Staging the Sacred: Field Discussion Transcript

Field Discussion
Staging the Sacred
November 13, 2008, 10am
Moderator: Daniel David Moses
Panel: Eric Gansworth, Monique Mojica, and Edward Wemytewa

Daniel David Moses: Well, good morning everyone, this is Staging the Sacred. I hope we can get in this other space this early in the morning. It’s hard enough being in our physical bodies without thinking what they might generate, but I’m Daniel David Moses. I’m a playwright from Six Nations of the Grand River, and I’ve done most of my work up there in the North. I teach playwriting at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Next to me is Monique Mojica, actress. I like the phrase in the bio, “spun from the web of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater.” She also works up in north of the border, and I’m happy to say that she’s been along on the ride of a piece of mine that’s in development. Next is Eric Gansworth from the Onondaga nation. He’s a professor of English and Lowery Writer in Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo. I like these titles: Mending Skins and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function. These are poetry, I’m guessing?

Eric Gansworth: One’s a novel and the other is a poetry collection.

Daniel: One’s a novel. And your play is tomorrow night?

Eric: Yes.

Daniel: Right. And down at the end is Edward Wemytewa. Is that close?

Edward Wemytewa: That’s good. Wemytewa.

Daniel: Our Zuni connection. And he’s the founding director of Idiwanan An Chawe, a storytelling theater. So we’re here to talk about finding ways of putting – or maybe not putting – our most cherished beliefs into theater. It was probably in those first three or, say, five years I was living in Toronto, years after I’d finally finished my education with a master's degree in creative writing, UBC, and was writing only poetry, and was as predicted by my dear Grandmother Bee among others, living, as I’m sure she said, as poor as a church mouse. It was probably back then when I used to have to browse the used bookstores that I came across a copy of Masked Gods: Hopi and Pueblo Ceremonials, an old anthropology text that describes those mythologies, and then relates the stories to the actions of the ceremonies. I hadn’t quite got it when my professors had talked about the roots of Western theater in the sacred. The Greeks as a source was just academic to me, but this, wow. This was reality. I was still young and impatient enough that the idea of ceremonies that went on for days amazed me. I paid attention. I’d been raised Anglican, Protestant beside the Grand River on the Six Nations Iroquois Reserve, and we Protestant-Mohawk-warrior-types are nothing if not efficient and practical when it comes to worship. It all happens in a church in less than two hours once a week, sigh of relief. To twelve-year-old me, that had seemed right and proper, but as a young man living in Toronto, trying to write back to some sense of that right and properness, that holiness, that sacredness, the completeness, that perfection with all the messy experience of those years in between, strange food, strange people, strange sexual practices. Also along for consideration, I found myself suddenly convinced by the thought – no, the reality – of those Hopi and Pueblo ceremonies creating center of a cosmos over in the American Southwest. I knew – and know – little of that territory, but I didn’t feel left out at all. What I started noticing, they call part of it The Four Corners. Hey, we have an intersection on Six Nations we call Four Corners. We also have a Sixty-Nine Corners, I have no idea why. And if we have a Grand River, they’ve got the Rio Grande. I’m sure I could go on. I’m sure. But let me be practical, and efficient – my practical and efficient self – and ask, how do we do theater? Our secular – perhaps even Protestant – versions of ceremonials, it does feel like a blessing when a play’s run gets extended, gets to create its own little cosmos for a few more dozen human souls and days. How do we tell these stories in ways that write back to the roots of our several human and territorial and often culturally specific values, but still get the broader human message across? Can we? Is it plausible? We all want to believe in universal values, but I’ve seen eyes glaze over when we start in on our prayers, and then when there’s stuff so sacred like the names of some gods, it’s not supposed to be said out loud, that’s when the audience gets interested. Let’s try, let’s just begin, to figure out some ways to preserve, revive, adapt into future performances, those stories that matter to many – or even just some – of us how do you stage the sacred? Monique, do you want to?

Monique Mojica: Yeah, you made a lot of things pop up there. One of the first things that came to mind was the last thing you said, about when you speak, that which within the culture is meant not to be spoken, came to mind immediately the Reading of New Plays Festivals we have in Toronto every year that was named by Tomson Highway of a very central figure in his Cree language and Cree culture that is also not meant to be spoken if there’s not snow on the ground – we speak it all the time, it’s written down. What does that do? What does that mean? And who do you ask? Ah-ha! Because you get different answers when you ask, and it’s my practice you always ask permission. You must always ask permission, in whatever way that means, whatever culture you’re working with, it’s going to be something different. I live in Ontario, there it’s customary that you bring someone tobacco and say, “I have this question, can I do…” Well, that doesn’t mean anything in Kuna Yala, where I just was, when I had to go ask permission. They had to actually go away, and these holders of traditional culture, and say, “No one’s ever come and asked us before. We’ll get back to you tomorrow.” Well, because people usually come and take, and go off and do their thing. We don’t know how to answer that right now. And the currency, what they needed on that particular community, was currency. That’s what meant something, that day, for those people. We’re talking about a community where kids get sent to the store to buy a bag of rice with coconuts. That’s how they pay. There isn’t currency there. So if we go ahead and speak the names of those entities that are not meant to be spoken, that has a reverberation, and what is it? And there is a consequence. I’ve been in shows where people said, “Oh, well, its theater, theater’s sacred, we can say…” and things started to fly. Things started to crash. People started to get sick and fall down. The playwright had to go and ask at home, okay, now what do I do? And we had to take care of those things. We had to do feast for the name that was being said. We had to tell this entity, “It’s just a play! We don’t really need you to show up on stage.” I really believe that there’s a huge responsibility -- a huge responsibility -- to do those things. And I feel as I was thinking one Dan was talking, if I speak this, it’s going to sound like an enormous contradiction, but it’s not. I will never, ever put what is ceremonial, or that which is held -- as it was described to be by the Onondaga clan mother – that which is held collectively private on the stage. Because that’s not theater. That’s ceremony out of context. On the other side, I believe that just about everything I put up there is sacred, and it will be sacred if it is done within the principles of how our stories are told, what our experiences are. If you take those cornerstone principles, all of those things are connected to the sacred, no matter how ordinary we might think something is. And that, I really had thrown up in front of my face in a way I’d never seen before when I went and spent the month of September in Kuna Yala, which is autonomous Kuna territory in Panama and Colombia, but I was on the Panamanian side, and we spoke to these keepers of traditional culture, and my cousin and I kind of gingerly saying, “Okay, well, this is what we’d like to do, you think it’d be all right,” and the traditional people jumping up and saying, “Oh, yes, you see this, you could do it this way, you could take that, you could…!” You see there’s perspective right here. “Of course you can do that! Take it and run! Who’s going to do it if you don’t?” And we were like, “Whoa, now we really have the responsibility.” And I think the other thing that was very, very telling to me, and that I was able to take away, is the layers of internalized racism that it forced me to peel off yet another layer, and yet another layer, and yet another layer, because I was talking to this one man this afternoon that is -- his job, within the traditional culture, is to be the interpreter for the chiefs, because when the chiefs speak to the community, even if they’re speaking to a community that speaks nothing but Dule Gaya, when you speak in the ceremonial sense, you’re not using everyday language. You’re using ceremonial language. A lot of other nations have that, I know that’s true in the Longhouse, it’s true in the Mayan world, but there’s a different language, so these men, who are called Arkar, are the interpreters for the chiefs. And he was speaking in language that was so sophisticated artistically that I had to confront now, why did I think that our traditional people wouldn’t talk about that? Why did I think that they weren’t going to use words like “metaphor,” and “abstraction,” and “multi-dimensionality,” and making visible that which is not visible? And that’s exactly how he spoke. Those things have everything to do with what is sacred in Kuna culture – duality. Duality of male and female. Duality of male and female is in everything. So if within our cultures, we can identify, acknowledge, and do off-stage everything to honor those principles which are sacred principles within our cultures and create our work around those principles, we are staging the sacred, and staging the sacred in an essential way without violating those things which are held collectively private. And that’s the way I’ve been trying to work. I’ve been trying for years to find a process along with the other colleagues – most centrally Floyd Favel, who is not here, I wish he was here, I have to speak his namemaybe wishing him here, Floyd Favel, Plains Cree -- and we’ve been, for about the past twenty years, looking for ways that we could identify a process or processes that allows us to use that which are our social traditions or ritual traditions as a methodology to the stage. He’s not using the word methodology anymore. Sometimes I can’t help it. He’s replaced it with “process,” but so that it’s not a linear process at all, it’s very cyclical. We can go either way, and what I’ve discovered in my work that sometimes I think I’m researching something theatrical, or theatrical structures, or dramaturgy, I think I’m researching something historical, but what I come to is something quite sacred. Sometimes I think I’m in ceremony doing something that has nothing to do with my life as an actor, but that’s what comes out in my theatrical work. So it’s not linear, there are not little boxes. I think Tamara said something like that yesterday that most of us work in a way that is considered in mainstream interdisciplinary. We work with the visual and the word and movement and song, and story, all at once, interconnectedly. That’s how it is in most of our cultures. So in trying to really discover and identify and find words to talk about a process that puts our way of being in the world in the center, it’s taken me to a lot of different places, and it doesn’t stop. I don’t think it’s something that you arrive at, but it’s something that we each bring to our work, and it’s, to me, it has to be different. There’s no one way of doing it. And a really interesting thing, because all of us in this room are from all different nations, and some of the things that are really important not to violate aren’t going to be the same. And I just want to end by this one little story. I was working with Floyd and with my cousin Achu DeLeon Kantule, who is a visual artist on the project that we’ve been collaborating on for about a year, called Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, and we were getting ready to stage it as a workshop staged reading, and I knew that I wanted cacao beans. I wanted a circle of cacao beans, and I was even thinking of a kind of a pile of cacao beans. Well, we couldn’t do that, because I’d slide on them and fall, so we just had an outline of a circle, and there was a hammock held above it. And I came to a point and I stepped out over the circle. And Floyd was very quiet. And then he said, “Well, is there a way that you can do that without stepping over that circle? Because, you know, in Cree way, you don’t step over anything. You don’t step over a person, you don’t step over a piece of paper, you don’t step over a stick. You always go around. It lacks respect; I really would not like you to step over that. Can you open a door?” So, we consult Achu. Okay, we’ve a circle of cacao beans, that’s very Kuna, so can you open a door? And so we explained the problem to him; it didn’t matter at all if I stepped over the cacao beans, because they were sleeping. They hadn’t been awakened yet. They were a food at that point; they were not the sacred cacao to pray with. They were asleep. But opening only one door was definitely not cool, because then the aesthetic of the symmetry was off. So if you’re going to open one door, you have to four. So negotiating working across cultures is what I think has to be done, and it takes a little bit more effort, but it makes it really rich, and really fun to find ways to solve that. And we have four doors in the circle of cacao. I’m going to stop.

Daniel: Thank you. I was just thinking, for those of you who aren’t dealing with these cultural-specific ones, but you’re all theater people. I mean, it’s been years since I’ve used any phrase except “The Scottish Play” when referring to that work, because it’s just become a habit that went with – even on those rare moments when I feel like I should actually identify this because people outside our theatrical circle won’t, I can’t go there. It’s something that’s become part of my belief system within the theater culture. If you just sort of magnify that response, which I’m sure many of you have developed as well for that particular Shakespeare, just because that’s a piece of theater that has a lot of strange energies in it. If you just sort of multiply that to a number of times, you’ll begin to understand some of these things that we’re talking about in our broader cultures. Eric?

Eric: I find that the writing process always is a sense of self-discovery, almost to the point of embarrassment most times. And I honestly believed that I was not remotely a religious person at all in my adult life, and then discovered that seven books in, every single book is about religion in some way, or about faith, or thinking about what that means, that other world beyond, and the relationship we have to do. And I often end up in these funny situations where I’m an inadvertent ambassador, I guess, and maybe some of you who’ve become professional Indians have discovered this as well, that you wander into situations and suddenly you’re speaking for an entire group of people, and you want to say, “No, no, I’m just this one person.” And yet you’re never just that one person, that wrestling match is occurring all the time. And the repercussions for it are real. And I have tremendous difficulty saying no, even to things that I hate and ideas that I know I’m going to badly. Somehow “yes” comes out of my mouth instead of “no.” And as a result, I’m always wrestling with then trying to do that thing correctly. But part of the reason “no” always wants to come out first is that I saw the relationship of – and this is maybe a flippant way of talking about this, but I’m sure you know what this means – the culture cops. The previous generation where I come from made very serious distinctions about what you could say and couldn’t say, and could show and couldn’t do and these very convoluted ways, and there was a writer from my community who had written this amazing book that certainly showed me the way, and I was very young when he wrote it. It was 1976, so I was a kid. I was still in elementary school, and I knew that it existed, and when I would see him, I would say, “When’s that second book coming out?” And he said, “Well, you know, I was working on one, but the chiefs came up and asked me to stop working on it.” And he did. And it never came out until the year after he died. And that’s a real and meaningful loss to me. And I think when you choose to become somebody who works between the two sides, rather than just within one or just within the other; you’re bound to fail all the time. Somebody’s going to be pissed off at you no matter what you do. And I think at the same time, I look at our long history and there’s this strong believe system of the seven generations and everybody talks at length about those. But often, it seems that people give one particular interpretation of that, which is seven generations into the future, and that’s the only entire correct interpretation of the seven generation. There’s you, and the three after you, and the three before you. And you learn from the strengths and weaknesses of those three that came before you, so that you can help with the three who come after you. I’m certainly not psychic enough to imagine what life is going to be like seven generations from now, but I can see three generations into my family, and so I know who I want to be for those people. And this last year – some of this will be very redundant after Saturday night because the piece that you’re going to hear is very self-reflexive, and so it’s a piece of writing about the process of doing the piece of writing, which sounds incredibly boring because it sounds like somebody sitting at a typewriter and who wants to see that? Because we come from a culture that is very lively and very oral, and what I discovered throughout this was that I was asked to speak for three hours on our creation story this last year, and out of some perversity, I said yes. Because that’s not what I do. I write about contemporary life, and I’ve pretty much always written about contemporary life, but it is what I do visually. I’m a painter as well, and my paintings have always gone back to the creation story, and so I had a very specific kind of familiarity with it. But it was one that was visually driven, rather than narratively driven. And so then to think of trying to carry that story forward wasn’t so much that I wasn’t interested in it – I was very interested in it – but knowing that I would not be able to do it well, and that that would mean something, that my incompetence would then reflect into the future. And I didn’t want to be that bad energy, as well. And so in over-preparing, trying to come off with a three hour stint that I thought would be reasonable, what I did was try to read every available version of the creation story that I could find. The first dated back to 1827. It was from somebody, oddly enough, from my community, from Tuscarora, and what I discovered in his version is that he makes an apology at the very opening, saying that he understands he is going to fail, and that he really wished somebody in his lifetime who had gotten a better English education would be articulate enough to translate it more thoroughly and more effectively than he could, but like so many other people, he’d waited around for many, many years for that person to come. But like nobody else, he said, “You know what, that person’s not coming, and it’s getting close to time for me to leave,” so he sat down and he wrote it. And he decided to include that as a preface. And I thought that that was extremely important to understand that what he was giving was a model for all further generations – that we know we’re going to mess it up to some degree, and that the relationship of translating the oral story to the page becomes something important and meaningful, if you really do believe that this is a relationship among seven generations, and that you become part of that continuum. You don’t really know where you fall on that continuum. And the last version of the creation story that I found was written in – I’m not positive but it seems to have been a personal press thing, because like, Universe is very readily available these days, so you know, this kind of publishing technology is available to the individual person. But it’s from one of our most serious thinkers, and I don’t know why he chose not to send it out there, or you know, put it out through the vetting process, and so forth, and get it published through some other source. But he did a similar thing, and structurally, it was almost identical. I mean, the version of the narrative was significantly different, but what he wrote was a fairly full version of the creation story, but then a twenty-page introduction to his reasons for writing it at this point, or re-writing it at this point. And so it was a brand new model that echoed the very first model And in looking at both of those things, I understood that, well, each speaker, each person telling the story does bring something to it, and if you’re a serious and committed member of the culture, then you have to bring what your eye and your filters bring to it. I guess I think of people’s imaginations – artists’ imaginations – as either a coffeemaker with a built-in grinder or an alcohol still. You know, you take all of this set of experiences and all these original things, and then you grind them up and filter them through the ways in which you think about the world and then they drip down and there’s this whole other thing that becomes of you, but not you. And so having read that and gone forward, I thought, “All right, I’m going try this.” And I wrote it as a lecture because that’s what it was supposed to be – a three hour lecture – and because I’m extremely neurotic, I wrote a fifty-five page essay, which, you must be pitying those students who were in that room that night. And I tried writing it as something that was to be read aloud, but it was terrible. And it was terrible because I am not a professional storyteller. It’s not what I do. I’m a professional writer. And I see storytellers and I’m blown away by what they can do, and the way in which their minds work. If I thought that thing from Star Trek worked, I would jump on one of them and maybe get that Vulcan mind meld and get a little bit of that talent in. But it doesn’t work, so I’m left with the page. And I looked at it and I was feeling really badly that it didn’t work in the way I wanted it to, because it was this hybrid form. It was an essay meant to be read for three hours, and who is going to come to that? Unless you’re officially assigned to come to that as the student. Nobody. And then I got this call for work, here, this call for the Native Theater Festival, and I thought, “Oh, maybe that’s what it is.” So I took a crash course – a single crash course – in reading a lot of contemporary plays and seeing how they were structured, and then saying, “Well, what can I do with the creation story that’s something like this, and that incorporates my own sense of where I sit, and the irritation of people who say, well, we can’t talk about that.” Because I think that’s a really dire thing, and it’s really short-sighted. I do understand that there are ceremonial language and ceremonial things that we don’t do out in public. But I think the overstepping bounds of the culture cops is a real thing as well. I think that David Cusick in 1827 risked that kind of ridicule for people like us who would come later, and who would say, “You know what? At some point, the culture’s going to shift, and people aren’t going to tell the creation story on a regular basis, and it’s going to be lost unless somebody writes this down.” And so I saw it as a movement forward in that somebody comes forward every generation, and tries to do some new version of it that speaks not only to the original story itself, but to the ways in which it has meaning in their particular lives. And what I discovered in learning the nuances of the story to try to do this correctly was that it’s largely a story of pragmatism. I mean, when your protagonist is somebody who gets shoved through a hole and the beginning of her story is that she’s falling and has no idea where she’s falling, and yet she still makes the best of it, that seemed like a pretty good story to live by. And I realized that’s how most of my life operates. I’m ultimately simultaneously an obsessive workaholic and lazy as hell. I would like to keep doing the same things over and over and over again and not move and not grow because those things are really comfortable. And growing, ultimately, is a pain in the ass, as you know. And yet somebody keeps pushing me through that hole. And this time, it was moving into theater. And it has not been without its growing pains. But what I discovered was that it’s a very intrinsic relationship with the creation story, and that to try to shine in whatever situation comes your way is an awesome philosophy to live by. And so I think staging the sacred, in this case, is a way, or an attempt to, despite other people who may want to keep the story privately or keep it for themselves, or believe that it shouldn’t be shared in some other form, I’m not really speaking for those people. I’m speaking for my nephew’s children, and my niece’s children, and the generations that come after them, to allow them to see that these are their stories, and that I hope that they’re intact enough that they’re meaningful to them in the ways that all those people who came before me did that tremendous and gracious favor for my generation.

Audience 1: Are creation stories one of the stories that there’s controversy about telling?

Eric: There seem to be parts of it, and there are lots of nuance, it moves back and forth, that one, I think because it’s so out there, so much out there that it’s not, but I know there have been other projects that I’ve stopped work on in the middle of because of that kind of tension. I don’t think the creation story is, but I am keenly aware that others are, and that sometimes I have no idea, like, somebody stops me in the middle of something and says, “You know, you shouldn’t be doing that.” And I have concerns about that stuff.

Daniel: Edward, do you want to talk a bit?

Edward Wemytewa: I think there’s cultural taboo, in my opinion, but then there’s the modern cautions of exploitations, and that’s what I’m always conscious of. Let me just give you a little bit more background about where I’m coming from. I have a book that’s on sale – was on sale last night – one of the book items being sold here, and it’s called Journeys Home. That’s an earlier work, and it was in collaboration with Roadside Theater, out in Appalachia. Recently, I had an essay published; it was a joint essay with Tia Oros Peters, who is with Seventh Generation Fund out of Arcata. Our essay is in this book telling stories that changed the world. And like Eric, I write, but I guess my foundation is the visual arts. But when I realized in the early 70’s that nobody was taking to the Zuni language, which is an isolate; no other group of people speak the Zuni language. And realizing that in the 70’s, I immersed myself into the language-project, and during the course of adopting the alphabet, I realized that we have to come up with some kind of arrangement that was going to ensure that our children who are coming see and enjoy the language and so I said, “What would be the medium?” And that’s when I switched to storytelling, just to keep the language alive, and to learn about the language and just the art of storytelling. So I do paint, and recently I was commissioned to do a painting. It’s a cultural map of our Aboriginal land, and it’s going to be featured in the National Geographic in January of ’09. It’s not selling now. I’ll come back then! It’s kind of trying to make the general public aware that our boundaries are artificial, and that really our territory is a lot bigger than what it is today, and that when New Mexico and Arizona boundary was created, it went right down the middle of our reservation, and so we were not recognized in the Arizona side for a long time, and so it’s that kind of issue. Right now, aside from my regular job, I am still administering a language board on behalf of the tribe. We’re the first tribe that I think – actually a third New Mexico tribe that had signed MOA with the state of New Mexico – in doing that, we certify our teachers – our classroom teachers – to teach language, and then culture, and one the board certifies it, the governor signs off, and then the state of New Mexico endorse this certification. And so that way, the tribe has say so on who teaches Zuni language in the classroom. The other ongoing work is that I think I’m completing the first phase of a new script. It’s called Splitting of the Tribe, and this story is about… it’s tied to emergence story; it’s tied to creation story, but when we talk about creation story, it talks about also the migration. It’s interchangeable. And in the creation stories, there is significant episodes that are caught in our stories, and one -- if you want to think in terms of a book -- I’m dealing with one chapter about a migration story, and it’s that chapter that talks about the splitting of the tribe, where a macaw egg was put on the ground, and there was this elaborate ceremony, because during the migration, half the people became restless. They became afraid, and they wanted to go to a place of familiarity, and that was the South. That was somewhere in the place for every summer. In our language, there’s a place for every summer. So as a modern storyteller, when I present these stories, the question will be raised: where did the macaw egg come from? Did they just reach in their pocket and pull out a macaw egg? And I say most likely, yes, because you have to go back and really delve into what made the people and where they came from. And also another question to add to that was, how can we have a macaw plant when there’s no macaws in New Mexico? And so the light bulb starts lighting up, and so anyway, that’s the story I’m pursuing. And there’s a sight in the Chihuahuan Desert where it’s almost a prototype of our architecture and their practices and their sacred creatures, sacred objects are very similar to what we have, like the serpent. But of course serpents are found along the coast, almost, and just the practice of anchoring a house using semi-precious materials to anchor the dwelling. And so there’s a lot of parallels, and in terms of the language, the question is, the scholars have been baffled where the Zuni language came from. Again, Zuni language is an isolate, and scholars are just baffled where it came from. And we just want to say, we’re simply the people. They will tell you where the language came from and so, our language came from the South. So that’s the story I’m doing. And it really isn’t about the border issue, but those things are coming to light. Those things are coming to light because, again, it’s this story about the migration, the splitting of the tribes, it’s not only an aspect that is in the Zuni tribal oral tradition; you find that in Hopi, you go in the Rio Grande tribes, and the Rio Grande tribes are pondering the question, too. So anyway, it’s a story that, for me, it’s different. It’s a different kind of challenge. The kind of stories are tidbits of folklore, with modern twists, but this one is more deeper, because again, we’ve… I feel that our language theater has built and audience, and they’ve grown to have expectations of our theater, and I think in order to keep them interested, keep them connected, we have to… the first four years of my theater, I said we’ll try to produce a new story or a new script every year, and we were fine until I got into Tribal Council, but that’s a different story. Might be a little dangerous when a storyteller becomes a tribal council member, but anyway, that’s a totally different story, but after my four year term, I came back and I’m pinned up on stories again, and I want to make sure that since we’ve hooked our audience, we continue to provide them new, fresh, and challenging ideas or challenging thoughts. So with that, now I want to talk about the subject of the panel. I come from a village that really still has deep religious roots, but again, if you look at the culture, there is secular aspects of the culture, too, and for me, to share stories within the community and sometimes out of season, I feel that storytelling was the medium to work with. Although some of our stories bridge over to religious significance, religious meanings, and there I have to rely on religious leaders to give me guidance. I have religious people on my language board, I have religious leaders on my advisory, and I actually have religious leaders who drum and sing for me, so they’re on stage with me, they travel with me, and to me, that allows me to put the oral tradition on stage. I think one of the earlier things that I became very conscious about is that when you’re on stage, when you write, when you start telling stories, you put yourself in a very vulnerable position. You’re very vulnerable, and you’re going to be tested. I think it was a comment that came from Tamara, or from the man, yes, Doug, he said you have to make the audience let go of any resentment. And I agreed with him on that. I think when you’re going to be exposed, you want to do your own cleansing, you want to become very visible, and allowed to be targeted. And I think when you’ve endured that, you can basically proceed with an open and healthy dialogue, and to me, that has been very important, and so today, I think when I speak, I try to speak not as an individual, but to speak on behalf of the people, and that’s why I think it’s so important for me to partner with tribal leaders. We have a modern tribal leadership, but when we have the traditional leadership, and I try to work with both. It’s always a balancing act.

Eric: How does that work?

Edward: Well, I was going to back to the cultural police. There’s always going to be a tribal leader, whether it’s an elected position or a traditional leader, but there’s always going to be a handful that is going to challenge you. But then again if you’ve done your research, if you have honored the goals and the objectives of the tribe in both arenas, I think that you will continue to get support, and it’s a fine line. It’s a fine line and again, I think part of it is that what you do, you have to give back. And I think that’s really a tribal… it’s an underlying principle for tribes to give something back, whether it’s having a celebration, whether it’s recognizing team players, but for example, I mentioned this cultural map, it’s owned by the museum. Posters were made, and so the posters are circulated within the village, and again, when we do performances, we go to a school, we do community performance for the general public, and it’s always free. So I think as long as we’re giving back and you recognize the people, it’s works for you and I guess my foundation is that I built a premise that is to let the community know that they should feel comfortable, that somebody’s taking their language, and that the work is going to move on – not at an everyday language level, but it would explore to reach abstract levels. And one of the things I want to say is that religion has been responsible for preserving our language, and today, that religion is still responsible for giving recitals that are very abstract and in the old language. You don’t hear very much old language, but during the course of the year -- we still follow the traditional calendar – and we have to two culminating seasons, the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, and that’s when you’ll see the most in-depth, the most articulate, the most ceremonies that bring people together. And again that’s the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice. And when you understand that and when you become a part of that circle, or when you grow up with it and are involved, it really is a powerful guide, and it’s something that has certainly reinforced my identity and my work over and over. Let me stop at that, and I can come back to answer any questions, or comments.

Eric: I’d like to do one quick follow-up based on something you just said. And it’s that – actually it goes back to your question about are creation stories among those things? There were specific aspects of the culture that were widely accepted as public aspects in the first half of the 20th century, and then suddenly in the second half, they weren’t any longer. And there’s tremendous repercussions if you choose to be public with any of those things, and I think that I have certainly respected that and not continued to move forward in anything that has subsequently been considered not for public consumption, but if that trend begins in 1950, who’s to say that it doesn’t begin in 2009, that suddenly the creation story is no longer a story for the public. And so I think wrestling with the communication of our culture, and what it means to pass it on to coming generations is a very real and meaningful thing. And so those are questions I’m keenly aware of, as I guess the idea of censorship is a very scary thing to a writer.

Daniel: I think I have this image of I think it was James Luna talking about he felt it was his duty to step outside his culture and do his work, but how he was aware that there would be these repercussions, but it was part of what he considered his job description as an artist to take those chances, and to go where his imagination led. That seems to be a very Western-contemporary image of what the artist is, but it may be necessary in this broader culture where cultures are banging up against each other. Shall we, yes, let’s open up.

Jennifer Podemski: Thank you for everything you said, I’ve learned a lot this morning. In terms of what you just said, David, about it’s almost like our job as artists -- or maybe we’re referring to James Luna -- but who do we ask for permission within a culture -- which is something I struggle with a lot. There are so many contradicting points of view about stories and teachings and protocol and ceremony and what you can or can’t do. I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble based on conflicting elders’ opinions and teachings. And then outside of that, my question is, when do I listen to the messages that I’m receiving on a bigger level, possibly as an artist being brought here to say something that is bigger than me? Who do I listen to, and how do you know when to put those things into your line items? Like, we always have cultural advisors and consultants, we work in ceremony to produce programs all of the time. But when you’re talking about bringing something on a national level, let’s say, does that mean that you have to spend six months and pay everybody across the country announcing every single person within the same nation, all of the elders together? What is the answer, and when do you listen to perhaps your own spirit and your own guides and the vision being given to you in terms of where to take a story?

Daniel: With my background, as I explained at the beginning, I don’t have directly a lot of connections to the tradition of the community I grew up in. My particular family, a large part of it, lives off reserve, and we’re very invested in making that work for us. So I’ve found myself – my rule is, if I can find it in a library, it’s fair game. Someone else has already gone and either gotten permission or done the damage, and it’s not my fault it’s out there. But, I mean, if I run across something that I know is owned by someone, and I actually know who that person is, then I’ll go an ask permission. But largely, there’s a sequence at the end of my play Brebeuf’s Ghost, that is based on an anthropologist actually talked to a Shaman, and the Shaman related his actual Shamanic journey to this anthropologist, and it was written down, and I found this thing. It’s stuff that I think normally you wouldn’t expect to be verbalized, but when I was working on that material, and I came across that, I just knew this is the end of the play, this image, this surreal dream that this man experienced. This is what will satisfy this work, and I just had to go there. I think you need to, maybe, just because my experience is largely I sort of stumble into dangerous territory, but usually I get away with it. My most sort of obvious political example is my play about Almighty Voice [Kisse-Manitou-Wayo], which has a tradition in Canadian theater. There were a number of versions beforehand, and the first director I worked with on the play had actually been involved in a prior version of the story where Theatre Passe Muraille had done a story of Almighty Voice, drama-based theater, and taken it West, and taken it to Saskatoon – that’s the closest big city to where the story really happened – and they were worried, because people had been saying “Oh, who do these Toronto people think they are telling one of our stories, and daring to bring it out to us,” but it was done at the university, they went into the university, and it was like the aisle in the theater was the border. On one side was all the university people, and the other side was all the local Native people. All these people were invested in the story in different ways, and Theatre Passe Muraille people were really worried about what was going to happen, that they did their performance, and then the university people started attacking, but then the local Native people started defending, and it was like, okay, that worked out, sort of, for the theater – that the artistic endeavor to explore that story and what it meant clearly got things happening, and that was useful. In that group of Native people on the one side was Maria Campbell. Maria I’ve always had great respect for. I feel like she’s one of my writing mothers in Canada, and it so worked out that when we did my first public workshop of my version of Almighty Voice, Maria was in Toronto working on a movie script, and she was in my office. So with all this backstory that I knew this play could be the center of an event of some sort, I thought, “Oh, God, I may be in trouble. I may have actually stumbled into a mess,” but I was lucky, it worked, people were happy with it, Maria embraced me, so I thought, “Okay, so far, so good.” But, I mean, this was a story that I had lived with for at least a decade, it was something I thought about deeply, and when I finally got the opportunity to write it, it was one of those things that a full-length play came out in like two and a half weeks sort of thing. It was one of those magical, essential things that I needed to do, so even though I knew there was a lot of weight on this story, I guess I was brave, or maybe just foolish. But it works out in the end to be the same thing.

Monique: There’s also a level where you were responsible to a community other than your own in that, because you had chosen, for example, to take the actual song that Almighty Voice’s mother and sister sang at the bottom of the butte, you may have been in big trouble. But you found a way to tell the story without crossing that line. People might not have been as embracing if that actual for real song was part of your script.

Daniel: Luckily it hadn’t been published yet, and I couldn’t find it.

Edward: Let me just try answering your question from my perspective. Earlier in our work, I guess one of the real temperature checks was what is oral tradition? What are the boundaries? And again in our earlier work, I really had to interview and I guess research what those boundaries were, and I know that in our oral tradition, it was about just the word, the use of the word creating this imagery. No props, no acting, and so it was confined like that, and we dealt with that, and then earlier on, once we start performing our storytelling, people are saying, “How come you don’t act? How come you’re not using props?” And I said, “You know, we have to play safe, and we have to make sure that we honor the art, and we honor what the storytelling became and what it is meant for. However, when we start collaborating with other theater companies like Junebug Productions or Roadside Theater out of Appalachia, there are to get to break out of the boundary or just being confined to story. We could act, we could bring props on the stage, and it seemed like the community accepted that. But we had to be faithful to the art of storytelling. So that’s one level.

Donna Cross: And let me say something, too, if I might. I have over the course of a similar journey of having been away from my people for a long time, a lot of this has worn off. Some are still factual. And when I began doing what I was doing, I was criticized a bit, you know. So I picked up the telephone and I started talking to one of my elders, and I spoke to her because she was the keeper of a particular drum, and I like, dared to speak with her, in a way, to ask her about these things. And she just said, “I’m so happy someone has asked me.” And she was very, very happy to speak with me, and to advise me. And then she says, “And one other thing, Donna,” she says, “don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It’s how you live and learn, but you have to be tough enough to do it.”

Jennifer Podemski: I think, I guess I’d like to hear more about contradictions sort of within cultural consulting. I work with a lot of elders, I do a lot ceremony, but oftentimes all those opinions clash within the same nation.

Monique: You choose. You choose. I think you choose. And the thing is, what I found in my practice and my writing is that even when you have decided, okay, that’s my answer, this is the person, this is the elder that I feel the most affinity with; I’m going to listen to what this one says. Because yeah, sometimes you ask five different elders, you’re going to get five different answers, even then, you don’t take the question, whatever it is, it isn’t necessary to take it in the form that it exists and functions in the culture and plop it on the stage. Because then, it’s not theater. And there are principles in our cultures that tell us how you then, you have to transform it into something else, and it isn’t necessary to show those things that are sacred, to speak those words that must not be said in order to tell the story of what those things mean or how they affect characters or elements in a story. So in that way, there is that protection built in. And I think all of our cultures have it, or all of these stories wouldn’t be so metaphorical.

Eric: I tend to measure the distance in the dichotomy, since Haudenosaunee culture exists on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border, and I see how different the responses are, and if I see one that’s exceedingly inflammatory to the other, I decide that’s just two land mines to avoid entirely. One particular set of imagery is so fraught with anxiety in the U.S. that a book has been allowed to go out of print because so many people have spoken against it, and then I was walking around Toronto in an Eaton’s, and I saw this imagery for sale in Eaton’s, and I thought, okay, the two sides of the culture have clearly very different views on it and going one way other is going to be disastrous, so I just stepped out of that story entirely.

Monique: You could talk about what the existence of – but you could talk about what the existence of that society means to your family, to your community, to your story.

Eric: Well, you see, I would normally think that was true, but the book I was talking about that was sort of halted twenty years ago, that the issue was talking about the Hu(t)-dui.

Monique: Just talking about them?

Eric: Yeah.

Monique: I still think there’s a way of doing it, without doing it, saying it…

Eric: My ass has stayed away from it.

Monique: That’s the safest!

Donna Cross: If you say it in English is totally different as well, because there are some things that are just said in the language, and it’s so much more extensive, and it’s only for the people that are speaking the language that are brought into that. But I think some things have gotten out, and then once they’re said English, it’s just like a different thing to me. I don’t know what the consensus is on that kind of thought, but I ran across that one time with – actually it was a war speech given by Black Hawk – and I had to put it up in English to make it into something dramatic. And the woman who gave it to me says, “I think you have changed some words and turned it around.” And I said, “Yeah, because I had to build and have an impact of making the people go to war. That’s why. I didn’t really change the words, I changed the order.” She says, “I don’t think so, I don’t think you could do that,” and I said, “Well, it was intended to stir the people to go to war when it was given in the language, but it’s been translated now. We don’t really know exactly what Black Hawk said, because this is according to this translation, and so if you want this piece to work dramatically, I think this is the best way to do it.” And when I said it that way to her, then she said "okay," and it did work.

Daniel: Diane, you had something?

Diane Glancy: These are very important issues that we’re talking about. Twenty years ago when I was writing Pushing the Bear about the Trail of Tears, I went to an elder in Oklahoma about some of the old language that I had found, and while he was translating it for me, he said, “You shouldn’t be writing about this, the Trail of Tears, because it was a story of loss and hurt and language brings it alive, and leave it alone.” And I did for a while. It took me about 18 years to write that book. And as I continued to travel around and do other things, those voices kept grounding lose, and so I thought, I’m going to transfer us and go back and get that story, which I eventually did. And then you have to go face them and you have to read in front of them, and you know how they sit there with their arms folded like this across the chest. But it was such a good question, Jennifer, because you’re in trouble no matter what you do, and you might as well make it something important to your heart that you want to be responsible for.

Vickie Ramirez: I just wanted to… you sort of nailed something on the head for me. My grandfather was really my teacher growing up. And he was born in 1926, and his take on everything like spirituality and everything was so open and so… today you’ve got to do a feast and it was all very sort of gentle. No barriers, no fear, no… it was so part of breathing, almost. It was like breathing for him. And it was really lovely. And only to find like, when I grew up and started talking, started writing about things that people were like, “You’re not supposed to discuss this!” It was so much a part of who we were growing up, then it’s “You can’t get in that!” All these can’ts just started coming out of the woodwork. And, I mean, I understand where it comes from, because I’m from North of the border, but a similar culture, and okay, it’s been good for our people in that my nephew’s first language was Mohawk, his second one was English, because that’s how Six Nations was gotten, a lot of it. But in another way, it’s like, Oh my God, where did all of these boundaries come from? And it’s almost, I remember before he passed, I told my grandfather what I was starting to do, that I was starting to write about this, and he was like, “Well, we always got in trouble, so it’s okay.” And he also said, “Just remember,” – and I think I’m about to get in trouble again – but he said, we have two very, very important leaders for the Haudenosaunee, and I’m not going to say their names here, but just remember, they were once guys sitting on the sideline with an idea, and had to talk to people and reach out to people and got them in trouble, too, so it’s kind of like… not all of us are that inspired, but we have something to say. Sometimes I wonder when I hear when we start putting people on these pedestals, because when I was growing up with my grandfather, the spiritual was as natural as breathing. And I almost wonder if the outside culture, that messianic culture who puts their spiritual leader on this platform so far above everybody, if that isn’t starting to affect us a bit. I don’t know. I wasn’t raised like that.

Muriel Miguel: I grew up also in the city with all my uncles. And my uncle who was a medicine person tells me, and it was really matter-of-fact, “Well, I wouldn’t do that…” – that type of approach. So, that’s how I approached all of that. And then I found as I went around that my uncles were really in their culture. They come from this island, they’re in their culture. So there was a bit there. But when you go into the other place, you find that people have lost a lot. And so they’re hanging on with their fingernails. And so they’re not going to give it away so easily. And the elders are not going to give it away so easily because they’ve lost so much. So you go from one place to another and it changes on where they’re centered in the culture. And that’s what I find it happens – we’re so shocked when you go and talk to an elder and you get slapped in the face, and they’re not okay about something. And I also find that I always have to state my credentials with them. And that’s really important, that you say who you are, and you’re truthful. I always say, “I’m a true city-Indian.” I don’t come from a reserve, I don’t come from a reservation, and that’s what I say up front to any of them. So that’s how I approach it. And you still get into controversy, because people are people. Elders are elders.

Jennifer Podemski: I’d like to bring up Norval Morriseau – I don’t know if everyone’s familiar with him, but – in my opinion, and probably shared with other people, sort of took a huge risk early on in his life and wrote the creation stories – not wrote, sorry, painted – a lot of stories, cultural teachings, traditional knowledge, and, well, basically sold it, made a living off of it, and was ostracized and blacklisted from his people for many, many years until the world recognized these stories and recognized the people that these stories originated from, and it’s almost like everything opened out, and everything changed, and then suddenly he became one of those cultural leaders in the community that really was… it was almost like he was a renegade at the time. So in that context, he was blacklisted for, I don’t know, thirty/fourty years.

Daniel: He was also the embodiment of that certain type of crazy artist who just has to do it, goes there. Yeah, he’s a man who even in his career, making money, did find him on the street. He had to have that sort of encounter with reality to do his work. There are a lot of crazy artist types. And I don’t think you make decisions by “Who am I going to offend?” You make decisions by “I have to do this work.” That’s the dilemma, right? If part of your mind is like, not wanting to offend too many people, you have to see how many people you want to talk to before you just move forward. But I do research until I’m ready, that includes talking to people and finding out about things, and at a certain point, I just think, “I have to write this down to get the work done. I can’t wait any longer.” I’m almost thinking I found a quote, it was parody lines that Tom King wrote for the end of his radio show, “Be brave, watch for the sign.”

Randy Reinholz: I wonder, Edward, the painting you mentioned in your talk, the history painting that had been shared, is that the painting you showed us last year?

Edward: Yeah, it was just fresh last year. I wanted to comment on Dianne’s comment. You made a comment about Trail of Tears. Well, you know, we talk about our stories and art addressing healing processes, and I think part of the story will be – the next story that I’m working is going to be about, to a certain extent, about healing, because again, it touches on a place where we, where our ancestors, where our elders dare to go, because there’s a place where it’s considered a place or first contact, where there was bloodshed, and this incredible archaeological site has not been showcased for the people because it’s, again, it was a place of first encounter, there was bloodshed, the conquistadors took over this village, it was one of the seven cities of Cibola, and it’s fifteen miles out from our main village, and in the 70’s, I pursued, I guess this story, and now it’s coming back. It’s gone through a full circle. But in the 70’s, I was inquiring about it and back then, we still had the final pool of the true storytellers. And that’s what I talk about in the book Journeys Home. You must buy it tonight. In that time, elders said, “Why do you want to go there? It’s not a pretty picture, and basically was the dark ages for us,” because there was, I think, to an extreme extent, there was cannibalism, because there was plenty of things that associate to that, and I think at some point, people have to realize and say that it wasn’t our fault. And it goes to another point, the story that I’m doing right now is going to talk about what happened to our sisters that went to the place of every summer. During that period after the European contact, many of the Indigenous people, especially on the Western and Southern coasts of Mexico, many Indigenous people were in chains, and iron collars. They were being sent off as slaves. It wasn’t only the blacks that were the slaves. A lot of Indigenous people were sold as slaves, and so there is that dark finish that’s going to have to come to life. And if we talk about reconnecting with our ancestors that went south, who are they, where did they go, were they part of this exchange of slavery? But we have to, at some point, address it and say that it wasn’t our fault.

Diane Glancy: Exactly. That’s another point of contention. As if there wasn’t enough already. But how much darkness and hurt do you want to explore in art?

Edward: And I guess that kind of touches on your question, too, as artists and as painters, we’re pioneers. We go to our comfortable places first, and we’re going to be, you know, decide.

Monique: It’s almost like there could be two sides of the same thing, or you need both. You need to go to the dark places, and there’s the sacred, also, that bullies you back up. But in all of the cultures, there’s the presence of both, that darkness and the light.

Daniel: Just as a younger artist, I think we’re often… it’s like kids going to horror movies. You want to test your metal. You want to see how much of this you can take. But eventually, you know, you go back home where it’s safe. But it really makes you appreciate that you actually have a peaceful place to live.

Monique: I like what you what you said, Edward, about the storyteller, when you put yourself out there as a storyteller, is to make yourself vulnerable. I think that’s really true. And I think that that’s one of the reasons that we have to do your cleansing, your protection, your grounding, because we are, we go out there and say, “This is what it looks like!”

Edward: And I think, yesterday the panel talked about trust and honesty, and I think once you make yourself vulnerable, people will mostly – or more likely – accept you and believe you. And you’re trying to be honest. You’re trying to be honest, and you just make yourself very vulnerable.

Eric: My second novel is largely a political novel, and I come from a really, really small place. And I was probably more mortified when it was accepted for publication than delighted, which was not the case initially, I was, you know, happy of the first novel. But it was because I wanted to explore what that meant to examine the life in the middle, you know, between two extremes of a progressive and a traditional stance, and it seemed to me that within communities, those are the only voices that were getting heard, were the two sides of things. And when it came out, some people who had read it said well, you know, don’t you think there are going to be a lot of people who are mad about that, about this work? And I said, “I don’t know, maybe.” And as it turns out, it hasn’t been received badly, and I’ve been relieved about that, but the big question remained for me, was that I suppose it was a huge risk, but at the same time, I think people who assert power over you count on your silence. And the role of the writer is to be explicit about opening those things. So I don’t think you can beat people and just hope that none of them get articulate, because one of them, someday, is going to get articulate. And so those are the things I think that we examine as writers and as performers, and it’s that we do go to those places that are uncomfortable, but the reason they’re uncomfortable for some people is that they reveal poor things they have done to others and it forces them to examine their own somewhat dubious actions on occasion.

Donna Heimbecker: I just wanted to further that. We started a theater company in Saskatchewan, right by Floyd’s place there in Saskatoon, the Saskatchewan Native Theater, and we do use theater as a tool, a medium, more specifically for youth and youth at risk – we call them youth with potential. But all of these --

Eric: Wow, that’s nice!

Donna Heimbecker: We have to get rid of “youth at risk.” But anyway, youth with potential. And we hook them up with professional playwrights, and they create stories, and these stories are part of their human journey, and a lot of people think that the products of the program are the plays. And the plays are great, because they’re stories that come from within those young people using the playwright skills to bring those to life. And so, you know, healing through the arts is a very real factor for many young people, and a very effective tool, and I think it’s part of our responsibility as artists and cultural leaders in our communities to keep that going, even though it hurts to some people, to experience, and usually the older people who are having a hard time dealing with these deep-seated issues like the residential school experience, or you know, the whole gang life, or whatever it is. It’s real for young people, and theater stays regardless. And it’s through those stories that hurt some that save others. So, I just thought I’d put that out.

Larissa Fasthorse: I’ve said that, Monique, I just wish you’d just talk to every young Native playwright I ever speak to, forever. And I’m a young writer myself. There’s not much of a lack of us, we end up in teaching positions really young, you know, helping other new writers coming up and it’s so… being Native people, over and over again, they get stuck with being a Native person, cancelling out their artistry, and they have to interpret everything… not interpret everything. They have to present things so realistically, and you talking about making the choices of an artist, and then how you present things, and the interpretational thing, I mean, that’s what I’ve always focused on. I had done some ceremony in my first play, but it was my characters, you know? I was fine. I didn’t worry about it because my characters were urban Indians that were trying to figure out their culture, so my characters did a ceremony they way they would figure out my culture. You know what I mean? And they did things wrong, and I brought in elders, though, and then we had elders through the whole rehearsal process to explain to the kids what was right, and how it’s properly done, and blessed and do everything, and I had to work with them a lot, and they totally got it. They got that they were making mistakes because they would. And I mean, I’m sure somebody was mad. Somebody’s always mad. But not mad enough to cut me up and eat me, which is crazy! So, yay. And then that’s what the rest feel like. I see young Native artist, again and again, they put this mirrored Indian thing over their artistry. They’ve self-censored. They’re their own cultural police, constantly censoring. If you’re true to your art, if you’re true to my characters taking their journey, I’m ready. I grew up in Rosebud and Pine Ridge, I’m ready for people to scream at me. And no one has. But it really is encouraging and just really helpful to hear that, and it helps me to remember to keep giving that commitment. So, thank you.

Daniel: Terry?

Terry Gomez: Yeah, I was just going to say, I think we all know when we’re getting to that fine line, and we know within ourselves. My great grandfather was a medicine man, and I just hate to say that to people because I feel like that was a cliché, but he was, when he was alive, I remember a lot of the things he did to heal us and to treat us kids when we were sick. And he was blind, and he couldn’t talk English. He spoke Comanche. But the important thing was in his room, they were all lined up and he knew what was what, and nobody ever questioned his judgment on anything. And he was a Pele man, and I have a play – when I moved to Santa Fe a long time ago, there were those, I guess, I don’t know what they’re called, but like… on the back, there were all these advertisements, of Shamanic healing. This was like maybe in the early 80’s, and my mom was living there, and I was shocked. I’d tell her, “What is this?” And she’d tell me, “There’s people that do this and those white people go and pay them, and people make a lot of money, evidently.” So I kept always thinking about that, because I knew it was wrong. We were taught to never, ever fool around with any of that, even when we were kids. You don’t bother certain old people. There was a house, we weren’t even allowed to go on this woman’s porch, because she had such strong medicine. We’d run around, there was an abandoned school bus, we’d be running around over there and we’d get in trouble because we were too close to that house, and we weren’t even allowed to go on the porch. So I kept thinking about all this stuff, and then maybe in the mid-90’s, there was a case in California where this woman, this fake Shaman held a sweat for these white people, where he put garbage bags over the top of the structure and killed that woman. And I thought, “I’m going to have to go write about this.” So I have a ceremony in mind in this place; it’s a real weird place, and they tell me it’s too violent, but that’s the way it went. But I had to be very careful with that. And it’s been done in staged readings a couple of times, and even then, we’d do stuff to protect ourselves, even though the ceremony’s artificial. I knew where to draw the line, and I talked to my mom about it, and she was like, “Oh, that sounds interesting,” and it’s like, here’s what I’m doing. And I’ve been in the ceremonies, and I know. I know where to draw the line. And I think I could have easily pushed it, and wrote about the real thing, and sung about it, or whatever you want to call it. But I think we know within ourselves where that line is, and I think we need to – well, I need to, I’ll speak for myself – I feel like I need to follow it, and to keep it like that, to use my own ethics and know what it is.

Gloria Miguel: I missed some people’s stories because I can’t hear too well back here, but this whole subject makes me think of a very, very funny story that Spiderwoman had experienced. At one point of putting a story together, we decided to research of all different kinds of spirituality, all different kinds of contact. And sometimes it would put you in a very serious, good place, and sometimes it’s absolutely ridiculous, but then from that comes a story. So here we are, in the city. We decide to meet and very seriously research getting connected to the spirits through an Ouija board. And we’re in the city in my sister’s apartment. We put all the lights out. This is going to be a very serious piece, and we are going to get in touch with the spirits, and use all kinds of research and background. We put all the lights out, we were very quiet, and we started the Ouija board business. It was like dusk, the weather was very good. We were sitting back there very seriously, and my sister’s husband came home from work, and he was very tired and he was taking a nap. And so we were in the middle of this, we asked a question of what we are about to do will be successful, and are we doing the right thing, and all those questions. And we’re seriously sitting down there with the Ouija board, the light gets darker, and all of a sudden, we hear “Ohhhh, Ohhh!” And so that’s my brother-in-law screaming and screaming in the back room. So we tried to ignore that. Another thing happened, because we were seriously going back to this again. All of the lights went out, everywhere, in the other rooms, everything. Lights went out! And we continued. At one point, one of our actors said, “I’m leaving.” So we thought, “She’s not serious.” And then a big – no bad weather, nothing – a clap of thunder and a bolt of lighting went “Bang!” and we just thought, “The Ouija board!” We got a message. Yeah! And we didn’t go that way; we did a lot of research, and everything said to us, “Don’t go there, don’t go there, don’t go there.” So I thought that would be a nice story to share.

Monique: How do you know when to not do it?

Gloria Miguel: Well, we got the message.

Muriel Miguel: What I learned from it was that we were approaching it from the wrong direction. We went to white people’s magic because we were trying to be universal. And so we went to a witch, and that turned out badly, too. The witch attacked Gloria, there was like this lighting going back and forth. We tried to raise a table, that didn’t work. All this the lights going on, and all that happened, so I realized that we were not approaching it the right way. We could not be universal. We had to start from us. You know? All this other stuff was not us. And then when we started to look at it from that point of view, you know, from our centers, that thing calmed down.

Gloria Miguel: I think what was so crazy sometimes is that we thought when we used all those things, “Oh, we could use that in this story, we could use this in that story. We’ll save all those little stories, those crazy, ridiculous things that happened, because that’s all together.”

Rose Stella: So what play was this for, this research? Reverberations?

Monique: Yeah, see, our ancestors don’t even have to be alive to come yell at us!

Kim Snyder: Last year I went to Pine Ridge, and I went to a yuwipi with Mike Carlo who’s a medicine man – I don’t know if you know Mike. And one of the reasons I went there was to talk to people, and interview the kids, and I went into the boarding schools, and we talked about ceremony and did they know ceremony, and had they been exposed, and what it meant to them, and where did they get their lessons, and a lot of them did no ceremony at all because their elders weren’t around. And so Mike Carlo, being a young man in the community, and also an educator, became the medicine man. And I went to his ceremony, and then afterwards I interviewed him. And he was telling me that there was a quiet movement going on Pine Ridge, where they’re trying to get the youth to get back to ceremony, because there’s nothing there. And I said, “Mike, when you’re in ceremony, where do go in your head?” Because I went to the ceremony, and the yuwipi, which was a healing ceremony – what they do is they tie him up in seven knots, and then by the end of the ceremony, through the song, and through the prayer, he is untied, and it’s in a room that is black, and there is no light, and there is no movement, and there was about a hundred people there. But during the course of the ceremony, I saw spirits, as everybody else did, and I was just… I couldn’t believe it! So after ceremony, I went to his house for this interview, and I said, “Where do you go, Mike? Where do you go in your head?” And he looked at my cousin, and my cousin looked at me, and goes, “You can’t ask those questions.” And I said, “Wait a minute.” “No, you can’t ask those questions. That’s private.” He says, “I have a calling, and I hear them. And they come to me, and when they come to me,” that’s healing, for whoever, that specific ceremony was for an elder couple, and anybody else who wanted to be healed as well that was there. But he would not go there, as far as how he reached out to them. And I wanted to understand the mechanics of it, but he was not sharing. But that was why, I really wanted to understand, “Where do you go? How do you reach out? How does that work?”

Monique: Lakota physics!

Kim Snyder: I know, but, so, it was a very interesting experience. And he did share many things with me, and that was a good thing. And so I have some footage of that whole experience. And the kids also learning about ceremony. And I was really surprised at how many kids don’t know their history. They just don’t know, because the elders or dead or no one’s teaching them. And as my cousin said to me, the churches were empty, and they didn’t understand why the churches were empty. The minister went to my cousin, Brian said, “I don’t understand why the churches are empty,” and Brian said, “Well, maybe because you’re not talking to them anymore. What are you talking about?” Because the ceremonies were getting a little fuller now. This youth had rediscovered, and through Mike Carlo, because Mike is young, so he has a voice in the community as an educator. And I found that very interesting, that this movement had begun on Pine Ridge, because as you all know, Pine Ridge is a desolate, highly impoverished, drug-ridden reservation with absolutely nothing to do. They have a recreation center that was built with a pool by the Boys and Girls Club of America, and the sad thing is that none of the kids can get there, because there’s no bus. And they can’t afford to pay to go; I think it’s a dollar to get to go to the club, and the kids don’t have it. So now, within the community, there’s this whole separation of those who have that dollar to go in and have a life, and those that are stuck out there with nothing. And that’s why there are all those kids at boarding schools, because there are no homes. But anyway, my point is that the ceremony process is very private. And I knew, don’t go there, don’t push, and I did.

Daniel: And, I mean, the nice thing about writing theater is that there’s not enough room on the front stage that the audience sees to actually portray everything anyway. So you do have to make those decisions about what you do and don’t show, and we’re talking about it in terms of what’s sacred and what’s forbidden, but I also think that maybe some of those things that if you put them out where the audience can see them, the won’t get them anyway. And that actually, if you leave them back stage, leave them in the back of the imagination, where the mind can work on them, maybe that’s where their power actually is. I just think really it's good dramaturgy to, you know, don’t show all your cards.

Monique: We were talking about that last night, and it occurred to me that that’s also part of making that connection, that link, with your audience, because you’re requiring the engagement of their imaginations. That’s their investment in your story.

Daniel: And that’s what we – we’re sort of at the time, so maybe we can continue this in our quieter moments a little later. You want to put a last word in, Diane?

Diane Glancy: I was just going to say, I think the spirit world, the underworld, protects itself. Like you said, often you can see without recognizing. So some of the things we don't have to worry about. It's bigger than we are.

Daniel: Thank you, everyone.