, and we lose it some how, some way. But it has to be nourished, and every nation can nourish their children.

Donna Cross: I wanted to say that I worked in a situation where we had to put up a play in four days, and met with each other and there was one person there who was not Indian – he was English, I believe – and his idea was, he was thinking of himself as the director, and his idea was that we’d take what he had put down on the pages and we would memorize it somehow, and then put it up. And I just went, “I think it’s not enough time to work just with your idea of the script. We’re going to have to take in these words and say them just this way.” And I said, “Does someone have a better idea?” I kind of did, but I wasn’t the director in the rehearsal. And so Floyd was there, and he says, “Let’s just do this.” We sat down with each other and we told each other the story, and as we all did, -- we had a sort of oral tradition story anyway, so it’s already there – and each of us had part of it the way we wanted to say it or express it. And we were able to put all of that together and put away the written page. And the play was absolutely fine. We did two performances of it, it worked great. I think it’s just such a difference in culture of the oral history and tradition and working that way and then working with that very written page kind of thing. I think it’s really a cultural difference, that’s what I think.

Jennifer Podemski: I would like to just go back to what you said, in reference to the childlike approach to theater and expression. Monique Mojica and Floyd Favel actually had a course through the Center for Indigenous Theater many, many years ago. And although I had trained, since probably grade two, on stage in a Western kind of context, we all came to the table—everybody was a trained actor at that point—but they taught us to take what was a linear kind of construction and turn it into a circle, where we became more childlike and opened our eyes to the expression of everything around us, and taught us, almost from an Indigenous perspective, how to emulate all of the things around us – almost like a world view, similar to how many people are feeling today about the world, and the global – seeing ourselves as citizens of the planet and the universe: I am this, I am that, and that is all there is. That kind of mentality. But I think in terms of the Indigenous process in theater, that helped me become a better performer and a better creator, because I was given the gift of that perspective. And the next ten years of my career sort of changed, and I believe that the process is what makes it Native. And I think everybody that I’ve worked with – mostly non-Native people – join me in that process of turning that line into a circle and kind of getting away from that kind of construct. And thanks to Floyd and Monique – and I hope that kind of philosophy is continuing – so many of us today are going to pass that on to future generations. And I just wanted to say that I think the Native-ness of theater, for myself, is in the process – in the rehearsal process, more so.

Muriel Miguel: There were a lot of us there. That was at the Center for Indigenous Theater. It was Floyd’s first time working as director there, CIT. And how we tried to go into this with all of these actors that have now been trained, was to talk about where your center was, and where the center was for each person coming from whatever nation you come from. And wherever your head is, that’s where your center is. It was very interesting, because we had Mario from Greenland, who had a whole other way of looking at it, because they are so immersed in European theater there in Greenland. And there was another thing I wanted to talk about, was that a lot of that self-image, that self-hatred that comes up in many of this is because we don’t have that center. And our center is around our ears someplace. And if you go in and think of teaching with that center and finding that center for that student, that’s when a lot of things start blossoming. A lot of things start coming out. That was a very good – that’s like fifteen years ago, Jennifer – and it started me thinking about a lot of things, because it meant that I could take a lot of things I learned in open theater and I learned as a dancer, and put another slant on it. So you do sound and movement, but there’s another slant on it. You do Laban technique – oh God help us – but you do it from another point of view. You can take this Laban and make it into… think of it in terms of how do you grass dance, or how do you break dance? But using Laban and finding the center, and that was the beginning of that. And it was really eye-opening.

Karmenlara: I just want to add to that really quickly. And I think that’s really wise, that idea of finding the center through performance, is why we’re very lucky to be artists, I think – or very blessed, I should say. But the center is also moving, and this goes back to what I was saying before. Maybe not for everybody, but I think for some, so that the center is found, and then it fragments and explodes, and then we find it again. And that’s our work. And that’s why we need our teachers, and we need our communities.

William: I’d like to add on about the means of teaching from the Native perspective. At Sisseston, at the Sisseston Wapheton Community College, they took the traditional values, the Lakota code of conduct, and incorporated it into the means of how we do theater. And it was interesting, of placing these traditional Dakota values on words that were European. Like, acting, how do you say “acting” in your language. See, this is in interesting concept. How do you say playwright in your own Native language? Can you say playwriting? Can you say acting? Can you say theater? Because if we’re really going to talk about how we teach – from whose perspective are we going to teach – but is there a generalization here in America? Because we have such a diversity. Is there a standard format that we can come up with as tribal people where we can incorporate these values, these words that everybody can be shared – that they can share? And I’m working with Dr. Margo Lukens, and we’re doing basically a book of how our experience was in teaching theater to the Penobscot and the Wabanaki Confederacy from their perspective. And we are incorporating some of their words in the text. But we found generalizations that could be shared. But will they transcend to other languages, and other tribal aesthetics? That’s always been the issue, because yesterday in your class, one of the students asked me, has there been a national movement by Native people? No, we’ve never had a Malcolm X, we’ve never had a Dr. King in this generation. We’ve had organizations that tried to unify a national movement among Native people, but it seems to be coming from the powwow. That’s the national movement. Everybody knows what a powwow is. But they’re confused between the tradition of what a Wachipi really is, and what it’s supposed to be, versus the commercialization of contest and prize money. But see, even the Wachipi powwow has a conflict – a contradiction – in our day and age. Even the word itself of how you say – I used to get criticized, by, again, the cultural police, because in my plays, I used to say – my characters would say – “I’m going to the celebration,” because that’s what we called it. And they’d say, “Oh no, it’s powwow,” and I’d say, “No, we call it a celebration.” But if I want to get more technical, we call it a Wachipi, and this is what happens at a Wachipi. When you say Indian powwow, all of these images go out. Even mainstream knows what a powwow is. But how do you say “Native theater”? How do you say “theater”? How do you say “stage”? How do you say “breath”? Well, they can say breath, I hope. But how do you say, take a moment, how would you say, how would you translate that into a Native language? How would you say “take your moment, wait for the beat, move upstage, move downstage, stage right, stage left.” How do you say that in your language? And here’s the other aspect – and I saw this in South Dakota – you use your lips. “Move that way. Where do you want me to move? Okay, I’m going.” But, see, we’re talking about a language we can all use in this country. Because here’s the other thing: Native American people have had a long history of theater, but only as props. We were put on stage in Europe as pedestals for the European families. Wild Bill Hickock and the Chautauqua -- we were basically just props. And now we can talk. So we need a language that supports out theories, our criticism, and most importantly, again, the theories -- because we don’t have a Bertolt Brecht. We don’t have a Stanislavski. We don’t have an Actors Studio. We don’t have an Uta Hagen. We have Haagen-Dazs, but we don’t – anyway.

Dianne Reyner: That’s interesting. One of the most difficult things when I was working with Ping Chong and company in developing Native Voices as part of his Undesirable Elements series, at the beginning of the piece, the structure, you introduce yourself: “I’m so-and-so and my mom’s name is Jane and my dad’s name is Dick, and I’m from here.” And there were six of us involved in constructing this particular piece, and it became funny because it was, “I can’t say that. I have to say, ‘my mother is so-and-so. I’m from these people, which is from this place, and my mother is from these people,” and taking it back to several generations, “and my father,” also, taking it back to several generations, so that everyone who heard it could place me exactly where I was in that particular sphere of life. And it became very difficult because it was like, “No, I just want your name, who your mom is, where you’re from.” Well, none of us could do that. So we had to come to sort of a cultural agreement that okay, so, maybe it doesn’t take ten minutes to tell you exactly who I am; let me cut it down to, I think I can still be respectful if I do this. And it was amazing, because each of us called our family and said, “This is what he wants us to do. How can I continue to be respectful to my family, my people, and give him what he wants in a time frame?” And so each one of us was given a directive. It’s like, okay, here’s what you can do. Here’s how you can change it, but you still have to say. And he’d want one word to say – I can’t remember the word that he wanted – but he wanted one word. Oh, a phrase: “I will tell you a story.” And we couldn’t do it, because the language didn’t translate for the one word that he wanted. So it was a very intricate thing with the language and how does this become representational of who we are. And I think to myself, in some ways, that’s very different in Native theater because it takes a little longer to say things, and you take different avenues. And so often when I have seen people approach some Native plays, it doesn’t quite fit what they want, because they want this line to go up and this line to come down, and then they’re to be a resolve. It has to be about this particular character, and that’s one of the things I always hear: well, whose story is this? Who’s the antagonist? Who’s the protagonist? A lot of us stopped and – we don’t have an identifiable protagonist and antagonist in a lot of stuff. So it’s like redefining. How do you teach that, and how do you get that vision? How do you get that audience, that perception to realize that they need to leave their preconceptions at the door when they walk into a Native play? They need to leave those preconceptions and those stereotypes behind when they pick up a Native play to read, and just accept the story and accept the way it’s being told.

Audience #1: I’m from the Caribbean and I’m studying theater now, and my experience has been one of laziness, over all, and of just – if there is such a thing – innocent ignorance. I think that there’s just a lack of rigor, in general, because – as you said before – white is a generalization, and a lot of these terms themselves actually come from other places: Stanislavsky’s Russian. Uta Hagen: not from the U.S. So there’s this absolute, absolute confusion that just goes on on all levels. And I think that there is a default. People assume that I’ve tried macaroni and cheese. I haven’t; I eat rice and beans. And there’s this assumption when you’re teaching – or in my case when you’re learning from a teacher – of like, regular theater, that we all know what we’re talking about, but I just don’t. And then there becomes this mysticism when you touch Latin theater or African-American – any other theater that’s “other” – because it’s like nobody really knows, and so you become all of the sudden the authority on all things Latin, or all things of color, you know? And they all look at you. And you’re like, “…what?” You know? And there’s this assumption of like, we’re all free to talk about it, we don’t know. But there is this innocent curiosity. I don’t think it comes out of malice; it just comes out of years and years of just hiding it and crushing it. And so there’s just not the musculature, there’s not the vocabulary, there’s not the anything to tackle that problem. And so that’s why a lot of the plays get mystified: like, “what is the moon, really?” You know? And people are like, “I wish I could be Latin like you.” I’m like, “What did you say? Y’all didn’t like me. Y’all think…” I mean, I’m only 20, and somebody told my mom not to bring me to a party because we were brown? I’m in Jersey, I’m not far from the city. We’re supposed to be liberal. No, they just don’t know. I think, Bill, you said something in class the other day which touched my soul, because constantly, I’m the troublemaker at school because I’m like, “great, so, when am I going to get to do a scene in Spanish?” and they’re like, “I don’t know,” and I’m like, “Well, make it happen, because I’m paying to be here.” But everybody always asks me, like, “Who is your play for.” And I’m like, “Who isn’t my play for? And why would I ever make a play that somebody can’t watch? What are you talking about?” And you said that the play is for the play. You write the story because it is asking to be told. And I think that in there comes a vocabulary. You had snow, so you made a word for snow. You need to make something happen on stage, so you find the word to make it. And it becomes complicated and it becomes fragmented, but it happens. I’m working with a cast – there’s no Latinos in my cast right now – and I bring in Spanish terms. And it’s because they need to be there. And they understand them. They make the effort and they understand them. And all of a sudden we’re speaking Spanglish in my rehearsal. And nobody’s from Latin America except for me. And so I think that there are stories that are begging and demanding and screaming to be told, which is what we are finally getting to encounter. And I truly believe that each one calls for its own vocabulary. And it takes that rigor. It does take more time, and it does take more effort, and it is exhausting. But that’s just what needs to happen. So it just needs to be done. So I think that even for all the white people themselves, they’re lacking in something. And I think that this is a perfect moment to make it happen.

William: We’re at a time when we have change. See, this is the other thing, too, the other thing that has always amazed me because I’ve been in the Native theater for X-amount of years now, that people are so overwhelmed by fear. They’re so afraid. At the same time, I’ve also seen something very interesting, too, is that why do we have to play for this one group? I’ve always been amazed that – I’ve come across Native people that say, “Well, I don’t want to offend the white people.” It’s like, “Well, why not? They don’t care about you.” “I’m afraid what the white people back East will think.” Well, why care? They don’t give a damn about you. You’re out here in Montana, they’re in New York in Washington, D.C. Do the action. Do the production. And then they’ll notice you. But see, here’s the other thing about academia that we have to be careful of. When we have a few non-Natives who train in Native theater, they become “Indian experts.” I’ve actually – unfortunately – developed two of those people. And they actually found people who were of lacking in blood quantum and said they were not Native. And it’s like, who the hell are you to say they’ve Native or not? But we also have an interesting process, too, where we have people who have just become aware of their Native-ness and they’ve become experts. And they’re judgmental. Now, I can be accused of being judgmental, but at the same time, I always ask for forgiveness, because eventually I know I hurt people with my words. And that’s the worst kind of thing to do. But you can always recover for someone’s words. But when it becomes a legacy and these would-be Indian experts, they have this legacy of putting people down for not being Native, that’s very scary. But it’s only an American issue.

Karmenlara: You know, I think that – just really quickly – I think that it’s really important in a festival like this, and going forward for the future, that we not be afraid to be controversial, and that we not be afraid to talk, and take risks. And Bill has set the stage by saying we can apologize for our mistakes, but that this is a useless festival if we don’t actually talk and take the risks to say the things that we need to say, and make a community through that – because that’s the reality. That’s where we are. So I just want to put that out there and say that I think the ability to apologize and try is what makes it safe enough.

Gloria Miguel: It’s been done, we’ve kept at it -- I don’t like to toot my own horn -- but to get a group of Native people together and to tell their own stories and find out a way that they would tell it just maybe from their soul, or where they are, not thinking about how the white men or the white world will do it. And you have to be tough enough to take the crap the world – and I mean the world, not only the white people, but the Indians, too – because that is them. And we’re researching and functioning and working and performing, and it’s not easy. It’s not easy. And you have to fight all the way through. But even if you start from your soul, from where you are, it’s worth it. And you have to keep on going, because we did it. We started it. And it’s not easy. You have to take a lot of crap.

Terry: Well, I guess we only have a few minutes left, so we can get some closing comments all the way down. Bill, go ahead.

William: The only thing I would say is this: we are at a pivotal point of change. Within every Native community, there is the possibility of potential of hearing these new songs these new words, these new works. And the most important thing is, don’t allow your voice to be taken from you. We’ve had a cycle of oppression and colonialism in this country. I’m a child of the 60’s. My mother was an activist. My brother Fish -- George “Fish” Redstone -- was a member of the American Indian Movement, and was a part of the Wounded Knee takeover. My cousin Mini Two Shoes was a part of the Wounded Knee takeover, as well. But they fought for their own homeland. They fought for their people. Theater can be sacred, but we also must respect it, but we must respect our community for that to happen. And yeah, you will take a lot of abuse from your own community, but that’s what keeps us human. That’s what provides us the humility. It reminds us we are not that significant in the universe, but we are a part of the universe. Now the only thing I will say is this. Is that remember at one time -- it’s great to be a Native playwright, but I was of a generation that we weren’t considered human beings. We were less than dogs because we were Indians. And we will always be that. But we can change it. In the old days, they used to say, “I want you to take these papers to our great white father in the East.” Those days are done. We can now say, “Take these papers to our brother in Washington, D.C.” It’s no longer the great white father. There is a change, but we must take the change. Thank you.

Terry: Thank you, Bill. Dianne?

Dianne Reyner: As Gandhi says, “Be the change you want to see.” I would just like to say, in closing, and sort of getting off topic because I’m not going to be on another panel – yay! – I would like to say how much I appreciate the invitation of the Public Theater to come, I appreciate – and I’m not trying to be Indian humble, because if you know me, well, anyway. So, I do appreciate, so much, because I believe very strongly the reason I have been doing Native theater off and on since 1974, through thick and thin and through the back of a van, and stuffed a bunch of Indians in a cargo and we’re sleeping on each other and we’re sweating, and we’re going out and changing in bathrooms, and presenting the stories, and doing whatever we have to do to get the story out. It is so sweet to be a part of Native people coming together who have the same passion that I have, and who has done the same thing that I have, and who may have been the shoulder that I slept on when we were driving through South Dakota. But you have been there, I have been there, we have all been there, and we have all shared that, and we have all had two bucks in our pocket when we headed off on our 800 mile road trip, and it’s like somebody feeds us along the way because they feel that it’s that important for us to come and tell the story. They’ll put us up and they’ll make boiled meat soup and they’ll make fry bread, and they’ll give you corn soup and they’ll say, “Well, you know, you can sleep in the living room,” and you line up; it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, you line up in the living room and you sleep and you get up and you go out and you perform. And that’s what we do, and that’s what it’s for, and people say that there’s a stereotype about theater artists being selfish and self-centered, and they do it because they want the spotlight on them. And that spotlight is warm, but that’s not why we do it. That’s not why any theater artist does it. I look around, and I look at Muriel and I look at Gloria and I look at all the people who are doing these wonderful, wonderful, wonderful things, and it warms my heart. And I appreciate you so much. And I want to say that because we don’t often hear it. And if I’m the first person to say that to you during this conference, then shame on everybody who hasn’t told it to one another. Tell people and encourage each other. Keep doing – I hear stories when we’re walking back and forth about students, we have a student who’s in trouble, so we’re all still working on things that are happening out there. And everything I hear is, “Well, I don’t know if my agent has called and I’m going to get a part,” what I hear is, “someone needs help where I just came from. What can I do to help them?” And that may be a thousand miles away. So I appreciate you.

Terry: We’re getting close to our time.

Randy: I’m thankful for plays and stories that change people’s lives. I’m thankful for institution and people who dedicate themselves to the furthering of knowledge and intellectual pursuit. And I’m thankful for institutions that bring those two worlds together and create visibility for artists in meaningful ways.

Karmenlara: As arrogant as it may sound, in everything I teach, I’m trying to explode academia from the inside out. And I will fail at that, definitely, but that’s part of what I care about, and not only with Native drama, but Native drama is important in that. And I can only thank the people who have been influence and who have taught me a lot in this community, and also my students for making that really meaningful, and it makes it worthwhile to be a part academia, which is so fraught with so many complications. And thank you to the festival.

Terry: And then going from that, I guess, I’d just like to say, I think maybe we should all think about developing a language, developing our own theory, and so as instructors, maybe we need a little consistency or coherence. I know I could use some in my classroom. Sometimes I’m just trying to remember things that Bill told me, that Bruce King told me, other Native teachers that I’ve worked with, and going from what Bill said, no we don’t have Uta Hagen, and we don’t have Bertolt Brecht, but we have our beloved Spiderwomen, and we have Bill Yellow Robe, and we have Diane Glancy, and we have Jennifer Podemski, and all of our beloved playwrights here, too. So we need to not discount ourselves and say we are not all that, because we are.