A Conversation with Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

Our Past is Only Yesterday:
A Conversation with Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
by Tom Pearson

In my interview with Native Hawaiian/Samoan playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl we spoke of how her experience as an indigenous artist working from within a Pacific Island culture compared with indigenous concerns from the continental United States and Canada, and how her journey as a playwright has stayed true to her original desires to render the power and complexity of women and speak directly to the concerns of her Native heritage.

Tom: Victoria, tell me a little bit about your work and how you became a playwright.

Victoria: Well, I was born in Honolulu, and my father is half Samoan, and my mother is part Hawaiian, so I was born and raised mostly in Honolulu. I went to the same high school as Barack Obama. I know it’s so funny to say that, but anyway, I lived there most of my life, until I was about twelve years old. My mother and father moved back to American Samoa, so I spent a lot of time there, and then I went and lived there for about seven years. I came back to Honolulu, I guess it was in the 70s sometime, and then I went back to school. I got a BA in Liberal Studies from Antioch University, which had a small program in Hawaii at the time. I thought I was going to become a Jungian analyst, so I was going to go into the psychology program at the university. And I thought I’d take a semester off and do something really different. So, I went to sign up for a creative writing class in the English department, but they were full. So I was looking through the catalog of courses, and I saw this class for playwriting, and I thought, “Oh, well my uncle did that. My uncle was a playwright.”

I just stumbled into this class. I’d been to about five plays in my whole life including [one] I was in when I was eight years old. And it was pretty scary. The teacher was, I would say “harsh,” is a gentle way of saying what he was, but I saw myself make so much progress from when I walked into the class and when I finished the class, that I decided to take the class over again with a different teacher, Dennis Carroll, who was there at the university from Australia. He kind of mentored me. He’s the one who had a lot more confidence in my writing than I did, because I didn’t know enough to have confidence. I didn’t know whether my writing was any good or not–but he thought my writing had promise, and I thought he was smarter than I was–so I just followed his lead. And that’s how I started writing, and I was very lucky because there was a theater in Honolulu, Kumu Kahua Theatre, which is totally community based, and they only produce plays that are about our local community, so there are a lot of Asian-American plays. There are a lot of Pacific plays. And they were very hungry for my work right away. You know, my first full-length play was produced at their theater, and right away I got into a cycle of writing and seeing my work produced, which I think is pretty fortunate for a new playwright because so many people struggle for so long to get a reading. But I was able to get into that cycle of writing and rehearsal and production right away, so that really helped me.

Tom: You write about Hawaiian culture. What would you say are the major political and social concerns in your work?

Victoria: I think if you look at the body of my work, that I come back to this theme of how the past collides with and influences the present. I mean, even though some of my pieces, like The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu, is categorized as a historical play, you know, some of those issues that are in the play are still issues in our community today. Was Christianity a good thing or a bad thing for the Hawaiian people? So, I think that’s probably a theme that I keep coming back to over and over again, and it provided for infinite thematic material.

Tom: It seems to be very delicate issues too, and in the play that you mention [The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu] which is having a reading here in the festival, it seems as though you’re walking a very fine line with your treatment of this character, who does sort of shift from one stance about Christianity to a very different stance, incorporating and assimilating that. I wondered if you’d talk a little bit about that character, because she’s real. She’s, first of all, a real historical person of great significance. What were the challenges and concerns in rendering such a well-known and controversial figure?

Victoria: Well, I think that first of all when you look at the period of time that she lived in and acted in, for me, that’s one of the most difficult, aside from the overthrow of the monarchy which comes at the end of the century. We’re looking at the beginning of the nineteenth Century. I think that was one of the most difficult periods of time in Hawaiian history, and the things that those people faced, especially the chiefs who were supposed to guide the people, they had to make some really tough decisions in a time that was very chaotic because there was so much relentless change happening. Depopulation was incredible. You know, when [Captain James] Cook came, they estimated the population at 300,000 and that’s supposed to be low. By the time of this play, the population is about half, so you know fourty years, half the people are gone. And there’s a lot of gunboat diplomacy happening in the islands too. So Ka’ahumanu, as a figure, as a leader, she had to face a world that was changing so quickly. I’m thinking from week to week, it must have been hard and unfamiliar, and I think some people when they look back and want to, you know, criticize her decision to become a Christian, I always think of that analogy of windsurfers out in the water and someone sitting on the beach laughing when they fall off. They don’t know what they are doing. They are not the ones out there having to face those things.

Tom: I love that you mentioned earlier that you were originally pursuing psychology. You treat Ka’ahumanu’s character with a lot of compassion and show these incremental changes in her attitude. Was there anything particularly daunting for you in that? Is she so well known that it’s difficult in some way to take on that character?

Victoria: Well, she’s pretty well known, and any time you write about one of the Ali'i, one of the chiefly class, I think you have to be careful because the Hawaiian community is not all in agreement about everything, and there are different factions. But I think the play was pretty well received as far as the Hawaiian community goes, and I try to do that, to treat her with compassion. And also, what was really important to me in portraying her was, I think sometimes people have the idea that foreigners or missionaries came to Hawaii and kind of led Hawaiians around by the nose. That’s so not true about our chiefs and our leaders, especially her. She was intelligent, and she had a very strategic mind too, so I think that I really wanted people to recognize that our leaders were intelligent and made the best decisions that they could at the time.

Tom: Your plays have been shown in many venues and to many diverse audiences. Is there a difference in the way people react in Hawaii versus elsewhere?

Victoria: I have to think about that for a minute. Yeah. I think there is. I think that when a local audience in Honolulu or Hawaii sees our plays, there’s much more of an emotional connection to the material. And I’m not saying that non-Natives audiences don’t make an emotional identification with the characters. But it’s interesting, for Hawaiian people, the past is yesterday, you know. What happened one-hundred years ago is just yesterday. It’s interesting; it’s so fresh in our minds, and I think we have that connection to the past because our parents and our grandparents feel that connection to our ancestors too. I think, I was going to say that when you’re with a local audience and something sad happens, you are much more likely to see people bursting into tears or making emotional connections with the material.

Tom: Can you tell me why this particular play is the one you selected for this festival?

Victoria: Actually I didn’t select it.

Tom: You didn’t?

Victoria: No, I didn’t. I sent the theater several. I sent them my anthology which had three plays in it. And then they asked for another one that’s not in publication, and I imagine they read the one that was published in the Seventh Generation, which is an anthology of Native American plays, and they selected this play.

Tom: It’s always interesting to hear how certain choices are made because it’s a very diverse festival.

Victoria: I should ask them why.

Tom: Yeah. It would be interesting to know what it was that resonated about this one, at this particular moment. And, what are you working on currently?

Victoria: Well, I just finished a mystery novel. I made a foray into prose, and the novel was just published. It’s set in 1935 in Honolulu. I’m working on a play now tentatively called Aitu Fafine, which is a play about female ghosts, and I wrote a play called Fanny and Belle, which is a play about Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and her relationship with her daughter, Belle Strong. It’s set in Stevenson’s home in, well it’s not western Samoa, now it’s called Samoa. Where Stevenson died. And so I had it in my mind to make a trilogy of Vailima [Stevenson’s home] plays that are all set in this incredible house and in this incredible place. So, the second one is about spirits; I shouldn’t say ghosts, because “aitu” can also mean spirits. Samoa has this incredibly rich tradition of ghost stories and female spirits, and I thought it would be really interesting to write a play that included some of those wonderful female figures.

Tom: Backtracking a little bit, I also wanted to ask you, in terms of your work, who has really been an influence for you in terms of your writing?

Victoria: Well, I did get a masters degree in drama, so I did read a lot of western plays and I think of the western playwrights, those early feminist writers from England like Caryl Churchill, and Louise Page, Pam Gems. I was really excited about their work when I discovered it, and I think The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu reflects some of those values that early feminist theater had, you know, like a play about women, a play about women in different social classes, a play where there’s no really big star but everybody’s part is integral and equal to each other’s part. So those writers were big influences on me. I really love the early work of Sam Shepard because it was so out there. You know, I liked Arthur Miller because he addressed social issues.

But I think one of the biggest influences on my writing was my uncle who was born in Samoa, and he went to the same school I went to. Then he went to Yale, and he was one of the youngest members of that drama workshop there. He came back to Honolulu after World War II and wanted to start an indigenous theater and wanted to encourage local playwriting in the 40s. Then he went to work in Hollywood for about twenty years and wrote all these television shows, but he came back to the theater in his later life. And he really reinforced some of the values that I had about the theater, that it was a place and a venue where we could use our voices to talk about our own culture and our own history, that it wasn’t just a place to be entertained. That it could be a meaningful platform to look at cultural and social issues. And he really believed those things and his writings reflected that too. And I think knowing that there was someone in my family that had done this before me was really important to me. So, I’d say that he’s a pretty big influence.

Tom: And do you see yourself as carrying on this tradition?

Victoria: Yes.

Tom: I know that it’s impossible to really encapsulate an artist’s work in a short interview, but I wondered if you could give us a broad stroke idea of, from your first play to what you’re working on now, what your trajectory has been in terms of the subject matter and issues that you’ve been looking at.

Victoria: In terms of the subject matter and issues, I think you know, because I’m fascinated by the past, I think my first, very first play I wrote, was about the tradition of hula and how the older style of hula was replaced by this new kind of kitschy style of hula and…

Tom: Kind of a little more lyrical, slower hula?

Victoria: The older style, or hula kahiko, is done to chanting, not what westerners would call music. And it’s very, some of it’s pretty bombastic. Some of it’s pretty sedate, but it’s always done to chanting, and it’s not done to any kind of guitar, not to western music. Hula auana, or the new style of hula, is done to music that’s composed for western instruments and western melodies and things like that. It was about a woman coming back and rediscovering that part of herself and realizing that was her path, to preserve and perform that dance. So, I’m not that much farther away thematically, but I think that I’ve got a much wider field in terms of how I use the structure of a play. And I think my field has gotten more and more free as I’ve gotten older. And I always tell my students, you know, you can look at all of these classical rules of playwriting and structures, but actually, what works on the stage is what works. You just have to kind of develop a theatrical sense of what might work or not on the stage. And, I’m still writing about women, which is what I started out really wanting to do, writing about colonization, women in particular; although, I’ve taken some side journeys on certain plays, but you know. I think as a playwright you think you know what you’re writing about, but you just have to leave yourself open to what wants to enter and what is exciting to you and what makes you feel passionate about your work, so like a dancer…

Tom: Yeah. A lot of times you don’t know what it is until it comes and tells you. And it’s really great I think to have the opportunity to have your work read in a festival like this, too, and get to hear it. You know, that’s a very different experience I would imagine.

Victoria: Yes. Well, because we really don’t have a professional theater in Honolulu, it’s great to see these people coming together so quickly and doing such a great job. And it’s wonderful that the theater has brought two of my favorite Hawaiian actresses to be in these roles. I think what that says to me, is that things have come a long way from when I first started writing. Those kinds of things didn’t matter to people.

A Conversation with Director Marie Clements

An Approach Full of Vigor and Delight:
A Conversation with Director Marie Clements
by Tom Pearson

When Marie Clements and I met early on the first day of the festival, she had already hit the ground running, taking a short break from rehearsal to talk to me, before preparing to show the first reading of the festival that self-same evening. We immediately got down to brass tacks so we could get her back into rehearsal as quickly as possible.

Marie is a multi-talented, award-winning performer, playwright, screenwriter, and director. So immersed in the task at hand, she spoke a great deal about The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu, the play she was directing here at the Native Theater Festival, but quite understated about her other work and projects. To offer a little more information about her own projects, a link is provided at the end of this interview.

Tom: Tell us a little about yourself and the work that you do.

Marie: I’m Metis/Dene, and I’m based out of Vancouver. I started off as an actor and then began writing and now direct and produce and have a company called Urban Ink Productions, which I founded and am Artistic Director of for about seven or eight years, then I started a new TV and film company with a partner, Evan Adams.

Tom: And you are currently at the Public Theater directing a reading, which is going up tonight. Since I know that is currently commanding all of your attention, will you tell us a little bit about this work and what your point of entry was into it?

Marie: Where should we start, eh? We’ve been in the room all day and that’s all we’ve been thinking of and consuming. It’s a work that Victoria Kneubuhl began about twenty years ago, and I think what’s really remarkable about it is that it’s about contact. And it’s so well-written and so layered and complex that I think even though it’s about an historical witnessing, it’s as relevant today as it was when she wrote it, and as vital as when it actually happened. The characters are based on real people from her history and her land, so it’s a very powerful piece of work, very poetic, and it really breaks out the characters, five women, and how they embrace each other, how they repel from each other, to tell this one story.

Tom: I spoke with Victoria earlier, and one of the things we were talking about is the challenge of working with someone who is a historical character and rendering that character. The queen, Ka’ahumanau, the title character of the story, is a very powerful figure in Hawaiian culture and a very transitional figure as well. As a director, what research did you have to do to prepare for this? What challenges do you face in directing a character like that?

Marie: Well, Victoria was very generous from the get-go, so we had, you know, lots of conversations over the phone, talking about specifics and the general world of the play because it’s not something that I know. I’m a northern girl, so my references are snow and things that Hawaii…

Tom: …has never seen…

Marie: … has never seen. It’s a very different world. And I think there are similarities, obviously, between Native Americans and Native Hawaiians as indigenous people, but there are also differences, too, that are quite marked and quite spectacularly great to discover. Victoria sent me a book on Ka’ahumanu, and I asked more questions from there. But I think it’s a real honor to get to know this woman, not only the writer, but this powerful woman who co-ruled Hawaii because she is in some ways, not only a queen of godly decent, but a political figure, and feminist, and a very layered and complex woman, meaning she did also enjoy her womanhood. She enjoyed sex. She enjoyed ruling. She had a sense of humor. She devoured the language, not only her own, but English when it arrived. She was able to not manipulate, but maneuver the new world, not only for herself, but for her people, which is kind of a story of strength.

Tom: And it’s really interesting the assimilation that she brought about. I can’t wait to see this tonight. I got to read it, and have become kind of obsessed with this figure after getting this little nugget.

Marie: Well, she does get inside you.

Tom: I wanted to also ask you because you are so in the middle of this right now: What have been the most important questions and issues for you as a director?

Marie: Well, I think it’s a unique piece in the sense that it’s poetic. It’s powerful. It tells the story, not only from one perspective but from many. And it has a very clear woman’s perspective, which if anybody’s been in theater for a long time, sometimes it’s a very unique place to be allowed in, to go into a story with a woman’s perspective. Obviously history is usually written from a male point of view and documented very well from that point of view. So as artists, women artists, it’s great to be able to approach it with that kind of vigor and delight, to be around these very powerful women and to see what they are going to do with these very powerful characters that were real people. So, it’s very layered that way. It’s like an embodiment of history coming to life.

Tom: What are some of the opportunities that a play like this affords a director? Or a festival like this?

Marie: Well, I think it’s always an honor to work on something that is well written. I mean we die for those things. That’s what we need. We need to be fed [laughs] beautiful things, and definitely the play is that, for many reasons. I think that’s the biggest thing… and I think obviously the vision for the piece is that people should be able to witness it, and it has the capacity and the complexity to be in a big house. It has that kind of power. Whether it will or not is another thing. But it deserves the stage, definitely.

Tom: Do you have any other projects that you are involved with, anything coming up?

Marie: Sure. I’m working on a project called The Edward Curtis Project. It’s a piece that I’m writing and co-directing. It’s a commission of The North Vancouver Presentation House and we’re presenting it with the Cultural Olympiad for the 2010 Olympics in January.

Find out more about The Edward Curtis Project and Marie’s other endeavors at http://www.marieclements.ca/.

A Conversation with Playwright Laura Shamas

Mothers, Daughters and the Breakdown of the Hive:
A Conversation with Playwright Laura Shamas
by Tom Pearson

In my interview with playwright Laura Shamas, we talked about her complex characters and use of metaphor in her play Chasing Honey and took a quick look at where she was coming from and where she was going.

Laura: I was born in Oklahoma and I grew up there, and I’ve also lived in Denver and Los Angeles. So, those are the places that I really think I’m from. I grew up in a theatrical family in Oklahoma, and so that’s how I really started being a playwright, because my mom is a writer and director, and her brother, who passed away, had a long career too as an actor and a director. So, it was always in my family that one could do that. I acted a little bit. I did about twenty-five roles before I figured that I wasn’t really that good, but I love the theater, and so I started writing plays when I was, I guess formally you could say, when I started UCLA and was a theater student. I wrote my first full-length play while I was undergrad at UCLA, and I got very lucky with it. It was published, and you know, I thought, “Wow, won’t life be great? This is what life is going to be like in the theater,” and then, you know, it turned out differently than that. But that’s really how I started.

Tom: Tell us a little bit about the themes and issues that pop up for you. Are they the same issues or sets of issues? What are the politics in your work?

Laura: I think that I’ve always written plays that have gender politics involved. That’s something that I’ve cared about for a long time. I think part of that did come out of acting because I was always looking for good roles, and I would always bemoan the kind of roles that I’d get to audition for. I always wanted to find roles that were smarter than I could audition for, and to be fed more, where the female was the protagonist, and the female drove the show, and that kind of thing. So, I started out from a very strong gender-political, I guess, agenda, if you will. But I also love the theater, and so I like to have things that are epic. I always like to tell big stories. I am a very political person. I’m a liberal person, and so, I’m proud to say that I’m politically liberal. I believe that almost everything we write is political, and I find myself writing about a lot of issues that I think some people would label as liberal issues. But to me, it’s part of who I am. It’s what I care about. It’s what I want to make audiences think about. It’s what I want a theater community to think about, and there have been a whole range of issues. This play that I’m very fortunate and blessed to be at the Native Theater Festival with is about Colony Collapse Disorder…

Tom: Among bees?

Laura: Well, among bees, but also taking that metaphor and seeing where it’s going with our whole culture and our society, with Native culture and family. What does it mean to have a breakdown like this with our, with Mother Earth? And what does it do to our whole system, our whole family? And what are we doing about it? What are people planning to do? What are they thinking about with it? I started this play last year, and I was just talking to one of the actors who’d done an initial workshop of it, Cara Gee. She and I were talking about how in the amount of time since I first started work-shopping the play there’s still no solution to these issues. And it’s great that I get to keep working on the play but not great that this is still an issue for our planet and our world.

Tom: As I was reading the play, it seems that there are also some identity issues that are bubbling to the surface in this work, and I wondered, is that common in your other work?

Laura: Identity issues? I’m someone from a multi-cultural background, and I’m very interested in elements of identity and how we align ourselves with identity. What part of culture is identity?

Tom: And what part of race? What part of…

Laura: Yes. Yes. It’s all very interesting to me and so I think I observe, as a person, a lot of people wondering about that question. As an artist, I’m supposed to raise questions. I don’t necessarily think that I need to answer them, but my job is to raise them. There’s an element of: Look at this. What do you think? And let’s get some dialogue about this. I do see people exploring a lot of identity issues.

Tom: It seems to me that your characters would be very rich for an actor to play…

Laura: Oh, thank you.

Tom: … because they appear to be one thing, and then we see the complication of that identity. And I wonder do you use archetypes and/or stereotypes to start a work? Do you start with an idea of who these people are in one dimension or two dimensions and work towards the other elements of character?

Laura: I don’t know that I work formally that way, but you tapped into something I care about deeply. I do like to explode stereotypes, and I also like to look at, what I think is a perception, and then try and go and say, “But look at this side of it,” and then, “It’s really not like that. It’s really like this.” So, you get into a deeper layer, and I think maybe some of that is, some of the things I’ve experienced. Where people will maybe meet me and make a certain assessment about me, and that really isn’t true about my own being. So it’s been an interesting experience to hear some of the things that have been said to me or assumed about me, so I know that it happens to lots of people. That it’s something that I like to work at, like you said, “Let’s go deeper than this assumption.”

Tom: I’m thinking in particular of the mother in the story who seems very paradoxical and operates in two very different spheres and I wondered if you would talk a little bit about that character.

Laura: Well one of the things that you said too, my PhD is in Mythological Studies, and I do work on other projects as a consultant, talking about mythological planes. What I tried to do with the mother, this is a mother who is both speaking to her daughter on the earthly plane, you know, one level of our mythic existence, and then the celestial, the heavenly, the spiritual. So, she’s also working trying to reach her daughter on an upper spiritual level as well. That character that you’re talking about is also in the process of dying in the play. She’s becoming spirit. And she’s trying to teach her daughter in the celestial, heavenly plane as much as she can while she still has a body too. So, I did really try to work with two different levels, very consciously there, and you know, I don’t know if it’s working in the play, but that’s what I’m trying to do.

Tom: Well, I’m very biased. I love it, and it resonates with me, and I’ll just put that out there. The thing I was really struck by is there’s a lot of pain in all of the characters but particularly in this one, I was thinking that this relationship between the mother and the daughter is only good in this sort of higher plane. And it’s really going wrong right here in front of her.

Laura: In a way this play, Chasing Honey, to me, is a major defense of the maternal, and part of that is using Colony Collapse Disorder, too, metaphorically and as an analogy. In Colony Collapse Disorder when the queen bee goes crazy or breaks down or leaves, the whole colony goes. So, the mother really does matter a lot. And what happens to the stress we put on our mothers in these situations when the stress is put on the maternal, what happens to the mother/daughter relationship? And, what tools does the mother then have when they are put through stresses like that? So I’m so glad you saw that, Tom. It’s thrilling to me.

Tom: Well, it’s fun to hear you talk about them too, because there is such complexity and symbolism with the parallel structure of the hive and this family unit that we see breaking down. It’s really fascinating, so I look forward to the reading.

Laura: Thank you. Me too.

Tom: Will you tell us a bit about what you are working on now, I mean other than this, which I know is all-consuming. But what comes next for you?

Laura: I really don’t know. I started a play in April and I would like to get back to it. It’s a gender political play, I’d say, about female decoys. I don’t know that it’s called Trapper Joan, [laughing] and I don’t know if I’ll get to go back to it or not. It’s a completely different kind of piece. But I’m very interested in the idea of decoys and private investigators and what that says about relationships in the twenty-first century that those are on the rise. So, I might get to work on that. I’m also hoping I can write a movie, some screenplays.

A Conversation with Director Alanis King

Saskatchewan Native Theater, Youth with Potential,
Busy Bees, and Paris in the 20s:
A Conversation with Director Alanis King
by Tom Pearson

I spoke with Alanis King, Artistic Director of the Saskatchewan Native Theater Company in Saskatoon, while she was at the Public Theater in New York directing a reading of Laura Shamas’s play, Chasing Honey, for the Native Theater Festival. Alanis, a passionate artist and educator, had a lot to say about her work within the Native community in Saskatoon and with the area’s youth, as well as her current and future projects.

Tom: Tell me a little about yourself and the work that you do with your company.

Alanis: I’m from the Odawa Nation. Right now, for about a year now, I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and I’m the Artistic Director of Saskatchewan Native Theater Company. We’re approaching our tenth anniversary next season, and this group was founded by some very high-profile luminaries of the theater and film world, Gordon Tootoosis and Tantoo Cardinal, who were on the set of Big Bear, being made in Saskatchewan. Ten years ago, they suggested the idea of starting a company that could serve the youth of Saskatchewan and get arts going and get the youth involved in something where they could be more creative and use their self-expression for self-confidence, and get out of risk mode and get into potential mode and do something that was valuable to them. There was a lot of suicide and addiction, and all of that inner city lifestyle is really affecting our young people.

So that vision was carried though, and now we have two buildings right in the heart of the inner city in Saskatoon. One is going to be converted into a black box theater, and the other space is all for training. So, we offer quite a bit of activity year round. We have an entry-level program called the Circle of Voices, and we take youth-at-risk through a six-month program and use theater as a tool. But it’s really four components: we teach them culture, so they have a sense of identity; we teach them life skills; and we end it with career management; but right through it all, we have the performing arts and creative play. And, we hire a senior playwright to work with them, and then they actually act in it. Then, we tour throughout the province. It’s been going on since 1999. So, that was a real successful way to keep Saskatchewan Native Theater Company going at that time. There was this whole healing movement. So, I really see this as a major force in the arts in Saskatchewan, all first peoples there. So although we are located in one small city, we actually serve the wider [area].

After that [Circle of Voices program], is the Red Spirit [program]. So, the ones that are talented and want to pursue the arts more, we encourage them to apply to the Red Spirit Performing Arts Training Program. It’s a two-year professional program. They do a lot of engagement with the community. In the past, we have done projects with Legal Aid Saskatchewan, and several other institutions have come forward like SGI, Saskatchewan Government Insurance, to deal with road issues [traffic safety]. And then these young people, in training, are able to be submersed in the community, while at the same time learning the basic techniques of movement, dance, ritual, voice, storytelling, and powwow singing. So, we always have a cultural approach to the program as well as teaching acting, and we also have them build sets and work with carpenters to get carpentry skills, so that their skills are transferable if the role isn’t there for them. Often, they can be in stage management or production and so forth. We also, of course, have the main stage and that’s where we have our seniors and established artists come and do two shows a year. Basically, other companies that are touring, we are trying to book them and present them to Saskatchewan audiences that may have never seen them before. I’m always feeling that Native theater in Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan has a core audience of our own people and our own community, but I know there’s a lot of room for non-Natives to really embrace the theater, and that’s happening, but its not happening in droves like the mainstream theater a couple of blocks away. You know, so it’s, I think, it’s an ongoing kind work that we’re doing to get that, and with higher numbers you get increased support and subscriptions which gives you a grounded comfort zone, that you can operate next year. So, you know, there are a lot of places for it to go and for us to celebrate our tenth anniversary for sure.

I really feel that it’s been a great time in my life to be able to use all my experience to-date, and for the past year, hit the ground running at such an intense place, and to create virtually a professional arts training program modeled after the national theater school that I attended, but actually Indianize it now and put in cultural components, which is just as skillful, so that our classics become our creation stories or myth. We have a lot of writing to do and a lot of plays to do that haven’t been out there. I’m not really one for teaching young people Shakespeare and Molière and all of the other sort of European forms or classic stuff because I really feel we have our own, and we have to explore them and write them and, you know, that’s there in the oral tradition, so it’s just a matter of working with elders and bringing those forward so that they become stand-up pieces. So that eventually down the road, other people can study, can pass that along.

Tom: So, there’s an effort to sort of canonize that material for your own community?

Alanis: Yes. So that we don’t have to always rely on, say, Greek mythology, and why not explore our own stories of the trickster which are equally as magical? And that’s not the only entity or deity or character that is magical. Actually there are tons, and then there are all the stories of how everything came to be, so those are grand.

Tom: It’s almost its own field of study, just trickster tales within a certain culture.

Alanis: Exactly, for sure, and also the cultural knowledge: color, ceremony, symbols, all of that aspect too. It’s a great wealth of play content for the years to come. I never feel like we run out of anything. We haven’t done enough yet.

Tom: And now with ten years, you’ve certainly put down your roots. It sends a really great message of stability and continuity. And you’re here this week with the Native Theater Festival at the Public to direct Laura Shamas’s play Chasing Honey. Will you tell us about that and the challenges you face as a director with this particular work?

Alanis: Well, I was really moved to be asked. I’m on the Advisory Committee, but that didn’t necessarily mean that I’d be directing. I submitted scripts from what I thought represented [Saskatchewan Native] theater too, but its been going really great. The play is about beekeeper migrant work, and it’s told through a young woman, Sandy, who just meets Len, and he’s the son of a beekeeper. So, at the same time, she’s losing both of her parents, one [her father] to the Shadow Wolves and his tour of duty in Afghanistan and his eventual take down. Her mother is a meth head and so suffers from that addiction. So, in that loss of her parents, she latches on and finds true love with Len, this young man she met through a university student club. I have probably the best cast in Turtle Island [North America], and Gary Farmer and Sheila Tousey are really senior, well-known, well-respected Native actors. So as a director, you really don’t have to do much. As an actor, you always make yourself “director-proof” in the business, right? So, they really make my work really easy. And Laura’s play, I honestly feel that there are some places for it to go. I would love to see it produced sometime, and I think that’s the whole purpose of why we’re here. Its really a script workshop as opposed to sort of getting towards production, so I think what we’re really trying to do is open it up, open up the script, open up the text for her. Let her really hear it. Discuss certain aspects of character journeys, maybe sort of incomplete characters who would, say, be minor, but really, even if a character comes out in one scene, they still have to have a complete story behind them for an actor.

Tom: And there are lots of characters like that within the Native student group that reappears throughout the play.

Alanis: Yeah, right. That’s right.

Tom: After the festival here, what is next for you? Do you have anything in the works?

Alanis: I’m thinking of a few things, but immediately I’m going to be directing The Velvet Devil, and it’s going on a national tour in Canada and to the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. The Velvet Devil is about a Métis singing sensation from the 40s, Velvet Laurent, and she gets a call that her mother died and she has to go back home. So that show is going to be touring around, and it’s a complete one-woman musical. There are three musicians supporting her, but in the future, in the long-term, I am developing the beginnings of a co-writing project about the women on the right bank in Paris in the '20s. I want to have a Native blues singer who’s part of those salon evenings and becomes quite popular in Paris during that time. And how she got there, is her father served in the war and left her behind, and she grew up to become quite a sensation and meets all those famous women who were performing their poetry and singing their songs and doing their art, their performance art, and [I want to] explore that. I think that would be kind of exciting and have universal flare as well.

Find out more about Alanis King and her work with the Saskatchewan Native Theater Company at http://www.sntc.ca/

A Conversation with Playwright Eric Gansworth

In the First Person, Telling it Like it Is:
A Conversation with Playwright Eric Gansworth
by Tom Pearson

In my interviews with Native Theater Festival artists for the online Native Theater Journal and the Hemispheric Institute archives, my mission was to establish background information on each interviewee, to find out what their current and future projects consist of, and to situate those within a conversation regarding politics and performance in the Americas.

Visual artist, poet, novelist, and now, playwright, Eric Gansworth has no lack of ideas or inspirations, and also no lack of political and cultural fodder for his work. We spoke about Eric’s professional trajectory and his current endeavor, which takes on a monumental topic, loaded with concerns regarding cultural sensitivity, ownership, and inheritance: a re-telling of the Haudenosaunee creation story from a deeply personal perspective.

Tom: I wanted to start off talking about your background. Will you say a bit about who you are, what you do, what your work is about and how you became an artist and a writer?

Eric: Ok, well I’m the youngest of seven from a family that is Onondaga, living on the Tuscarora reservation, and though we’d been there from the beginning, we had this kind of complicated history of being “other” within an already smaller group of “other,” so I think it was maybe difficult, perhaps, for many members of my family, but the perfect place for somebody who’s interested in becoming an artist because you get to be outside of the culture most of the time even while immersed in it. So, you’ve a viewpoint on it, I guess, that’s a little bit distant from people who are fully immersed within it. And I think technically, as an artist, I was pretty interested from the very beginning. I guess all kids draw when they are two and three, and you know, they color and they draw and things like that, and at some point, some stop and others don’t. I was pretty serious and committed to drawing, and I recall being annoyed that I didn’t have the technical motor skills in kindergarten to master the kind of drawing I wanted. I was largely influenced, at that point, by comic books. And I think I would say I went through a fairly long period of not being particularly interested in writing or drawing within the bounds of the culture. As I got older, it was rock music. I probably became serious about writing as a direct result of rock music from the 70s. I discovered that the lyrics were really moving me in these really interesting ways, and as a result, I began mimicking them and reading fiction and finding that same thing, that I was moved by certain pieces of fiction and had the desire to start writing. I had almost no awareness that I was following the best advice about composing which is to respond to what you know, so I thought I was writing a horror novel, and it turns out that I was writing a novel about reservation life that had these weird monsters in it [laughter]. By then, I had hit college and my creative writing professor said, “Well, you know, this is a really vivid story about reservation life, but what’s with the monsters?” That was a big shift moment for me, and I was able to say, “Oh well, maybe I can just get rid of the monsters.” I discovered that I was really writing about the things, the areas in my life, where I had passion, which were family dynamics and relationship of memory and history and contemporary life. So, it was an easy progression once that had happened.

Tom: You do so many different things. You are a visual artist, a writer, a poet, which I guess falls under writer [laughs].

Eric: [laughing] A lot of people make distinctions about those two.

Tom: There are nuances there. I was wondering when an idea comes to you, does it demand of you, “Make me a painting or make me a poem?” Does the idea dictate the medium, or do you approach it a different way?

Eric: I think there’s an experimental phase. And so often, I’ve tried out ideas in a variety of media to discover in which medium it’s going to sing most and have some kind of relationship with an audience. As an example, I really wanted to wrestle with the loss of one of my uncles. We’d spent a lot of time in his house growing up, and he lived two doors down from us. And he’d no electricity and, you know, we had electricity, but we didn’t have running water. But his house was even one degree more from finished than ours was, and he used to play the acoustic guitar and would sing for us all these blues standards and country songs. So that’s really the music I grew up listening to. I guess I was in college when he passed away, and I wanted to really deal with that in a legitimate way, in a meaningful way, and it started out as an idea for a performance, which was me playing the guitar incredibly badly. And it was going to be called Songs My Uncle Taught Me because none of us ever… We sort of took advantage of him or took his presence for granted, and that he was always going to be there, and so none of us bothered to learn to play the guitar from him or learned to sing these songs. So when he was gone, suddenly there was this huge void in our lives, but then I thought about the reality of audience and, of course, who would want to sit through somebody playing guitar badly for more than a minute or so? So I ended up turning it into a piece of fiction that became a chapter in my first novel. Often that’s part of the process, is to see which medium is going to most effectively deliver the idea. Sometimes there are many false starts for a variety of ideas.

Tom: And your current work, part of the festival, Re-Creation Story, is a play, and this is your first play?

Eric: It’s the first play that’s gone beyond the rejection phase. I had written something that started off as a short story maybe five or six years ago now, then when I saw the initial call for work for Native Voices at the Autry, so this is going back to 2003 I guess, I thought, “Oh, maybe I could rewrite that short story.” it was a much more immediate short story than most of my work. I thought maybe I could rewrite it as a play and see what happens, and I sent it to them and they didn’t take it, but they were encouraging in their rejection. So, that was the first move in that direction, and then when it came back rejected, I just rewrote it as a novel and it came out as a novel. This piece, now, originally started as a lecture, kind of a failed lecture. I mean, I delivered it, so I knew that it was going to be kind of performance based, but I didn’t think it was as successful as I’d wanted it to be or the way I’d imagined it. And I thought what it really needed was more voices because it was just too static the way I had done it as a single person. And then when I saw the call for work from this, the Public’s Native Theater Festival, I thought, ”Well, let’s go back to that piece because it was too long to be an essay and too performative in its structure to be viewed on paper as well. I mean, it was definitely meant to be presented aloud. And so I decided to commit, to see where it would go, and really make sure I got to an ending, to give it a judgment, to say, “Does it exist as a piece of drama?” And I was happy enough with it that I decided to send it out.

Tom: Re-Creation Story is going to have its reading on the last day of the festival. I had an opportunity to read an early draft, and a couple of things struck me. It seems like there’s a few very delicate balancing acts that you are navigating in this. One is that the main character in your play is Eric Gansworth. I think that is an interesting challenge, not only with regards to production but also in the writing of the work. And the play itself is grappling with the telling and re-telling of the Haudenosaunee creation story. What are the politics involved in rendering yourself in this way and in rendering something that belongs to a community of people, a bit of culture that a whole confederacy of tribes shares ownership of?

Eric: Well, that is a funny reality of a community-based story, and there certainly are people who consider themselves, either community-granted or not, consider themselves culture cops. Who has ownership of this story, and who can tell it, and under what circumstances? Because of the complicated nature of that, I have largely stayed away from it in any kind of verbal context. I have painted it a lot, because I think you can safely render moments of it as a visual artist, and with even more, let’s say politically charged paintings, can still have it grounded in that imagery more safely than you can verbally. As it turned out, I got stuck giving a presentation, very inadvertently, and realized that, of course, there are inherent skills in being a storyteller that I just don’t have. Then I thought, “Why did I even agree to this?” It seemed like I was just setting myself up for failure in agreeing to do something that was just a bad idea for me. Through the process of having accepted that, I agreed to it, and I began realizing that I did know a lot of it, but there is was also a lot that I didn’t know. And it became a very meaningful relationship to me to think about what it means to have ownership of that story and also what it means to be responsible for it. One of the last major documents to have appeared about the creation story came out maybe two years ago, and it was a fairly encompassing version of it but written in a contemporary diction. It was by a Seneca scholar named John Mohawk, and he also had a fairly fascinating introduction to it. The introduction was maybe twenty to twenty-five pages of contextualization of why he chose to write it now. I understood its importance, in his choosing to tell it and tell it for a contemporary audience and I think that his introduction was as important as his choosing to document it. I thought, “Well, the only way I’m going to really be able to make the creation story something that’s very explicitly connected to my life is to examine what it means to me and what it means to me that I’m not this kind of storyteller, and when I arrived at that, it occurred to me that I’m almost being asked to be that kind of storyteller even though I’m not. And I thought, “Well, that would be kind of a weird and interesting addition to the process, that it always involves a relationship with an audience, allows it to go in this other place.” And so much of it, the autobiographical elements, really did–and it’s sort of weird that, like email errors on my part–start forming what becomes part of the oral tradition. Because when somebody sees you needing help, they are compelled to help you, even though you don’t necessarily want to hear that kind of help because when I started getting those emails….

Tom: … People’s ideas of what help is sort of runs the gamut…

Eric: … Yeah. Exactly.

Tom: I like that you said the word “responsibility” in relation to all of this, and I think that comes up in different ways in different Native works. When you are dealing with this kind of subject matter is there a different sort of accountability, a different sort of responsibility that you are cognizant of as your writing? I know this hasn’t had an audience yet, but do you have some anticipation about how audiences are going to react or how Native versus non-Native audiences will react to it?

Eric: I have absolutely no idea how people are going to react to this or if it has any audience whatsoever. I think it’s one of the risks in working in between two different things. There’s this group of writers I guess I would generally consider myself part of, who tend to work in fairly contemporary ideas or contemporary narratives, and I think that’s true of my visual art as well. It’s got a post-modern aesthetic, generally speaking. And then there’s a whole other group of people who are very traditional in the way they work, who do beadwork designs that have been in their families for a couple of hundred years. And so to jump in between those things is to potentially alienate both groups of people. I think what John Mohawk tried to do in rewriting the creation story with a contemporary diction, is he chose that risk, and because he believed that it was a necessary risk. You know, in order to preserve the story for another, for the future, you have to take some risks, and you are going to have some enemies as a result. So I guess if I’m writing for any audience, it’s for the future. Our story does recreate itself. I guess I’ve taken the extreme stance that the teller has to take ownership of the story to some degree. So, where I wanted it to go was some place that I didn’t see any of the other versions taking it, which is to really show a dual narrative in which its meaning is manifested in the personal, individual life as well.

Tom: And what’s next? What are you working on now?

Eric: I usually have several big projects going at once. My next book will be out in the fall of 2009. It’s a collaboration with a photographer who had, for fourty years, documented the Indian communities of western New York. I have written a series of poems in response to his works. So that’s in production at the moment. And I have a new novel being considered by another press, and I’ve got notes on what I think is the next piece for theater because this is really exciting and interesting.

Eric Gansworth’s novels and poetry collections are available in bookstores and online through Amazon.com, at Barnes and Noble, and other major book retailers.

A Conversation with Director Leigh Silverman

Of Niches, Meta-Theatricality, and the Role of the Director:
A Conversation with Director Leigh Silverman
by Tom Pearson

Leigh Silverman and I met after what was a long day of interviews for me, and a long day of rehearsals for her, directing a reading of Eric Gansworth’s Re-Creation Story for the Native Theater Festival here at the Public. A little punchy on both our parts, we started jokingly but quickly got into some serious questions about the relationship between the director and the play, and about race, gender, and Neil Gaiman.

Leigh: [Laughing] Are you going to ask me what it’s like to not be Native working on the Native Theater Festival?

Tom: [Laughing] I can if you want, but I wasn’t going to necessarily start or even go there, but if it informs something one way or another, that’s fine. I thought maybe we’d start with… Well, you just finished a rehearsal. How was it?

Leigh: It was great. You know, we have some interesting challenges with this piece because we have a playwright who’s written an autobiographical play, but he’s not playing himself in the piece. We have an actor who’s playing him, and yet the piece is really his [Eric’s] first stab at playwriting, so there’s a lot of interesting energy of a writer, a real writer, writing a play about himself, a fictional actor trying, who just met this writer for the first time, trying to play this man, a group of other actors who are trying to assume twenty or thirty different characters in a piece that starts out being about one thing and sort of switches directions half way through. And, you know, doing it in two and a half days, it’s challenging.

Tom: Quickly, for people who don’t know you, could you tell us a little about yourself, the work you do, and give a sense of who you are coming into this process?

Leigh: Sure. Well it’s really interesting, not that I’m really interesting [laughing]. It is interesting because I feel that somehow the niche that I have found myself in, in a very interesting way, is with these kind of autobiographical meta-theatrical plays about race and identity, and certainly the plays that I’ve done here at The Public, Well by Lisa Kron and Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang, are both plays that dealt with a writer who wrote a play, where like the first line of the play is, “Hi, I’m Lisa Kron” or “Hi. I’m David Henry Hwang.”

Tom: Well went on to Broadway, right?

Leigh: Yeah, Well we did it here [at the Public] in 2004, and then it transferred to Broadway, and you know, Yellow Face, which we did last season was really terrific. You know, we extended for three weeks here at the Public, and it was a Pulitzer finalist and won an Obie and all sorts of things. I think when Oskar called me and asked me if I wanted to look at Yellow Face, you know, he said “I think you’re going to be the perfect director for this.” And I thought, “What on earth is this play about that I would be the perfect director for it? I mean what’s my niche that I’ve fallen into?” And then I read it and I was like, “Oh, that’s the niche!”

T: And now you have another one…

Leigh: [laughter] And now here I am working on Eric’s play, which also covers very similar themes. I mean, I think for me, I am interested in plays that are big and stylistically adventurous and deal with really political, big, global issues, but that are also incredibly personal, and, like Well and like Yellow Face, this play really grapples with a relationship with a parent in a very intense personal way and is also a very big beautiful, sweeping attempt of a writer, who’s a character in the play, to tell this story, the creation story.

Tom: When you start talking about “this is your niche,” suddenly, in some ways, I think people find their niche and it’s a relief, but at the same time, there is a little bit of a panic that sets in, an “Uh oh! Can I get out of this, or am I stuck in this for the rest of my career?” Do you ever feel that?

Leigh: [laughing] Well, not until you just said it that way. You know, I guess that I feel like after we did Well, I got like fourteen plays about people and their mothers, and so I think when you do something that’s successful people send you a lot of other plays like that. And I think there are worse things to be known for than big, epic, political, personal, autobiographical, meta-theatrical work. So in some ways, I feel like it’s exactly the kind of work that’s interesting to me, you know, work that keeps unfolding and is surprising and deconstructs and has a lot of big content and struggles with itself the whole way through. I feel very grateful that if this is the niche that I’ve fallen into, that it’s so challenging to me.

Tom: And there’s something cool about the work being so structurally complicated, that the question becomes: “Who can handle this? We need somebody who’s really got the touch.”

Leigh: Totally. I, actually for the first time in six years, am going to direct a revival in Seattle next month, and it’s crazy. I think, “Wow! This is such a conventional, well-made play. There’s a fourth wall and the people just talk to each other on stage.” It’s so well made it just feels like a vacation practically.

Tom: With this particular play [Re-Creation Story], everything seems to make sense why the match was right, but then after you’ve taken this on, what becomes your point of entry into the work?

Leigh: I really think that it is my job, you know, sometimes I’m really emotionally connected to the work; it’s very personal to me. The personal points of entry are different than what people would expect. And I think that there is always a way in if the play is good because that means the play is universal. And so people used to ask me all the time… I did this play of Tanya Barfield’s called Blue Door, and it was two African-American men, and it was the story of four generations of African-American men and their family, and people used to say to me, "Why you? Why are you the right person for that? Why did you want to direct that play?" And I thought that even though I’m not an African-American male, well, what I understood about that play and how to tell that story… There are things about that play that were incredible personal to me. Really, any play, it’s my job to actually stand outside of the play and tell the story and if there’s something about me that automatically makes me an outsider anyway, I think it’s actually helpful in a certain way to have that certain kind of bird's eye view of it. And, I mean, that is really the job of the director. I think that the plays that I have felt the most sensitive too, personally, or attached to, or felt that it was my story, I don’t know that I did such a good job, because I think that there is a way in which a director needs to stay on the outside of something. So, both I think you need to have really specific contact points and ways in and ways to feel really invested in it emotionally, but it’s not my job to be the emotional one. It’s really the actors’ jobs, and it’s my job to tell the story. And so I always want to stay both totally inside of it and make all of the right decisions about it, but also to be able to be outside of it enough to guide it. You have to be able to sit in an audience of people reacting to it, in all their ways, and it’s really why the actors can’t see the audience. It’s better not to know. It’s a constant dance when you are a director to be inside and outside the process all at the same time.

Tom: As you’re talking, I’m thinking that it makes perfect sense to see you paired with Eric, whose voice is so strong in this piece. It’s so Eric and so very distinctly a male point of view, especially concerning his relationship with his mother, and I think it feels very complimentary to have a woman direct this play and add some checks and balances in a way.

Leigh: Yeah, you know, we’ve been sort of engaged over email and on the phone, and we had never met until yesterday in the lobby. It’s funny because the first thing he said to me was “You’re not at all what I thought you were going to look like.”

Tom: What does that mean?

Leigh: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s good or not. It’s so funny, particularly in this kind of very short process. It’s such an intense relationship, and so much trust has to build so quickly. What’s really great about Eric is that he has a very strong point of view, and because he hasn’t done this before, he’s completely trusting because he sort of has to be. It’s funny, he said to me last night: “I’ve never had a first day of rehearsal before.” So interesting, so to have someone who’s so smart and accomplished but has never been in the theater world. And I was looking at him today and thought he must think we’re a bunch of freaks. We’re, like, moving all the music stands around. I think it must feel he’s in an alien culture. It’s lovely because he completely knows everything about everything and is so accomplished, and his writing is so sophisticated, and he’s been doing it for so long, and yet, it’s fun to say, “No, it’s like this.”

Tom: In terms of the play, and it’s something Eric and I talked about too, you’re looking at the Haudenosaunee creation story. That’s big stuff. That has a lot of cultural weight and there are a lot of accountability issues for engaging in a story like that. One thing that I think is a useful device and I see him employing in the play is a lot of self-referential material. Now, how does that material and those devices used throughout the play… Do they present more of a challenge as a director or do they make your job a little easier to have those references in the work?

Leigh: It’s both. I mean in comedy, in particular, it’s always a little helpful because it lets the audiences off the hook. Like if someone makes a big speech and then says, “God, I always make big speeches,” it’s a relief to the audience. But it’s hard, because the part that’s sort of great and then the part that’s sort of hard about it, is that there’s a lot of Eric’s personality written into this character of Eric. And so, to have somebody else playing that is a hard thing to teach someone how to do. Eric’s own personal humor, his own personal quirkiness and eccentricity is written into the play. I think that’s where the challenges really come in. It’s interesting because Lisa Kron and I have done four productions of Well, and there have been twelve productions this year. There’s a production running on the West End right now, and you know, Lisa, to have someone playing her after she’s played the role for so long, it’s hard for her. You know, David Hwang was never in Yellow Face. He wrote that part for Hoon Lee to play, so there’s a lot of jokes in the text because David is not an actor and never would be an actor. And I think it’s really different when you have someone who actually is a performer, and Eric is a performer too, but it’s a tricky line.

Tom: It must be interesting to have the character that you’re directing and the character that this actor is playing in the room together.

Leigh: Well of course, I say “You know, Eric,” and both the actor and the real Eric both says “Yes?” [Laughter]. And I’m just like, “Oh God! No, I mean Billy, when you’re saying this as Eric,” you know. [Laughter] It can be a little confusing.

Tom: Your show Re-Creation Story is on Saturday night, so you have a couple more days, and you just started today. Do you know if there’s a plan for the work beyond the festival?

Leigh: I have no idea. I’m sure Eric will… Hopefully, this won’t scar him too badly, and hopefully he’ll feel energized by it and galvanized to keep working.

Tom: And what other projects do you have coming up that we can look out for?

Leigh: Well, my really exciting project this year is a musical called Coraline that I’m doing in the spring that David Greenspan wrote the book for. It’s based on a young adult book called Coraline by Neil Gaiman. And Neil Gaiman is kind of this groovy author of the Sandman series and Beowulf [screen adaptation].

Tom: Yeah. We have some Neil Gaiman on our shelves.

Leigh: Yeah. Neil Gaiman is a cool guy, and he writes this book called Coraline, and we are doing this adaptation of it, and it’s really wild! The music is by Stephin Merritt of the band the Magnetic Fields, and he’s an amazing Indie pop/rock guy, and the whole thing is composed on toy piano, and prepared piano, and regular piano–and it’s just a wild, wild piece, and I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. And I’m very excited to have that happen. It’s, like, the anti-musical musical. There’s not a single song you can sing to or dance to in the whole piece, but it’s like people ask me, “How did you get involved with that?” And I’m, like, “Yeah, I know I’m no where near cool enough to work on it.” But it’s really going to be a great show.

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre will present the world premiere of Coraline May 6 through June 20, 2009. More details at http://www.mcctheater.org/.

A Conversation with Native Soul Singer Martha Redbone

Walking in Two Worlds:
A Conversation with Native Soul Singer Martha Redbone
by Tom Pearson

My interview with Brooklyn’s own Native soul singer, Martha Redbone, is the first in a series of interviews with artists involved in the second Native Theater Festival at the Public Theater. Martha kicked off the festival with a performance at Joe’s Pub on November 12, 2008. We started by talking a bit about Martha and where her music comes from, while video taping for the Hemispheric Institute archives, hemi.nyu.edu, an online library of interviews dealing with performance and politics in the Americas, and also audio recording for the accompanying podcast.

Tom: I’d like to get us started with a little info about you. Could you talk a bit about yourself and your music and about where you are coming from with all of that?

Martha: OK, well I was born and raised in New York City and also in the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, what we call Appalachia. My mother is Native American. She’s Choctaw, Shawnee, and Cherokee. My grandpa was Choctaw, and my grandma was all the other mixed tribes. And my father is African-American. She [my mother] left the mountains when she was in her early twenties because she felt that she wanted to give, you know, she wanted to see the world, and I think she ended up coming to New York City and staying to give us more opportunities than she had in rural Appalachia. So, we were raised, my brother and I, here in New York City. So even though we had the sounds of the city around us, when you go home it’s chicken n' dumplings and fry bread and “Who’s makin’ the beans?” That’s how it was for us. We had this dichotomy our whole lives. And when I started writing songs for myself to sing, I thought it would be a nice idea to honor where I came from. Because you know people always ask, “What are your major influences,” and people say, “Oh I grew up listening to Otis Redding” or “My parents loved this” or “This was always on the radio when I was a kid.” And I thought, “Yeah, all those things are true from my parents,” but I’d also like to kind of honor them because their influence is what makes me who I am today with the musical thing that I’m trying to create, which is what I call “Native Soul.” It’s mixing Traditional Native Music with Rhythm and Blues. And you know, I’ve heard Native Rock. I’ve heard traditional music, and I thought, “No one’s done soul music with that.” How would it sound? And it would be really great if we could figure out a way to combine the two. I figured, “Well, they’re both roots music, so it should work like any other combination of music that comes together,” but I didn’t want it to feel contrived or patronizing. I didn’t want it to be, like, I guess a cheap pop. I wanted it to be fun, fun and catchy, yes, in the pop aspect, but I wanted it to really kind of dig into something that hadn’t been done before to this extent. And in my research I found only one group who’d done something like that, who’d done rhythm and blues and had honored where they’d come from, and that’s the Neville Brothers, who are, like, my heroes.

Tom: And did you know that before?

Martha: Well, no I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it before. I mean, I know their music, but I never really paid attention to what it was. I just loved what they did, and I didn’t pay attention to why I loved it, but when I started singing traditional songs from my grandpa’s nation and from the Cherokee nation, I thought, “This really sounds familiar.” And then I found their Yellow Moon album, produced by Daniel Lanois, and then also their album Valence Street, and I thought, “Oh wow! So they’re doing it too.” So the Neville Brothers and myself are the only people who I know who are doing it. I hope many more end up doing that.

Tom: When you first started were you, right from the get-go, were you blending both of these traditions?

Martha: Yes

Tom: How did that evolve?

Martha: How did that come about?

Tom: Yeah.

Martha: As an independent artist, I’ve never had a major record deal ever, and when we made our first CD, Home of the Brave, we pulled favors, saved money, got angel investment, you know, we begged borrowed and stole to make that record. And when the album was about to come out, well, I didn’t have a title for the album because none of the song titles felt right, and I thought, “Well, if I were to pass on tomorrow and my CD ended up on somebody’s desk in Japan, what would I want them to know just from that album cover?” And so the first thing I wanted, at that time, was I wanted them to know that I was American, that I was Native American, and African-American, and that I sang soul music. You know, that kind of thing, just headlines.

Tom: Very clear messages…

Martha: And that’s how it came about… and that I wanted to honor where I came from, that was the main thing I felt, you know, making music. And music comes from the soul. My dedication to my heritage, I really wanted that at the forefront. I got really sick and tired growing up, I think I mentioned it in last night’s show, where I had to fight as a child because people didn’t, when I was in school, people didn’t understand that my mother is American Indian. They thought that Indians don’t exist anymore.

Tom: It’s still like that. There’s still that educational step.

Martha: It really is still like that. So, it became something that was just kind of an idea of me honoring where I come from to a responsibility, and now I feel and have felt for the past five years, that it’s my responsibility to let the world know, whoever wants to hear. I don’t know how far our music is going to take us, but I just felt I needed to educate the listeners that Native American people do exist. We are not just in Dances with Wolves; although, that was a great film. We’re hybrids. We come in all colors and nations and traditions, and we don’t necessarily always have to wear the feathers and the fringe to be recognized. And those are the things that I do now. My journey has turned from music to children’s workshops to motivational speaking. It’s opened up this whole can of worms I didn’t expect, but it’s a nice can of worms for me.

Tom: In talking about where you’re coming from and about these two traditions that you are pulling from, your name itself has an interesting story, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Martha: Yes, Redbone was my nickname. My family called me Red. That was a derogatory term for people who were Native and Black, and as a child I hated that name, you know, “Little Redbone.” I thought it was just horrible, so I decided in this process of healing and acceptance of being mixed race in New York City, you know, with this traditional heritage mom and African-American father, I thought that I should embrace everything that I am. My dad passed away in 2001, and that kind of made me realize and appreciate everything that I am, because you know, we are not all going to be here forever, and so I decided to turn what I was ashamed of into something to be proud of, and I thought I’d just take that name and use it as my surname.

Tom: I think that’s also indicative of your music that there’s a real sense of reclamation in a lot your songs and in a lot of what you do. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about, within your music, what are your political agendas if there are any? I think we are always political. But are there certain themes that you keep coming back to?

Martha: I think um, one of the… I guess I didn’t think of it as an agenda, but I guess it is kind of an agenda. Like I said, my mission is to educate people without being preachy, you know, if the music is fun and everyone’s dancing around and the messages are positive and very strong, but in a subtle way, I just hope that people can have an open mind. That’s what I’m trying to do with our music and with my band. My band are mixed race. We are kind of like Sly and the Family Stone across the board. And our music vocabulary is from all styles of music: classical jazz, rock, funk, soul, and it’s all there, and we all have that mindset. There’s a Lakota phrase, “mitakuye oyasin,” which is “all our relations.” I think, in a way, the music that we are doing, the kind of infusion that we are doing, and the band are reflective of it. You know, I am mixed race, and it’s kind of doing that whole thing, so maybe I’m just one big hybrid.

Tom: I think you are embodying your messages. And speaking of the diversity of your band, you had a special guest with you last night.

Martha: Yes, that’s right.

Tom: Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be?

Martha: Gary Farmer. Gary Farmer is a buddy of ours who we met probably about five or six years ago. We did Buffalo Tracks, a TV show in Toronto which is a Native talk show. We met Gary back then and hung out with him, and recently, we ended up doing a bunch of shows together through the Seminole Hard Rock Café. We’ve been doing these sort of all-star Native blues festivals. Turns out, there’s the San Francisco Native Film Festival going on today, and they are giving tribute to Floyd Red Crow Westerman. I was invited to go out there to perform today, but I declined because I have a baby now, and we’ve been flying so much, and I thought “We’d better stay home or he’s going to be sick.” But Gary said “I’m going to be in NY.” And I said, “Oh, well we’re performing at Joes Pub,” [and he said] “so am I. I’m doing a play.” And we’re like, “Oh my God, you have to jump on stage with us.” So that’s how that happened.

Tom: That was exciting. It was a fun moment for everybody…

Martha: It was great fun.

Tom: …and you said this in your show last night, which I think is pretty remarkable that, I mean the show itself was fantastic and the crowd was great, it was a full house, and the crowd loved you…

Martha: The crowd was so much fun.

Tom: …and you’re doing this twelve weeks after having a baby.

Martha: Yes.

Tom: So, you’re juggling a lot. And your tour schedule has been pretty heavy, right?

Martha: Well, not really. I mean, we’ve done quite a few shows over the past few weeks, but it’s slowing down now, and it’s going to pick up again in the New Year. So, I’m fine, and he’s a rock ‘n roll baby. He just goes with the flow. He really does. He’s amazing. He’s already taken four trips, so eight flights. We went to Coeur d'Alene reservation to do a conference out there and then Phoenix for the NCAI [National Congress of American Indians] conference. And we were in Florida.

Tom: So, he’s seen a little bit of the world already.

Martha: Oh yeah, and he’s just right there. He’s amazing, but I think it’ll be nice to be home for a few weeks [laughs].

Tom: You have two albums currently.

Martha: Yes.

Tom: Are you working on another one?

Martha: Yes, I am. We played a lot of the new songs last night, which was really interesting. We got great responses. That’s kind of how we did the last album, the Skin Talk album. We wrote all the songs and then went on the road and played them for everyone, and we saw the responses. You know, certain songs were like “hmmm” and certain songs were amazing, and we said “OK…so…”

Tom: These are the ones.

Martha: These were test marketed. And we’ve had great success with Skin Talk. We were pleased with it much more than we’d ever expected. So with the new album, we’ve been playing these new songs and we play them as we write them.

Tom: Is there a lot of revision while you’re on the road?

Martha: Yeah, I always write and rewrite and rewrite, so yeah. I’m certainly not precious about the craft of songwriting. I really respect it.

Tom: Where we can see you next? Do you have anything coming up?

Martha: I think in January we are going to be doing a tour called Native Music Rocks. I believe it will sponsored by the Seminole tribe in Florida, and they’re putting together this kind of tour.

Tom: Is this down in Hollywood?

Martha: … in Hollywood, Florida but I think the kickoff is here at the Hard Rock in New York City. I’m not sure exactly where it’s going to take us, but I love the message behind it, and the Seminoles are really getting behind Native music, just bringing all musicians to the forefront. And this is something that hasn’t happened across the country, so I hope it really takes off and sets a nice precedent for casinos to hire Native music acts. I mean, B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt can’t be everywhere all the time [laughter]. Even though I love them both. And Bonnie is a huge supporter of Native rights. In fact, we did a concert together a couple of years ago to raise money. We raised over $130,000 to send twelve Native students to college, full scholarships.

Tom: You do a lot of work in that arena as well. Can you tell us a little more about your activities?

Martha: Sure. Well, I think there’s a thing where lots of Native musicians actually go to reservations and as part of doing the kind of band gig or whatever the concert performance is, we also like to go into the schools to talk to the teens or little kids to see where their heads are at. It’s like part of a meet and greet, and just to interact with the people of that nation. And for me, the national HIV and AIDS partnership in Washington, DC asked me to become a spokesperson for them, so that turned into, “OK so that is something that I will do.” I’ll go to these reservations and I will talk to the teens, and HAP [HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Program], the Center for Disease Controls, gives me up-to-date statistics on what’s going on in Indian country. So, these are things that we also talk about with the teenagers. I also gave music workshops, particularly last year, with the United Houma Nation in Louisiana. You know, they’re about half an hour south of New Orleans on the bayou, and so I gave a traditional music workshop there last year for the teenage girls. And that was great fun, and I was going to do it this year, but then I had the baby.

Tom: And you are based in Brooklyn, right?

Martha: Yeah that’s right.

Tom: So, not only do you straddle several cultural traditions you also…

Martha: Straddle the urban one [laughter].

Tom: Yeah, yeah, you are rockin’ the urban thing too, which adds a whole other layer.

Martha: Yeah it does, and what’s nice about it is because the urban culture has spilled into Indian country, into youth culture with rap and rock and this kind of music, it’s not so foreign compared to how it used to be, so it’s nice. They get it. We get it. It’s a nice blend, healthy blend.

Tom: Is there a kind of invisibility, especially with urban Native artists? Have you experienced that?

Martha: Well, yeah, always. I mean being raised in New York City was like a big X, you know, because I’m not in the homeland. My grandparents raised me for a little bit when I was small but not having that connection or not being in the homeland, there’s a big stigma with that. I think a lot of these stigmas are disappearing, you know, and for me, thankfully because the world is a smaller place, and people get around. People are moving and coming back home and taking things. This is funny because I think it was, it might have been, Sitting Bull that said, “Our children will come back to us.” You know, and that’s kind of what’s happening. And it’s not just with myself, but there are tons of Native musicians and artists who live in cities: Chicago, you know, wherever, San Francisco, and then end up going back to Navajo country or Cherokee land. Anywhere. So, we bring… we live in two worlds. That’s what we say. We walk in two worlds. And in the end, you know, as long as we walk in beauty, we’ll be fine.

To listen to music clips or to find out more information about Martha Redbone, including a list of performance dates, visit http://www.martharedbone.com/.

A Conversation with Muriel Miguel

Legacy and the Persistence of Memory:
A Conversation with Muriel Miguel
by Tom Pearson

I met Muriel Miguel many years ago when I participated in a workshop that Spiderwoman Theater held at the Kitchen, and my own work as a choreographer and theater artist has been imprinted upon ever since. Through the years Muriel and I have met periodically at performances and through our mutual friend, Thunderbird American Indian Dancers Artistic Director, Louis Mofsie.

I caught up with Muriel during the Native Theater Festival and again a few weeks after when she and her sister Gloria Miguel staged a reading of Gloria’s new play, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, at the American Indian Community House here in New York. Before the reading, Muriel gave a lecture demonstration on story weaving, the technique Spiderwoman Theater uses to create its complex, multi-layered performances. The demonstration featured contributions from performers Joe Cross, Donna Cross Couteau, Josephine Tarrant, and Brian Toledo. After the reading, Muriel and Gloria spoke about legacy and the need for the young to listen to the elders, but also for the elders to listen to the young – for all of us to tell our stories and to hear the stories of others.

Muriel and I met a week later at The Public Theater and had a lengthy conversation, spanning some seventy years or more as Muriel rendered a compelling oral history of American Indian performing artists in New York City. We began with a discussion about her friendship with Louis Mofsie, Director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, which Muriel co-founded and with whom we both still perform. From Muriel and Louis’s beginnings in a small community of American Indians in Brooklyn, a whole community of performers has emerged.

Muriel: How far do we go back? We go back as far as our mothers. Alvina Mofsie and Elmira Miguel were best friends. Louis’s mother and father came to New York. They finally settled down in Brooklyn, and the first child was born which was Norton. And I guess, they [the Mofsies] were right next door to my mother and father who had two children, my older sister and my sister Gloria. Norton and my sister Gloria played together. They were playmates, but it was really a whole Indian conclave because there was my mother and father, and I think all my aunts and uncles. They all lived in this one house. And next door, I think it was on Degraw Street but I’m not sure because I wasn’t born, they [the Mofsies] moved in. And, I think with them came two of Louis’s aunts. And then there were a lot of people from Hopi that came and lived there, and from Hochunk, from Nebraska. I guess Josephine was born first. That’s Louis’s sister. Then Louis, then me, and we were all born next door to each other and so we always knew each other. And these two women were really best friends.

Tom: And were you a part of the Little Eagles originally?

Muriel: Yes.

Tom: Which became the Thunderbirds later?

Muriel: Right.

Tom: And you have a background as a choreographer.

Muriel: I have a background really as a dancer. That’s how I started. What happened was that, I mean, that was a great rebellion at that time because there were all of these young kids that were dancing and singing, and I don’t know if I’ve said this to you. I forget who I’ve talked to after a while. I’m old you know [laughing heartily]. It was a time when there was real oppression. We’re talking about the religious acts, and all of these dances and songs were forbidden. It was really verboten, so when the Hopis came to town, they came and they found these little kids that wanted to sing and dance, right? Same way with a lot of the Sioux people. These people could not pass their songs and dances and religious aspects onto their own, and this is my own feeling, my own private feeling about this, so they passed it onto whatever young mind, fertile mind, that was there and wanted to. And here they were in New York City, and no one was stopping them.

Tom: Do you think that was because of the urban situation…

Muriel: Yeah.

Tom: …that allowed a space for that to happen?

Muriel: Yes. Certainly. Certainly. So, they just gave it to us like that, you know. You ask Louis Mofsie about people like Johnny Sunroad. And God, there was so many of them. I remember him. He was Hopi, and you know, we learned all these dances, and if you ask Louis, there’s a photograph of the first powwow ever to happen on the East Coast, and it happened in Connecticut, and it happened in a big arena, and we had everything. We had horses. People just came and taught us and taught us and taught us, you know, and they would take us by bus to various places to learn to dance, and we even had a tap dancer [laughing]. We had a tap dancer and what do you call it now? You know, an Apache couple, duet. They did Swan Lake and so forth, but they also did one of those Apache dances, and they were Mohawk [laughter].

So, we have a photo that has all of us in it, and we’re the youngest. We’re way down at the bottom. You see this picture of us. We’re the youngest, right, and our fathers and uncles and mothers, everybody, my sister, everybody’s in this. You know, I sometimes… I do a one-woman retrospective, and that’s one of the things. I blew this picture up, and Louis has this picture also. I blew it up, and I show it on a big screen. And, I say to Native people, I say, “Come up here, and I bet you’ll find someone your related to” because everybody was in town for this. I mean, it was the biggest thing, and you know, it was in an arena. My sister sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” We had guys from the 101 Club with us. You know what that is? It’s the old wild west shows, and after the wild west show, Wild Bill Cody, when they broke up, all these guys left. But they were already in show biz, these guys, and they did all this stuff, you know. The Grand Entry came from there.

So, that’s what happened when we were kids, and from there, we really started to dance. And then there was a huge reaction in the public schools because the public schools said there were no more Indians, and Indian culture is dead. And how could that be?

Tom: When there you were there.

Muriel: [laughing] We were so immersed, and I remember really, even at that age, questioning the Social Studies teacher to the point where he tried to make me feel bad. I didn’t make the connection. I mean, I was really militant, and also felt that we had to, we really had to do something about it, and so that’s how we started the Little Eagles. And it wasn’t only Josephine, Louis, and myself. There were all these Mohawks that were involved because they lived all around us, and there was a church that had a Mohawk service and a minister there who really believed. He taught Mohawk, and he really believed that that was a way to bring… but he was interesting because he was a socialist, and so, he went amongst a lot of people, and when we came and we asked him if we could use his downstairs basement to teach and to work out dances and so forth, he said yes. And so we had this big party and invited people. We were very young, I mean we were like ten, eleven, twelve, and we were doing this. And we invited all the fathers and mothers of the kids that we wanted to work with, and everyone was so excited. And we started, and we always had that place to go to. We did it for a very long time as Little Eagles until we got a little too old to be called the Little Eagles [laughter]. And I guess it was Louie Martin that said, “What about the Thunderbirds?” I think he was the one, and we were all very close because our mothers, because our families were close. So, it meant that we, a lot of people kept an eye on us. And when very handsome Native guys came in to town, and one happened to impregnate one of the young women, it was, like, it was dreadful. I was so angry. Our parents snatched us up. Home we went, not to stick our head out again. That man was around, you know, like floating sperm… [laughing].

Tom: Sort of an overreacting…

Muriel: It was very funny, but the telephone was just like, everyone who was anyone had a telephone, and my parents, my mothers, all the mothers kept in touch with each other. You know, there are people out there now, if you hear the name, there’s a guy, he’s a ventriloquist, Buddy Big Mountain, and his mother was one of the Thunderbirds, you know, and so was his uncle, and it’s so funny to see this whole family of Big Mountains and say, “Oh, my God.” How did they meet? And that I made the wedding cake for Marguerite and Arthur, you know? These old, old times, and old people.

Tom: And all coming from one spot, that one particular place?

Muriel: Yeah.

Tom: It feels like we just jumped into a conversation about legacy, which is cool because that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about with you initially, and you know, it’s funny to hear you say how people would come and teach the dances to anybody because you were willing to learn and that was able to happen because you were in this sort of urban setting. You know, looking at the Thunderbirds now, forty-five years later, they still feel that way, like a repository for cultural preservation, of the certain things that they were given. At the same time, I feel, it’s been an interesting trajectory for you and what you’ve done, and I feel like you’ve always been highly political whether you meant to be or not. You know, just by saying you are here and that this is what you are interested in. That made Spiderwoman kind of jump into the consciousness in a way that was really powerful, and your politics, then… Well, I know that the academic communities are very interested in you [laughter] and you mentioned that…

Muriel: Mama Mia!

Tom: …getting into this headspace thing, but I guess the question about that is, a lot has been written about you and Spiderwoman and politics of race, and identity, and gender, and sexuality, and sort of, auto exoticism and all of that. Did you intend to have that happen, or did it organically evolve? And is it different now? I mean, are your political interventions now still dealing with the same kind of issues [long pause]. That was kind of a lot to ask all at once [big laughter].

Murial: [laughing] Well, let me go back to where we were, and talk to you about us growing up here and the legacy that I feel that was left. I think, and I understand a lot of times, what happens with young people because I see young people come here from across the country and from Canada and so on. And, because everything is so anonymous, I understand how easy it is to not be part of a community, you know? You don’t have to be, because there is a certain type anonymity that happens here. And it’s good. I mean, I’ve heard young people say, “It’s so great. I walk down the street and nobody says, ‘Oh there’s an Indian.”

Tom: That idea of passing.

Muriel: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s not even passing. It’s that you’re not being pointed to. If you do it in an Oklahoma town, like Joe Cross says, they all know who you are. You know, you do it, even in Toronto; they all know who you are. And so, here it’s such a big pie, and people enjoy that. They enjoy it until they get lonely.

Tom: Until they feel like they’ve lost some of that, and then it becomes about reclamation.

Muriel: Yeah. Right. And that’s when they start seeking, you know, and going back. And all of a sudden, someone will show up. Like there’s this guy. He’s from Alaska. Sherman. He just showed up. He’s been here quite a while [laughing], and he just showed up, and with that kind of thing like, “Hi. How are you?” And he thought he knew me, which I thought was funny. It was my sister he knew. But that’s, I think, the nature of the beast, you know, in how we look at things, and so, you know, I go back to that same thing again. People were so happy to pass onto us, this repository that we were, you know, just like sponges here. But we all went to school, right? A lot of us went to school, and Louis, who was the main singer, went upstate. And I went to dance school, and Josephine got married. And of course, amongst all that, it sounds so easy. But it wasn’t easy because all those things that happened on the rez was happening here: the drinking, the drugs, the drinking and driving and drugs, you know what I mean? So, a lot of us died before we were forty in that small group that we had. That’s just a small group of maybe twenty kids. And, we were always involved as show biz Indians. There’s no way of getting away from that. I, myself, don’t feel proud of it. I mean my father started out on the corner selling snake oil.

Tom: Which you talk about in your shows.

Muriel: Right. Here in New York City. So, we have done a lot of that “Show biz.” You know, Red Wing, Louis’s aunt was part of Tom Mix and the silent movies. And we’ve done all of that sideshow stuff. I personally couldn’t [laughing] handle it after a while, and then felt guilty because I felt like I was a sell out, and I also felt that I… it’s hard for me to do the Thanksgiving things in November. It’s really hard for me to do it. I did it for a while, but my other stuff came in.

Tom: You mean how everybody wants an Indian performance in November?

Muriel: Yeah. And I hate it. I really hate it. Sometimes, you know, all those things to me are selling out. And if I had my druthers I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that kind of work.

Tom: And then, that work has provided so much fodder for all your creative expressions where you sort of reclaim and reformat it.

Muriel: …because they were all show biz Indians. The thing that saved some of us, I mean my family, with a lot of heartache and a lot of fighting, was that my uncle was two things. My uncle was a medicine man, and would go back to Kuna Yala, you know, and really would come back and worry about the kids and worry about his grand nieces, you know, what was happening to them. I remember saying that my daughter was, I rattled off four or five tribes, and my uncle looking at my daughter, hurt me so much beause he said, “Poor thing.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” He really feels like that. Poor thing! Because she’s not a full blood. In his mind, she’s not a full blood. You know what I mean? She’s a full blood, [laughing] but she’s not a full blood.

Tom: Right. And I think a lot of people don’t realize the nuances with that, that certain tribes, you know, you marry another tribe, from a western point of view, you are still full blooded, but from within your own tribal system, you are not full anything.

Muriel: Right. But now it’s becoming more and more because the world is getting smaller and smaller. I know what I was trying to tie this back to. I understand when young people come here and they want to be like everyone else. They don’t want to make waves. You keep your head under the table. I understand that because in dance school that’s how I was, but I was so protected in a way from a lot of stuff. I just went ahead and did things. I think Louis did too. We didn’t realize that we were out of synch [laughing]. So, things happened like, I auditioned for Julliard, and I didn’t get in, and one of the reasons I didn’t get in, I didn’t know you were supposed to bring ballet slippers. And also, you have to show a sample of your work, and my work was out there, already. I had a chair, and reggae music. And I did a dance with sitar music. And everyone was doing Swan Lake [laughing], and they all came with their mothers, and here I was, this little straggly thing that came in. And I upset them so much. One of the dance teachers was so upset because I didn’t have ballet slippers. They felt so bad for me; bad and embarrassed. And I said, “Nevermind.” So, of course, I didn’t get in, but I did get a scholarship to Alwin Nicholai at the Henry Street Playhouse. But I was already working as a dancer in my own community. I already had the stage presence because we, all of us, were working as dancers, as Native dancers, but I would never say that. I wanted to learn another thing. So, you know, I went to Erick Hawkins, and I didn’t say anything, but he spotted me because he lived in Taos and all that kind of stuff, so he knew. And you know, he did a kachina dance, and I thought I was going to die. I thought, “Oh my God, he’s doing a kachina dance.” And they were all counting. You could hear them counting from the seats [laughing].

Tom: That had to be very strange for you.

Muriel: Well, I kept it all under cover, and I understand when they keep things under cover. I kept it really under cover. I watched them. I maybe imitated them, but I kept it really under cover because I was more interested in absorbing what they had than giving out what I had.

Tom: It’s interesting, that Hawkins example. I’m thinking of your work where you are there, Native, playing white people, playing Native [laughing].

Muriel: Well, I kept very quiet, and the last person I studied with was Jean Erdman, also out of [Martha] Graham. But Jean had another background. She also came from Hawaii, and her background was really Hula. And again, another woman, I mean she’s from a pineapple family, and she was married to what’s his name?

Tom: Joseph Campbell.

Muriel: Joseph Campbell. So, Joe Campbell was with us all the time. Now it’s so funny, you know, like, with Joe Campbell, he would give workshops, you know, and I had no idea who this man was. He would talk about myth and mythology, and he was a boyscout, you know, and he was so happy to have me in his class. And I was like, no connections at all. It was so funny. He was this really handsome man, really great big Irish man, turned up nose, deep blue eyes, and was so happy to have me, and would stand there and stare at me. You know I’d look at this man, and I finally said to Jean, “Hey, you really got a good looking husband” [laughter]. “Where’d you get him?” She told me the story too, was so interesting. She was a student, and he was a professor at Bard, and she seduced him.

Tom: She was teaching Graham?

Muriel: No, she was a student. It was a big scandal. She ran away with the professor [laughter]. And at one point, I was also teaching at Bard. It was so funny. Now Bard is this big fancy college, and it used to be this really interesting college. What did I want to say about that? So, I can understand how you want to keep undercover and absorb and not give anything away, so that people don’t, so that the spotlight is not on you. And all through those younger years, I was like that. The only people that really, that really would take me and say, “I want you to do this, this, and this Muriel” was Ellen Stewart. She’d say, “Come here, girl.” She knew because my parents would come to see all the shows, and she was like beyond herself that all these little Indians were coming in to see these shows. She was like, you know, she was so happy, and she would describe them. I met her a couple of years ago, and she would talk about what my parents would look like when they came in. So, she knew. But certainly Alwin Nicholai didn’t. Murray Louis didn’t. They just thought I was a strange.

Tom: And Joseph Chaikin?

Muriel: Joe knew. We were all in Nevada, and there was a point there, I guess I had a poncho in a casino there. And we were all sitting there, and everybody sort of ordered a drink. And I look up, and I order a drink, and there’s beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, and then she put it down. And I remember someone said, “Gee, Muriel, I thought she wasn’t going to take your order.” And I said, “Yeah. I thought so too.” But no one made the connection. They were completely out of it. They had no idea what this was about, and so me showing my brown face, I knew what it was about in a way. I didn’t really comprehend it, but I knew what this was about more than they did. They were just privileged people, and so when I went into Circus Circus and saw all these monkeys dressed up as Indians being twirled around on machines and everything, and everyone laughing. All this stuff happens above you as you gamble, and I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ.” And then someone saying to me, “Well, you know, it’s my culture too; I’m an American too, so it’s my culture too.”

Tom: It’s their invention. And it still happens in places, which is strange, maybe not in that exact way, but you still see it.

Muriel: Yeah, so you know, I grew up with all that, and what you have to think of is that you have to own up to it. You really do. You have to own up to it. You have to say, “Well, Muriel, you sold out there. Well, Muriel you didn’t say anything there. Well, Muriel, you could’ve been a little more forthright there. Well, Muriel, you shouldn’t have just smiled and walked away.” All those things, and say it to yourself. You know, otherwise, I can’t live with myself. I can’t live with myself thinking that I did not say something. I did not put my all in there because it was so hard all that time, you know. Yeah, Joe. But the others didn’t really realize what I was. I think they realized when, maybe, when I got married, and Josephine gave me a huge powwow at the McBurney Y [YMCA], and everybody was at the drum and everything. And you know, all those people, Gerry Ragni, Steve Forrest, Fred Forrest, all those name now, they came. And they were all so excited, but they never made the connection [laughing]. [Pause] From Open Theater, I had that whole dance training behind me, and that’s how I came into Open Theater, as a dancer. I came in, and there was another woman, Lynn Laredo, Jean Erdman. I understudied Jean. I taught for Jean, that kind of stuff. Betty Meredith Jones was one of them. They were all Laban people. And that’s what Lynn brought in to Jean, so we had a laboratory of Laban. I was working in Laban since I was thirteen because I met this woman Lynn Laredo, and I started to work in Laban. So, initially, my first input into modern dance was through Laban. It’s so ingrained in me. I have to really break it down to teach it because I naturally do it. It’s like Native dancing. And you’ll see it in the stuff I do, that it has a lot of Laban, or it’s connected in some way.

Tom: How did you develop your own working method, story weaving?

Muriel: What happened was that when I came out of Open Theater, I was working as an actress, and you know, agents call you up. And, you find, at that point, that you can’t do anything except whores, maids, only mothers of color. It’s all commercial stuff, and all the worst things you could probably do to women. Those were the only roles you could probably get. So, I was discouraged in that way. I think I developed a part for myself in an Arrabal play. Arrabal came here, and I worked with him, and so we had a great time. He was a crazy guy that was interested in me. The same reason, because I was Native. He had no idea what that meant. And so, because of the way I respond to stuff, he got all excited. So, he actually wrote a part for me in his play. That’s the kind of stuff I was doing, and I still wasn’t satisfied.

Then, one of the things that happened, was that Joe started to talk about storytelling, and it was funny to me because, when we started talking about storytelling, I thought, “I know that. I understand that.” And they talked about it in terms of something new. OK. It’s new [laughing]. And I didn’t think about it much, but they were taking apart storytelling, and I knew storytelling, you know. I knew it from the bottom of my toenails, my heels, bottoms of my feet. I talk about this a lot, about storytelling coming from listening under the kitchen table, you know. So, when he talked about it, I understood him clearly. I understood the paths, and how one can go into another path, and the sounds of it. Joe would say, “I’m not talking about Mickey Mouse, ‘tick tick tick’ or I’m walking down the stairs, ‘boom boom boom.’ I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the feeling. Like what is red, and what is the smell, and how do you express the smell?” I understood that. So, I understood enough when I left Open Theater, because all of our stuff, The Serpent, was based on that really. It was all the stories of the bible. Terminal was based on that, all the stories of death. Viet Rock, in a way, was based on that. It was stories of war. And the Ubu plays were, again, in a way, because it was taking the very essence of a lot of the stuff in the Ubu plays, because the Ubu was so out there. Do you know them, the Jarry plays?

Tom: Ubu Roi?

Muriel: Yeah. So, I played Mère Ubu, and it was like taking the essence of something, like the essence of being stupid, well, not stupid, but the essence of craving, of wanting, and never satisfied, and trying to find that nasty kind of… but taking essences, you know to put upon a character that... who knows what the hell they were talking about? All of that, I think I brought with me when I left Open Theater, and so when I started to think about storytelling, I started really thinking about it in a different way. And, I started to work with a group of women. It was the beginning of the women’s movement, and I really wasn’t interested in the women’s movement. You know, like, go away don’t bother me. And then Lynn Laredo, she was burning bras and all that in Atlantic City. What’s that about? So, she started a group and they did a lot of, not storytelling, but a lot of it in dance movement. And so I joined this group, and again, I found that thing, the propaganda that comes with what a Native person is, but I found that my propaganda was just as strong… So, spent time with this group really exploring that, and exploring and using stories to tell it. And, in exploring who I was and all the stories that I was ashamed to tell about my family, I started to tell… and really upset my family. But, I’m proud of those stories, and that was just the beginning of trying to understand what stories meant and how I heard those stories from my family, really heard those stories from my family. And how some of those stories were secret stories, and then I went to Sun Dance. I’m a Sun Dancer, and I realized again, “Damn, I’m really Indian.” You know, that thing? I say it in one of my pieces, how I’m really Indian. Men are piercing, you know, and you are dancing, and all your attention is on the piercing, and someone is piercing from the back. Someone is dragging a Buffalo skull. You know, you are really committed to who you are, and there’s no getting away from it. You know, you’re really Indian. And, it’s understanding it, like you understand stories. It comes from way, way deep down, from the center of the earth, before time, you know, this feeling, right? And I came back, and I had one experience where I was sitting after the Sun Dance. I was sitting on a bank, and a butterfly came and sat on my hand, and I just… It didn’t fly away, and it started to talk to me. And I was talking to the butterfly, and it was such a sacred moment for me, and such a you know, that kind of connection. That kind of connection, not from English speaking people, not from anything that is Euro-connected, but from another place… uh, I’m gonna cry… but from a place that’s from beyond beyond. So, so deep. And that was the first time, I really understood it. Before that, I was this little girl, wandering and picking up things, looking at them and shaking them and saying, “Oh, that works.” I was in my thirties then I guess. That was my first Sun Dance. And, you know, I became a woman at that point. I say it now. I didn’t say it then, you know. So, I had in me thoughts about now what I wanted to do with theater, and I never thought of it as theater. It was, “This is what I want to say.” I wasn’t talking about theater. I was talking about, “this is what I want to say,” so my first impulse was with these two women, and I didn’t get along really with them, with one of them. And it was baby things. We were two similar really, both wanted to be leaders and both had different ideas and stuff. So, I started to look around for other people that I wanted to work with, and I had big groups of women that I would just invite, and we would sneak into, what’s the name of that NYU’s…

Tom: Tisch?

Muriel: I told you about that right?

Tom: Yes.

Muriel: Anyway, I was asked to perform something at Washington Square Methodist Church. It used to be a hot bed of Socialism and all kinds of radical things. Spiderwoman did their first performances there. They had a very radical minister. And a lot of avant garde… It was down the street. There was the other church…

Tom: Judson.

Muriel: Judson. And down from Judson was the Washington Square Methodist Church, and they both had radical ministers. So, Judson had Al Carmine, and uh, I can’t remember his name. He married me, matter of fact [laughing]. So, there was a very avant garde group of musicians, and I had worked with them before because of some other people. So, I can’t even remember. I’m getting old [laughing]. Anyway, they did things with bowls and dropping rocks and playing with feathers, all sounds. But they were all real musicians, and this is what they were all doing. So, they were playing with the Tibetan bowls, and dropping rocks [laughing]. And they asked me if I was interested in adding to this, so I had this image of Josephine, cause Josephine one time started to tell the Spiderwoman stories, creation stories. So what I did was I put her on, like, three boxes. And Washington Square Methodist Church is huge. And, Josephine was a wonderful, wonderful seamstress and craftsman. She did wonderful beadwork, and she did other things, like finger weaving. And so, what I did was drop her from the balcony. I dropped a belt that was half finished, that she was working on. So, she was on top of there and she finger weaved, and she told the creation stories.

My other friend, I don’t know if you know. Do you know Split Britches?

Tom: Yeah. Peggy Shaw and Lois [Weaver].

Muriel: Well, Lois. And so Lois was the in the original Spiderwoman, and Peggy Shaw came later. Lois had this dream about making love to Jesus Christ. And it was a real, real dream for Lois, a connection of who she was as an ex-Baptist, a Baptist, a Christian, and what it meant to her. And I did the story of the butterfly, and what I did was project a river that ran between all of us. I was on one side, Lois was on the other side, Josephine was up there, and I started to script it. You know, so I would hear it, hear where the place would be that you would start Lois’s story, and then I would hear where I could come in, and so the weaving at times, we were saying the same words even. We’d use the same gesture at times. But it was really choreographed. And that was the beginning. It was me experimenting with my idea of what I thought story weaving was about and how it’s the core, it’s the kernel of how this is part of this. And this is part of that. And how it’s universal, but it’s not “UNIVERSAL.” And that’s how story weaving was created for me, and then I took that idea, and that’s when I started to work. And this, in a way, was way before Spiderwoman. It was like maybe a year because Josephine passed away within, and that just [trailing off]… With Josephine passing away came my determination to do this before, you know, I wasn’t even forty. Josie just became forty when she passed away, so it was like, if I don’t do this now, I will never do this. And I will never discover what I am talking about. And I say it like this now. At that time, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like, okay that’s it: “Aaaaaahhhh! [screaming]. It’s got to happen!”

Tom: I like thinking that story weaving is choreographing theater, you know, because it feels that way. You did a lecture demonstration before Gloria Miguel’s reading of her new play last week, which was great to see how you draw from different components, and then intersect them, and layer them, and then to get to see it in performance right after, that was satisfying. I thought about it that way, that it looks like a choreographic process, and choreography to me.

Muriel: But what is choreography, then? You know Stalin on the Beach, and any of those things, Nixon in China, you know what is it?

Tom: Right. Riefenstahl and Nuremberg…

Muriel: Right. You know, so I didn’t think of myself anymore as a dancer or a choreographer. I really thought of myself as a director. It was much later. Our first piece was called Women in Violence, and it explored…

Tom: The first Spiderwoman piece?

Muriel: Right. And I had great help from Open Theater. First of all, I thought we were very serious [laughing], and these people were falling off their chairs. They thought we were so funny, and I understood once it hit the audience. What the audience was saying. You can’t work in a box. That was obvious. And our stories, even though they were heartfelt or sorrowful or terrible, a lot of the stuff was funny because of the way I put it together, the way my mind works. And then, someone said to me, “OK. So you got it.” I don’t know who in Open Theater. “But it has to be layered more. “Layer it more, and start putting in stuff. Think of it in terms of repeating.” You know, “dat dat dat dat BAH dat dat dat dat BAH," you know? So, I started to look at it that way. They didn’t say it, but this is how I think of it. You know, like, what is the container for all of this? What holds it together? And so, again, a lot of talk between us, from all of us talking about what is the cement that holds this together. So, we started to talk about dirty jokes and obscene gestures, and out of that came the stuff. We went around and asked my sister’s husband. He’s a hard hat type of guy. He gave us all these awful, awful anti-women jokes, you know? Those guys that whistle at you, and say, “Hey look at those tits” and whatever else they say to you when you’re walking down the block. Those stories. Those jokes. What offends people? We didn’t say pushing the envelope, but really going out there, taking it to the absurd because that’s what we were talking about. It is absurd that someone could do things to you and make you feel bad. This is all in one piece, some guy jerking off in front of you. What do you do about it? So, they all had stories about it. People say, “Oh, you’re so uptight.” This was the 60s [laughing], or “You didn’t see that. That’s your fault to look.” And we made a big story out it: [starts to sing] “Da da da da dum.” We did it in a chorus line. Women loved it. Men would crawl away.

Tom: Well, it’s uncomfortable when you go to that extreme, it’s both so deadly and so funny at the same time because people don’t know how to really deal with it.

Muriel: So, it was that kind of weaving and heavy layering, one thing on top of the other… and sexual abuse stories the same way, and I talked about AIM [American Indian Movement] the same way. Upset a lot of AIMsters.

Tom: Especially at that time, right?

Muriel: Oh, my husband was so upset with this. You know the guys, would come and watch. We started at 38th Street. That was the first Community House. And we had a third floor, which we turned into a theater, and we always had a theater. Everyone was so surprised. We turned it into a theater. We put up lights. We almost had tin cans, and we had cement floors. It was freezing up there. Everyone helped us at the community house, and we had a guy that ran the lights because he did it for some rock shows, so he did it for us. We didn’t ask for much, just put lights on, put lights off. And we did it at the Community House. We opened it at the Washington Square Methodist Church, and then we ran it at the community house. We did it where Amerinda is now. That place. We did this show, Women in Violence for the First Women’s Shelter. This place was amazing. New York City was amazing because it was all this stuff, people didn’t think of it as grass roots, but it was really grass roots. And we were doing it without even thinking that it was grass roots, and we were mainly Native.

Tom: It also sounds like you did it, talking about what you needed to talk about, but the timing of it also coincided with all of these other things happening which gets layered on too, the feminist movement, AIM, and that gets absorbed somehow into your identity.

Muriel: Well, I was really a feminist. I am a feminist. And I was battling with my own craziness of having a husband and children and all of that at the same time. And, so you know, that was a big thought. All of us, I think, were battling with that. How do you deal with men, at a time when we were so angry? I mean, I was really angry that I couldn’t walk down the street in my sheer cotton thing without somebody, the butcher, staring at my breasts. It really angered me.

Tom: Interesting, the butcher… That’s kind of an accurate metaphor [laughter].

Muriel: Right. You know, I mean and being married to a real dog, you know, was very hard. And, the fact that I wasn’t brought up that way. I was brought up as an emancipated female because both sides of my family come from matriarchal societies, you know? Getting your period is a big deal. Not whispering about it, but, “PERIOD! BLOOD!” [Laughter] It’s no small thing. You know what I mean? So, to turn around and live in a neighborhood where it’s all, “You got the curse.” And then going into places where, “Stay away from me. You’re going to take my strength because you have your period,” you know? It was like, “huh?” It’s my strength. You know, because I was brought up like that. So, I found myself being thrown up against this wall of anti-women, and you know, all these guys were talking about the worst things you could do to women was an Indian way. C’mon. Give me a break. Go wash the dishes. So, I had all these guys in my one room apartment. They were sleeping on my floor. And I had a new baby, so I was nursing, so I’d go into the other room to nurse, and all these guys would come along and sit at my feet, and talk to me. I didn’t want these guys around me while I was nursing. I’d go into the next room, and they’d follow me into the next room. So, I felt like this Mother Earth that didn’t want to be a Mother Earth, and then I realized that Mother Earth was one of those words that trap you. Because they say “Mother Earth” to you, and you say, “Yes.” And so, you find yourself doing five jobs while the guy is just sitting there. Then he takes the credit. And I got fooled. So, the beginning of Spiderwoman, I started to unfool. I put it like this: You’re going up a hill, and you’re working very hard to get up that hill. You have a long cloak, and on the cloak are your babies, your family, and so forth, and also your husband. And he’s saying: “I’m so proud of you. You’re so wonderful. You can do it. I know you can do it. You’re so full of vitality, and you’re so full of life and determination. You’re Mother Earth.” And you say, “Yes! Yes, I can do it! Yes I’m going to go, and I’m gonna go up that hill, and I’m gonna bring everyone-with-me-and-I’m-gonna…” and you’re pulling, and you believe it. You believe your own myth. “I’m Mother Earth! I can do this!” And I saw it around me. I saw all these women doing this, and I was the bad one ‘cause I was saying, “Get off the fucking cloak [laughing]. Walk up yourself.” And so [they thought] I didn’t believe in family. Obviously, I didn’t believe in family if I did such a thing. I found that to be a feminist was not to be Indian and not to believe in family, and you hate men. And, I had to go back and look at this, and I said, “Get out of here.” [Laughing] They’re jerks, you know? And to go through all of Native people’s reactions to me being a feminist was not easy.

Tom: Do you think that during that time that the Native audiences were your most critical?

Muriel: Yeah. Except for the people like Rosemary Richmond, you know, that understood what I was talking about. And saying, “Yeah, Muriel, you tell them.” That’s where I was in the feminist movement, and then I started to realize that, “Hey, the feminist movement doesn’t really recognize me.”

Tom: In my conversation with Oskar, we talked about how everyone in the festival said “Spiderwoman” at some point. “Because I saw Spiderwoman do it, I knew I could do it.” Or, “I learned this from Spiderwoman” or, you know, everyone can track, in some way, how they’ve been influenced by what you’ve done. And, I said, “Yeah, but also, a lot of what’s happening in avant garde theater or performance art in what we call a downtown aesthetic in New York, can say that as well. I mean, it’s not just Native people. What you guys were doing at that time, and where Split Britches sort of moved on from, and you continued, and what Deb Margolin and other people…

Muriel: Right. Right.

Tom: … in that trajectory have been doing is all going right back to that, so the web is a lot wider than people often acknowledge.

Muriel: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I agree. I so enjoy watching Split Britches. I think they are just absolutely wonderful, and I think it’s that thing that sometimes when you feel so depressed, and you go to see something like that and you say, “Yes. That’s why I’m working.” You know, when I used to go see Joe, and I’d say “Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s why I’m working. It’s because of Joe, because of that kind of aesthetic of looking and exploring, and picking up something and seeing the veins, and getting lost in the veins, and maybe people saying, “What the hell is she doing?” Coming out on the other side with information for yourself to go on. Sometimes, you know, you do something that isn’t so great, but the information it holds is what’s important. Yeah. I say this to my students, to think of it as a safe space, and it may fail, but the information that you receive in failing is the lesson. You know, it’s not that it’s triumphant, but what you gather at that time, that’s what excites me now. That’s REALLY what excites me now, finding those places. And now, I’m older. It’s a scary place at times, too, because I’m looking at death, you know, aging, looking at aging. I’m looking at death and what happens after death, and that passage of time between aging and the knowledge in your head, until the time you let go, or of other people going before you. It’s a big difference between Josephine dying, which I think was the most radical thing that could’ve happened to any of us at that time. I mean, it was so radical. You have no idea. I went off screaming. Louis went off screaming. It was great determination at that time because she was oldest of any of us, and she wasn’t making forty. That’s something, you know, and still to be so close and to… I don’t know what I’m saying.

Tom: Well, where you are going is kind of in line with a question with what I wanted to ask you about Spiderwoman’s legacy now and where you want it to go because I know your daughter is performing with you. Your granddaughter performed with Gloria’s show last week.

Muriel: Again it goes back to all those places. It goes back to the Mofsies and the Miguels. We all performed, and I’m not saying that’s the best way to perform. You throw the kid out on the stage and say, “dance.” You know [laughing], but maybe they will go on to be performers, singers. But as Deborah [Ratelle] said, “It would be nice to have an architect in the family” [laughing]. Or a scientist. Oh well.

Tom: We started with legacy, your own and Spiderwoman’s, and I actually have a more detailed question for you. I saw you, saw Spiderwoman perform in the Bronx at the museum there, and your daughter, Murielle [Borst], was performing with you, and you were trying to figure out how to address the older work by sort of divvying up some of Lisa’s [Lisa Mayo] material, now that she’s retired from performing. And there was also a moment where Murielle brought her own new material to it. And that moment was actually interesting to me because it seems that the work that you all make is so much about, so much about you. It’s all coming from all of you, and coming from your relationships with each other and experiences together and how that changes when other people come into the mix. I know you’ve always worked with people other than your two sisters, Matoaka, the Colorado sisters, and different iterations of your group, but it always seems like it’s so much about those involved, and that’s why I think it always feels universal.

Muriel: It’s specific, but that’s what makes it universal. I mean this is the fight I have with Gloria all the time. That I feel like if it gets too personal, it becomes, “You’re bad and I’m good,” and so how, again, it’s going into that area of looking to see what did the grandma do? What was the grandma’s story?

Tom: This is the “don’t choke the child” moment from Gloria’s new show?

Muriel: Yeah. Right [laughing], and you know, there’s another story there. I don’t know it. I only know it from feelings about it, you know. Of this woman who came from Virginia who during the Civil War and so on, went back into the plantation and wouldn’t have anything to do with the Civil War. Who, when she finally came out, found that she didn’t have any land, and she had to make believe that she was a slave to get land. So, there’s great bitterness there. I think there were other things too. At the same time, these were women that were midwives and herbalist, and so all of them worked, went on horseback. My grandmother and great-grandmother went on horseback to deliver babies on the plantation and outside where Indians lived. So, I think there’s a big story there, but we will never know it. I know what I saw as a baby because I was two years old. This was an embittered woman who didn’t want to be up here, who was really a country woman from the south who was now here and being idolized because she was beautiful. And she didn’t want that. She wanted to be back there without shoes on, and because she was so frightened, and she lost children to cholera and so on, and up here in New York it was just as bad as it was in the south only it was hidden. So, there were still petitions made that my family could not lived on that block. They tried to keep them off that block because they weren’t white, on the block that I live now. And it was only because of this good man that said, “This is not right and I am going to rent this house to them.” And that story is there. There is a lot there. She had to fight. She didn’t want my mother to marry an Indian because she was a Christian Indian, and my mother found the most savage of them all [laughing]. She found a Kuna. Man! They spoke their own language. They didn’t wear shoes. They had rings in their noses. Holy Mackerel! [Laughing] You know? So, I think of all of that as legacy. I talk about this in Red Mother a lot. Legacy does not mean that it’s wonderful. Legacy does not mean that you impart wonderful, thoughtful things to the next generation. Legacy is legacy. There bad legacy. It’s awful. It’s mean. It’s all of that. That’s legacy, and that goes down the line too. And also, we would not be here. I would not know the things that I know, if I didn’t have a grandmother. She delivered me. She fought for me and my mother when I was born. She threw out the doctor because he was calling us savage. She did all of that, and that’s a legacy, you know? It’s not nice. She was not nice. She was not a nice lady. She did all kinds of things to her kids, but at the same time, I can stand here and say, “I was born on the floor on 333 Degraw Street.” And my grandmother pulled me out, all of that back there that makes us who we are now. We hate them. My sister hates that grandma, and I can’t exactly, maybe it’s because I grew up later, I can’t exactly hate her. I can’t because I know that she was a barefoot woman, and I know that she was a midwife. And those things bring great strength to me. Though, you know, I think that she was so neurotic that she couldn’t work her way out of a paper bag, but that doesn’t mean that we can negate that. That’s what I guess I’m getting at. You can’t negate that. If there’s a schizophrenic in the family, you can’t negate it. There was a schizophrenic in the family, but in that, terrible things happened. There could be sexual abuse in the family.

Tom: They all have stories.

Muriel: Yes. Yes. Yes. And that’s what I guess I’m talking about. That’s so important to me, that persistence of memory makes us, what we do each night, how we wake up, what you think about when you open your eyes. That’s all part of it, and that to me is legacy. For me, I am responsible for those next generations. When I die, it does not take away responsibility. I still have that, even if I’m dead, and I have to think about that. And maybe they didn’t think about it. Maybe my Uncle Joe did. I think my uncle Joe did. I don’t know if my mother did. She was angry at the end.

Tom: And then, maybe they are helping you think about it now, and maybe they reconcile through you?

Muriel: Yes. I finally had a reconciliation with my mother. I put up altars, and when I go away on tour and when I’m working away, I carry all my stuff. And so, I put up this altar for my mother, and it happened again because my kids, I say kids, you know, they’re your age. Something happened, and I can’t remember now, and I remember saying, “Did you smudge? Did you do that?” and I said, “Well, it seems to me, it’s grandma’s birthday and we really have to do something heavy here.” So, they called up Monique [Mojica]. They called David and my sister Elizabeth, and Kevin and Muriel, and Josephine and Mouse and all of them. They were in one place, and I was in Chicago with Gloria. And Monique was in Toronto, and we all decided at a certain hour we would have our feast, and that’s what we did. And I put up an altar to my mother in my apartment. And my sister came in, and she brought flowers. We put the spirit plate, everything on this altar. So later on, I went to the altar, and I found myself talking to this altar and saying, “I want to thank you for protecting my children because you have always protected my children. I know you protected my children because they talk about you. So, I have to thank you for this, and that I had to think that it’s time to let go of all the anger that I’ve placed on you and you’ve placed on me.” I remember doing this and smudging and lighting the tobacco and everything, and I was able to reconcile this craziness with my mother. It was hard because I’m the youngest, right? And she expected me to always take care of her, so that’s part of legacy. You see that? You know, that’s part of legacy. That’s part of her responsibility towards my kids. Her responsibility towards Kevin, towards Josephine, and I feel that way about legacy. What I want to do with Spiderwoman now is not only with, it has a lot to do with my family, but I see all these young women that have stories and want to tell them. And how do you tell them? And where do you tell them? And sometimes they are working on little things, so it’s like a fifteen minute story. Sometimes it’s forty-five minutes. Sometimes it’s a production, and those are all stories. And they’re stories that are from them, that should come out. It’s from their legacies. It’s legacies upon legacies upon legacies. And that’s what I see now. I see that my journey is almost over, maybe if it’s good, it’s another twenty years [laughing].

Tom: You can do a lot of damage in twenty years. [laughter]

Muriel: Yeah, so I see that my journey now is to collect these stories, to collect these women, and show these women, you know, work with them. I mean, I work with all these kids at CIT [Center for Indigenous Theatre at Trent University], so they know my method of working and so on. But these other young women, and it isn’t that I advertise or anything, people find me. These women find me and say they want to work with me. And I say, “Fine. Get a grant.” [Laughing] I’m doing things free. It’s true. I’m doing things for free, for a hat, or a supper. But, I think it’s important for all these people to pull out their stuff and examine it because I don’t see any other way for Native people to go on. And also, here in New York, I think that we have to really raise the profile of Native people in theater in New York. So, that’s my other thing that I’m really thinking about. I want to do little things like I did there with Gloria, and keep on doing them, and doing them more frequently. And then do maybe a small festival of one-woman shows like that, and just, you know, talk about being Native in New York. I mean there are people that have been here for a long time, and families that have been here for a long time that have been in theater.