The New York Times: In the 1980s, when Larissa FastHorse was in high school in Pierre, S.D., friends would sometimes forget she was Native American. Talk would turn to the area’s “drunk lazy Indians,” she said, and “I’d be like, ‘um, excuse me, I’m right here.’”
“And then it was always, ‘Oh, well, not you!’” she continued.
3 comments:
It’s insane to me that, after years of writing plays about Native Americans with roles FOR Native Americans, Larissa Fasthorse’s first major commercial success came with Thanksgiving Play, which has an exclusively white cast. That being said, I’m glad Fasthorse’s work is finally being produced and recognized to the extent it should be. I love how she uses classic farcical tropes (mistaken identities, disguises, tricks, and dozens of exits and entrances) in her plays to emphasize and draw out her experience as an Indigenous woman. Choosing a play structure that uplifts the absurd and allows her to fuse comedy with social commentary is an ingenious way to express how absurd the treatment of Indigenous voices is today. I love it whenever writers have a common theme to their body of works. Often, when there is a topic they are passionate about, it reflects in their writing and makes for a more compelling story. I can’t wait to learn more about “Fake It Until You Make It” when it opens in April.
The irony of the first commercially successful play about Native Americans that FastHorse wrote including an entirely white cast is truly crazy, but what's even crazier is that I never learned about or heard about her work before reading this article. As an influential, history-making playwright one would assume that her work would be taught in school and more publicized, but it has not been. I would assume this is because of what she calls the great erasure. I’m concerned that with the current DEI rollbacks by the federal government information and productions about subjects like this will become increasingly fewer. There's already such little information acknowledgement easily accessible about subjects like this and other injustices in America, and with banned books and increased censorship it is only going to get worse as time goes on. I hope that FastHorse and other artists like her continue to stay strong and tell important stories despite pushback.
I think that in this day and age there is still so much stigma and stereotyping happening in Hollywood. For an industry that preaches itself to be so diverse and with the times, it is not. It shocks me that Native Americans are still so underrepresented and marginalized in this industry and all industries. Their history is erased and basically they are erased from our current society as well. This makes me think of all the other cultures in Hollywood that are also misrepresented by the people in the industry because there is no one to advocate for them, not that they should have to do that. I think there’s also something to be said that FastHorse wrote The Thanksgiving play out of frustration and that it immediately got picked up because she wrote for white characters. I think that money plays a huge role in what gets picked up and what doesn’t because the audience is majority white which sucks because that just means all the shows that are good and diverse are just cut.
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