Panel: Muriel Miguel (Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater),
Soni Moreno (actor/producer), Suzan Shown Harjo (writer/advocate)
March 10, 2009
This conversation was part of the Public Lab Speaker Series following a performance of Tales of an Urban Indian.
BETSY RICHARDS: Hi all. Why don’t we let everybody come on in. Well, I just want to say aho and welcome. My name is Betsy Theobald Richards. I’m from the Ford Foundation. I’m a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and I’m also a theater director. But, tonight, we have the pleasure of having people who have dedicated themselves for years to the excellence of their work and lives to making things better for the Indian people in this country, and possibly for all indigenous peoples. They were also here in New York at a very particular time of social change and of people’s movements, in the late sixties, early seventies.
So first I want to introduced Muriel Miguel, who is [applause] a Founding Member and Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Native American womans’ theater company in North America. She was also an original member of Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater. Suzan Shown Harjo is a poet, a writer, a curator, a policy advocate, who has helped Native people recover more than one million acres of land and has developed laws to protect Native nations, arts, cultures, languages, religious freedom, sovereignty, and sacred places. [Applause] Soni Moreno is a co-founder of the internationally acclaimed Aboriginal women’s vocal group Ulali. She was a Hair cast member. She is now also a board member at the American Indian Community House here in New York City. And what we’re going to do is talk for a little bit [Applause].
Simon Douglas said tonight, in his story…he started off by saying this story is not told enough. And when I talked to Oskar [Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater] about the importance of having this panel about placing some of these fantastic people to talk about fantastic things that were happening at the time, it really was first sparked, I know it was important from the beginning, but when I read Steven McElroy’s piece in the The New York Times—it was just a blurb where he was talking about the 2007 Native Festival, and he said “A dedicated New York theatergoer might be justified in thinking this town has played host to every kind of theater possible….But the Public Theater, which doggedly tends to uncover the new, is offering a festival next week featuring the work of American Indian artists from the United States and Canada.” And I read that and I said, “New? Hmmmm. We were here before you. And we’re “new?” There are some important stories to tell. So, the fact is that Native people have had a presence in performance in New York City for many, many years. And that could be the subject of volumes. But tonight we’re limited in our time and our scope; and these three women who are here have many stories to tell, so what I’m going to try to focus on is just one period, the late sixties and early seventies. A time when, to quote what Robert Allen Warrior and Paul Chaat Schmitt published in their book on the Indian movement “Like A Hurricane,”: “Indian people, for a brief and exhilarating time, staged a campaign of resistance and introspection unmatched in this century…It was for American Indians every bit as significant as the counterculture was for young whites or the civil rights movement was for blacks.”
So tonight, we’re going to do a kind of hitting on…a little Edward R. Murrow, you were there (Laughter), jumping back to two particular years. We’re going to be soft on the edges, we’re not going to be exact but back to 1968 and 1973. It will give a chance for you to know us. We’ll talk a little bit about places […] and to share with you perspectives.
The year is 1968. It’s Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy has been assassinated. There’s violence and a convention. Nixon’s elected. “Green Tambourine.” The Graduate. And the tribal love-rock musical Hair is running at the Public Theater. As producer Michael Butler picked out on the poster and you can see it on your leaflet, “Guess this is a play about American Indians because that’s what’s on the poster.” It’s a tribal love-rock musical that has Indians. And he calls Joe Papp about producing it on Broadway. The American Indian movement is dominant in Minneapolis. The Native community in New York is preparing—they’re in their planning stages in founding the American Indian Community House. So to each of these panel members, that’s not true, I know it’s battle of ’69, I’m saying they’re preparing.
MURIEL MIGUEL: No. There was a distinct quote.
BETSY: Okay. I had the same conversation with Suzan beforehand. What was happening with you at the time?
MURIEL MIGUEL: What was happening with me at the time? There’s two stories of the conflicts in my mind. One was, Hair had auditions, there was a cattle call for Hair here and I had an uncle who worked across the street at Mann Refrigerator…still see the clock that says Mann Refrigerator. He was staring at all these people who were candidates; the line was around the corner. And I was working here, I was doing The Serpent here, so I came through all this crowd and everyone’s making fun of all these people and I came out and I ran across the street and said, “Uncle Charles!” He was so aghast. He had never…Oh My God. And then he went, “Yeah. Uh huh.” That was one of the things I remembered about working here and Hair. The other thing is that the American Indian Community House at that time, before that, that was before they hired Hines and she started with Community House on Broadway in one little room with Iola Boyle and one other member—I can’t remember her name. And they started and that was before the money came in that they started that. So there’s one story I can’t remember anymore.
BETSY: You were at The Serpent here at the Public Theater. Who directed that?
MURIEL MIGUEL: Joe Chaikin. And it was…I didn’t know who here…as a matter of fact, the first Spiderwoman benefit was done here and all those guys, Gerry Ragni and…Oh that was the other story. So they wanted to make an Indian play and Gerry Ragni, who was maybe God, calls my ex-husband, husband then, and he says, “Can you bring drums in for Galt MacDermot?” Galt was really upset because…my husband came in and sang for him. Gerry wanted an honoring song. He was with us, he came to my powwow when I got married. He really wanted that feeling. He wanted that death scene to have an honoring song in it. And Galt was really upset. Finally, Gerry said, “Well can you do this?” and Gerry leaps across the floor and Gregory [my husband] says, “No. You can’t do any of that on the [gestures] You don’t even [gestures]” and so that was the end of that. The end of that being a Native play… (Laughter)
SUZAN HARJO: I was sitting in a little room at a church that was the American Indian Community House and I was just answering phones, answering letters, lots of letters and got a call. A man who identified himself as a Black Panther was on the line and I said, “What are you calling here for?” He said, “Because I don’t know where else to turn.” Isn’t this extraordinary? So I called Shunatona Hines and others who were among the founders of the American Indian Community House and told them what an extraordinary thing and I said, “So this man is on his way over now and we have to give him some charity because he asked.” They didn’t know what to think about but they agreed and thought also that it was an extraordinary thing. So I thought it was just amazing that, well, it reminded me how our ancestors must have felt when pitiful people came here and we fed them. They didn’t know where else to turn. They looked to us to feed them. And to see them through the harsh winters. So we did that for him and then he went on his way. We gave him some money and you would recognize this man. So, he lived a long time, I’m glad to say.
During that period, I was in a lot of different things. I had moved to Greenwich Village near the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death and because of that… (LAUGHTER) then moved to a loft above the bank at Sheridan Square and was right by the that wonderful […] we used to go to to hang out at the writer’s bar…where they had…well, anyway, I remember that my friend Vine Deloria Jr., who was our most prolific author, who was unknown at the time outside of Indian circles, introduced us all to that particular bar because he fell in love with Jessica Lange who was the waitress. (LAUGHTER.) It was that kind of time. I was doing theater all over the place with Classic Stage Company and WBAI radio. Joe Chaikin was a great mentor and friend and taught me a lot about how to use public places and how to use public forms for the common good. I’d call and ask him about something or for someone’s number and we would finish that and he would say well, hey, so and so wants to come over and do a reading about something, why don’t we do a reading of speeches by great chiefs and we’ll just gather some people. So we did that. Anyone in town… I guess this is another lesson I learned from Joe: everyone in New York who is in the theater is always out of work. So everyone’s anxious to do something…so you can always have the cream of the crop come over to your place and do something. So there were a lot of programs on WBAI where I produced first on a program called “Seeing Red” which everyone thought was a Commie program and then they would listen for another minute. It was a good program. Milton Hoffman, who went to WETA [Washington Educational Television Authority], was the director of the drama and literature department, hired me in his department and then promoted me to replace him when he left so I got to do great great things. Joe Chaikin threw me programs and I would throw him programs. He had a really wonderful mix […]
I don’t know if the young man [Darrell Dennis] we have been watching for an hour and a half can hear us but…I think he’s marvelous. Thank you so much. (Applause.)
SONI MORENO: In 1968, I was at […] I was going to high school…I went to continuing school. I left home when I was seventeen. I went to school during the day and got a job at UC-Berkeley in the drama department. Then, I too had no idea what I wanted to be but at the age of eight, I had decided somewhere that it was going to be […] (Laughter.) And so drama became a love for me. I grew up in a family that picked fruit during the summer. Every summer we worked in the fields and then I’d go live in Stockton, California. So I left all that, was living in Berkeley… During that time there was a lot going on in [Grizzly] Peak Park. Literally it was practically my backyard, handing out acid and people getting together and artists. The people took over that park and that’s when the National Guard came. So all during this time in 1968 there was a lot going on.
I had heard about this play Hair that was being cast in New York when my science teacher, because I went to school half a day, all you had to do was sign in and get credit so I was pretty much the only one in class. So I was being tutored.My science teacher brought in this San Francisco paper saying there’s an open call audition for Hair. And he knew I was into theater and in the drama department. He says, “I know you’ll never get the nerve to audition. You wanna be in this but you’re not going to be in it.” […] I said, “Well watch me.” I used to get high with this teacher. (Laughter.) So, I went and I called up. They said, “You need three songs. Come on this day.” I’d never sung before. Spanish was my first language. I learned how to speak English by annotated songs on the radio. The very first song I sang was “Round and round, the Christmas tree and Christmas…” […] So I would imitate these singers. I came back to school and I said, “well, I have my appointment. I have these three songs.” “Well what songs are you going to sing?” “Um. […] I had to have a rock tune or upbeat, so I chose “The Weight” and another melancholy song so “Diamond Song.” I went in and was singing those songs over and over again, performed for myself, went to that audition. It was like magic. It was everything I expected it to be. Oh my god this is crazy. It was time for me to go, I was so nervous, my voice was shaking and I was singing (imitates herself in a falsetto voice). I finished that song. I was a junior at this time and so my science teacher —god bless his heart—was very very there for me. I got called into the office, two weeks later I was sick and out of school for two weeks, I was called in. Well, within those two weeks I got a call back, another call back, and I was waiting. They said, “In seven days you’ll know.” In those seven days, I was called in the office. “We have some news for you. You didn’t graduate from this class as you liked because you haven’t enough credits.” Two days later I got the call, I was cast in Hair.
That started the theater bug. While I was doing Hair in San Francisco, I was the only Native that was cast and during that time they took over Alcatraz. The takeover was really incredible because again there was a lot of stuff going on in Berkeley and in San Francisco. The show had opened really well and I’d gone to the producers and asked, “Would it be okay if I came out—because they have a tub that they would bathe Claude in, I don’t know if anyone saw Hair—if I could take the tub out and ask for donations at the close of the show.” “Oh that’s so cute, yeah, go ahead.” At the end of the show I would ask for donations. What happened was I was able to get two boats every Sunday […] I was able to take that first trip on a boat to Alcatraz and spend a couple hours there…I really felt that…what a cool thing. I’m getting paid for just being me and being able to stand up for what’s right and to be a Native…It’s really interesting I didn’t really know that many Native people in San Francisco at the time…and now a lot of my friends are there asking me […] That’s where I was 1968, 1969.
BETSY: Okay Edward R. Murrow, moving on to 1973. (Laughter.) Doesn’t have to be exactly ‘73. Just around the same time. U.S. is completing its withdrawal from Vietnam. […] World Trade Center has just been completed. Carly Simon is singing “You’re So Vain.” (Laughter.) […] There’s the deadly confrontation between American Indians and federal authorities in the town of Old Indian Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Marlon Brando turned down his Oscar in protest of the treatment of American Indians. […] Actor/writer/director Hanay Geiogamah founded the American Indian Theater Ensemble at La MaMa earlier that year with Ellen Stewart and was planning to take his company to tour Indian reservations across the country. Where were you?
MURIEL MIGUEL: […] I was sitting there. First of all I have my two children with me. Marlon Brando has this little tape recorder. It’s a small one. And he’s playing with it and talking into it […] and he says to my daughter, she’s like three and she’s looking at him, she asked him what it is. It’s a magic box. And “That’s right!” he says, “It’s a magic box. If you tell it a secret, it will tell you a secret back.” She said, “It’s a tape recorder.” (Laughter.) […] “Of course the kids know it, right?” And he’s sitting there, he doesn’t have shoes on and his belly’s showing. He has pot belly. And I keep looking at him thinking “I’m looking at Marlon Brando’s pot belly.” It was on 59th street near the Russian Tea Room. Well that’s one thing that happened to us.
You know, I have to talk about Alcatraz for a moment because when Alcatraz was over, one of the people who came to town was a guy named Harjo. Harjo lived with me for about a year or more and stayed with me for a long time. I mean he lived with me—I had a husband, he lived with us. And the baby. And Uncle Joe…he lived with all of us. Then we went to a green corn dance in upstate New York and he met Suzan there. […]
SUZAN HARJO: From my dad’s home community Muskogee, Oconee and Okawaigi, Oklahoma. My dad’s Muskogee and my mom’s Cheyenne so I grew up on both sides of Oklahoma. A little town, really little. I came all the way to New York and went to Onandaga many many times because it’s the closest place to the ceremonies and so I would go up there regularly. I had to come all the way to New York, all the way just outside of Syracuse to meet someone from my dad’s home community that I could call home and say he’s a Harjo, probably...so that was quite wonderful.
So I captured him in fact and brought him to New York with me. And then we began producing, at WBAI and teaching lots of Native people how to edit tape in the days you edited tape. None of it was digitized. He was very involved in activism. One night we did a program. Bob Fass who is still at WBAI…I was in charge of a lot of personality programs. One night he got very sick so he gave me this program. We were doing these really interesting mixes of Muskogee stomp dances and Cheyenne social dances and jazz. We had our friend Jim Pepper mix the Indian tonal scale with jazz tonal scale. And Miles Davis gave him the credit for being the first person to ever do that. He was a wonderful saxophonist. We were doing all sorts of really interesting stuff with music and we got a call from a patrol man and one of the detectives said John Lennon’s on the phone for you. We were like “Yeah, right. We’ve already gone through that crap.” It was John Lennon. He came up and hung out with us a long time and we put a lot of things together and he was very devoted to Native activism. I asked him one time…He would go up to Onandaga because the state wanted to build an acceleration lane rerouted right through the reservation and everyone up and down the route wanted to turn them down. They didn’t even bother to ask the Onandaga nation. So he said, “Oh sure. I’ll go. What’s the worst that can happen?” So he went up to draw attention to what was happening and he did just that and did bring some attention but it didn’t deter the state. The state went on to build this acceleration lane. So we were all up there; everyone wanted to overturn their bulldozers. We didn’t have weapons because the Onandaga feels very strongly about their treaty of peace and friendship with the United States. We’re not going to break that by declaring war or carrying wars into the United States. In fact when the U.S. entered World War II, Onandaga and other people declared war on Germany and Japan and loaned their young men to fight in the war. So on the day of reckoning, everyone was ready and prepared for who knows what and no one came. State troopers did not show up. They didn’t show up and they didn’t show up. Slowly we began to hear what had happened. They had been diverted to Attica. There was some huge melee and mass killing of people there. And they never even showed up. And the state just dropped it after that and any aggression […] So those were the times we were in. Pretty extraordinary times. Everything was just sort of […] And then there was the Wounded Knee.
MURIEL MIGUEL: I remember the first time I heard about it. It was my Uncle Chuck. He said, “Hey, there are Indians at somebody’s ankle.” (Laughter.) At that point, no one knew what was going on. Then we started to get all the messages back and forth. […] What to do here? So I was […] I would come out every night and my ex would come and we would talk. We would just collect money from people in the audience and we sent all that money, even dimes and pennies, we sent everything to Wounded Knee. And then at the end of Wounded Knee there was this big cross section of people that came back […] all these different Indians that were in New York and Bobby Onco was one of them. Bobby Onco was the one of the ones that was identified with the Russian rifle […] he was living with me, again living with me, with my family. […] He was on parole which meant that we had to find some place in Brooklyn for him to go to report. So we went out to find a federal parole officer in downtown Brooklyn. We had to travel through all of the federal buildings looking for a federal agent that we could say, “Here is Bobby Onco and he is reporting to you.” And finally there was this one little room and we asked this guy if he was a federal agent and he says, “Yes.” (Laughter.) It was such a difference between coming in Brooklyn and what Bobby went through out in […] the small towns there because what happened there was […] the guy was like really you did this and that and shook his hand. That was his federal agent. And that’s how I remember Wounded Knee.
SONI MORENO: 1973. I was wearing platform boots.
MURIEL MIGUEL: So was I. (Laughter.)
SONI MORENO: I came to New York in 1972, on New Year’s Day to pursue my acting career. I came upon a few people, Hanay Geiogamah being one of them, and I had been to La MaMa in pursuing theater. I studied Shakespeare and I thought I would come to New York to do Shakespeare only to find they weren’t casting people of color. […] In awe of this, I came to La MaMa and found all this wonderful theater going on. Hanay Geiogamah was doing Native theater and was trying to convince me to go to Oklahoma to do theater. And I was like, “I just arrived in New York to do theater. What am I going to do in Oklahoma?” […] that was the whole process. He was going to go do a tour of Native country. Beyond that, I found not being able to do what I wanted which was Shakespeare […], I would work at La MaMa and various showcases. I did a show that produced Native theater, they were doing a series of young writers, experimental theater. Dennis Reardon had written a play called The Leaf People and it went to Broadway and lasted several days. But it was incredible because it was about the people in the rainforests. It was a rainforest where they were building a highway. And what they did to these indigenous people. Back then […] brown people. I was one of the green people. It all took place on the ceiling. There were ropes… […] Up in the sky. I thought it was brilliant because theater to me is an expression and what I liked about your piece tonight was that it was real. Part of what I learned in this […] music and theater for me…it’s so wonderful to be able to see different work being created but the seed, what’s inspiring, is their own. They’ve made it their own. Once I learned that you can take a piece but once you make it your own, then it lives. You learn from people. You can imitate as I imitated […] and became introduced to music but the theater, how you can take a piece, write a piece and just make it come to life. Some of the pieces that I’ve got to work in New York City, there’s one, Aladdin’s Lamp at La MaMa, these are my favorites that weren’t really popular but I really learned a lot because it introduced me to a lot of different actors from all over the world. That’s the beauty of theater—it’s the world. It’s not in one place it’s a universe of expression.
BETSY: We’re right to the point of my final question. We’re going through another great time, a great social change. The world is changing right in front of us. What words or thoughts or images do you want to share with us? Particularly those members of the theater community or those interested in supporting the Native community—don’t have to be, could be just what comes from your own experience?
MURIEL MIGUEL: I remember when Reagan came in. I was abroad most of that time. When I came back everything was cut, everything was slashed. There was nothing for the arts. All of us were hanging on by our fingernails. It was really a bad time. I remember thinking, “If I don’t survive this, Spiderwoman will not survive.” What we did was just take money out of our pockets and we started […] and we went to tell them and we went to Crystal and George and we spent it on a space and that’s how we survived that time. I expect to survive the same way now. I think that there may be more support out there than there was then. We had a hostile president. “Feed them ketchup—it’s a vegetable.” You know? I think my thoughts now as with Darrell, when Darrell talks about generations, I felt like as Native people it may seem like old hat sometimes that we talk about generations and we talk about going forward, we talk about this all the time and that you’re responsible…you’re responsible for... I remember John Oakwood saying he didn’t care if things were messed up between England and France with the tunnel going through. He’s not going to be here. My reaction to that was, “Yeah, you’re not going to be here but what about your generations? They’re going to be here.” I can’t think that way that I’m not going to be here. I’m responsible even though I’m not going to be here because that groundwork is what we have to think about. And that’s what Darrell…we get that at the end when he says, “It always gets me. There will be children that are not adults, there will be children that don’t know about that. There will be children who think of their culture as a joke.” And that to me is important. It’s important to keep this going. We pass this on, we pass this on, we pass this on. I think […] I’m seventy-one. […] I’m really thinking that what happens now in this change is that Spiderwoman changes and how to do that? How do we do this? I pass it on to my daughter. I pass it on to whoever she wants to work with. Does it change? Is it still a theater group in the same way? Is it a mentoring group? Is it working in film?What is it working in? So now I’m thinking the more we bring in playwrights, and that’s another thing—I was thinking about this with Darrell—I never thought of myself as a playwright or a writer. I had to live; the theater community wasn’t going to support me. So I had to do my thing and create this thing that I was going to do. So I never thought of myself as a playwright for a very long time. You do it because you have to do it because your curiosity is there. Do this piece and what it means to you and get that voice out. So I think all of this stuff is changing now. I think that Native theater now, we have to take it by its force. You know what I mean? We have to take it, grab a hold of it, we have to really lead it. No one else can tell us what to do about this. We have to lead it. And that is something every one of us in theater should really think about now, “We have to lead it. No one can tell us anymore.” It’s not…[…] and then told what to do. Now it’s move over.
SUZAN HARJO: That was inspiring. (Laughter.) I was thinking how different my life would have been if I stayed in New York and not left the year after your question.
MURIEL MIGUEL: I was heartbroken.
SUZAN HARJO: That was so sad. Muriel had selected two people to be Spiderwoman with her. I was one. Our dear friend Josie Terran who was Muriel’s childhood friend, was the other. I left New York for a variety of reasons, mainly because New York was killing my kids and my husband. So that’s why I left at the opportune moment. I had gotten a call from my old friend Richard [D. Bramante] …asking if I would take his job for the American Press Association in Washington D.C. which was a totally different planet. I would not have flourished there or stayed there long after had I not had theater there. I’d never been able to write a script, coach them in the ways what my son says “Indian moderne” had it not been for my theater and arts training here in New York and the grittiness of New York. So it broke my heart to have to not be Spiderwoman. And to leave my job at WBAI. You mentioned Joe Chaikin. This is how good it was there. He called me one day and said, “I have three plays that Samuel Beckett has written for the radio. Will you produce them and I’ll direct them and those will be the premieres of those three Beckett plays if your interested in.” Hold the phone. We could do anything we wanted during that time. Philip Glass on the radio. We were doing a lot of the equivalent of that in poetry and producing the radio version of William Burrough’s “Naked Lunch.” What a treat that was! It really was a treat working with him. Things like that. You look back and say this was quite a time. What Muriel was talking about…and what was so well-articulated also in the play is the talk about responsibility towards the seventh generation. Where you don’t just have responsibility just for your kids and their kids and their kids and their kids into the seventh generation and you have to base all your decisions on the seventh generation. In the Plains we have a little different take on that tradition but it’s the same concept. We talk about respect for the three generations past. […] Respecting your own time and your own place in the world. It’s the same seventh generation concept. You’re responsible for a long time. When I moved to Washington, […] I very quickly learned there were no Natives doing advocacy. I thought it’s going to be easier for me to learn the advocacy stuff than for the white guys who are making the Indian policy to learn the Indian stuff. So that’s what I did. I was the Indian on Carter’s campaign. People were saying “Jimmy who?” I was the Indian in transition who worked in the Carter administration. I felt the same way about Barack Obama. Hence my friend Margaret Sanderson’s great piece […] (Applause.)
BETSY RICHARDS: Do we have time for one or two questions in the audience? Do we have any questions?
Audience #1: It seems you all have wonderful things to say about what’s inspiring to your work, things that spring into your creative work. In working in Native American theater, [I wonder] whether you have thoughts about potential audiences that hindered you, confused you or inspired you in ways, performing for white people or performing for Native people? Are we just trying to do what we do and let the chips fall where they may?
MURIEL MIGUEL: Well…all that happened to me. One of them was that I started Spiderwoman as a feminist theater group and as we went along it became everything. At one point we were gay/straight, grandmothers/mothers, married/divorced/single. It was very exciting but awful. (Laughter.) We were mostly targeting women so we talked to woman, worked with women, we mentored women. Then it was obvious our community, the Native community really wanted us and things started to change. Then it was the Native community which was male and female. We were talking to them, all those things that were pertinent to them…but it was always theater. No matter what we did it was always theater. We may not have thought of ourselves as playwrights but we were writing like mad on anything—napkins, tablecloths. We have these archives with napkins and tablecloths. Yes. It was always theater. We always had theater people. They thought we were a little nuts at times. I think they didn’t understand us but it didn’t change. And now it’s everyone. It’s Native people, that’s our main goal always and women. And it’s theater.
BETSY RICHARDS: I’m being given that now it’s time. Thank you for coming.
(Applause.)
MURIEL MIGUEL: I agree with Darrell. I really think…I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re doing this. And your director, Herbie.
(Applause.)
