HowlRound Theatre Commons: Narrative is a powerful tool. It enlightens, ignites critical thought, and invites reflection. However, narrative can also divide us, harm us, and manipulate us into believing false truths. The way narrative can be weaponized against the most marginalized in our communities is not a surprising revelation stemming from recent presidential elections, but rather it is something I have experienced my entire life as a Native person.
4 comments:
Wow, this article was such an insightful and powerful read. What really stood out to me was the conversations this article brought up about how theater more often than not idealizes this idea of the “West” and the “American Dream” with no regard for how these structures have been used to systematically oppress native populations. What also stuck stuck out to me about this article was how growing up the author really didn’t have access to theater or any live performing arts. She identifies a key part of her culture as “being the original storytellers on this land” and that when she was exposed to theater later in her life it fit really well into her cultural identity. I think it is really tragic how because of the colonial ideals and power structures that are held up by western theater make it so inaccessible to minorities. I really appreciated the final call to action in this article to “continue reading the words of these Native artists if you become unsettled… [and to] sit with the confrontation of truth”
I have had this conversation many times with one of my friends who is Native and in theater. America seems to forget over and over again that the only reason this country exists is because of the displacement and harm to Native Americans. People often think of theater only as entertainment and forget that it is also a form of protest and learning. Yet even when people “understand” that it is a form of protest, they tend to think of it only as a form of protest for the queer community, women, and those of lower economic statuses. Native American people have had so much of their history taken from and decided for them. So many shows for theater have been written by white men for white men even if the playwright does not completely understand that that is what they have done. As someone from RI who has seen a lot of shows done through the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA program, I was happy to hear that they were supportive of the author and encouraged them to change the narrative.
Tribal Sovereignty is wicked important to any discussion of American Indian culture and heritage and I think the casual way a lot of art depicts American Indians as a collective group throughout history is truly lazy and leaves out a lot of the most interesting facets of the real history and narrative around those peoples and cultures. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a crazy call out in this article as I remember being shocked at how ruthlessly callous and uneducated some of that musical’s songs (such as the brutal “Ten Little Indians”) was when I first listened to it. I also like that the author points out that most American History textbooks do nothing to discuss native peoples after 1900, leaving out the importance of the AIM movement, their occupation of Alcatraz, and how their movement worked with and in context of the broader American Civil Rights movement. The author’s lived experience is moving and disheartening, and is representative of the lack of curiosity and care many non-native Americans have for the way US’s narrative interacts with that of American Indians. I think that while a lot of good attention has been brought to the misrepresentation of black people and African Americans in art and media, we still have a long way to go when it comes to the representation and mistreatment of other minority groups such as American Indians- as evidenced by the “snow white” comment in this article. The genocide that was enacted against Native American peoples and cultures is still underrepresented in education today, and the white status-quo hegemonies refusal to reinvestigate the hateful rhetoric of its past is something that must be righted. I really like this article, especially in its mission statement at the end. I think a lot of articles like this fall into the trappings of “x is a bad thing” period full stop. I think Moses’ plan at the end of the article is really uplifting and the exact kind of thing we need more of in our societal discourse and in our world in general.
Especially with Foundations of Drama II we are talking a lot about how ritual and theater are not mutually exclusive and usually the basis of a group of peoples performance practices. I wonder if that distinction would classify Pow-Wow and other ceremonial dance events as pre-colonial theater. A lot of media about oppressed groups made by people not of that group ends of becoming trauma-porn, an issue it seems brought up in an effort to make the oppressed group sympathetic instead of hated. These all negate that the oppressed group is complex and deserving of existence and the many joys it comes with because you can be sympathetic and still not acknowledge someone as worthy of humanity. At the end of the day its racism and I hope we can see more widescale testaments to native joy or more pre-colonial stories. To equate a group to pure suffering is to damn them to it eternally.
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