Talking With Native Artists: Field Discussion Transcription

Field Discussion
Talking With Native Artists
November 14, 2008, 4pm
Moderator: Sheila Tousey
Panel: Gary Farmer, Muriel Miguel, Tamara Podemski, Martha Redbone, and Chaske Spencer

Sheila Tousey: Hi everyone. Welcome to Talking with Native Artists, hosted by me. My name is Sheila Tousey, I’m Menominee Stockbridge-Munsee from Northern Wisconsin. I’m helping with the festival; I’m also acting in Chasing Honey tonight, which starts at 8 o’clock. I’m I would say primarily an actor, although now I’ve started doing some directing, and I teach some acting, that kind of stuff. I’d like to introduce our prestigious panel of guests. Gary Farmer, way there on the end, my good friend, part of the Cayuga First Nations Confederacy, has been an actor happily for thirty-two years. (see bio) We also have with us Muriel Miguel. She’s Kuna and Rappahannock and a founding member and artistic director of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Native American women’s theater company in North America. (see bio) Tamara Podemski, right there, is a multi-disciplinary artist, born and raised in Toronto, Canada. (see bio) Martha Redbone, part Choctaw/Shawnee/Cherokee/Blackfeet, is a leading voice in both soul and contemporary Native music. (see bio) And I don’t know if you got the chance to see her but she rocked the other night. And Chaske Spencer from the Lakota Sioux Fort Peck Indian Reservation. (see bio) Thank you very much guys for being here. Well, I didn’t prepare any questions, but I just wanted—I thought it would be interesting for you guys to talk about, I’ve read a lot of things that you’ve been doing, so I best is over with. I’d like to—you know, everyone’s been working on different things, and I think maybe talk about what you’ve been doing lately, and I’m curious about what you do, as we say, during your off time, as I say, your quite time when you’re not working as an actor or you’re doing something else. I’m curious, as actors, how you stay busy creatively when you’re not working on something.

Tamara Podemski: I enjoy being an audience member when I have down time, I see all the theater that I never have time to see. I go and see dance, and I read a lot, and I try to go on the other side. It’s so easy to get totally self-absorbed when you’re into the work, that I practice being an audience member. That’s fun, its fun.

Sheila: You sing a lot too, I mean you’re like a major singer.

Tamara: I used to think that on my down time from acting that I would be singing, and I would just juggle them, and think that I was having rest from performing theater if I would go to music, but I think the best thing for down time is to be on the other side and remember what it’s like—remember the magic of it. To feel affected, rather than to affect.

Martha Redbone: I’m in my—hi everybody—in my downtime I go and see friends’ bands too, because we usually, when we’re on the road we miss everybody else’s gigs, so we like to keep up the independent music scene in New York by catching as many shows as we can in our down time. I also do a lot of community work around the country, and in addition to a lot of the shows that we book on reservations across the country, which if it’s during a work week or during the school year, what I try to do is get involved in the school and give a music workshop, or just to talk to the teens, and that’s also part of my responsibility as a spokesperson for the National HIV and AIDS Partnership in DC. It’s just to interact with Native youth and bring them up to date with the statistics of HIV and AIDS, and the spread and the awareness and prevention in the Native community. So I try to keep that going in my down time. And it’s nice because, you know, as a musician, like you said you don’t want to become self-absorbed, but I always enjoy being around young people, just to hear where their minds are at, to see—especially on the reservations where how much urban and TV culture is influencing where we all come from. And I’m pleased to say that everybody in the younger generations is really determined to preserve their heritage, their language, their culture, it’s just fantastic. So that gives me hope too, as an old…

Muriel: Well, I’m old so I sleep a lot. But one of the things I really do like to do is listen. And that means talking to young women, most of the time it’s young women, and see what they’re thinking about and what they’re doing, and encouraging one-woman shows around the country and into Canada, and leaving them with thoughts, as well as—they don’t know, I think, that sometimes they really energize me as well; talking to these young women. And that’s mostly what I do, is go around, and I teach, and I teach at CIT, and do workshops around…

Chaske Spencer: What I do, when I can’t sit still, so I don’t really see movies that much, or plays, but I’ve got a writing partner and we usually get together, and we’ve been working on a screenplay. I try to help out my other artist friends, fill in for them if they need a drummer, or I like to walk around, because I do a lot of observing, a lot of observation, but to keep my creative juices flowing I usually hang out with my artist friends and just help them out as much as I possibly can. But writing really helps out a lot. I don’t necessarily—when I’m not working on a job, I just sort of remove myself from that whole thing altogether. Camping, stuff like that; around here it’s kind of hard but I found some places. And then I just walk around the city. I try to observe a lot of things, because as an actor being really observant is one of your main tools, and what I like about this is that I can watch people. And, I have, it sounds boring, but I really get a lot out of that just by watching people. And that’s pretty much what I do.

Gary Farmer: I used to do really extreme things, like publish a magazine, or find a radio network, or fight for signals for a television network, but you know I backed away from that a bit and I’m still kind of too busy. I spend a lot of time playing music now, and trying to be better at the harmonica, and of course I sing more than I ever have so I practice at that a lot, and I spend a lot of time trying to find work to maintain my debt, so I spend a lot of time doing that, and sometimes that leads me to a crap table or to a poker table. I’ve always been fascinated by—I’ve been a gambler since I was a kid, and I don’t talk about that much because people look down at you for that, but I’m very good at it, I survive from it, and you know not too seriously, and it’s a great mind reliever, it takes your mind totally away from all the stress that one leads in this life these days, so that’s kind of what I do.

Sheila: That’s very interesting. That’s a good piece of information.

Gary: I’ve been thinking about doing workshops in Native communities about how to gamble, because I find most Native communities don’t really know about the games that they actually propagate, so most Indian people don’t know how to play craps, or know the odds, or understand the game. So I could make some living from that I suspect.

Sheila: I’m curious, how did everyone get started.

Muriel: Oh god!

Tamara: Okay. I started as a dancer, and I was very young, maybe twelve when I wanted to be a professional, I thought that was a good ripe time to start making money, as a dancer, and so I looked in the local newspaper, like the Village Voice but in Toronto, and I found these dance auditions. And I went in, and they had me—I brought my father, because he trust me going to these places—and they had me dance in a cage, and I think it was for a music video that they needed really sexy dancing that was so beyond my years or understanding, and when they passed me, and they said—so part of the video is dancing, and the other part is you making out with a guy in the back of car. And it was a big rock-band/punk-band called Acid Test, at the time, and that’s when I said, “Thank you very much, this is not at all how I want to break into the business.” And they said, “You know, can you just speak to the director, and maybe we can work around it, we just think you have a great energy about you.” So I went in, for the meeting with the director, and the director was Bruce McDonald. And he said, “Okay fine, you don’t have to do the video, but there’s this film I’m working on called Dance Me Outside, and I would love for you to come in, I think you’d be great for this one character.” But I didn’t know, I’d seen one of his films, but to me he was just an old guy who is asking me to have a private meeting with him somewhere. So I brought my sister Jennifer to the meeting, and I got the little itty-bitty role, and she was given the lead role! So I still take credit, to this day, for starting Jen’s career.

Jennifer Podemski: The finder’s fee.

Tamara: Yeah, I still need the finder’s fee for that one. But that basically started my introduction into an incredible, thriving Native arts community in Toronto, and my, I guess, induction into Canadian film. And that was sixteen years ago.

Sheila: How did you—I never got to see you do Rent -- and everyone kept telling me how great you were. Who hired you, said, man you’ve got a great voice. Did you train, or –

Tamara: Yeah. As a dancer I went into this performing arts school, it was like a fame thing, you go in when you’re eight years old, and you graduate when you’re eighteen. So there we had to study music and dance and theater, and I always thought I had a good voice, so I was always auditioning for all of the choirs and the shows, but I never got into any of them. And so I just thought, as my little secret, that I was going to do in front of the mirror, and with my sisters at home we put our little shows on, so it was like ten years that I would secretly, behind my agent’s back, audition for all the musicals that came into town. And they always wanted that pretty, Miss-Saigon-beautiful, operatic voice, which was not my kind of voice, and then, I guess, eighteen years old Rent won the Tony, well won a few Tony Awards, and I just thought for the first time this could be a chance for somebody with a rock-and-roll, different sound. And they were so hungry for raw talent, like people who had never performed or sang publically before, and I went in and I sang an Alanis Morisette song, and I didn’t know—I’d never been able to sing longer than a bar, because every one had always cut me off… and so when they just stood there and listened, I said “That’s it.” I had totally forgotten the rest of the song because I had never been allowed to sing it all the way through. And then they just said, is there any other song? And I’m like, well I’m not going to remember what the lyrics are, and they just put me on the spot and asked for Amazing Grace. So I sang Amazing Grace and they cast me in the ensemble, as an understudy, and I did that for six months in Toronto, and then I just got a call one day that said, we want to transfer to Broadway. And luckily at that time the person who was playing the lead, Maureen, was calling out a lot, and so for about six months I was her understudy on stage, six shows a week. I finally got the actual part when her contract ended. But I think it was only from six months of being able to prepare, because I don’t think I was ready, that was like the best crash course. And that was it. And it’s so funny because when I went back home, and all of my teachers were there, everyone shows up when you get a role like that and you’re like the pride of that school, and I never got a chance to just remind all those people that you never—I didn’t get into any choir or any school show, but that toughened my skin for this whole business. And I still have yet to do the next musical, but one day.

Sheila: I have another question. So that was first big gig, and that’ a big gig, I mean you sing a lot. Did you find yourself having to, in terms of your instrument, did you have to—did you do anything special. Because, you know, you’re singing, what, eight shows a week maybe?

Tamara: Yep.

Sheila: Did you find yourself like having to do anything special because you were singing this much? Anything different? Did they give a special voice kind of person to help you?

Tamara: Yeah, well I had been studying voice since I was little, and I had the training, but I think what happened, when the stress hit, like when I knew I had to perform and prove myself as the understudy I was fine; and I could sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. And then when they gave me the role, I guess my body just realized we had fought so hard to get here, and now that we’ve got here—we need a break. And I was on the verge of— So one night I go out and I sing, and it was my second night, I guess, as Maureen, as official Maureen, and something happened in my throat, and I went off stage at intermission and I said, “I think something’s wrong, something doesn’t sound right, something doesn’t feel right, and I’m very scared,” and they said , “You sound fine, just go out.” And at least I told—so just a note to everyone, when you don’t feel well you have to tell the stage manager because they’ll make a note in the show report to prove that you declared something was wrong. And when after the show my voice was just not working, and I went into Dr. Gwen Korovin, who is the most famous—she is Celine Dion’s person—and they took a picture, they stick the camera up your nose, and all the way down your throat, and they take a picture, and I was on the verge, my vocal chords were on the verge of hemorrhaging. And it’s still safe, but she just said: do not speak. I had a pad and a paper for about two months. Jen was living with me at that time in New York. I could get out of bed, I couldn’t dressed in the morning, my entire universe just crumbled, and then it was less about—I’m sure my voice was healthy after two months of rest, but then it just became, in my head, that the fear of stepping on stage and not being able to sing again. So I met with every main big famous throat doctor, and voice specialist, and it was finally some woman in Nova Scotia, from a very small town, who used to be a nun but then became a voice teacher, and her name is circling around, and I was on the worker’s compensation, because I said that something was wrong and they made me go back on stage, so now I could be covered. It was very hard to pay the rent and everything—pay the rent, funny—but I flew her in, with the last couple hundred bucks, and she just sat with me for three days and reprogrammed my brain about the fear and about the ego and about, just, I don’t know, how to be able to—my confidence. And from that day, she left, I went back to work that day, and then it was eight months, I didn’t call in sick again.

Sheila: Great. What a great story.

Kate Josephson: What was her name?

Tamara: Her name was Peggy Redmond.

Sheila: What great story. How did you get started?

Martha Redbone: Well I actually went to the School of Visual Arts, for fine art and graphic design. And then met a boyfriend who happened to be from London, who over here who ended up getting home sick, and so we were either going to break up, because he was going home, or I was going to go with him. So I said, sure why not! So, you know, I asked my mom, I got her approval, and I got a one way ticket to London, and we broke up six months later. So I was on the phone speaking with my mom, you know crying, balling my eyes out…and she says “Well why don’t you come home and take a breather for a while.” And I said “yeah, that sounds like a really good idea.” She goes, “Yeah, because I got a lot of this stuff that you can help me with, and you can pay some of these bills, and share half the rent” and I was like, “uh…I think I’ll stay.” So I stayed in London and I started doing freelance graphic design, designing CD sleeves for bands, for like a dance label. Then one of these dance companies that I was doing these kind of weird graphics and stuff for, one of the producers had a session and one of their singers who they booked didn’t show up. So just as I walked in to bring this art work to them, he said: “do you sing?” And I said no. And he said, “Of course you’re American, all Americans—it’s in your blood, you guys sing, you guys…” And I was like, “Well, I sing in the shower, but I never sang in front of anyone.” And they said, “Well, you know, we can pay you fifty quid.” And I thought fifty quid! That’s like more money than I made in a week at that time. So I thought, yeah okay I’ll try it. So they said, “Oh we’ll put you in a cab home and we’ll give you the money.” And I said “whether I do well or not?” And they go, “Yeah you get paid anyways.” So—I’ll take it! So I went to this session and these guys were, you know, very intimidating, these producers, because they were really ticked of that the singer that they had booked didn’t show up. And so I was extremely intimated by them, and I was also terrified because I had never sang in front of anyone other than from home. So, speaking of the confidence and how you voice tenses up—even to speak, you know—I could barely get anything out. And we tried for about a good hour and a half, and they were like, “Okay, we’ll try it again. Let’s lower the lights. Let’s lower the lights a little bit more. Let’s turn the lights out. Let’s face backward.” So they twist, they turn their seats so they weren’t looking at me from the control booth, and I managed to get a little bit out, but my voice was just so tight. So they were frustrated, they couldn’t get the vocal that they wanted, but I got paid. And the buzz of being in this studio and the connection to the music, even though I was just so nervous, you know, I was almost in tears. And I said, “Well, what do you think?” And they said, “You actually have an amazing voice. You were just so nervous you can’t get a note out. So you’ll just practice and you’ll get used to it.” And because they were so encouraging, I thought, this is great; this is my calling! So I called my mom, I told her how it went, and I said, “I think this is what I want to do.” But I don’t want sing, like, dance music songs, you know. If I’m going to sing anything, I have a lot to say about where we come from, about my identity, about the ways of the world, and this kind of stuff. So I began writing songs from that point on, and demoing my own songs, just with one of those little, well back then it was like one of those little work station, you know, you could program little beats. It’s like a little karaoke machine.
And so I started demoing songs like that and met up with different musicians through those two producers, who I’d used as a reference. And from there, long story short, I got a big session singing background vocals from like some pop star over there.

Audience: Which one?

Martha: You know, you never would have heard of—Jennifer something, I can’t remember her name. But they had, it was for Arista Records, and we in this really fancy studio with—so much money was spent and it was really glamorous, and I got paid a lot of money just to sing background. So it was fun. So I thought, this is great, you know. I was a really, truly, a starving artist in London, and to be paid so much money for doing so little, I thought this is my calling! And it’s fun, it was fun. I could pay my rent, I could eat, you know, whatever I wanted, I could actually afford to like go into a café and like sit with people and have my money when the bill came and not have to go… And you know, I know for actors and musicians that’s a real luxury to have something like that. So, then I teamed up with a friend of mine. A friend of a friend had a friend, who was a musician, who also wrote songs and played the piano. And she said I should team up with him and meet with him, which I did, and we really connected. We both loved Prince, we both love Led Zeppelin, and we said we could do something. So we started writing songs and we became this production team. And we ended up getting a publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music, and ended up writing and producing for other artists. So that was like my kind of getting stuck into the professional field; we were paid to write and we were kind of like staff writers. You know, you know you were handed a brief to make somebody sound like Britney Spears meets whoever, and we had to make the music accordingly, and then I really learnt what went on in the industry. And I did ghost vocals for a lot of people who couldn’t sing, you know people like—well I’m not allowed to say. But I can talk about other people. A lot of the people who you see in the charts, it’s not them singing, it’s people like us behind the scenes.

Audience: Like Milli Vanilli?

Martha: Well yeah, kind of, yeah, like Milli Vanilli. But now, where they were just kind of slammed for it, it’s kind of the going thing; that’s what people do. Then after about years of doing that, I got sick of writing songs I didn’t believe in, and we called ourselves professional turd polishers, because we were fixing up things and people were getting paid a lot of money to do things and they had no respect for the craft of songwriting, the craft of the, you know honing you vocal skills, your styles, they had no respect for it. And so I decided to go it alone, we had written enough songs of my own, and said let’s see if anyone even likes this style of music that we had concocted, what we called Native soul. And so, we test marketed it, we tested it out, to this attorney who kind of shopped our stuff out, and this bidding war came, and we got all these offers from these record labels. And then they said, “Why don’t you just do soul music, because you’re never going to sell anything with the Indian thing anyways?” And so that’s all they needed to say here, because that was like a red flag. Being raised by my mom -- my dad left when I was ten years old -- and to be told something like that, it just made me more determined to prove them wrong. And so I thought up yours, I’m going to do my own thing, and I went the independent route; and never really looked back. And I thought, I’ll just be fearless, I don’t even care about—you know like I said, as a writer, as a producer, as a session singer, you know I can earn a living with what I love in a musical aspect, and I knew that things would come. And the freedom of being an independent musician, to be able to travel around and to be able to do a show, and meet kids, and give workshops and talks and things like that, to me, I think is much more of a blessing than Madison Square Gardens sold out. I mean, that’s nice too, but there’s a price that you pay for that many people around you and that kind of stuff. I really just enjoy being around my guys in the band and my husband. And that person I was introduced to, all those years ago on the piano, sixteen years ago, that was my husband. But to me the freedom of being an independent artist I can’t tell you what a blessing, I feel truly truly blessed. And I’ll keep doing it. And we still get offers, I still do interviews with A & R people, they sometimes come to our shows and ask me to come in, and we get our time wasted and stuff like that, but it’s just part of the music journey, just one of the things that you have to do. So, as I said, that’s what I do.

Muriel: Well, settle down, this is a long story! Well, you know we grew up in New York City, we grew up in Brooklyn, and we were really show biz Indians. You know, Thanksgiving, you wanted an Indian, there we were. And we did that for a very long time. But there were a group of us that grew up in Brooklyn of young Native kids, Louis Mofsie was one of them, a lot of Mohawks were there, and what we found was that it was a time when all of those religious laws were in. You got put in jail for dancing and singing and so forth. And people were coming into New York for lots of reasons, and they came to New York because they were stranded here, they wanted to see New York City, they were in the Wild West shows, and we knew all these people. And there was a huge group of people in Brooklyn, and a lot of the iron workers came down. And so they found all these young kids, from nine to twelve, that were really hungry to listen and learn dances and to learn songs from other tribes. And they just poured their stuff into us, and there were at least ten of us. And so we were dancing anyway, and so we started a group called Little Eagles. And as we grew older into teenagers, we started to give concerts. One of the things was that we were in the Brooklyn school system where they told us that, you know, our culture was dead and there were no more Indians. And so we really reacted to that at that age. And so we started another group called the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, which is still going on. And we performed, we were young Indian kids, and we performed all over. And so I was, you know, a show dancer and I did all these other dances from all these other tribes. And I decided that I would maybe like to do something else. And I started with my two older sisters, really decided that I needed an education in art. And so they brought me to modern dance teachers, and I started to study with their friends and I studied dance, I studied modern dance. And I studied Labonne from the age of twelve on. And then I decided that when I got out of school that I was going to go to Julliard. So I auditioned for Julliard, had no idea what that meant, of course I didn’t get in, but I got a scholarship to the Henry Street Playhouse, which was Alwin Nikolai’s company. And I stayed with them and I was with their company. And then I went to Jean Erdman, and I went to Eric Hawkins, and I worked with Jean with in Coach with the Six Insides, which was this big thing that happened here in New York and I was the understudy for Jean. And at that time I started to do my own choreography, and it was like I was going up stream. Everyone was going some place else, and, I don’t know, I was just farting in the wind there, you know what I mean? I had this idea of the things I wanted to do and that’s what I did. So you know I played a trombone on stage, I can’t play a trombone but I played a trombone on stage, I danced to reggae music on yellow chair, I did all these crazy concerts where everyone would say, “What’s that kid doing?” And so I had this thought in my mind about story with dance, and that was during the time of people, you know, danced like this. So one of my teachers, Joe Chaiken, who was Open Theater and he was starting this group, and he was wanted his actors to really move. So he asked her if her dancers could come in and work with the actors. And I came in and he put these exercises and I understood immediately what he was talking about! And I just, that was it. And Joe asked me to be a part of Open Theater, and all those people that were in Open Theater at the time, we were all struggling crazy people, and we opened a studio in what’s now called Soho. We paid fifteen dollars a month for a cold water walk up studio, and we worked there. And out of it came all those exercises, sound and movement, transformations, all of that stuff came out of that time. And out of it all these different playwrights came in, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Megan Terry, Gerome Ragni, all these people came in and we worked on all these plays. And then Joe, at that point, said he discovered storytelling. So he said, he talked about storytelling and I listened to him, and I said, “Yeah, I understand storytelling.” And so we started to do storytelling. When I left Open Theater, that was really in my mind. I thought about how do we do storytelling from my point of view, from my center. And I started to work, and it took me three years, I worked with different women’s groups, and started to work on storytelling, not quite knowing what I was doing, and, it wasn’t called Tisch then, but we would sneak into Tisch, someone had a key and we’d use the studio there. And I had all these women, and I would just give exercises and talk about storytelling. And they were women from all over. I got a small grant and the small grant made me make a decision that I wanted to work on anger, and so I started to look for people that I wanted to work with. And I definitely wanted to work with my sisters. So one sister, Gloria, she was already training in Oberlin, and I was really interested in getting her into New York. My other sister wanted nothing to do with me because she hated avant-garde, she was studying with Uta Hagen, right, so she wanted nothing to do with me. She said, “She stands on her head!” So I convinced her, she said she would stay for maybe a couple of months but that’s it. And I asked some other women to come, and I put out the idea of what I thought of as storytelling. I did a piece before that at Washington Square Methodist Church were I used a river and my friend, who passed away, and she did finger weaving; she was Hopi and Ho-Chunck. And I grew up with her, she was one of the ones from Brooklyn, and she told the Spiderwoman stories. There was another, a young woman, who is now Split Britches, she told a story, she is Southern from Virginia, and she told a story about making love to Jesus. And I just came back from the Sundance, and I told a story about a butterfly and talking to a butterfly, and I had this idea of weaving all these stories together, and as weaving it and connecting to the river that was flowing. And that was my first thoughts of story weaving and how to put a piece together. And after that, after I got the CAPP grant, when I asked my sisters and we all came together, there we five of us, and we started on this piece called Women in Violence, and it was all about violence. Then how to put it together. So we collected all these dirty jokes and dirty jesters. And you know that you—again you’re working and you’re working, and people ask you what’s your audience? “Who knows what your audience is, you have to get this out of your head!” And so we worked with this piece and I thought I was very serious. I invited Open Theater to come and see it, and they were falling off their chairs. They thought it was so funny; I was so upset. I thought this was serious, and they thought we were very funny. And we based it on clown. And that was the first piece we did. We took that to Baltimore and we separated the audience, either you loved us or you hated us. And big big arguments, and academic arguments, about whether we were artists or not, or whether this was theater or not. And so Louis Valdez was there, and he was asked to recommend for someone to go to … , and he said if you don’t take Spiderwoman don’t take anybody because they’re the cutting edge. And so we got money, we got this French letter inviting us, and we put together—I got a loan and we went off to …and that’s how we began, we toured ever since then. That’s Spiderwoman.

Chaske: I was flunking out of college, and while I was there I started taking an acting class. And at the time I didn’t really know what to do with my life, I was studying to be a teacher, but I didn’t want to do that. And I had gone to a lot of movies and stuff, and I was thinking, you know I’m taking this acting class, I can kind of put the pieces together, you know maybe that’s not such a bad job—that looks like a pretty good job, you know it’s not that much work, you get your ego fed, plenty of girls, fame, fortune, and all that, that kind of looks like a good job, I think I’ll try that. So I told my parents I was going to go be an actor, and they did not like that at all. So went and bought myself a one way ticket to New York, to here, and all I had was one hundred bucks. And I had never been to New York City. And so I arrived, I think it was LaGuardia—no it was JFK -- and I got the cab, and that took half of that right there. I came with a lot of attitude, a lot of moxie, and definitely New York City eventually knocked me down to humble in the first hear. I got here and started hitting the pavement right away, looking for acting classes, acting coaches, because I thought if I’m going to do this I better take it really seriously, because this is my life here. And plus, I don’t really want to go back to Idaho. And while I was there, while I was back in Idaho, on a Reservation, I wasn’t doing anything like most other Indian guys were doing. I was up to no good, and I thought if I stuck around there I’d either become a statistic or, like all of my other friends, just not do much. So when I got here, I really started to take things seriously. I started to look around for acting coaches, I started interviewing acting coaches, and I thought about going to the New School, auditioned for Julliard stuff, but by that time I was really sick of school and I didn’t want to be confined by any kind of school environment. I just wanted to get what I needed to know, and pay as cheap as I could, and find the best guy I could find, or woman, And I found him. His name is David Gidean, and he’s a working actor, made a lot of stuff in the seventies, he was affiliated with the Actors Studio, he was Lee Strasburg’s prodigy, one of many prodigies but he was one of them. And he would start to teach his class on his own. When I got here I was twenty-one/twenty-two, and I went to start to talk to him and I auditioned for him, and he only took working actors; he took people that were fresh out of New School, or people doing stuff Off-Broadway, or movies and films. And, I don’t know if he must have felt sorry for me or what but, I just went in, I was very raw, I mean raw, and I just went in, did the audition, and then started talking him and he took me on. And it was brutal, it was really brutal, I mean I thought I was the next something, just like I knew what I was doing, I had a commitment, and looking back on that now you just shake your head and go, “Oh God I was horrible.” And what he did is I told him that I feel like I know what I’m doing, it’s just this piece of coal—I got a diamond—if you just teach me the basics of what I need to know. And he took me aside, and I began to work scenes with him, a lot of like relaxation techniques. And at that time, I was hanging out with a lot of actors, I was auditioning, and I was getting roles like off-off-off Broadway stuff, stuff done like the Lower East Side and way over in Alphabet City when there were junkies and stuff, and I was loving it. I was hauling my props, and was living this poor artist life, hanging out with other actors and actresses and musicians and just having a great time. But I wasn’t getting paid, so I definitely had to do the bar tending and waiting stuff, you know doing any job just to get a pay check. So I got a …he started breaking it down to me, and he was really brutal with me—if I didn’t know what I was doing he would call me out right off the bat. You know, I didn’t know what my character was doing, if my tension was too tight, he would just call me out and basically broke me down in where he could like mold me into an actor. And he told me—he always told me this: I’m going to teach you the rules so you can break the rules. And I never knew what that meant, never knew what that had meant ‘til later on down in life. In scene study I was working with, you know, working actors and I always took that saying—it’s like playing chess—if you want to learn how to play chess, you’ve got to work with people who are going to beat you. So I took that as acting, I’ve got to learn to work with people that are so good that I can get what I can off of them. And I was stealing things left and right from them. And while doing all this, and just being surrounded in this environment, I was also in touch with The American Indian Community House, this was about ten years ago, and they helped out a lot too. I was working in theater with that as well. And while all this was going on, somebody told me there was an audition for Skins, and I didn’t know what the deal was, and I didn’t have an agent at the time, you know, I didn’t have anything—just working, trying to hone my craft. And so Rene Haynes, who I owe a lot too--I love that woman, she is the woman—I sent my tape to her and within a matter of a couple of weeks I got a call back. And I was really surprised to get a callback, I was like, “Oh wow, okay cool.” And luckily I had this guy who was in the new school in directing, I had him do my audition tape. And that was so cool about working with all young artists, because they had this education stuff that we’d do barters and trades, you know, “I’d do your play if you help me with this audition tape, I’ll do that and that,” because we were all broke. And he really like, and he knew how I worked, I would try to work my craft. Because at that age I was doing the whole young actor thing, trying to be in character 24/7, trying to figure out how to do the right acting thing, and now I know it’s not really about that—for me anyway. And so I got onto Skins, I got the part, and they flew me there, and I didn’t know too much—All I was working in was theater, a lot of theater, so my movements were very dramatic, and things I did so that the audience could see. And my first day on set I was doing a scene and I was very dramatic, and the director pulls me aside and goes, “Yo, kind of tone it down a little bit.” And so I was like okay, okay. And I remember taking it down a lot, and so when I learned film acting I had to learn right on the spot right off the bat. And that’s what I love about playback too, if you have a chance to work on a film you can look at your playback. Because I don’t, I’m really self conscious that way, but I’m able to take myself out, like any painter, you just take a step back and look at you picture and go, ‘okay I see what to do, and then you take a little bit--.” And that’s how I learned how to film act and that’s where I got my break. And I was surrounded by a lot of gifted actors, you know Gary, Eric Schweig, Graham Greene, Nathaniel ‘Arkan’, Gill, I just remember being immersed in it and watching the film go down. Just watching everything like a sponge, just observing everything. And really watching how Graham worked, and Eric, because I was playing young Eric, a young Rudy, and I did some really embarrassing things, I like followed him around, I’d like watch how he’s walk, how he talked, and I think that really annoyed him. Some young dude just spying on him all the time—I’d hate that too. And I really started to talk to Erica and listening to these people. Listening to all these guys who were in the film business a long time and getting little tips and stuff, and I really picked it up fast. And that lead to Skins, with my affiliation with Rene Haynes. After that I landed Dream Keeper. I was going out for a small role, I figured I’d get some money to get by one, and I auditioned for every role on that thing and I ended up with the Eagle Boy role. It was one of the lead roles with Eddie Spears. And I was still in class, and I remember auditioning for that and having the same people form the New School help me audition with that. I was going to class for the audition and bringing the sides, and having to work over and over again, and really committing to that. And that film, that taught me more about filmmaking that anything else, plus it really—I felt like this is my calling, this is where I need to be, you know hands on, learning, and working with directors, and you work with different kinds of directors. I mean from theater I work with directors and we work on character, developing in character. And then in some directors in film, you just need to know how that shot is going to be made and you, as an actor, are hired—and for me I thought, well I better have my job done, I better know exactly what I’m doing. And so coming from the people I was being trained with, you know, I would sit there and learn my lines, learn their lines, and just really break it down and figure it out. But when I got to set I would see that my lines had been re-written. So it gave me an education of being very free, being in the moment. And I still memorize my lines, but most of the time I just try to get them down enough because I know they’re just going to change. And Dream Keeper was very much—I dropped twenty pound for that, mainly because I was nervous most of the time. I never thought I’d be doing this ABC Mini Series, it was so fast, I felt really blessed. And so I started really dedicated myself to that role, and things, and that lead to, because of that, I got involved with ABC and they had a holding contract—plus they were holding scenes with that ethnicity workshop. We did that and I was working with a bunch of other actors, who are not Native, they were Chinese, Korean, African-American, Latino, and we’d do scenes and stuff. And they put us on contract to hold us, so we’d audition constantly for like Lost--when Lost was coming out during pilot season. And I still kept up with classes with David, and then at some point I started learning that I could get into that actor’s head taking too many classes. At some point, for me, I started really analyzing things way too much so I had to pull back. And I can’t be too serious about this, because watching other actors who are working the field, I watch them and they are very free and in the moment; their talking to someone, action, they go right into it. It’s like, “Wow, I’d really like to learn how to do that.” So I back off and working my craft in the films and stuff, and I landed Into The West, and again I had auditioned for all the roles on there. And it took a year to audition, and every time I thought that I didn’t get anything, I was just devastated, I suck, I’m just a one hit wonder, nothing’s going to happen. And I ended up landing a role on there. And by that time I had got more comfortable with camera and stuff, and I started to be more free and open, and working with Eddie again. I love going to auditions with other Natives because it’s just like one big powwow. It’s like we see each other all the time. It’s like “hey how you doing.” And you get a relationship with them, you can work off them. And I started to just to really pay attention…Um, I’m getting lost.

Sheila: Well actually I was hoping Gary could—

Chaske: Oh please, Gary, go.

Gary: I was a juvenile delinquent, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and it was kind of a tough place where I was. We used to have this theater where we used to hang out and smoke cigarettes and stuff, and…used to try to get us into the theater. And I was the only one that ever kind of reacted to that, and tried to encourage all the other people to kind of, let’s go in there, let’s check it out. But I say that because it came back to me later in life, oddly enough. And I went off to be a cop, because I was like the oldest child of a fairly dysfunctional family and I wanted to help somehow. And some reason as a gang member, you, not that I ever carried a gun, but they started to carry guns. And so gang members, I found in Buffalo, and in New York here, you become a gang member and when you grow up you just go into a legitimate gang…we go to the police. And so I tried that and I learned a lot—in fact I think it kept me out of jail, because I learned how cops think. So that was really helpful. And then I ran out of money, because I was a status Canadian Indian, even though I grew up in the States, and so they wouldn’t pay my schooling anymore. And so I told them, I said, “Look, I want to be an FBI agent,” and I had to study something in the United States, I couldn’t study in Canada so you can’t be an FBI agent in Canada. They gave me money and I went to Syracuse University under a false pretense, but I fell in love with the film and graphic arts—the school of communications at Syracuse. And I picked up an interest in photography because I got tired of playing football, because I realized---I was a really good athlete—but I didn’t like hurting people that much; at least not physically. So I picked up this interest in photography, so if I took the pictures of the football players they wouldn’t bug me to play, because I was like massaging their ego; getting them in action and stuff. And so I picked up this interest in photography, and then my scam, I failed chemistry in this scam to be an FBI agent, and really want I wanted to be was a—I started to get into film appreciation, I really wanted to be a filmmaker all of a sudden, and this is my third year of university. And so they caught up to me, and I didn’t have a high enough average to get into the school of communications, so my parents had just picked up a lease on a store, in Ohsweken in the Six Nations rez, which is just about sixty miles north of Buffalo. So there I went off to Canada—I mean I spent a lot of time on the res as a kid, but I was an American in a way, in my head, and that was kind of weird. And when I went to Canada, the world just went boom. You know, like I didn’t have an enemy—I grew up with enemies, right—and it was the first time we didn’t have that, and that was profound. And I went to this school called Ryerson, and I studied photography and motion picture production. And I drove a cab during the day, and I worked as a bouncer at the Silver Dollar Hotel, which was the Indian bar, and of course there was Anishnabees and Crees from everywhere in Canada, and I was a Haudenosaunee from the South, but I just got a real education there, but eyes just blew open. And I’m hanging around town there, and I move there to go to school, and there was this guy, this old Cree opera singer guy, and he was sitting in an office with a tie and suit, and he was the nicest guy, he had glasses, and his name was Jim Bullard. And he sat there for years trying to get things happening. And I used to go up there and he hired me to shoot photographs of Tomson Highway playing a piano down at the Shaw Festival. The Shaw Festival and Tomson had something going, and I just will never forget this guy, he had a tuxedo on and his hair was down to his ass at the time, his hair used to be really long, and I was so fascinated by this guy and I took all these pictures. And then he stepped up and played this grand piano on the stage, and that was pretty profound for me. And then Jim had this gang of people, non of whom were Native people, they were all—well one of the guys, they decided to start this theater school, and one the guy who was the head of the theater school, he was a pretty straight actor out of England, he grew up with a lot of those famous actors then and he ended up in Canada, and they started a theater school way up on a little farm. And at the time they decided they were going to train Native kids, they were thirteen and fourteen-- they didn’t go older then, they went younger, trying to get them when they’re young—and they brought all these kids from a community called Curve Lake, not Curve Lake but Tobermory, there’s an Indian reservation there, and all the kids came from there. And of course when they came to this came, away from home for the first time at thirteen/fourteen, they were just putting frogs in each other’s beds, and this British theater director couldn’t really communicate to them. And of course I was fairly worldly, I guess, and I became Jim’s point man, and he said, “Gary, look I’ll pay you if you go up and just look after these kids.” And I went up there, and we started singing songs around the campfire, and I met this guy, his name was David Calderisi, and they had all kind of non-Native people who were there to support these young Indian kids and it just wasn’t happening. But we were sitting around the campfire, doing stuff like that, and they kind of got into that. So it became like I was the Mother Goose, and I noticed that if I did something they would do something. And so I said, "Okay, well I just danced in into this whole theater scene, or this theatrical work, and I fell in love." I think it was three or four weeks we were up there at the time and I just fell in love with the whole process of theater at that time, and I just thought, wow. I don’t know, I went home just full. And when I went home I tried to start something like that in my own community, in Six Nations, and then finally Jim said—it was the year of the Olympics, ’76 Montreal, and he said “look, we’re going to do this play.” And it’s not our play, it was-- Michael Cook was his name, On the Rim of the Curb, it was kind of a satire on the killing of the ‘Bayatuc’ people in Newfoundland. And so I jumped on and I hired, he said do you know anyone else, and I said I had some buddies on the res, so I brought a couple of my buddies on the res on Six Nations. And there was a girl named Colleen Lukes, who became a big agent in Toronto now, and there was another girl from Manitoulin Island, I forgot her name now, but she became a nun. And there was five of us in this troupe and we toured--and of course when I was working at the Silver Dollar Hotel, I used to try to get to the fights first, because there was a lot of fights back in ’76. And I used to try to make people laugh, but I had this guy who worked with me, who used to love the fights because he’s go fight, and he ended up killing somebody—so when we toured, that year, to every prison in Canada, and Central Ontario there, and he was there in prison for manslaughter, he had killed somebody eventually. So you know that was my kind of—but I think when I took that play home to my res, which my people didn’t know anything about the ‘Bayatuc” people, right? Something really happened to me then, when I saw the power of the theater, that if I could make people laugh or cry, I could affect their lives. And that really empowered me, I though "Wow this is a lot of power." I just never looked back from then on. I took a year to train in Toronto with various actors and teachers, some people who were mentioned here, Paul Thompson and other teachers that were around—Clown, that’s were I really found my thing, was in the clown. There was this guy named Richard Pochinko, who took kind of European French clown and took Native American idealism, like numbers and colors and directors, and that’s where I really put a lot of things together in terms of who I became as an actor. I took a year and managed to get some support from the band to let me take a year of acting classes, and then I just never looked back.

Sheila: Anyone have any questions?

Mandy Hackett: Gary, when you look at work now, what excites you? What are the kind of projects that you want to do? What makes you want to say yes to something?

Gary: Well I want to do, just like I’ve always done. I want to move people, I want to make change. I want to change the world. I mean as an actor, that’s what I always wanted to do, I wanted to make—cause you know life for the Indian people, for me growing up, there was a lot of things, I was the outsider, I was just different. So I wanted to help make the world better for my own people, somehow, and so I thought that was always-… So the script, I came from a very—you know Jim, he used to show us this movie about--if you’ve got problems with cocoa farmers in South America, well then it needs education; you don’t send the army in there—so that’s where I learned these concepts. You have to do theater for change so that you let the farmers know that there’s alternatives. You don’t have to grow cocoa, we can do anything we want as a collective. So you ended up speaking to them, dealing with their own issues that they’re facing as a community. So you know when we had teenage suicide issues, back when Shirley wrote a twelve page play, that was where it’s at for me. Because suicide is still an issue among our people, because they lose faith in life. So if I can give them faith, if I can give them whatever, make them think, if I can socialize them to think a little differently or to make better choices. And that’s where the acting, in terms of making positive choices as actors, I always find that, in the study I did, my teachers taught me that. And so I use that stuff still. How can I take, what’s going on, and take that information and then shape it into stories. I don’t care, as long as they’ve got something to say. I don’t want to piss around, and I don’t last long on things that don’t have anything to say. So I really want to move audiences. I’m not—I was a shy backward boy—I’m not here to make friends, my football parody thought, but I want to change lives.

Sheila: Anyone else want to ask something of our esteemed panel up here?

Stephanie Walseth: I’m just wondering, you’ve all started your career at different times, what changes have you noticed from when you started to now, for better or for worse, what’s different?

Tamara: The opportunity part, the most recent thing is the opportunity to play non-race specific roles that really brave producers or casting directors, because the writers kind of do whatever they want, but when it’s in the hands of casting directors or producers, they have to see that a doctor—when we can just be seen as anything. I think the only reason why I went into this business was because I had an older sister who looked different, and I could see that she was working, and if I didn’t see her get work, I don’t think I would have thought that I could have done it. Because they weren’t interested in seeing people who didn’t look what the masses looked like. So I see an improvement there. The majority is still open to all ethnicities, and you wait for those opportunities, but that’s been a good development.

Martha: I was just thinking, the time that I started writing music was in the nineties, and the big difference I guess how it was, because I’m from the old school. I believe in instrumentation, where people these days play computers. You know music is made on a computer, you know you get guitar sounds on a keyboard these days. And we came up in the age of sampling, where if you liked a groove of a song, instead of using that record to inspire you to write your own music and play your own thing on your instrument, they would take that song on the CD and sample it and then write a whole new song on top of that record. So Aaron and I have a thing where we consider that a corruption of the purity of music that’s been happening since the late eighties and through the nineties. And so it’s kind of been our mission to go back to the old school, you know where people play instruments, people write songs, and people sing. No auto-tune, none of that kind of stuff, and just bring it back to the roots, which is why part of the reason that I sing soul music, and write rhythm and blues music, and have a band that is very expensive but we take them on the road is because I believe that’s what we should sound like. I don’t believe in taking, kind of, karaoke CDs and putting them on backing tracks and singing; to me that’s soul destroying. I’d rather just go on the road with my husband when he plays the piano and I sing, and we do do this. And that’s the difference between the era that we started making music. And I think it’s coming back to that now, because the new generation of kids, they have this school rocks thing, school house rock and all these things, so there’s like a twenty year gap, but teenagers now, and younger, and picking up instruments again, thankfully! And I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, the budget cuts in schools. I mean when we went to school we had music class and you were given an instrument and you learned how to play it, and that’s giving away my age, and then all that stuff was cut. And now, well as far as New York goes, music is coming back into schools; thankfully. So there’s hope for the future.

Tom Pearson: I want to say something about that, because that really resonates with me with something I heard recently about, you know, that we’ve lived in such a time now of new media. Things have become very pastiche oriented and very sample oriented, and that suddenly—you have to go so far into that space before you realize what you lost. And now there’s a real sense of revaluing of the live experience, and people are starting to talk about theater and why performance and live music and instrumentation is something that has value again to people. And I wonder, since we’re theater artists, that that’s something that other people have experienced recently, or have a sense that people are now against seeing that at as the antithesis to the isolated moment we’ve been in.

Gary: You know I think a lot of Indian people never have had access to technology, so a lot of us never experienced the big wave of things that have gone on, so I don’t think we’ve ever left, you know, the drum. You can’t replace that no matter what---nobody’s going to replace that. So some of that, I’m not sure if that’s really relevant to us, but I never had exposure to that. Those kind of toys, you know, I think it’s the more sophisticated world that’s had that stuff and manipulated it into something that’s real I guess.

Tamara: Technology has—I mean I notice—I do a lot of workshops with kids on really remote reserves also, and technology has been incredibly beneficial in that sense. That people who had no access and are so far removed from an urban center, the music that they get to make and the ways that they’re able to create—you know, it may not be the best, I guess we’re…the stuff we’ve heard that they’ve been making. So it’s not the for the purpose of them creating art, but just for them to play around and express themselves, and find the different way that they can reach out. I’ve seen really positive effects of how that technology has made them gather around together in a living room and all rap out lyrics and things like that, and then put it on their facebook. I mean that’s a whole other thing that, you know, we roll our eyes at, but for the young generation and the way they’re communicating—It also teaches, the way that they’re communicating face-to-face now has been affected by that, but that’s the reality of 50% of the Native population, is half of them are in remote areas and half of us are in the cities. So for the people who don’t have access, technology has been good in that sense.

Randy Reinholz: Sometimes I think it’s important what we put in front of young people. We were working with the Seaquam Band, which is close to us in San Diego, and we were working with their pre-schools through six grade. And as we started working we were like, “Oh we should video tape to try to get a sense of who they are. So the first year was a lot about, you know, I want to a football player because of Danny Thomason of the Chargers had a relationship with the band so they all wanted to play football. So we go back the next year and rap had started to come in, a couple people had started producing a bit and nothing really hit and they were like, “Yeah football or rap.” And, “I could be an actor too,” because all of a sudden they had acting there one year. And in that particular situation, we were working with elders, and we were working in language, and they were having to figure out how to tell their creation story. And at six that’s a lot of weight. “Oh man, you’re going to be an ant, and I’m going to come up here and you get blind and then we see, and where’s the…” You know so they’re having to figure out all this stuff, which was really great, but all of a sudden they were like, “I could be an actor,” which it was possible. And the year before it wasn’t possible. So, so much about what they can be is what we put in front of them.

Sheila: Do we have any more questions?

Vickie Ramirez: I just wonder how you guys feel about like with modern technology, and coming together with traditional storytelling, do you feel like it’s somehow corrupting it? Because I always think of my niece and nephew on the Six Nations and we’re like, “Oh, and we’re going to this pageant and we’re going to go.” And they’re like, “whatever” and texting away. Like for instance, it makes such a difference for them to see you guys out there. Like you don’t know how much of an impact, just to see you guys present visually. And oddly enough, on—we were talking about why should a mainstream be a ruler for Native people. You know, why should Indian people care what the mainstream thinks? But it’s a little kind of thing, like seeing Sheila on "Law and Order," seeing Chaske on ABC, seeing Mr. Farmer, hearing your music, hearing it accepted out there, it’s that moment when they’re like, “Hey , I’m not a freak.” You know, it’s like we’re not freaks, we fit it. So I know watching them and how they react, it’s like they are so proud when the Indian’s on, it’s like wow that’s an Indian. So I wonder how you guys feel, do you feel like you’re loosing anything with the modern technology? When you go into it, do you feel—like when some of the scripts come in there they’re like, am I going to do this one or am I not? Is TV selling…, or am I going to sign with a major label and get distributed across the continent, but how much am I compromising, or do you see it as a way that is a door? I mean, just a question.

Gary: It was an experiment -- well it wasn’t an experiment -- but there was a young kid who back in New Mexico, where I’m currently living, who got a Mac computer and got a camera and he wrote a Foundation grant, and it was for one of the Pueblos, like Santa Domingo, a very traditional Pueblo, and he got all the kids -- like young kids -- involved, and they started making videos and doing the music thing. And they start to get empowered with the technology, and then they started making little films. And one of the first films they made was about the issue that the teenagers had with teenaged pregnancy. And they made this film about it, and the elder people in the community, well one of the leaders, went in and took all of the gear away from him, fired the guy, took it away. And so I think that, I mean who knows why he did that? Whether he thought, well they shouldn’t be dealing with that subject matter, or it could possibly be that he was the perpetrator of bad things and didn’t want the rest of the community—and I’ve see that happen a lot, where we bring in our skills, we empower the kids, and then they raise issues that are dark, they don’t want to talk about it, and that still happens a lot because it can be challenging for status quo. And that’s what I spent a lot of years trying to do is get radio. Because I thought, well that’s an oral medium, let’s spread that around all Indian communities, so we all got that. If we’ve got a diabetes issue, we make one program than we can feed everyone and we can all deal with it that issue, rather than health workers—So I just thought that was a more effective way. But there is stuff going around in our communities that I think only arts can really bring forth. I remember when we worked with Tomson, and I know it caused a lot of fall out in ways about being misogynists and stuff like that, but one of the things I thought he really said was that until we expose the poison, you know how are we going to heal it? Sometimes that’s our role, I think, is to expose the poison.

Muriel: I guess how I feel is that it doesn’t matter if people come to your workshop, you have to be there. And it’s your responsibility to be there, even though they don’t come. We had a situation where we were in Arizona and terrible things happened to our set. And we were tired, and there was a windstorm and our set would fly off. And so it was the next day, and we were supposed to go to this circle at ten o’clock in the morning, I didn’t want to go, I was so tired and crazy. And people said we have to go and I said, “Oh they won’t even show, they’re not going to show up.” So we arrive, they’re waiting outside for us, there’s fifty women, there were fifty women, and we were talking about sexual abuse and beatings and spousal abuse. And they catered this, women came in from Phoenix to talk to us, and I realized that it doesn’t matter whether they show up, we have to show up because that’s how important it is and that’s our responsibility, that we have to show up to these things.

Sheila: I had a question. Do you guys find yourselves being more of an activist/social worker/psychologist/--but I mean do you sometimes feel resentful that you have to do that, to create your art, you know what I’m saying? Because it’s a big responsibility and it’s also like—gosh, I would just like to create—I just want to do Chekhov some place.

Gary: Well you mentioned about turning jobs down. I haven’t turned a job down, unless it was timing, because in order to do all this work, which I’ve done my whole career. I had to find money to sustain that work, so I had to do the you know whatever, do the monster movie and do the … you know, I had to do it. That was just survival. I wish I could. I remember when I used to get gigs when I was younger, that weren’t apart of my own community, it was like wow, I can really relax. But there’s not so much pressure, when you play an Indian, still in today’s world, you have to look after the script. When I played the world’s biggest Hopi in this film Dark Wind, I had to be a Hopi. I had to take the Hopi culture on, I had to defend the Hopi culture to Robert Redford. And that’s a drag! Robert’s in love, he’s just falling around down in South America, he didn’t want to deal with Hopi culture at the time. It’s awfully challenging. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to… But it’s tough, it’s tough. When you do get those roles that don’t make you have to look after the world, it’s really freeing.

Muriel: And I feel that way. I was in a situation where it was, you know, a music kind of play, and I didn’t have to do anything, it was just a play, right? And oh my god I had to work so hard to stay in that play, to really center myself in that play because it didn’t mean anything to me. And I had to find all kinds of things as an actor, right, you find all kinds of things to stay in the play. But this was so light I could have flew off, you know? And it took everything and I remember calling my partner and saying, “I’m giving up acting because I can’t do this, there’s something wrong with me.” But it is, I can’t talk for all of us, I can only talk for me and my sisters I guess, is it feeds us. I was working with one young woman and she says, “God, it feels like therapy.” And I was thinking, "My God I guess it does feel like therapy." But I just want to pursue the path to what she wants to do, right? So I learned from that too, it isn’t a one way street, you know, I learn a lot coming from that woman. That she gives me as much as I try to decipher.

Tamara: It’s interesting because when you ask what we do in our downtime, all of you – well, most of you guys – mentioned how you do the community work on your downtime, and I specifically was thinking in my head, that to me still, because of the responsibility and how hard it is sometimes, not because you don’t want to be there, but sometimes it is, it’s work, and you have to lift yourself up with every bone in your body to get the strength to face the issues that you’re going to face, and even though we do get the love back and the inspiration back, and at the end of the day, I walk away feeling like if I didn’t speak to all those kids today, I would be so out of touch with the world. So the payoff is great. But it still takes a toll, working with community. And especially when you’re going in to a really hurting community and you go in there with love, and strength, you feel, “I’m acting right now. I am acting right now,” pretending that, or trying to show them that, we can be strong and happy, and I am crying inside from what I saw last night, outside my freakin’ hotel room. It was really interesting, because you were speaking about it in that not-work way, but I know it is work, I know you guys all obviously feel that taxing. But it’s part of it. It’s part of being a Native artist.

Muriel: I call it ethnic stress. You know?

Sheila: You guys are really good about that. I just sort of live in the woods and hole up.

Martha: That’s a good alternative.

Sheila: That’s all I do.

Martha: As soon as you know that this is what’s going on out there, you can’t turn a blind eye to it. And now with the Internet and stuff, it comes to you. I don’t know about you guys, but with fan mail and stuff, you get these things from young girls, or boys, or whatever who say that you’re an inspiration, I love your music, I love what you do, I saw you in this film, and you’re showing that Natives can do it, you rock, all of that kind of stuff, and it’s kind of like you don’t want to let them down. I actually did this workshop with Lightfoot, I don’t know if you know this rapper Lightfoot? When went out to the …Rez out in Yuma, Arizona, and he does his thing, and then you know I did my thing, and at the end of it they wanted to hear me sing a song. And so I didn’t have any music, and I just sang acapella, as we say. And at the end of this day, we’re walking out the car, and we’re loading our stuff in the car, and these kids, these girls, came up and they all had their arms around each other, and they’re like “Martha, Martha, Martha. We just wanted to tell you, thank you so much for the song.” And it was their last day, and they were going to have a battle, because of some gossip that was going on between them; these girls were like fourteen I guess. And so somebody said something about someone, and their sister’s going to back them up, and before you know it there was going to be a huge battle the last day before they left for a week. And they said that, you know, my song “Talk About It,” which was what I sang to them, and they said they talked about it and they decided to become friends. And even now I still have tears in my eyes! And they were crying and we were crying, and I was loading into the van, and I’m crying and I’m hugging them and they’re hugging me. And when you know stuff like this happens, you can’t just say—ahh, I don’t want… You know what I mean. It’s like once I know, I can’t let them down. Even if it takes a lot of energy, I’ll just find more, you know.

Gary: I had to find out a method to deal with that because if I go anywhere near communities, you know they follow me around, and I’ve got to do a hundred—if I go to a powwow I’ve got to do at least a hundred and fifty pictures. And it gets hard because you just want to be social. And what I do is that I started, in the last two years I stared to say, “Sure, I’ll do a picture, they’re $150.” And they look at me and their mouth drops, and I say, “Well I didn’t bring my credit card machine and I don’t have my swiper, so you gotta give me cash or check.” And of course I never get the hundred and fifty bucks, but it’s allowed me to kind of interact with them; otherwise, they kind of got so like I was a ghost dancer, where they just take and take and take. And I had to find some way to me to joke with them, interact with them, so that now I’m always trying to charge them. I give them my address to send me the money, but it’s just role playing of trying to survive the intensity of people day in and day out, and people after twenty-five years, powwow highway drives you nuts. Like I don’t want to be… anymore.

Jennifer Podemski: It just occurred to me, Gary and I share, and Monique Mojica, and earlier on today Randy shared something with me about producing and acting—

Randy Reinholz: Being an artist, right?

Jennifer Podemski: Being an artist, being separate. And it’s difficult because, as so many of us as we’ve been talking, wear so many hats and it’s hard to separate things. What just occurred to me thought is the moment that I decided to sign with my agent, it was thirteen years ago, and I saw Gary Famer on the wall, Monique, Pamela Matthews, Billy Merasty, Graham Greene, and another couple of people, and I saw them first, of course I knew they were actors and talent and artists, but I saw them first as community activists. And I thought, “Wow she’s into this stuff.” Making that choice, and knowing that she’s 100% supportive of, not just myself, but I think everybody else, the five or six Native community activists that she represents, I think was one of the most important career choices that I ever made. And I don’t know if anyone here is in the same position, or to pass it on, but I think when you’re looking for representation it’s important that you have that support because this industry isn’t one that opens its arms to people like us, in terms of the work that we do and turning down work because it doesn’t assume our cultural or community mandate. And I just wanted to mention that, that our agent to me really stands out as a champion of, I don’t even know, of community activism. And because of her, it’s allowed me to take years off and just work with youth or try to change the world, and not lose my career because of it. I just think that’s a really important— alot of us want to give up a lot, early on, because we’re going to sign that big deal or sacrifice who we are because our agent is big time and is going to get us this, that and the next thing. But I think that’s a core, a central person who is going to determine the kind of impact and change we can make on the world. So I just wanted to mention that.

Sheila: You certainly would be hard pressed to find an agent like that in Los Angeles.

Tamara: I did!

Sheila: You did?

Tamara: But it was, in all the meetings I had to be straight up. Like I came to the table saying, this is what I do, and you have to know that that gig is as important as that gig, is as important as that gig. And yes, it was very hard, there were people who don’t care for it, but I did find the one. And so far she’s, so far—it’s only been eight months—but so far she’s still with me. But it is hard.

Sheila: Anyone else?

Ed Bourgeois: Just going back to Sheila’s question, in the past two days a lot of people have been talking about working with young people, and most of us are training in theater, or there can be a lot of different kinds of training. But I would assume that very few people have counseling training. And in working in communities where there is a lot of trauma, a lot of kids that…all the issues that are in the communities that we go into, do you ever feel that you get into situations with young people? Because I’ve seen in happen where you’re in really deep water, or in really dangerous water with kids that are exposing things or you’re helping them, then all of a sudden it’s really dangerous for them. So how do you deal with that, those of you who really are educated. Do you have people that work with you, or do you just trust that what you have instinctively is going to help them? Has anyone every gotten into a position where they’re—

Sheila: I did. I don’t consider myself, I don’t do a lot of community activism, but one time when I was directing a play, Terry’s play—remember Terry? -- Terry wrote this great play called Comanche Women, which is an adaptation of The Trojan Women, and in the second act, it’s a family welcoming home an Iraq war veteran. And he has issues about some people that he’s killed in the war. And the actor that we had hired was actually an Iraqi war veteran, and had a major incident in playing the— because he wasn’t an actor, but we brought him on because he was actually pretty good, you know, he acted well, he had a lot of natural instincts, he was good. But he had a—there was this moment when something triggered him and it was kind of scary. And at that point I didn’t know what to do. It was really kind of frightening. I mean, I didn’t feel afraid, but I was afraid he was going to do something, he would lose control. So that was a situation where I didn’t know what to do, you know.

Gloria Miguel: I was working in a city, in Minneapolis, at a high school, a Native high school in St. Paul really, and I had a lot of gang members, Native kids, and they were mostly, they were teenagers. And I had this one young man, I had them all on the floor, we were doing exercises, you know everybody’s groaning and carrying on, and he would put up one leg. And I went up to him and I said: “Oh you can put up your other leg, come on, you’re a young man!” And I touched his leg, and he said, “Take your fucking hand off me.” And I said, “Oh come on, you can do it,” and I went to touch his leg again and everything went on him. And I realized at that point, you know I didn’t know what was the matter, and I said “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I touched you. I’m very sorry. Accept my apology. ” You know, and he calmed down from me saying that to him. And later on I found out that he had a false leg. And he had a false leg because he got shot in the hip in a gang war. But I was pretty upset because I felt like someone should have told me. Someone should have told me of the teachers there. But he became, you know, someone that I could work with.

Tamara: I think with a lot of the other Native artists that I know that work in communities, we’ve all been through a lot of therapy ourselves, and that equips you with a language in with—just experience. Before we found performance, me and my sisters, it was years of therapy that we had to do all those ridiculous exercises, that we thought of at the time, and then when we started theater we were like, why are these the same exercises that we do in theater class? And it actually equips you really well.

Muriel: I asked Gary if he had therapy.

Gary: You mean like a psychologist? No. Well I did go for a period, if you must know I did, to try and fix my marriage.

Tamara: See? I still have yet to find one person who hasn’t, even if it was the online emergency.

Muriel: No, I never had therapy.

Tamara: No? Or spoke with a therapist, not even for a personal session?

Muriel: No. I have my sisters, true.

Gary: Every time that people get together, and we’re going to talk seriously about something, what we do is we lay some tobacco down and we ask The Creator that everybody be of a good mind. That what we’re doing here is to foster care for our people and to make things better, so you’ve got to go into it with a good heart. And if you do that, good things happen. And after that you thank The Creator for all the good things we’ve shared, and now we’re going to go on to our lives. But that’s the tragedy for most actors, is that they don’t know how to heal. Because sometimes we have to go to these emotional places, which sometimes are really dark, and yet we’re supposed to go on to our normal lives and move on after, even though we’ve been moved all night long and made people cry and many people have died. So that’s the challenge, I think, for most young actors, is to learn how to care for yourself emotionally, physically, and spiritually in preparation for this work, because you just can’t go in there and do some of this stuff without that knowledge. And we can see that travesty in Hollywood stories everyday, with people who don’t have that understanding, so I think at Native artists we’re way ahead in that game.

Muriel: You’re absolutely right, because I realized, when I said I didn’t have therapy, that I do have my sisters, right? And I have sisters that I talk to. And before we start a lot of these shows, or have an idea for a show, we talk and we talk and we talk, and we fight! And I think that is part of getting our juices started, but of getting an understanding of a lot of things, and how each one of us looks at the world. And we protect ourselves, before we start our shows, we put into the shows our protectors on stage with us; and that’s how we protect ourselves.

Gloria: And I just want to say that to know what to do, in case of an emergency like that—Because I was asked once to teach suicidal teenagers drama, so they could tell their story, and I went into it saying, oh this is a challenge, I know I can do it. But before we started, I said I need back up. I had a sense enough to know that if one child went off, I’m not a psychologist or social worker, so I would need someone to help me. So it just so happened that the reservation had money enough, and they hired some social workers to sit in the room with me just in case, because that was a scary thing to do. I wouldn’t know—one girl went off and I just hugged her. That was enough, I was lucky, but it was—these kids tried suicide, and I don’t know if anything happened, I don’t know if…helped at all. I needed help.

Sheila: We have like five more minutes, and some of us have shows tonight, so we’ll take one more question?

Jennifer: I find that most of the kids that I work with -- I know Donna Heimbecker said not to use the word “at risk”, youth with potential -- but you work with a lot of the same kids, and I find that elders really play the most important role, because a lot of gang members don’t really want to deal with parole officers, and don’t want to deal with social workers, don’t want to deal with the White way of doing things. And when anytime I’ve had a problem, you know, whether I’m more involved, an elder has always been the one to protect both sides, and we’ve always come to some understanding, no matter how heated things get. Perhaps people are taken away to jail afterwards, but it’s always tempered from a cultural perspective. That’s what I find. And I think that a lot of people operate in that way, at least where I’m from.

Sheila: Well guys, thank you for chatting with Native performers, I’m your host, and come see Chasing Honey tonight!