All Together: Native Theatre in Fifty Years

From the windows of my favorite coffee shop by Pace University I see my friend Nitotem scurry down the street. The late autumn wind billows around the sharp corners of southern Manhattan, through the open ground of City Hall Park around the corner, assailing their eyes and making their scarf fly as they approach the cafe. I give them a moment to find their bearings before waving them down to my seat by the window. We hug or shake hands and share our warmth as we inform each other of the mutual truth, “it’s been too long.”

We sit together, talking about the establishment and the menu, chortling at each other in Nehithawiwin. I’m not a coffee drinker, never have been, but our industry is knee deep in caffeine, built on sleepless nights and dreamful days. Once our orders are in, we’re giddy to be in each other’s presence again. “It’s been years.” I nod, holding space for the time that passed between us, the cells shed since then. How much of each of us is a new person altogether?

Where were we when we first met each other in the distant year of 2025? I still lived in East Flatbush during the height of the residency that marked my emergence as a writer, a year that boasted my first full, in-person reading. They traveled a lot, couch surfing in the various cities where one could scrape together a self-produced production on little more than hope and a dream.

Hope is an expensive thing, a plant that takes root in the dead of night or in your aching hands after a day of labor, a thing that takes days, weeks, months, years of tending to truly flourish; and it is all too easy to cut it down ourselves, let alone to have it pruned by the gardeners tending predominantly white institutions. But we were capable of hope.

Isn’t that amazing? Through the forces of ongoing genocide and oppression, through the darkness of political regime and alienation, Natives never stopped laughing, never stopped dreaming, never stopped loving, never stopped hoping. It would be naive to say we could ever easily be on the other side of the proverbial tunnel, but today, half a century from the distant year of 2025, I see the light at the end of the tunnel in the eyes of someone I adore.

The music in the cafe dies down a bit after we finish the initial catch up, one of those lucid moments when time and mind are suddenly in sync in a way the spirit must burden. Despite this, my friend smiles.

“Listen, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about this just yet but—” 

“Oh, come on!” I pounce on their words. “When has that ever stopped us? Gossip is our people’s lifeblood.”

Nitotem shares that they have a production going up somewhere, a theatre that, before we had grey hairs, produced a play that shocked and hurt our community. It took years of action on the part of Indigenous artists before said theatre admitted the possibility of wrongdoing and accepted the shape of their harm. It took years to repair community bonds, something many feared was impossible.

Through the forces of ongoing genocide and oppression, through the darkness of political regime and alienation, Natives never stopped laughing, never stopped dreaming, never stopped loving, never stopped hoping.

“I hope they’re ready to handle you,” I say with a wry smile. I whisper thank you as the hot chocolate I ordered is handed to me. “You’re one hell of a choice for their first Native project.”

I realize immediately that my reflex was wrong. Nitotem isn’t the first or even the second. No, something magical had happened within recent years: We began to run out of “firsts.” We’d both come up as the first contact for nearly every theatre professional we’ve met, despite standing on the shoulders of giants like Spiderwoman Theatre and other contemporaries whose names would be levied the moment we introduced ourselves and our work as Native. The constant maintenance of our relationships was exhausting. Back then there were a lot of firsts yet to happen. Many major residencies run by predominantly white institutions, despite committing to “uplifting Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) voices,” had never featured a Native playwright. 

We gossip about the production and the theatre’s past for some time when Nitotem says,

I can hardly remember a Native theatre artist back then who wasn’t exhausted from the hustling it takes to support themselves in the industry, from protecting their spirit. How many times would we find ourselves in a meeting where we would see a stack of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson CDs, or something else present in the background, or another insult to our allowance to be a person? Look at us now, a lifetime's worth of work in the place where your spirit gets eaten.

There is no escape from an Indigenous narrative, just as there is no escape from complicity.

There was a time when seemingly every major house exercised a deliberate, visible demonstration of the obstacles in white American theatre. Theatre is a place of celebration, of wiggling, cardigan-wearing dramaturgs’ preshow speeches joyfully recounting the details of each new play. It felt horrible to dissent; it gutted us to have to be the educator, to ruin the fun, lessen the work, and stabilize the dramaturgs. But the silence hurt more, passive pains boiling over and harming our minds, spirits, and bodies until we could stay silent no longer. 

The United States is deeply and inseparably steeped in colonial violence, to the point of our unpersoning via slur usage in even the founding documents of this nation. Indigenous people were weaponized in the works of others to establish a circumstance, and then we were cast aside after our violent use. Whether the authors of said works claimed the use of us was in ignorance, or deliberate political effect, it fails to address the nature of violence against Natives. It is always political. There is no separation of politics in any interaction between settlers and Natives, but settler forces had the privilege of remaining ignorant of it. For the settler, violence gets to be a tragedy, or an accident, but for the Indian it’s a brutal and constant inheritance.

“The opportunities when we were young were scarce and disproportionate. I mean just for a second think of how good we were. How much better we had to be just to beg for resources for a production.” I drink the thought in, the thought of the many artists who lost hope or slipped away stirring an old sadness in me. I catch the reflection of myself in the drink between my hands.

“So few of us received the success we deserved,” I say, a whisper escaping me. Native theatre is special, the way that it reaches beyond just our people. There is no settler on our lands that can find themselves unaffected by our work. There is no escape from an Indigenous narrative, just as there is no escape from complicity. I remember witnessing this firsthand seeing Mary Katherine Nagle’s Manahatta at the Public Theater in 2023, seeing the shuffling of the white American audience, seeing the new weight on them, hearing their whispers and mumbles, knowing they now walk the grounds of this storied island with more awareness of the their own shape in something vast and permanent. 

I find the idea that theatre is capable of immediate political change to be grandstanding, but it’s just about the only art form that can seep into an audience member before bias. It’s an art built on discovery; it is temporal and only exists in the moment, different every performance, static script or not. I saw, time and time, again the power of Native theatre to shift the mindset of settlers, to open hearts and doors, and I knew with every fiber of myself that every moment of this fight to bring Native voices to the forefront was worth it. Not just for equality, but for the betterment or dissolution of a dilapidated colonial structure, one that had become fascinated with an old and truly mythological version of itself, seeking to “make itself great again.”

When I started writing I did it because I didn’t see myself in the narrative around me. The theatrical world at large was doing its best to show us we didn’t fit into its vision.

My jaw throbs just thinking about it. Colonialism has wounded me in some ways clearer than others, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain being one of them. The stresses of being an Indigenous transwoman in a field like this has done a number on me. In that way, the reparation will never be enough. Every time the hot lash runs up my jaw to temples, I think about those years in my twenties I spent fighting for my life, fighting for my peace and for that of my loved ones. It’s the same for Nitotem. It’s the same for all of us.

“How’s the work going?” I look up from my reflection in my drink. Their hand is on my shoulder. It’s a good question, and a caring one, but one I typically answer with a shrug and a little shame. The truth is that I’ve come far. When I started writing I did it because I didn’t see myself in the narrative around me. The theatrical world at large was doing its best to show us we didn’t fit into its vision. I would write until my hands seized up just to scream that I exist, that we existed. Bit by bit I saw I wasn’t alone. Bit by bit I became held, my belting became part of a choir. The tension slipped into the past, piece by piece. It wasn’t linear: It took time. It took medicine and laughter and great Native plays. It took Estradiol and Progesterone and voice training. It took love, family, and every level of reconnection. My works are blatantly trans, queer, Native. I do not spend time worrying about the reverse of diversity; I have the opportunity now to show the theatrical world how I fit in, how my people do. I exist in a way that is effortless and not dumbed down to be palatable to the casual, straight, white theatre audience.

“The playwriting is—well it’s the work. The only way out is through, and I only just dove in again. Although… I’ve got an interesting group of students this year.” I hold up two fingers “Two Native students—Boom! Count ‘em!” We giggle, and I take a sip of my drink and smile at my friend smugly. It’s not fair for an educator to pick favorites, but this is what we worked so hard to do. Many of us, myself included, have worked our way into collegiate education. My path was carved for me by intrepid pathfinders, and while I was never fortunate enough to have an Indigenous professor in my time, I was able to be that person for other people.

“I was never much of a student,” I confide. “I spent a lot of time in school just bouncing around to the things that interested me, the things I was good at, and being forced out of the rest. But for these kids… Maybe I can make a difference.”

No more TMJ pain for Native academics. No more gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) or any other side effects from the stress of predominantly white institutions. All this pain, it sits in the gut, in the heart, in the hands, in the spirit. But we can intervene. We can lessen it now.

My friend looks over at me, smiling, giggling about some stupid joke we made. I think of Billy Ray Belcourt’s words, “What do you call a handful of Crees? A Laughter.” Here we are, two Crees in a pod, a giggle of Crees, as we aren’t quite a handful just yet, existing just a dozen blocks away from Wall Street, where the eponymous wall was raised in New Amsterdam to keep people like us from entering.

Somebody’s device beeps, and we suddenly relearn one of our favorite lessons: how easily the hours slip away when you’re having fun. We’re now running late for a show, so while running on Indian Time and our beverages of choice, we speedily pay our bills and slip on our jackets, moving as fast as our old bones can carry us down the street together to find this theatre.

When we reach the building after a bit of a walk, it looks impossible, too big, or too small, too heavy either way. But this is the place an Indigenous play has fought to make home. The doors will open with some effort. Theatre doors are never easy to open, physically or metaphysically. Through a nigh on comical system of elevators and stairs we find ourselves where we need to be, in a room full of longwinded Indians chatting before the show.

As we’re guided towards the audience to grab our seats, we thank the Creator that we’re old enough to sit in the front row seats reserved for elders. I set down a blanket to save the spot next to me for my friend as they make their way to the bathroom, my eyes darting up and down the architecture of this room, my mind locked years ago during a time when our calls to action were unanswered. We once held a town hall not far from here at HERE Arts Center asking for institutional accountability from the American theatre scene. We were underprogrammed, underrepresented, ignored, and regularly harmed. But through hard work, something changed. Theatres became brave enough to engage with their own part in a violent colonial legacy.

Theatres became brave enough to bring Indigenous writers in on their residencies. Decent enough to cast actual Native actors for Native roles in major productions. They became kindhearted and knowledgeable enough to listen when they are told scripts are harmful, to alter works or even say no to them instead of gutting the tiny Indigenous communities they had somehow cultivated. I won’t lie to you and tell you it was through the work of theatres alone. Even by 2025, over fifty years of work had gone into forcing predominantly white institutions to listen to this beautiful theatre community. It has been another fifty since then. It was not easy. It was not without hard, emotional work for both parties. But it was worth it, for what progress we’ve made. In this theatre, we see the worth proudly on display. Through the sounds of laughter and chatter, generations of ideas spreading from across the continent, a community in the form of thousands of nations, ready to hold each other during this work that, for a brief few hours, will let us be one audience with the settlers around us. A work that lets us all lower our guards, be surprised, and discover together.

All together.