My Reply to Vickie Ramirez

Here are my thoughts on non-Natives using Native images in their plays written in response to Vickie Ramirez at The Public. Her thoughts on the subject are on their blog, which you can reach here:

http://publictheaterny.blogspot.com/2011/11/manifest-destinys-my-co-pilot.html

Ms. Ramirez,

It seems like your argument hinges on two suppositions. The first I question, the second I take issue with. Like Mr. Yellow Robe, I certainly mean this in the spirit of dialogue, and I appreciate and respect your bravery in publishing words you recognize to be controversial in the Native community.

Your first supposition is that the plays you list, in which outsiders co-opt our images, have “inspired plays to answer them.” This is my question. I don’t know what those plays are; I’m sure to my detriment.

Your second supposition is that those plays have made “the pantheon of Native plays…richer for the dialogue.” This is where I take issue. I certainly have not been in Native theater for as long as Mr. Yellow Robe or many others who are perhaps reading this, so please correct me if my facts are wrong, but I have a sense that part of the need for a Native theater came from us needing to reclaim our images. I know how bad I feel after watching movies like The Searchers, and I can only imagine how my grandparents’ generation felt being inundated with those images. By your logic, it seems that we are to say that films like The Searchers or Apache are worthwhile works of art in spite of the psychological damage that they caused and cause. These movies, as well as the plays you mention, are products of colonial views of colonized peoples. Are we to say that colonialism and its incumbent genocide are good things, since without them the Native Renaissance could not have happened? I think not.

We Native peoples are fighting aggressively in the fields of politics and law to repatriate our homelands and cultural objects that have been stolen from us. Our images and stories have also been stolen and continue to be stolen. There seems to me to be no difference between fighting for our homelands and fighting for our sovereignty with our images. But for that to happen we need to be living peoples and a living pan-Indian community. And that means lively dialogues like the one you’ve started, so I thank you for your words. I hope that mine are taken in the spirit of dialogue in which they’re written.

Yôotva,

Waylon Lenk