An Earnest Call-in from Native Theatremakers to an Industry That Refuses to Change

On 25 September, I sat at HERE Arts Center in New York City as part of a Native Theatre Community Town Hall. With brilliant playwrights, actors, and directors to my left and right, I was struck by how versatile this community is. I helped organize this event alongside a handful of the people in this community, and we follow in the footsteps of countless Indigenous artist-activists before us.

The questions we were gathered to discuss that night were, in essence: How have anti-Indigenous patterns in the American theatre affected you and your career? What do you want the American theatre to hear?

These were not new questions for anyone in that room. Almost every artist there has had to come up with solutions to countless problems that institutions refuse to acknowledge. The very term “American theatre” is a loaded one. Used habitually by the theatre industry at large in the United States, it’s an amorphous phrase that somehow represents both the smaller artists arguing for their rightful place in the US theatrical ecosystem and the hegemonic institutions that gatekeep that same ecosystem. The non-specific nature of the term allows it to be both an inclusive label for a broad community and a shield against accountability—identifying racist trends in the “American theatre” allows those trends to exist free-floating, not attached to their specific perpetrators. That said, it’s a phrase I use specifically, as an attempt use that same wide, vague reach as a call-in. If the “American theatre” is the ecosystem we exist in, then the first step to improving it is to acknowledge that everyone in that ecosystem, from the small storefront theatre to the multiple Tony-winning Broadway house, is complicit in those same anti-Indigenous trends, and we all equally share the burden of directly addressing and dealing with them. Addressing these patterns should be seen as basic community maintenance, but instead, within the ecosystem of the American theatre, it’s seen as activism. As I shared during the meeting, I didn’t choose to become an activist; I was forced to be one because activism is the natural byproduct of the self-advocacy that is necessary for any Native person trying to make a career in this industry. However, that’s not the whole truth. I was born into activism. 

My mother, a Native powerhouse in her own right (and aging into a proper matriarch, though she’d swat me on the back of the head for saying so) has worked in environmental and social justice her entire life. I was born during her first year of law school. By the time I was five, we’d moved to Boston, where she worked for an environmental justice nonprofit in the historically Black neighborhood of Roxbury. I spent a lot of time listening in on organizational meetings from under her desk and toddling along next to her on picket lines. I was a mixed-race kid, both Black and Native, growing up with activist parents in ostensibly one of the most progressive cities in the country. I optimistically thought racism would be solved by the time I was thirteen. I thought my mother was part of the last generation that would have to fight that fight. But by the time I actually turned thirteen, surrounded by Thanksgiving hand turkeys and “educated” white people who did think that racism had been solved and that Native peoples were extinct, I found myself asking questions. These were essentially the same questions our ancestors have asked since the first treaty with white settlers was broken.

How many times does someone have to say to you “you’re hurting me” before you stop what you’re doing? How many times do you have to scream to be heard? When is enough enough?

In an industry ostensibly built on full artistic expression, where stories are celebrated for the truth, authenticity, imagination, and the power of change they bring to the world, we are not allowed to speak for ourselves or tell our own stories. 

I like optimism. I like the idea of it. Of looking into the future and seeing hope and possibility. Optimism is a skill, one I’ve never been particularly good at. That’s why I cherish opportunities, like that town hall, where I can be in community with other Native artists who have dealt with the same difficulties and fought the same fights, but who still look to the horizon, see the sun coming up, and say, “Tomorrow will be a better day.”

However, as a Native artist, especially one who grew up in one of the earliest colonies in these “united” states, it’s impossible to let pragmatism go. New England is the first foothold of the Protestant work ethic on this continent. Although I grew up in a city entrenched in that mindset, I was reminded in real time at the town hall, by the generations before and after me, that optimism is just as much an inherent part of our nature. But despite a burning desire and countless attempts to live in our inherent optimism, none of us in that room or beyond have been allowed to do so.

So many artists talked about how brutal this industry is, especially for us. Artists spoke about how two particular New York City theatre companies have never produced Native American work on the mainstages—and how that is true for so many theatres. One of the core points, repeated in so many ways by so many people, is that in an industry ostensibly built on full artistic expression, where stories are celebrated for the truth, authenticity, imagination, and the power of change they bring to the world, we are not allowed to speak for ourselves or tell our own stories. 

Can you imagine the opposite of inspiration, then—when your only option is to be a feature of someone else’s imagination?

Daniel Leeman-Smith (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) shared how we don’t need to just imagine this reality:

There is a danger that has come from institutions and non-Natives creating works that represent us, that historicize us. That make caricatures of us. That are harmful…There’s a study by Stephanie Fryburg et. al. that shows us that there is very real psychological harm that is caused to Indigenous youth as a result of what is put forth by the mainstream media.

How can we live in optimism when we’re told that the ideal modern Native person is a mascot? Why is it that even when our stories are lauded, we are still erased from them? How can we imagine better futures for ourselves when we’re losing the fight to even exist in the present?

And it is a fight.

But what if it didn’t have to be? What if institutions could imagine paths forward? Or solutions? 

Fortunately, we’ve already done a lot of imagining. 

Native artists have been fighting this fight for years, so what would make the American theatre change now, after all this time?

Native people have been discussing better futures within our communities for years. Many of us have been hired by big, tastemaker institutions to discuss these futures. Even more of us have shared these futures with those same well-monied institutions for free. Many of us have written about these futures. Today I’m doing the same to share with anyone who is interested in genuinely engaging with Native artists instead of continuing the erasure we’ve already explained: 

• Watch the Native Theatre Community Town Hall. Listen to the voices of so many Native people and understand how we got here and why.
• Hire Native people in all areas of production and in your theatre. Have Native artists on your boards, in your artistic staff meetings, in your reader’s groups, in your fellowship programs, on your payroll, as an advisory council for all your work (like the Guthrie Theatre).
• Hire Native artists for all productions—not just the Native ones. (I promise, we can do Golden Age musical theatre, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and much more.)
• Program Native plays with ample resources for access, community accountability, and cultural responsibility. (This goes far beyond a cultural consultant, but please hire them too.)
• Take accountability for your institution’s history of inequity, and create a plan to address it (like Geva Theatre’s Action Plan).
• Deepen your seasons with community engagement for all productions, not just the Native one(s).
• Program Native work in every single season (like Santa Fe Playhouse).
• Create affinity positions at Actor’s Equity Association (AEA), Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the Broadway League, Theatre Communications Group, etc.
• Combine resources to fund Native Theatre initiatives (like Zach Longstreet suggested in the comments of the town hall)
• Invest in accessible training for Native people (also like the Guthrie Theater)
• Provide free access to the theatre for local Indigenous communities (like Seattle Repertory Theatre)
• Partner with community groups run by local Indigenous communities on all productions (like Company One Theatre)
• Engage in financial or land-based reparations with local Indigenous communities (as outlined by LANDBACK.)
• Do your own research to thoroughly understand Tribal Sovereignty and how integral it is to any and all work that is about Native people or implicates Native people.
• Refresh yourself on the myriad of resources that so many Native people have offered before (including with Safe Harbors New York City’s Reflections of Native Voices Conference Report and We See You White American Theatre)
• Embrace the discomfort of engaging with and programming work that challenges your conceptions of story, art, community, etc., as well as art that challenges the American narrative and your place within it.

What I keep coming back to are two moments where the town hall was addressed by two bona fide matriarchs of Native theatre. The first was the powerful moment in the middle of the evening, where Muriel Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock Nations) laid out the entirety of Native theatre work and activism for the past hundred years, including her own activism during the Public Theatre’s workshops and mounting of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in 2010, a show she admitted to risking the future of her career to protest. The second, at the end of evening, was the pointed question asked by Larissa Fasthorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) which led directly from Muriel’s earlier points: Native artists have been fighting this fight for years, so what would make the American theatre change now, after all this time? I’ve been grappling with these moments, which sum up the combined earnest work of every person in that room. If we know the problems of how we’re underrepresented and misrepresented on stage, in television, in movies, in the general public consciousness, and we have documented proof of the harm it causes, why have none of these solutions been systemically taken up?

The plain and simple answer is that when asked to dismantle those systems, the American theatre resorts back to this unspoken treaty: systemic silencing in exchange for the inherently colonial American dream.

Do you know how excited Native artists are? To collaborate? To create? To share? For two hours, I was in a room with so many Native artists who just want to work. We want to do good work, work we can bring the entirety of ourselves to. So much so that every single one of us are finding ways outside of our fields to make work happen. 

But the American theatre does know. We know it does. We know because Native artists show up every single time, to every casting call and workshop and roundtable. We show up hungry to work and create, openly and honestly. And we’re good! So many of us are trained by and have worked in the institutions the American theatre venerates.

I come back, every single time, to two questions, posed by Murielle Borst-Tarrant and Larissa Fasthorse: What do we do, and what are we willing to risk? What do we have to do, and what will make the American theatre change?

Compassion? Public pressure? …Nothing? 

Can the answer be “nothing” because the American theatre is finally ready to treat us as equals of its own accord?

Native artists will continue to risk our hearts and bodies to survive like we always have, and we will survive this. I sincerely hope that everyone reading and listening will look back at this, our final call-in, to step into a kinder future and be on the same team. Our team could look like a panoply of theatres with a panoply of stories and storytelling styles. Shows incorporating traditional languages and performances styles. Musicals with dream pow-wows and dream ballets. Traditional Oral Storytelling interwoven with modern American theatre, creating new, dazzling performance styles. A new theatre that is wholly unique.

Or, as Muriel so beautifully stated, once we have a seat at your table we can “break up the table and make it into cinder [and] make a tipi out of [it]”. 

A new theatre is coming. One built by all of us as a team or one built by the survivors from the ruins the American theatre left behind.

The optimist in me is ready. Are you?