Borders and Colonial Structures in Rogue Reading's "Coyote"

Rogue Readings is a group of graduate students at Stony Brook University who put up readings of new plays that have come to our department for the John Gassner New Play Competition, but have not been selected for that particular event. On Wednesday, November 30, Rogue Readings put up Kevin Kautzman’s Coyote.

I remember being one of the first in our department to read Kautzman’s play a year ago. I remember being thrilled until about the middle or end of the second act. As far as story-telling goes, Kautzman keeps you on the edge of your seat as the plot thickens, and you learn (spoiler alert) that the young good-looking Arizona Minuteman is actually a coyote using the old racist Minuteman to help him get immigrants across the border. And the suspense and the intrigue came across splendidly in the reading – Steve Marsh was riveting as the disgusting Vince, and Gareth Burghes gave us all the sweet-faced innocence of a man who has something to hide.

My problem is that Kautzman has Luke’s (Burghes) Mexican girlfriend Anna (Andrea Penaherrara) tell “Fire Race,” a Karuk myth. I wrote, in my initial comments on the play, that for all the play’s strengths, the use of this story outside of its cultural context – I wrote “permission of the community” at the time – is probably enough to sink it if Indian audiences get wind of it. Cultural appropriation, while certainly a topic of debate in Indian communities, can get the appropriator a lot of bad press and alienate a lot of Indian audiences. For good examples that have made headlines, take a look at the ongoing acrimony over Indian imagery used as team mascots, or the lawsuit by the Navajo Tribe against Urban Outfitters. Needless to say, I was miffed when I found out that Rogue Readings had decided to go ahead and do it anyways. But, to their credit, when I brought up my concerns a second time, Erin Treat and Stephanie Walter of the Rogue Readings board invited me to be on the talk-back panel after the reading.

As the play concerned immigration across the US-Mexican border, the other panelists focused on today’s immigration controversy. Gallya Lahav, from Political Science, talked a bit about it from a raw political standpoint; Margarita Espada, a Puerto Rican artist and activist, talked about immigration to Long Island; and Erin Treat, who hails from Tucson, talked about her community’s discussion of the issue. They spoke far more eloquently and knowledgably about immigration than I can, so I’d like to continue with my discussion of cultural appropriation in Kautzman’s Coyote.

My statement was similar to the one I’ve written above, except that I also took Bill Bright and Tony Platt as positive examples. Bright came to the River, and worked with individuals to record and analyze our language. His work is crucial to the continued restoration of our language. Tony Platt actually went to the Yurok tribal office and asked permission. It wasn’t given or withheld, so he proceeded to engage individual Yuroks as he wrote his book, which seems to be well received by the community. The through line for Bright and Platt’s success is that they actively and humbly worked with the community to produce their works, which in turn benefit our community. The Urban Outfitters scandal is a bad example in that they went behind the Navajo people’s collective back, and as such have gotten a lot of bad press as exploiters of an indigenous community.

The panel’s response bears discussion. I was able to touch some upon some of the specific points that they brought up at the talk-back, but having spent some time thinking about it, I would like to continue by looking at the overarching colonial structures that have shaped this whole event. But first, here are the three counter-arguments and something of my response at the time:

• “Fire Race” belongs to the same mythological archetype as the Greek story of Prometheus. Really, there are only maybe about seven myths, and all are cross-cultural.
• Stories have a historical fluidity across cultural boundaries.
• Indians don’t believe in property.

My response at the time was to say that archetypes may all be well and good, but that thought process doesn’t account for the tenacity with which indigenous people often hold onto the things that remain ours. By telling one of our stories, or using our images, out of their cultural context, the story becomes less ours and has less potency as a symbol of our ethnic identity. The second point seems legitimate, but I believe that it still ignores the current political climate. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was not able to address the third point, which is wrong on two levels – first, every people has a different culture; and, second, yes we Karuks most certainly do.

Stepping back, I believe I can argue that all three of these arguments and in fact the event as a whole, shed interesting light on current colonial treatment of borders. This is almost poetic, since a border is the central issue and conflict in Kautzman’s play.

In order for colonialism to exist, borders must be transgressed. When this play first crossed my desk, I lay down a boundary based on what seem to be generally held principles of propriety in my community, to wit, that this is our story and you need permission to use it. I spoke as a Karuk, and as a member of the Karuk community. Rogue Readings ignored this stated boundary when they chose to do this play. The Rogue Readings board consists of non-Karuks or any other indigenous person who can claim that this is one of their people’s stories. The structure seems to be one in which a group of outsiders ignore the boundaries set by an indigenous person on the behalf of his people’s cultural integrity.

When I stated my misgivings a second time, Rogue Readings invited me to speak on the panel. This belies three things that indicate ongoing changes in colonial structures, as well as ongoing stasis. The first, and most obvious, is that the Karuk voice was given a place at the table. The second is that I could not have done any of this if I was not a grad student at Stony Brook University. My very being here is a sign that the racial borders around academia are vanishing. In fact, one of Stony Brook’s greatest strengths, in my eyes, is its diverse demographic landscape. The flip side of that strength is that, in order to get ahead in the world, I have to accept a degree of assimilation. It’s like Julian Lang says: “It’s hard to be Indian because you have to live in two worlds.” The third is that we Indians really have to push to even have our voices heard – it would have been nice not to have had to repeat myself.

The third stage of this journey is the talk-back after the reading itself. All three of the arguments employed against Karuk intellectual sovereignty (archetypes, geographic fluidity of stories, and lack of ownership amongst “Indians”) tend towards one conclusion – the borders don’t exist. Now Kautzman definitely seems to be against borders by the way he demonizes the minuteman and creates sympathetic characters out of the coyotes, so it’s consistent for him to deny cultural boundaries as well. My problem is that, in order for indigenous sovereignty to happen, borders around what is ours must exist. To look at this in terms of an “us-them” binary would be incomplete, and therefore dangerous. The aspects of assimilation caused by me being a student in a Euro-American education system, and by my accepting the structures of the predominately white Rogue Readings board to voice my protest mellow this binary and soften the border. Outside of this assimilation, however, the overarching structure has been one of an indigenous person setting a boundary that makes sense in terms of modern decolonial politics, and a group of outsiders using a variety of tactics (the act of ignoring, the act of assimilating, academic arguments, and colonial historiography) to weaken this boundary.